The Funeral Party Read Online Free

tenacious memory, his fine musical ear, his skill as an artist, along with his ridiculous talents for yodelling and playing a strong game of billiards.
    Valentina was massaging his bloodless leg, and it seemed to her that a little life was coming back into the muscles.
    While he was in this state of sleepy oblivion, Arkasha Libin arrived with a new air-conditioner and a reasonably new girlfriend, Natasha. Libin was an admirer of ugly women of a particular type: petite, with large foreheads and tiny mouths.“Libin is approaching perfection,” Alik had joked recently. “You’d have trouble fitting a teaspoon into Natasha’s mouth. He’ll have to feed the next one on spaghetti!”
    Libin planned to remove the old broken air-conditioner and install the new one in a single day, and to do this alone, although even professionals generally worked in pairs. But Russian confidence is indomitable. Moving the bottles from the sill to the floor he took down the blinds, and the Latin-American music Alik so disliked instantly surged up from the street as if the window had been taken out. For two weeks now the block had been tormented by a band of six South American Indians who had picked this corner under his window to play their music.
    “Can’t someone shut them up?” he asked quietly.
    “It’s easier to shut you up,” replied Valentina, clapping a pair of earphones to his ears.
    Gioia looked at Valentina indignantly, offended this time for Dante too.
    Valentina put on a tape of a Scott Joplin rag for Alik. He had taught her to listen to this music during their secret nocturnal walks around the city.
    “Thanks, Bunny.” He flickered his eyelids.
    He called them all Pussy-cats and Bunnies. Most of them had arrived in this country with twenty kilograms of luggage and twenty words of English, leaving behind hundreds of ruptures large and small—with jobs, parents, streets and neighbourhoods. The rupture they were slowest to recognize was with their native language, which over the years became more and more instrumental and utilitarian. The new American language came to them gradually in their new emigré milieu and was also instrumental and primitive, and they expressed themselves in a terse, deliberately comical jargon, part-English, part-Russian,part-Yiddish, which took in the most exotic criminal slang and the playful intonations of a Jewish anecdote.
    “Oy, this isn’t music, it’s
koshmar,”
Valentina grumbled. “Be an angel and shut your window. Do they think only about eat and drink, and have fun and get the good mood? They make such
gevalt
we get all the headache.”
    Gioia, offended, laid the red volume of her Florentine emigré on the bed and returned to her apartment next door. Small-mouthed Natasha brewed coffee in the kitchen. Valentina turned Alik on his side and rubbed his back; he had no bedsores so far. They didn’t reattach the urine-bag, for the plasters flamed his skin.
    Sodden sheets piled up, which Faika collected and took to the laundry on the corner. Nina dreamed in a chair in the studio, glass in hand. Libin fussed unsuccessfully with the air-conditioner; he didn’t have the bracing slat he needed, and in the usual Russian way he was trying to make a short one out of two long ones so he wouldn’t have to go home for the tools he had forgotten to bring with him.

FOUR
    After a long retreat, the sun finally slipped down like a fifty-kopeck piece behind the bed, and a few minutes later it was night. Everyone left, and for the first time that week Nina had Alik to herself. Each time she went to him she was newly appalled. A few hours of alcohol-fortified sleep rested her soul: in sleep she blissfully forgot about this rare and peculiar disease which was draining the life from him with such terrible power, and every time she awoke she hoped that the spell would have passed and he would come to meet her with his usual “How are you doing, Bunny rabbit?”
    But he didn’t.
    She lay down beside him,