The Funeral Party by Ludmila Ulitskaya Page B

the choice.”
    How interesting that he had had no choices, Alik thought; I had them till they came out of my arse.
    “I was born a Jew,” Reb Menashe continued, shaking his thick side locks. “I was a Jew from the beginning and will be one to the end. It’s not hard for me. You have the choice. You can be nobody, which I understand to mean a heathen. You could become a Jew, which you have every reason to be by virtue of your blood. Or you can become a Christian, take the crumb that falls from the Jews’ table. I won’t say if this crumb is good or bad, only that history’s source for it has been extremely dubious. If one is honest, isn’t the Christian idea of the sacrificing of Christ, understood as a hypostasis of the Almighty, the heathens’ greatest victory?”
    He chewed his lip and looked quizzically at Alik again. “In my opinion you should at least remain a captive,” he concluded. “I assure you, there are some things which are for husbands to decide, not their wives. I can give you no different advice.”
    Reb Menashe stood up from the uncomfortable stool and suddenly felt dizzy. He craned over Alik from his full height, and began to take his leave: “You are tired, you must rest.”
    He mumbled some words in a language which Alik didn’t understand.
    “Wait, Rabbi, I’d like to drink to our leave-taking,” he said.
    Libin and Rudy carried him into the studio and sat him, or rather arranged him, in his chair.
    “He’s very weak,” thought Father Victor. “How near the miracle is. We should call out to the Lord. Lower him through the roof. God, why are we incapable of that?”
    He felt particularly sad, because he knew why.
    Leva was in a hurry to take the rabbi away, but Nina came up and offered him a glass.
    Leva refused firmly, but the rabbi said something to him.
    “Have you paper cups and vodka?” Leva asked Nina.
    “Yes, we have,” Nina was surprised.
    “Fill them up,” he said.
    Music drifted up from the street like the smell of drains. It was hot too, that New York heat which doesn’t diminish at night but raises the energy level towards evening so that many people are troubled by insomnia, especially foreigners, whose bodies carry in them the habits of other climates. This was the case with the rabbi: although accustomed to the heat of Israel, at least the part of it where he had lived in recent years, there the heat of the day would drop, giving people respite from the sun.
    Nina brought over two paper cups and handed them to the bearded men.
    “After this I’ll take you back to the university,” Leva said to the rabbi.
    “I’m in no hurry,” the other replied, thinking of his stuffy room in the hostel, and the long wait for fitful sleep.
    Alik sprawled in his chair. Around him were his friends, shouting, laughing and drinking. It was as though he wasn’t there, yet they were all focused on him and he felt this. He enjoyedthe everydayness of life; like a hunter, he had spent his life chasing after mirages of form and colour, but now he knew there had been nothing better than these senseless parties where people were united by wine, friendship and cheerfulness in this studio with no table, where they laid a makeshift table-top on trestles.
    Leva and the rabbi sat in two wobbly easy chairs; in the years when Alik was moving in, the local rubbish-tips had been excellent, and the chairs and the settee were all from there. Opposite Leva and Reb Menashe hung a large painting of Alik’s, depicting the Chamber of the Last Supper, with a triple window and a table covered in a white cloth. There were no people seated at the table, just twelve large pomegranates, drawn in meticulous detail in delicate shades of lilac, crimson and pink, rough and full of seeds, their jagged, hypertrophied crowns and vivid dents evoking their internal partitioned structure. Beyond the triple window lay the Holy Land, seen as it is now rather than in the imagination of Leonardo da Vinci.
    Reb Menashe