“Hold my hat,” whispered Genrikh, who was standing near her, thrusting his Astrakhan sheepskin cap into her hand. Then he rummaged through his briefcase to make sure he had remembered to bring his passport. Nora immediately caught the smell of his hair, which had permeated the cap, a smell that she had found unpleasant since childhood. Even her own hair, if she failed to wash it every day, gave off this same acrid scent, an admixture of coarse fat and some sort of disgusting plant.
A woman functionary read some official nonsense from a piece of paper. Then her father uttered some commonplaces, equally bland. Nora felt more and more disheartened by the triteness and vulgarity of the event. Suddenly, out of the blue, her despondency was dispelled by that same tiny old woman who had wept in Grandmother’s room. She went up to the head of the casket and, in a surprisingly resonant voice, made a genuine speech. She began, it was true, with the official phrase, “Today we are saying farewell to Marusya,” but what followed was passionate, and anything but predictable.
“All of us standing here now, and many who are already in their graves, buried in the ground, were shaken, shaken deeply, when Marusya came into our lives. I don’t know of anyone who was acquainted with her just in passing. She would turn everything upside down, then set it all back on its feet again. She was so gifted, so vibrant, even eccentric. You can take my word for it. Because of her, people learned to feel surprise; they began to think with their own minds. Do you think Jacob Ossetsky was such a genius merely through his own merits? No, he was a genius because he had known a love like hers from the age of nineteen, a love they only write about in novels.”
A whisper started moving through the dark clump of relatives, and the old woman noticed this: “Sima, you hold your tongue! I already know what you’re going to say. Yes, I loved him. Yes, I was with him during the last year of his life, and this was my joy, my happiness—but not his. Because she left him. And you don’t need to know why she did. I don’t know myself how she was capable of such a thing … But here, by her coffin, I want to say, in front of everyone, that I am not guilty before her. I would never have so much as looked Ossetsky’s way. He was a god and Marusya was a goddess. And who was I? A registered nurse, that’s what I was! I am not guilty before Marusya; and only God knows whether Marusya was guilty before Jacob…”
At this point, Genrikh grabbed the old woman, and her ardor ceased. She brushed him aside with a flutter of her dry hands. Then, hunching over, she left the hall with a brisk tread.
Everything faltered. The functionary rushed up to restore order, strains of the unbearable music struck up again, and the coffin was lowered, sinking slowly down to where it would be consumed by the unquenchable fire, and sulfurous rains, and fiery Gehenna … although worms were unlikely to survive down there. She’d have to ask her father who this old woman was, and whether he knew her story.
Throughout the entire painful and distressing event, Nora had not given a single thought to the repast. Her father reminded her. “Shall we go?”
The relatives piled into the funeral bus in an orderly manner. Nora got into her father’s Moskvich. Along the way, without taking his eyes off the road, he said, “Looks like your mother didn’t think it necessary to come and pay her respects.”
“She’s sick,” Nora fibbed. In fact, Nora hadn’t even called her. She’d find out soon enough. After Genrikh’s divorce, Marusya had stopped seeing Amalia.
The door to the apartment was wide open, and the smell of pancakes from the kitchen wafted through the corridor. The door of Grandmother’s room was open, too, allowing the scents of her eau de cologne and the scrubbed floors to mingle with the kitchen smells. The window in the room was flung open, and the white pillowcase that had been hung over the mirror billowed slightly in the breeze. Nora went in, took off her coat, and threw it on the armchair. She sat down on the coat, peeled off her woolen cap, and glanced around. Even the age-old dust on the piano top had been wiped off. When she was about five, Grandmother had seated her on top of two pillows and begun teaching her to play on this instrument. At that time, though, Nora had more fun playing with the piano stool than playing on the piano. She had turned the stool on its side, sat on the stem, and tried to turn the seat like a steering wheel. Now she touched the stool—at one time shiny with lacquer, now covered in dull patches. Maybe I should take the piano for Yurik? she thought. But she immediately rejected the idea. Movers, a piano tuner, shifting furniture around … No, no way.
Then the whole busload of relatives, in the same order in which they had been sitting, entered in pairs: her father’s hedgehog-cousins, four of them, took off their black coats and placed them on the divan. Then the women’s brigade, the fish breed, swam through the door like the school of fish that they were. They were all wearing fur coats—Grandmother’s three nieces with two young daughters, Nora’s second and third cousins, all of them with sharp little chins pointing downward—very charming. And another pair of ladies she didn’t recognize. Nora had met her cousins in childhood at parties that her grandmother had organized for them. But they were all younger than Nora, and thus bored her. Nora hadn’t liked younger children—she had always preferred people who were older than she was. There was one person in the women’s brigade who stood out—the tall Mikaela, a brunette with a faint dark mustache, who was about sixty. Nora tried hard to remember whose daughter or wife she was, but she couldn’t; she had forgotten. She saw these people only once every decade, at other such family gatherings or events. The last time was a celebration in honor of her father, when he had defended his doctoral dissertation. Lyusha, Nyusya, and Verochka were the older cousins, and their daughters were Nadya and Lyuba. Then there was this solitary Mikaela.
The women stamped their feet on the rug by the door, shook off the dirty snow that had stuck to their boots, and threw their coats on the divan. Nora noticed that a puddle had formed on the clean floor around her own shoes.
Then, in a whirlwind, they all made their way into the kitchen, where the neighbors were waiting for them. The awkward absurdity of what was under way didn’t escape anyone’s notice. In the middle of the large communal kitchen, two tables had been pushed together and covered with newspaper. A mountain of pancakes towered in the center. Galia, an old actress, a former bosom buddy of Grandmother’s to whom she hadn’t spoken in more than twenty years, was cooking the rest of the pancakes in three different frying pans. Katya was pouring warm fruit compote out of a saucepan into Grandmother’s washstand pitcher. It was covered with a web of tiny cracks. The estranged washbowl, the other half of the set, contained a spartan beet salad made of ingredients that Katya had been given by her sister free of charge, which she had chopped up fine with her own two hands.
There was nothing to drink but vodka.
On Grandmother’s tiny table—she never cooked, but preferred to eat in public cafeterias or eat convenience foods at home—there was already a shot glass full of vodka, covered with a piece of rye bread. Nora felt a surge of sharp annoyance. It was all a farce, a sham! Grandmother had never taken a drop of vodka in her life. To her way of thinking, even drinking wine was verging on decadence. Again, the absurdity of the situation gripped her, and Nora felt personally responsible for what was happening here. How hard would it have been to announce, with grim finality, “No, you won’t have any funeral dinner”? But the neighbors were running the show here, and now this communal repast would just have to play itself out.
Katya felt she was the hostess of this celebration, and the relatives and mourners were her guests. Genrikh looked complacent—all the unpleasantness was behind them now. They poured out vodka, raised their glasses, and drank it all in one go, without clinking glasses, according to the unspoken rules of a funeral repast. “May she rest in peace.”