Funeral Party

ONE The heat was terrible, with one hundred per cent humidity. It was as if the whole of this great city, with its inhuman buildings, its magical parks, its different coloured people and dogs, had reached the point of a phase transition, and at any moment its semi-liquefied people would float up into the soupy atmosphere. The shower was permanently occupied, with a queue of people standing outside. For a long time they hadn't bothered with clothes, although Valentina wore a bra to prevent her large breasts chafing in the heat; normally she never wore one. Everyone was dripping wet, the sweat failed to evaporate from their bodies, towels didn't dry, and hair had to be dried with a hair-dryer. The blinds were half-open and strips of light fell across the floor. The air-conditioning hadn't worked in years. There were five women in the bedroom: Valentina in her red bra, Nina with her gold cross and long hair, so thin that Alik had once told her, ?Nina you're as skinny as that snake-basket.' (The basket stood in a corner of the room; when Alik was younger he had gone to India in search of ancient wisdom, but the basket was all he had brought back with him.) Also present was their neighbour Gioia, a foolish Italian woman who had moved into the building hoping to learn some Russian in this strange environment. Gioia was forever taking offence with people, but since they never noticed her imaginary slights she always magnanimously forgave them. Irina Pearson, formerly a circus acrobat, now a high-paid lawyer, looked stunning with her waxed bikini-line and a new bust constructed for her by an American surgeon to look no worse than her old one. With her was her fifteen-year-old daughter, Maika, known as Teeshirt (?maika? means teeshirt in Russian). A plump, clumsy girl in glasses, she was the only one of them wearing clothes. She had on a pair of wide Bermuda shorts and of course a teeshirt, depicting an electric light-bulb and a luminous message saying FUCKIT! in Russian. Alik had made it for her birthday the year before, when he still more or less had the use of his arms. Alik himself lay on a wide divan-bed, looking as small and young as his own son. He and Nina had no children, however, and it was obviously too late for them to have any. A sort of slow paralysis was consuming the last vestiges of his musculature, and his limbs lay meek and inert, neither dead nor alive to the touch, but in some transitional state, like setting plaster. The most alive feature about him was his cheerful shock of red hair that stuck up in front of his head like a brush, and his straggly moustache which appeared enormous on his emaciated face. This was his second week at home. He had told the doctors at the hospital that he didn't want to die there. There were other reasons for this which they didn't know, and which he didn't tell them. But even in this high-speed hospital'where the doctors treated their patients like fast food cooks, with never enough time to look into their eyes, only their rear-ends, or their throats or wherever it was that was wrong'everybody loved Alik. His apartment on the sixth floor was like a general thoroughfare, crowded from morning to night with people. Some would end up staying the night and it was an excellent place for parties, but for normal life it was hopeless, an old rehabilitated loft warehouse with the end partitioned off to make a tiny kitchen, a lavatory and shower-unit, and a narrow bedroom with a slice of window. There was also a large studio with two light sources. In a corner of the studio was a carpet on which late guests and stray visitors would sleep. Sometimes there were as many as five of them on it. There was no front door, and people came in directly from the service lift. Before Alik moved in, bales of tobacco used to be brought up in this lift, and its smell still hovered in the air. It was almost twenty years since Alik had first aUlitskaya, Ludmila is the author of 'Funeral Party' with ISBN 9780805241853 and ISBN 080524185X.