The Funeral Party Read Online Free PDF Page B

without difficulty in the telephone directory. When she asked him to meet her urgently he was greatly taken aback, and in the two hours it took her to reach him in the Bronx he anxiously awaited some major unpleasantness, or at least inconvenience, from her.
    His office was rather shabby. The business he did there had been hatched by Irina, whose practical mind and easygoing attitude to money had served him well during their brief marriage. It was she who at the start of it had persuaded him to invest all his money, his laboriously accumulated five thousand dollars, in a high-risk kosher cosmetics business. This had proved to be brilliantly profitable. Irina was still in the throes of her short-lived love affair with Judaism then, a gentle, reformed Judaism to be sure, but one which respected the dramatic connection between milk and meat, especially meat which had oinked when alive.
    Leva’s cosmetics were just starting to find their market when Irina, plastered in non-kosher all-American cosmetics,walked out on him. As he embarked on this new phase of his life he quickly changed orientation and betrayed reformism for orthodoxy. There was a political reason he had to stop producing the crude paints which had defiled the noble faces of Jewish women, and sold this part of his business to his cousin, reserving for himself the production of kosher soaps and shampoos. He also learned to make kosher aspirin and other drugs, and he had plenty of customers, who evidently didn’t regard the idea as a complete swindle.
    Leva met Irina at the door to his office. Both were greatly changed, but these changes weren’t so much to do with the passing of time as with the new directions their lives had taken. Leva had filled out, his jowls were fleshier and his back broader, which made him appear shorter; his face had lost the pink and white hue of the young King David, and he had acquired a sallow complexion. Irina, who during their marriage used to go around in knitted jerseys with holes on the shoulder and long Indian skirts which swept the floor, dazzled him now with her impeccable, fashion-plate looks, the sculpted elegance of her brows and nose, her firm chin and soft lips.
    “A pearl, a real pearl,” he thought, and said it out loud.
    Irina laughed, her old light laugh. “I’m glad you like me, Leva, you don’t look bad either, you’re a serious, important-looking man now!”
    “I’ve five children, Irina, five.” He pulled a small photograph album from his desk. “So how’s Maika?”
    “She’s fine, she’s a big girl already.” Irina examined the album and nodded, then put it back on the desk. “The thing is, an old friend, a Jew, someone I used to know in Moscow, is very ill. He’s dying. He wants to talk to a rabbi. Could you arrange it?”
    “Is that all?” Leva felt hugely relieved. He had imaginedshe might make some financial claim to those five thousand dollars from the time they were married. He was a good man but he was burdened by family worries, and he hated unexpected expenses. “I can get you ten if you need it.”
    Immediately he had said it he felt embarrassed, but Irina didn’t notice, or pretended not to. “It’s urgent, he’s terribly ill,” she said.
    Leva promised to call her that evening.
    He did indeed call that evening, and told her that he would be bringing round a well-known rabbi from Israel who was delivering a course of erudite lectures at New York University; he agreed to bring him to the sick man as soon as the Sabbath was over.
    It was uncharacteristic of Irina, who never forgot anything, to forget that the Jewish Sabbath ended on Saturday evening and she told Nina the rabbi would be coming on Sunday morning.
    The priest, Father Victor, promised to visit on Saturday after early vespers. Nina attached great importance to the fact that the priest was coming first.

SIX
    Fima visited Berman very late, without calling him first, this familiarity being usual between them. They were