Free The Funeral Party by Ludmila Ulitskaya

Gutsul region of the Ukraine. In her cheap cloth suitcase she carried her completed dissertation, of no possible use to her now, a complete holiday costume as worn by a Vologda peasant womanfrom the late nineteenth century, and three Antonov apples which she was forbidden to import, and whose powerful smell emanated from her feeble case. The apples were intended for her American husband, who for some reason wasn’t there to meet her.
    A week earlier she had bought her ticket for New York and had called to tell him she was coming. He seemed happy and promised to meet her. Their marriage was a fictitious one, but they were true friends. Mickey had lived for a year in Russia, collecting material on the Soviet cinema of the thirties and enduring a neurasthenic love affair with a little monster who humiliated and robbed him and put him through a hell of jealousy. He had met Valentina at Moscow’s fashionable philology school. She had taken him back to her place, given him valerian drops to drink, fed him Russian dumplings and finally heard the shattering confession of a homosexual crushed by the incontrovertibility of his own nature. Mickey was tall and delicate-looking. He wept and poured out his anguish to her, keeping up a running psychoanalytical commentary all the while. Her heart melted, and she marvelled at the capriciousness of nature. During a brief respite in his two-hour monologue she asked him: “So you’ve never been with a woman then?”
    It proved not quite so simple: when he was fourteen, his seventeen-year-old cousin from Connecticut had stayed in their house for a month and a half and had tormented him with her caresses, finally abandoning him in a state of exhausting virginity and indelible sinfulness.
    This emotional tale, crammed with relevant details, seemed a little too literary to Valentina, and by the time it was over she was exhausted. Laying his hands firmly on her fine nipples, she raped him without any great difficulty and to hiscomplete satisfaction. It remained the only such occasion in his life, but from then on their relationship assumed an unusual warmth and intimacy.
    Valentina was experiencing her own emotional crisis at the time, having just been stunningly betrayed by the man she loved. He was a well-known dissident who had survived a stint in prison, and was widely regarded as a hero of irreproachable honesty and courage. But there was evidently a joint running between his upper and lower halves: the upper half was exemplary, the lower was vicious. With women he was insatiable and promiscuous, and he used all of them. His departure from Russia was mourned by many beautiful girlfriends of the most extreme anti-Soviet persuasion, and the lives of at least two illegitimate children would have to be sustained only by heroic legends about their father.
    He had married an Italian beauty and left Russia in a blaze of glory, abandoning Valentina with her KGB “tail” and her unsubmitted dissertation. Big-hearted Mickey proposed a fictitious liaison, so they got married. For decorum’s sake they held the wedding in Kaluga, where Valentina’s mother lived, and from that day on she was reconciled with her daughter. She didn’t like her husband and referred to him privately as “the tapeworm.” But his American passport worked its charm even on her; at the print-works where she had worked all her life as a cleaner, no one had yet married their daughter to an American.
    After waiting two hours for her husband at Kennedy airport, Valentina finally called his home. There was no answer, so she decided to go to the address he had given her. She asked some friendly Americans the way, and they explained that the place wasn’t in New York at all but in the suburbs. (She hadpicked up a few bits and pieces of English but they didn’t amount to much.) More or less knowing what she was doing, she set off for the address she had written down.
    A sense of the complete unreality of what was happening freed