Free The Funeral Party by Ludmila Ulitskaya Page A

her from normal human anxieties. However the future worked out, it was bound to be better than the past: behind her everything was cursed.
    With these happy thoughts she boarded the bus. For some reason nobody took her money. She wondered if this was what the “land of the free” meant and was glad she didn’t have to pay; she had fifty dollars on her, and she would have to hold on to them if she was to track down her errant husband.
    The sun was setting when after several small adventures and large impressions she got out at Tarrytown. She breathed in the evening air and sat down on a yellow bench at the bus station. She hadn’t slept for over thirty-six hours, everything was moving about in front of her eyes and her head was spinning from a sense of weightlessness and uncertainty.
    After sitting there for ten minutes she picked up her case, walked out into a little square lined with parked cars, and asked a young man fiddling with the lock of his vehicle how to find the street she wanted. Without saying a word, he flung open the passenger door and drove her up a hill to a pretty two-storey house surrounded by well-tended shrubs. The light was fading. She stopped in front of a pair of white slatted gates.
    Rachel, Mickey’s mother, had been bothered all morning by a wonderful dream she had had before waking. In it she had come upon a white wooden summer-house which didn’t exist in their garden, where a sweet, plump little girl had talked to her about something very important and pleasant, eventhough she was only tiny and in real life small children don’t talk like that. What she had said, however, Rachel couldn’t remember.
    During the day she had lain down for a nap and tried to summon back the airy summer-house and the plump child, so that she could finish the important matter she had been talking about. But the little girl didn’t reappear, and there was no point expecting her to, since Rachel never dreamed during the day.
    Now she waddled to the gates, a simple-faced Jewish woman with round eyes ringed by years of insomnia, and she saw a girl standing outside with a checked cloth suitcase. She let her in.
    “Good evening, may I speak to Mickey?” the girl asked.
    “Mickey?” Rachel was surprised. “He doesn’t live here, he lives in Manhattan. He left for California yesterday anyway.”
    Valentina put her case on the ground. “How strange, he said he would meet me.”
    “Ah, that’s Mickey!” Rachel waved an arm. “Where are you from?”
    “From Moscow.”
    As Valentina stood against the white gates, Rachel suddenly realized that the summer-house in her dream must be these gates, and that the plump child was this plump girl. “My God, my parents were from Warsaw!” she exclaimed happily, as though Warsaw and Moscow were adjacent streets. “Come on in!”
    A few minutes later Valentina was sitting at a low table in the living-room, looking out at a sloping garden whose trees bent their heads in the gathering darkness towards the brightlylit window. On the table stood two delicate unglazed cups as thin as paper, and a rough terracotta teapot; there were biscuits that resembled seaweed, and pink triangular nuts with a fine shell. Rachel put her hands on her stomach in the same peasant pose as Valentina’s mother, tilted her head in its green silk turban to one side, and looked at her with kindly interest. It turned out that the Russian woman knew Polish, so they talked in Polish together, which gave Rachel great satisfaction.
    “You’ve come here on holiday or to work?” she finally put the all-important question.
    “I’ve come for good. Mickey promised to meet me and help me find work,” Valentina sighed.
    “You met him in Moscow?” Rachel asked, tipping her head to the other shoulder: she had this funny habit of tilting her head from side to side.
    Valentina thought hard for a moment; she was so tired that having a worldly conversation in Polish, let alone embellishing it a little,