David Bezmozgis - The Free World

— Did you bring us anything? Zhenya asked.

— Greetings from the late pope, Alec said.

Polina extracted a small bag of caramels from her handbag. They had melted in the heat and needed to be refrigerated. She gave them to Emma to give to the boys.

— For later, Polina said.

— How very thoughtful, Emma said.

— Yes, thank you, Rosa added.

— Afterward, Emma said, when they sing the songs they learned in the Hebrew choir we’ll give these as a reward.

The boys, Rosa explained, had been going daily to Club Kadima to learn songs for the High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Rosa, who actually possessed an excellent singing voice, was part of the adult choir. Karl, regrettably, was not. He was a true bass, and they could have used him. In Riga, Rosa said for the enlightenment of the one-legged Josef Roidman, Karl had belonged to a choir. It was where the two of them had met.

As Rosa spoke, Alec glanced at his father, who sat stonily in his chair.

— Normally, they don’t accept children so young, but the boys learned the Hebrew very fast, like a mother tongue.

Alec could only imagine his father, at his most saturnine, his eyes like mineshafts, enduring the Hebrew singing of his grandchildren.

Rosa mentioned the date of the concert.

— Of course they will come, Emma said.

— They have a very capable conductor, Roidman volunteered. It promises to be a very memorable show.

— Maybe it will sell out? Alec asked.

— Don’t you worry, Rosa said. Nobody who wants to come will be turned away.

— Very good. Alec smiled. We’ll come, so long as it doesn’t conflict with the inauguration of the new pope.

— Well, naturally, Rosa said, you have your priorities.

Since they had already started in this direction, Alec said that he and Polina had in fact gone to St. Peter’s, where Pope Paul VI was lying in state.

The excursion had been Lyova’s idea. At first, Alec hadn’t been enthusiastic about it.

— I prefer to remember him as he was in life, he’d said.

— You saw him in life? Lyova asked.

— I saw pictures.

— You don’t want to go?

— I’d just as soon not go out of my way to see a corpse. Even a famous one. In the end, every corpse has the same face: your own. It’s depressing. My policy is to think about my own death as little as possible.

— Did you know this about your husband? Lyova asked.

— Not in so many words, Polina said.

But in the end he had come along and joined the line of mourners. Some were interlopers like themselves, others fingered rosaries and murmured prayers. There were those who wept quietly. The crowd numbered in the thousands and flowed forward at a surprisingly brisk pace. Unsentimental Roman policemen shouted, Andare! Andare!

They shuffled forward and through the doors of St. Peter’s Basilica, where the pope was stretched out on a catafalque, under the cathedral’s towering cupola, designed to reduce a man before God’s grandeur. Mourners were instructed to pass four abreast. Alec, Polina, and Lyova formed a group with a bald Roman man who remembered an act of kindness this pope had performed during the war when the Americans bombed San Lorenzo.

Two fans rotated above the catafalque, where the pope lay draped in purple velvet. A black-robed attendant stood at his side, his face composed for the occasion. Candles and incense burned, but not sufficiently to cloak the scent of rot. Alec heard people gasp in shock. Some crossed themselves and averted their eyes. When his time came, Alec looked upon the pope’s ghastly face. It should have come as no surprise in such heat, but he, too, had expected that, for the pope, death might take the form of a benevolent hand, leading immaculately into heaven. As they moved away, a fly settled on the pope’s forehead, which the attendant immediately and impassively brushed aside.

The world’s multiplicate attentions were now focused on this one corpse. Presidents and potentates would fly in from all over the globe for the official funeral.

— What kind of presidents? Roidman asked. Carter? Trudeau?

— Possibly, Alec said.

Roidman waggled his head appreciatively.

— What is this to us? Rosa interjected. We have our own problems. There is more important news in the world.

— For instance, Karl said, Christina Onassis, the world’s richest woman, married a one-eyed Russian and plans to live in a cooperative apartment in Moscow.

— For instance, scolded Rosa, Begin said he will meet Sadat in Washington.

— She has five hundred million dollars. He has a glass eye, Karl said.

On their way home, to reward themselves for having made the trip, Alec took Polina to the Ladispoli movie theater that showed pornographic films. Ladispoli had only one, although there were a number of them in Rome, mainly in the vicinity of Termini Station. Lyova, a connoisseur of all things Roman, had been the first to introduce Alec to the theaters.

— Something else communism denied us, Lyova said.

Together they had gone to one of the theaters near Termini to catch a show. Lyova had extended the invitation to Polina as well, but she had demurred. So they had gone without her one evening, and sat with other men in a theater half filled. Lyova didn’t distinguish particularly among the movies showing, and just picked one he hadn’t seen before. The lights went down, immersing the theater in total darkness — a darkness so complete that it was no longer possible to see the person sitting beside you. Then the screen came to life, flashing images of a beautiful young woman in an urbane setting. Some American dialogue followed and soon the woman was naked and being licked and caressed by two other naked women, a Negress and a Chinese. Already, this exceeded Alec’s expectations. For all his experience with sex and women, he was seeing on the screen combinations, situations, and acts that he’d never before seen, engaged in, or even conceived of. Images of happy, coy, compliant women were projected. The camera traveled languorously over breasts, buttocks, and open thighs. A man dropped his pants and the leading actress readily took his cock into her mouth. The screen filled with her bobbing head and her big, intent eyes. Later, on a huge, gleaming, candlelit dining-room table, she was ravaged simultaneously by two men and another woman. To a syncopated soundtrack, they squirmed around and inserted fingers, tongues, candles, and cocks into every available orifice. When it ended, Alec grasped the full extent of Soviet deprivation. If Russian men were surly, belligerent alcoholics it was because, in place of natural, healthy forms of relaxation, they were given newspaper accounts of hero-worker dairy maids receiving medals for milk production.

The afternoon Alec took Polina, a French film was playing at the theater in Ladispoli. The film was already in progress when they arrived. The theater was as dark as the one in Rome and they were able to find their seats only with the help of a dreary-looking usher. On the screen, as they sat down, was a scene in the countryside, where the leading actress was being mounted from behind by a strapping country lad, who was naked but for a pair of leather riding boots. Standing obliviously behind them, nibbling the occasional clump of grass, was a muscular white horse. The actress was blond and very attractive, but what aroused Alec wasn’t so much the way she looked but the sounds she made. To hear her cry out using her French words and inflections heightened the experience. Silent, she could have been any woman. But crying out, she became a Frenchwoman. Sexual pleasure resided in adjectives. Nobody ever just fucked a woman. Fat, skinny, young, widowed, rich, poor. Or, more resonantly: Armenian, Kalmyk, Estonian, Gypsy, Polish. Watching this one Frenchwoman, Alec felt as if he had been given carnal insight into all Frenchwomen. In fact, into the entire French nation. If he ever traveled to France he would no longer be intimidated by the culture. He now knew the French. He reached over and slid his hand under Polina’s skirt. She didn’t rebuff him, but clenched briefly to assert her personality, before parting her legs and letting him do what he wanted. Then, as if interpreting the pulsing signal of his hand, Polina reached across the armrest and lowered her hand into his lap. Instantly, Alec was reduced to the part of him that existed under the play and pressure of her fingers. Around them, the darkness assumed the geometry of a chamber that separated them from the others in the theater, who occupied their own dark chambers.