“What a charming young woman,” Alexei Kirillovich thought to himself in an abstract, contemplative sort of way. He had married long ago; his wife was a professor, a hydrobiologist with a reputation no less solid than his own. Many years before, she had left her first husband for Alexei Kirillovich, then still a student, and they had married in the Registry Office.
There had been a time when she, born and brought up a Lutheran, had even thought of converting to Orthodoxy in order to legitimize her marriage officially, but in the postrevolutionary years the idea was dropped and even seemed risible. The profound disagreements between the denominations dissipated without a trace in the air of a new world which had no interest whatsoever in any Articles of Schmalkalden.
The couple lived in civil marriage in peace and harmony, exchanging professional information over the dinner table and not inclining in the least toward adultery. That merest flicker of a flame catching light in his bosom under its thick coat of furlike hair might well have remained unnoticed even by Alexei Kirillovich had not Alexandra herself felt attracted to this droll, old-fashioned professor, and had she not assiduously fanned the flame of unfocused, barely smoldering interest.
At first she gave him three days, but he made no approach beyond positioning himself opposite her in the volleyball circle and only passing the ball to her. Then she gave him another two days. Every evening they went swimming together with a noisy group of friends, then played ball, and still he made no approach, only casting quick, frightened glances in her direction and intriguing her more and more. They did not see each other during the working day: he went off to his plots to watch the ants, and she helped the botanists with their work in the herbarium.
For people of strong moral principles and decent physical habits, such as Alexei Kirillovich undoubtedly was, life lays the simplest traps, but also the most effective. The final twist came when he had all but emerged as victor in a contest which had never begun. Actually, the twist came in Alexandra’s ankle in a moment of abandon on the volleyball court. It was impossible for her to stand on it.
The male research workers took turns carrying Alexandra from the shore to the house. First, two postgraduates bore her on hands linked to make a seat; then Botazhinsky, an ichthyologist, carried her piggyback; finally, for the last third of the way, it was Alexei Kirillovich’s turn. That evening she was his, elbows, knees, sprained ankle and all.
He could remember perfectly well carrying her to the corner room and then going over to Junge’s dacha to get a bandage from the dispensary, a prerevolutionary German bandage from the supplies of the late Vyazemsky, no less, and returning to Alexandra to wrap her swollen and inflamed foot. The half-hour which passed between the act of bandaging and the moment when, without even closing the door, he plunged into the muscular grip of the novice volleyball player, disappeared without trace from his memory.
Possibly, Alexandra conceived that very evening, and two months later, departing before the end of his period of research leave, Alexei Kirillovich went back to Moscow leaving her unambiguously pregnant and quite certain that he would be returning for her in the very near future. However, the rearrangement of his former life which this romantic history entailed needed more time than he had supposed.
His wife took Alexei Kirillovich’s announcement of the new circumstances with Lutheran calm and even perhaps rather coldly. The only condition she stipulated was, however, unexpected and not easily met: she asked him to resign from the university where they both worked. Before September he had no means of looking for teaching work since the higher education institutions were all on vacation. In September a vacancy came up at the Timiryazev Academy, but now there were problems with accommodation. The apartment on Polyanka Street went to his wife. The Timiryazev had staff accommodation, but time was needed to complete the necessary applications and obtain the essential signatures and resolutions.
Time passed. Alexandra was not conspicuously pregnant and did not have to let out her clothes until the seventh month. She received weekly letters from Alexei Kirillovich and, thanks to her carefree nature, gave not a thought to what would happen if he were to disappear as unexpectedly as he had appeared. Or perhaps her equanimity was based on confidence that if need be Medea would take on this child too, as she had once taken on Alexandra and her brothers.
In the meantime neither sister said anything, although Medea did go through the old linen and set aside a few bits and pieces for diapers. Only when she saw an old-fashioned baby’s bonnet in Medea’s hands, on the border of which she was finely embroidering a crisscross pattern, did Alexandra tell her about Alexei Kirillovich, tossing her hair and perhaps protesting a little too much: “I do like him very much … he really is a very interesting man … he is someone you already know very well …”
Medea did indeed remember him from the days of her childhood, when Alexei Kirillovich, who was a student at the time, had rented a room in their house before he went to England. The Crimea attracted a lot of naturalists then. Now both the Sinoply sisters were waiting for Alexei Kirillovich’s return.
He, meanwhile, had been allocated his accommodations, a winter dacha beside the Timiryazev park. The dacha was so run-down it had to be hastily redecorated, and additionally Alexei Kirillovich had a major new lecture course to prepare on general entomology, as well as a special course on “orchard pests.”
Alexandra’s son didn’t, however, wait for them to move to Moscow and was born under the supervision of his Aunt Medea at the same Theodosia city hospital in which Matilda had given birth to all of her children. Only Dr. Lesnichevskii was no longer in the land of the living.
Two weeks later, without advance warning, Alexei Kirillovich arrived at Medea’s door. He knew from Alexandra’s letters that shortly before the birth she had moved in with her sister. He found a young woman sitting by the window on a bentwood Vienna chair with cropped ginger hair half-concealing her face, and a round-headed baby sucking at her bluish-white breast. This was his family. It took his breath away.
Two days later, Alexei Kirillovich and his new family departed for Moscow. There was no need for Medea to travel with them, but by now she had become so attached to her nephew, whom she had already christened, becoming his godmother in the process, that she took time off work and went with them to help Alexandra settle into her new home. That month, the first month of little Sergei’s life, she vicariously experienced to the full the motherhood that would never be hers.
Sometimes it seemed to her that her own breasts were filling with milk. She returned to Theodosia with a sense of profound inner emptiness and loss. “My youth is over,” Medea guessed.
CHAPTER 7
Valerii Butonov came from the Rastorguevo district of Moscow. He lived with his mother, Valentina Fyodorovna, in a low private house which had long been threatening to fall apart. He had no recollection of his father and as a boy was convinced that his father had died in the war. His mother did not particularly insist on that, but neither did she undermine the legend. Valentina Fyodorovna’s short-stay husband had signed up for contract work somewhere in the Russian North even before the war. He had sent back one letter of little interest and then dissolved forever in the polar wastes.
Like most boys his age, Valerii spent his protracted childhood hanging on rickety fences or driving a captured German penknife, his most precious possession, into the run-down suburban soil. In this activity he had no equals, winning with his knife easily and lightheartedly, like a latter-day Alexander the Great, all the cities and states gambled on the barren patch of land behind the Rastorguevo bus station.
The neighborhood kids, having ascertained his total superiority, stopped playing with him, and he spent many hours in the courtyard of his house, implanting the penknife in the pale wall-eye where the lower branch of an enormous pear tree had been sawn off, gradually moving farther and farther away from his target. Over these long hours he gained an insight into the mechanics of throwing, knew it inside out with both hand and eye,
but derived the greatest pleasure from the lightning moment when the knife in his hand and his chosen target came into alignment, culminating in the quivering of the haft in the heart of his target.
Sometimes he would take a different one, a kitchen knife, and choose a different target, and with a crunch or a moan or a thin whistle the knife would penetrate it. His mother’s old house, already falling apart, was covered in scars from his boyhood practicing. Perfection proved boring, however, and in the end he packed it in.
New vistas opened up when he moved from primary school to the newly introduced ten-year secondary school where much was new and unfamiliar: urinals, porcelain washbasins, a stuffed owl, a picture of a naked man with no skin, wonderfully shaped glass vessels, metal contrivances with valves. The place that really fascinated and delighted him, however, was the sports hall, which, for those times, was very well equipped. From the fifth grade on, he honed in on the horizontal bars, the parallel bars, and the leather vaulting horse.
A physical giftedness, so much admired in the classical world, and just as rare as musical or poetic talent, or a talent for chess, became apparent in Butonov. He didn’t know that the modern world rated his talent lower than intellectual gifts, and reveled in progress which became more striking with every passing month.
The physical education mistress sent him to the Central Sports Club gymnastics section, and by the new year he was taking part in the first competitions in his life. The trainers were astonished by his phenomenal grasp, his natural economy of movement, and his self-discipline. He achieved results immediately which usually had to be diligently pursued for years.
He wasn’t yet twelve years old when he was first sent for trials. On that occasion the junior athletes were not taken outside of Moscow; they were simply put up in a military hotel on Commune Square, in four-bedded rooms with a red carpet, a decanter and telephone on a hardwood table, in the ponderous opulence of the Stalin style with a military nuance.
It was during the school year, so in the mornings the gymnasts dispersed to their schools and, when they returned, had lunch in the local military cafeteria with thirty-ruble vouchers. The sports complex was located in the right-hand wing of a low, squat building, at the heart of which was the Great Hall. It was there that the future flowers of Soviet sport passed the best hours of their happy childhood. Entry was possible only with a pass, and everything together, the vouchers for lunch, the top-quality calorific food with chocolate, condensed milk, and cakes, the pass itself with his photograph in its little booklet, and especially the dark blue woollen tracksuit with a white stripe by the collar which was issued free, inspired a due respect in the youthful Butonov for his own body, which was deemed worthy of these heavensent goodies.
He wasn’t too good at school, always carrying some unredeemed failing mark, which he usually put right by the end of the term for fear he would be banned from training. Since he was the sports star of the school, his teachers usually bit the bullet and awarded him highly questionable passing marks without too much trouble.
By the age of fourteen he was a strikingly built youth with regular facial features, his hair cut short in the sporting fashion, disciplined and ambitious. He was a member of the youth gymnastics team, training under the master of sport schedule and aiming for first place in the forthcoming All-Union Competition.
His trainer, Nikolai Vasilievich, was an intelligent sports insider who had seen it all, had high hopes of him, and anticipated a major athletic career. He took a lot of trouble with Valerii, and his straightforward way of calling him “my son” was very meaningful and important to the boy. Valerii looked for shared features with his idol: he was glad their hair was the same color and their greyish-blue eyes similar; he narrowed his eyes the way Nikolai Vasilievich did, imitated the rolling, springy way he walked, and even bought himself white handkerchiefs like the ones Nikolai Vasilievich had.
He did not, however, win the All-Union Competition, even though he was sure he had. He performed excellently, felt like a knife in flight, and knew he had hit the target; but there were other important things he did not know, which his trainer knew only too well, about the secret mechanisms of success, about friends in high places, about rigged judging and the barefaced corruption of sport. The two decimal points which relegated Butonov to second place seemed to him such a cruel injustice that in the changing room he threw off his free Central Sports Club outfit and went back to Rastorguevo wearing his school trousers over his bare body.
Nikolai Vasilievich might just have succeeded in getting him back, papering over the defeat with meaningless words, slippery, half-true explanations of what had happened, but unfortunately one of Valerii’s older teammates—Butonov was the youngest on the team—revealed the secret side of his unjust defeat to him. It was a fix, and his own trainer was implicated. The boy who won had been trained by the son-in-law of the head of the federation, and the panel of judges was not independent—not bribed exactly, but tied hand and foot.
A number of things fell into place now: why the day before his performance Nikolai Vasilievich, who had taught him to reach for the sky, had told him for no apparent reason, “Okay, Valerii, don’t get too wound up. For you at your age second place won’t be bad, not bad at all.”
The trainer came out several times to Rastorguevo. The first time Valerii went up and hid in the attic like a little kid. The second time he came out but talked through his teeth, refusing eye contact. The third time Nikolai Vasilievich talked to Valentina Fyodorovna, but she only held her arms out wide and bleated, “I’m sure it’s all fine by me, what is there to get upset about, but it’s up to Valerii …” She too liked the free Olympic suits and saw nothing wrong with second place.
Valerii, however, was implacable. Nikolai Vasilievich was afraid the boy would defect to the Worker Reserves or Spartak and someone else would get the credit for his three years’ work, but that did not happen. The monstrous secret self-esteem of Butonov which had flourished in the shade of the Rastorguevo pear tree drove him on now to seek a different path, more certain, where there were no humiliating possibilities of defeat, no corrupt, rotten fixes, and treachery.
The summer holidays had begun, but he didn’t go to any trials, just lay for days at a stretch under the pear tree, all the time wondering how what had happened could have happened, and after a week was vouchsafed a revelation: you shouldn’t allow yourself to become dependent on circumstances or other people. Had he been musing under a fig tree, the revelation might have been of a more sublime nature, but that was the best that could be expected from a Russian pear tree.
Two weeks later he enrolled in the circus college. How wonderful it was! Every day Butonov came to train and experienced the delight of a fiveyear-old boy on his first visit to the circus. The training ring was entirely real: it smelled just as it should, of sawdust, animals, and talcum powder. Balls, colored clubs, and physically perfect girls flew freely through the air. This was a special, wholly unique world: that was what every cell in his body told him.
There was no question of competition here; each person was worth exactly what his profession was worth. The aerial gymnast could not be incompetent: his life was on the line. No telephone call could halt the bear when it reared up with its immobile muzzle completely incapable of expression and went to savage its trainer. Being related to the director, enjoying the support of someone higher up, was not going to help you turn a backward somersault.
“This is not like sport,” a sadder but wiser Butonov reflected. “Sport is corrupt. This isn’t.”
Although he would have been hard-pressed to articulate the thought fully himself, he was profoundly aware that at the very peak of artistry in the Soviet Union, in the zone where you are totally master of your profession, there is a tiny platform of independence. Up there, on the summit of Mount Olympus, were the stars of the circus, who freely crossed frontiers into other countries, and wore unimaginably beautiful clothes, and were rich and independent.
The boy h
ad intuited something crucial, although in many respects the circus was exactly the same as other Soviet institutions—the warehouse, the bathhouse, or academe. It had its Party committee, its local committee, its official subordination to superior institutions—and its unofficial subordination to any telephone call from the mystical heights. Envy, intrigue, and fear were the powerful levers of circus life, but this was something he had yet to learn. And in the meantime he lived that half-monastic life which sport had taught him. Although no formal vows had been taken, ascesis was observed, the rules of prayer were replaced by morning exercises and evening training, fasting was replaced by dieting, and the code of obedience by total subordination to the discipline of the trainer. The Master, as he was called here. As for chastity, which was not by any means esteemed in itself, a true sportsman’s life was organized in such a way that the ferocious physical demands and the harsh regime made terrible inroads into the free and easy party mood which draws two young people to pool their energies for the giving and taking of mutual pleasure.
The school remembers Butonov to this day. He acquired all the arts of the circus effortlessly: acrobatics, juggling, tightropewalking, and each of these arts laid claim to him. Butonov had no equal in gymnastics.
From the first months of his studies he was invited to take part in existing routines. He refused, because he knew exactly what he wanted to be: a trapeze artist. To work the air … Butonov’s teacher, replacing the discredited Nikolai Vasilievich, was an aging circus artist of indefinite nationality but from a circus dynasty, who looked like a Russian peddler but had the Italian name of Antonio Muzzetoni, and was popularly known as Anton Ivanovich.
Muzzetoni the Elder was born in a three-axled caravan on a faded red and blue circus horse blanket, on the road from Galicia to Odessa, to a lady horse rider and an acrobat. His face was etched with many deep vertical and horizontal wrinkles which were as intricate as the innumerable stories he told about himself.
Medea and Her Children Page 10