Medea and Her Children

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

  This time something similar had happened, not from touching inanimate metal but from being fleetingly touched by Butonov. Or perhaps she had just got too hot in the spring sunshine. At all events, her right arm was scarlet and slightly swollen.

  No sooner had she got home than Masha went to bed, covering herself with every blanket she could find. While she was shivering with the fever and tormented by thirst, she kept dreaming the same obsessive dream in which she seemed to be getting out of bed, going to the kitchen, and trying to scoop water from a bucket, only there was very little and the mug just scraped over the metal without getting any water. Parallel with this, rough lines of verse were shaping themselves, lines in which the seashore figured, and hot sun, and a vague sense of anticipation, along with an entirely real thirst.

  Georgii went out to smoke, sat on the bench by the house, and looked back out of the darkness, like someone looking from the darkened auditorium onto a theater stage, at the lit rectangle of the open kitchen door. The light came from two inconstant sources: a yellow light from the oil lamp and a low red glow from the hearth. Faces which in the course of the day had caught the dangerous spring sunshine now seemed heavily made up. Next to dark Medea sat light-colored Nora with her hair pinned back and her fringe tucked up. Nike had told her to rub some of their yogurtlike kefir on her face and now her skin had a dull gleam. When she gathered up her hair like this, her forehead looked too high and steep, the way it is in babies and medieval German Madonnas, and this fault made her face seem even sweeter.

  Georgii could also see Butonov’s powerful back in his pink T-shirt, and Nike’s winged shadow with the neck of the guitar and her hands flickering on the wall. In the middle of the table, like a precious globe, stood the samovar, but it wasn’t boiling for the tea. Although Georgii had finally run an overhead cable through to the kitchen, for some reason the electricity was cut off in the Village today.

  Along with the light, song poured out into the night, sung in Nike’s strong, simple voice supported by the uncomplicated chords of hands unschooled in music. At the time, everyone was singing Okudzhava, but Georgii, unlike the rest of them, did not like his songs. They irritated him with their cuffs and their velvet camisoles, their blues and their gilding, their smells of milk and honey, with all their romantic charm; but mainly, perhaps because they were captivating, and crept into your heart uninvited, and because you could still hear them long afterward and they left a residue in your memory.

  For many years he had been working in the field of paleozoology, the deadest of sciences, and this had given him a strange view of the world: he divided everything into hard and soft. Soft caressed the feelings, smelled, was sweet or repellent. It was associated with emotional reactions. Hard, on the other hand, determined the essence of a phenomenon, hard was its skeleton.

  Georgii could pick up one-half of an oyster shell buried in the hillside somewhere in Fergana or here, near Alchak, and tell straightaway in which of ten phases of the Paleogene Period this fleshy, long-vanished animal had lived, together with its adductor muscle and primitive nerve ganglions, all the stuff that made up its unimportant soft matter. These songs seemed to be nothing but soft matter. As distinct from, say, Schubert’s Lieder , in which he could feel the firm musical framework. Luckily he did not know German, so the words were no problem.

  Georgii crushed his cigarette end with a flat stone and went back to the kitchen, sitting in the darkest corner, from where he had a good view of Nora and her sweet, sleepy face. “She’s a real northern girl, and not very happy by all appearances,” he mused. “A Petersburg girl. There is an anemic blonde type with transparent fingers, fine blue veins, slender ankles and wrists. Her nipples are probably pale pink too …” He suddenly felt hot.

  As if sensing his thoughts, she half-hid her face with her slender hands.

  The days of Georgii’s youth, with their geological parties, their local cooks, obliging laboratory assistants always ready to offer up their muscular hips to the biting mosquitoes, their geologist girlfriends, were long past. From an Armenian mixture of stubbornness and lethargy, but also because he adhered to the mythology of family life instilled in him by his mother, despite the universal acceptance of promiscuity and all the habits of his circle and the derision of his friends, he preserved a grim fidelity to fat Zoyka but could never remember, no matter how hard he tried, what it was about her that had attracted him fifteen years ago. Nothing, except the touching way she folded her white socks carefully together, placing one on top of the other.

  He went out of the kitchen again to escape from the disturbing atmosphere which was bubbling away furiously in there, irritating and arousing him.

  “He’s gone,” Nora thought, disappointed.

  Nike meanwhile was busy with her favorite art of seduction, fine as lace, invisible but palpable, like the smell of a pie fresh from the oven, instantly filling any space. It was a necessity for her soul, a food almost spiritual, and Nike knew no better moment than when she was turning a man in her direction, breaking through the typical male’s self-absorption in the life taking place deep within himself; arousing interest in herself, deploying her lures, spreading her bait, drawing the bright threads toward herself, and already, while he is still talking to someone at the other end of the room, he is beginning to listen to her voice, picking up the intonations of her joyful friendliness and that other indefinable something which makes the male butterfly struggle dozens of kilometers to mate with the indolent female—and already, against his will, the man Nike has targeted is being drawn to the corner where she is sitting with her guitar, or without her guitar, large, jolly, russet Nike with the appeal in her eyes. Perhaps, indeed, this was the moment of her greatest triumph, with which no physiological delights could compare, when the game bird began to wander its way absentmindedly through the rooms with an empty glass in its hand, responding to the lure, while Nike, radiant, anticipated her victory.

  Butonov, sitting motionless in the middle of the bench opposite her, was already in Nike’s hands. For all his bright feathers he was a fairly simple game bird who rarely refused women but also did not allow them to tame him, preferring one-night stands to long-term relationships.

  Right now he wanted to go to bed, and he was wondering whether to save this gingersnap for tomorrow. Nike for her part had not the least intention of putting off till tomorrow something that could be done today. She got up casually and put the guitar in the armchair of Medea, who had already turned in.

  “The rest is silence,” she said, giving Butonov a smile which promised a continuation of the evening.

  Butonov did not recognize the quotation.

  “We’ll just check how the children are,” she said, seemingly addressing Nora.

  Butonov gathered that he was to wait.

  The women went into the dark house and looked into the children’s room. Nothing needed to be done: they were all worn out and sound asleep after their excursion; only Liza was sighing sweetly in her sleep as usual. Tanya was spread out across a very wide ottoman, to one side of which Katya was lying straight and elegant, not forgetting her deportment even in sleep. In the middle of the room stood a large communal chamber pot.

  “If you like, you can sleep here,” Nike said, indicating the ottoman, “or if you prefer, you can sleep in the little room—it’s made up.”

  Nora lay down beside her daughter. It was already past three in the morning and there was little time left for sleep.

  Nike returned to the kitchen and put her hand lightly on Butonov’s neck in passing. “You’ve got sunburnt.”

  “I have a bit,” Butonov responded, and it suddenly seemed to Nike that there had been no conquest. “Okay, let’s go, shall we?” Butonov suggested without turning around, his voice expressionless.

  Something was wrong here. The game wasn’t being played to Nike’s rules, but she didn’t stoop to flirting to try to obtain the requisite intonation; she squeezed her breast lightly against the firm back covered in stretc
hed pink material.

  What followed, on Ada’s territory, does not merit detailed description, but both participants were left wholly satisfied. After Nike had gone, Butonov relieved himself in the planked toilet at the end of the plot, which he had been unable to do earlier in a long day in the company of many people, and fell soundly asleep.

  When Nike returned home, it was already getting light and she didn’t feel in the least like sleeping: on the contrary, she was full of energy, and her body, as if appreciative of the pleasure it had just enjoyed, was ready for hard work and more fun. Humming something from a few years back, she scrupulously washed the dishes and cooked the porridge for breakfast. She was stirring it in a large saucepan using a long spoon when Medea came in for her cup of coffee.

  “I hope we didn’t disturb you too much last night,” Nike said, kissing Medea’s shriveled cheek.

  “No, child, no more than usual.” And Medea touched Nike’s head. She liked Nike’s head: her hair was just as springy and slightly crackly as Samuel’s.

  “I thought you were looking very tired yesterday,” Nike half-said, half-inquired.

  “You know, Nike, I never used to notice it, but the whole of this last year I seem to have been tired all the time. Old age, do you think?” Medea replied artlessly.

  Nike turned down the flame in the Primus. “Haven’t you had enough of that hospital of yours? Perhaps you should give it up?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know. I’m used to working. An affliction of slaves, Armik Tigranovna used to call it.” Medea stood up, the conversation over.

  Masha came in wearing a jacket over her nightdress, her face pink and inflamed and covered in little spots.

  “Masha! What’s wrong with you?” Nike gasped.

  Masha drank thirstily from a mug and, when she had finished, said in an odd voice, “The bucket’s full, though. I’ve got an allergy.”

  “It isn’t German measles, is it?” Medea asked anxiously.

  “Where would I have got that from? It’ll be gone by this evening,” Masha said with a smile. “I had a terrible night. Fever, shivering. But now it’s all over.”

  In her pocket was the crumpled piece of paper on which she had written her poem that night. For the moment Masha liked it very much, and she repeated it to herself: “A floating basket brings a child who nameless lies beside the river. Pharaoh’s daughter, heart aquiver, clothes the babe and with her song moves his destiny along. A fish is caught, it takes the bait and thrashes on the bank in netting. On that riverbank, forgetting everything, my name, my state, I sit in silence and I wait. I run the sand through fingers swelling. In that hot sun something’s jelling. I sleep, I bake, and still I wait. But wait for what? There is no telling.”

  In fact, however, she had no trouble at all in telling. After yesterday’s confusion and her terrible night, everything was crystal-clear: she had fallen in love.

  And she was feeling weak, as you do after a fever.

  CHAPTER 9

  Throughout her life Alexandra changed not only her men, of whom she grew bored easily, but also her profession. She met her third husband at the Maly Theater, where she worked from the mid-1950s as dresser to an ancient celebrity. Her husband, while collecting a decent state salary there, restored priceless antiques which the theater élite, the Actors of Merit of the USSR and the Actresses of the Soviet People, who had an eye for fine furniture, bought for a song.

  Alexandra, always ready for love, had little interest in wealth but worshiped brilliance. Her marriage to Alexei Kirillovich had not been brilliant. They were the three most boring years of her life, and they ended in scandal: Alexei Kirillovich caught her in flagrante delicto with the handsome deaf-and-dumb boilermaker who serviced the Timiryazev dachas.

  Alexei Kirillovich was deeply shocked and walked out forever, leaving his wife in the embraces of her huge Gerasim. Alexandra cried right up until the evening.

  She saw Alexei Kirillovich only once after that, in court for the divorce, but right through to 1941 she received alimony from him through the post. Alexei Kirillovich did not require access to his son.

  The boilermaker, needless to say, was an episode of no significance. She had various brilliant liaisons: with a dashing test pilot, with a famous Jewish academician who was a witty but indiscriminate philanderer, and with a young actor, a casualty of early fame and even earlier alcoholism.

  Her second husband, Yevgeny Kitaev, was a military man, well built, a lover of Ukrainian folk songs with a powerful voice. She had a daughter, Lidia, by him before this marriage too hit the buffers. They didn’t get divorced but they lived apart, and her second daughter, Vera, born just before the war, had a different father, a man with such an illustrious name that Kitaev modestly kept silent about the vagaries of his family life until the day he was killed. Alexandra’s last daughter, born in 1947, three years after his death, also bore his jolly surname.

  When Alexandra passed fifty, however, and admirers ceased to swarm to the no longer gleaming beacon of her red hair, she heaved a sigh and said to herself, “Oh, well, time’s up …” She cast her keen feminine eye around, and rather unexpectedly it came to rest on the theater’s cabinetmaker, Ivan Isaevich Pryanichkov.

  He was not old, about fifty, a year or two younger than she; not tall, but broad shouldered. He wore his hair longer than was customary among the working class, more in the fashion of an actor. He was invariably clean shaven, and his shirts peeped out freshly from beneath his blue work coat. Walking down the corridor behind him one time, Alexandra analyzed the complex and astringent aroma emanating from him and associated with his profession: turpentine, varnish, rosin, and something she couldn’t recognize. The smell struck her as really quite attractive.

  The cabinetmaker had a certain special dignity of his own. He did not fit into the usual theater hierarchy. He might have been expected to occupy a modest position somewhere between a stage mechanic and a makeup artist, but he stalked the theater corridors acknowledging greetings with a nod like an Actor of Merit of the USSR and closed the door to his workshop as firmly as an Actor of the Soviet People. One time, toward the end of the working day when the workers in the workshops had not yet left and the actors and all those needed for the production of the night’s performance had already assembled, Alexandra Georgievna knocked on his door. They exchanged greetings. It transpired that he did not know her by name, although by this time she had been working in the theater for three years. She told him about the walnut cabinet she had inherited from her late mother-in-law, cast a quick glance around the walls of his workshop, at the shelves with great bottles of dark and reddish fluids and at the various tools symmetrically hung up or lying around.

  Ivan Isaevich was holding a brown hand with a dark outline around the nails on the light-colored top of a dismantled side table, stroking down a jagged flower with a rough finger, and when Alexandra Georgievna finished her tale about the cabinet, he said, without looking her in the eyes, “When I finish this marquetry for Ivan Ivanovich I can come and take a look at it.”

  A week later he came to see her in Uspensky Lane, where she lived in two and a half rooms with her daughters Vera and Nike. The bowl of broth he was offered with a piece of yesterday’s meat kulebyaka, and buckwheat porridge which seemed to have been baked in a Russian stove, made a deep impression on Ivan Isaevich, who led a clean, worthy, but nevertheless bachelor existence, without good home cooking.

  He liked the solicitous movement with which Alexandra Georgievna took the bread out of the wooden bread bin and opened the napkin in which it was wrapped. An even deeper impression was made by the brief glance she threw at the end of the buffet, where a small icon of the Mother of God of Korsun was hanging and which he had not noticed immediately precisely because it was not hanging in the corner in the officially approved manner, but hidden—and the quiet sigh, “Oh, Lord,” which she had learned from Medea already in childhood.

  He was an Old Believer but had left home as a youth, renouncing his
faith. Having swum away from his home shore, however, he never did reach another and had lived all his life at war with himself, sometimes appalled at having turned his back on his parents’ world, sometimes anguished by the impossibility of uniting with the thousands of his frenzied and energetic Soviet fellow citizens.

  He was touched by her prayerful sigh, but only much later, when he was already her husband, did he realize that the crucial point was the amazingly simple way she had solved the problem which had tormented him all his life. For him the worship of a righteous God simply could not be reconciled with the living of an unrighteous life, but Alexandra brought everything together in a splendidly straightforward way: she painted her lips and dressed to kill, and could throw herself into having fun with total abandon, but when the time came, she would sigh and weep and pray, and suddenly give generous help to someone in need.

  The cabinet turned out to be an object of no importance, walnut veneer, with a lost key and damaged key plate. Ivan Isaevich laid out his tools and unscrewed the front leaf while Alexandra Georgievna got herself ready and ran to the evening performance to cloak her decaying prima donna in a merchant’s talma of heavy silk. The old woman played mothers-in-law in Ostrovsky almost all the time.

  Ivan Isaevich, left with her daughters, quietly got everything ready, cleaned the surface, removed the veneer where it was damaged in one place, and thought about the widow: a good woman living a pure life; her children well brought up; she herself, he could see, was well educated; although why on earth she was working as dresser to an old dame renowned for her difficult personality he couldn’t imagine.

  He had to leave before the owner returned, as she was held up longer than usual. The old prima donna had summoned the principal producer after the performance and ordered him to replace a young actress “who’s an uppity young madam, even though she’s incapable of articulating her lines properly herself.” By the time feathers had been unruffled and Alexandra had calmed her grand old lady down and changed her clothes, it was already half-past midnight, and Alexandra had to walk home because that evening the actress either forgot to give her a lift home in her personal taxi, as she usually did, or chose not to.