Nike sat down on the stack of laundry. “Never have dared what?”
“I grabbed him like you said.” Masha gave a rather silly giggle. “But you were absolutely right. You always are. I just had to stretch out my hand.”
“When?” was all Nike could ask in a strangled voice.
Masha embarked on a detailed account of how at the post office … But Nike stopped her. She no longer had time for long explanations and asked just one, seemingly quite odd, question: “Where?”
“At the Hub! It all happened right at the Hub. Like in an Italian movie. Now we can put a cross there in memory of my unshakable fidelity to my husband.” And Masha smiled her clever smile, just the same as it always had been.
Nike had never imagined that her crosspatch advice would be acted on with such precipitate literalness. But Butonov was obviously no dud.
“Well then, Masha, now you’ll have something to write poetry about, love lyrics,” Nike predicted, and was entirely correct.
“What a mess … Should I perhaps make her a present of this sports doctor?” Nike wondered. “Never mind, I’m leaving anyway. What will be, will be.”
CHAPTER 11
The small leather trunk bound with strips of molded wood, lined inside with glued white-and-pink-striped calico, full of partitioned boxes which interacted ingeniously to form a series of little shelves and compartments, had once belonged to Elena Stepanyan. This was the trunk with which she had returned from Geneva in 1909; and she had traveled with it from St. Petersburg to Tiflis; she had come with it to the Crimea in 1911. With this small trunk she returned to Theodosia in 1919 and there, immediately before her departure for Tashkent, she had presented it to Medea.
Three generations of little girls had swooned over it longingly, persuaded that Medea’s little trunk was full of treasure. There were indeed a few poor treasures in there: a big mother-of-pearl cameo, without its frame, which had helped feed them in the lean year of 1924; three silver rings and an inlaid Caucasian belt for a man, and for one with a very slender waist at that. But apart from these insignificant treasures the little trunk housed everything Robinson Crusoe could ever have dreamt of. There stayed there, securely packed and faultlessly tidy, candles, matches, threads of every color, needles and buttons of every size, spools for no longer extant sewing machines, fastenings for trousers and fur coats, hooks for fishing and needles for knitting; postage stamps—tsarist, Crimean, German occupation; shoelaces, braid, lace edgings, and insertions; thirteen locks of hair of various colors from the first haircut of yearling babes of the Sinoply family, wrapped in cigarette paper; a hoard of photographs; old Harlampy’s pipe; and much more besides. In the two lower drawers were letters, arranged by year and all of them in their original envelopes, neatly slit open down the side with a paper knife.
Here too various documents were kept safe, including some which were quite curious, for example a form concerning the requisitioning of a bicycle from Citizen Sinoply for the transport needs of the Volunteer Army. It was a true family archive, and like any worthwhile archive, it concealed secrets not to be made public before the time was ripe. These secrets were in trustworthy hands, and as far as it lay within Medea’s power, they were kept fairly scrupulously. At least the greatest and earliest of them was.
This secret was contained in a letter addressed to Matilda Tsyruli and dated February 1892. The letter had come from Batumi, was written in extremely bad Russian, and was signed with the Georgian name Medea. The present Medea knew, of course, of the existence of her Batumi namesake, Matilda’s sister-in-law, the wife of her elder brother, Sidor. According to family legend, the Georgian Medea had died of grief at the funeral of her husband, who had been killed in an accident. It was in her honor that Medea had received her own name, which was unusual among Greeks. The letter, with its spelling and grammar corrected, ran as follows:
Matilda, my dear friend, we heard it said a week ago that they had drowned, your Teresii and the Karmak brothers. The day before yesterday his body was washed ashore at Kobulety. The witnesses who identified him were Vartanyan and Kursua the Cap. He was buried and may the Kingdom of Heaven be his, I can say no more. When you ran away, his temper became even more foul, he beat up Uncle Plato, and was always fighting with Nikos. God granted you a lucky escape. My legs are very bad. Last winter I could hardly walk on them. Sidor helps me, great will be his reward. Get married straightaway now. I send you my love, and God be with you. Medea.
Medea found this letter a few years after the death of her parents and had kept it from her brothers and sisters. When the young Alexandra started on her first escapades, Medea had told her the story with some vague didactic intention, as if trying to conjure Alexandra’s destiny, to forestall the misfortunes and the difficult search for the meaning of her life which, this letter seemed to testify, had been the lot of their mother Matilda. Medea was deeply convinced that frivolity led to unhappiness, and had no inkling that levity can equally well lead to happiness or, for that matter, lead nowhere at all. From childhood, however, Alexandra behaved exactly as her wayward heart dictated, and Medea could never understand waywardness, whims, urgent desire, caprice, or passion. The second family secret was linked precisely to this peculiarity of Alexandra’s and, until its time came, had been hidden from Medea herself on the lower shelf of a single wardrobe, in the officer’s map case of Samuel Yakovlevich.
Medea had made herself a little corner of her own in the small room where Samuel had spent the last, agonizing year of his life. She placed her husband’s chair with its back to the window, put the small trunk at its side, and laid out on it the few books which she read constantly. She continually changed the white curtains in the room for even whiter ones, and dusted the whitish Crimean dust off the bookshelf and the cupboard where Samuel’s things were kept. She did not touch his belongings.
For the whole of that year she read the Psalter, one kathisma each evening, and when she got to the end, she started again at the beginning. Her Psalter was an old one, in Church Slavonic, left from her school days. Another, Greek, which had belonged to Harlampy, was difficult for her because it was written not in the language of the Pontic Greeks but in modern Greek. She also had in the house a Russian-Hebrew parallel-text Psalter published in Vilnius at the end of the nineteenth century, and this, together with two other books in Hebrew, now lay on the lid of the small trunk. Medea tried sometimes to read the Psalter in Russian, but although this made the meaning clearer in some places, the mysterious veiled beauty of the Church Slavonic was lost.
Medea well remembered the brown face of the young man with the thick, crudely split upper lip, his pointed nose, and the big flat lapels of his brown jacket, who came firmly up to Samuel sitting on a bench near the Theodosia bus station waiting for the bus to Simferopol. The young man was pressing three books to his side with his elbow. He stopped next to Samuel and asked him very directly, “Excuse me, are you a Jew?”
Samuel, tormented with pain, nodded silently, choosing not to come out with one of his customary dazzling jokes.
“Please take these. Our grandfather has died and nobody knows the language.” The young man began pushing the dog-eared volumes into Samuel’s hands, and it became clear that he was terribly confused. “Perhaps you will read them some time. My grandfather’s name was Chaim.”
Samuel silently opened the top one.
“The Siddur. I studied so badly in the heder, young man,” Samuel said thoughtfully, and the youth, seeing his indecision, hurried to say,
“Do please take them. I can’t just throw them out, can I? What use are they to us? We aren’t religious.”
And the brown youth ran off, leaving the three volumes on the bench beside Samuel. Samuel looked at Medea with large eyes: “There, do you see that, Medea,” he halted, because he guessed that she could see everything he could see and a few more things besides, and deftly wriggled out of his predicament. “Now we’ll have to drag all this weight to Simferopol and back.”
; The last leaf of hope had fallen from the tree. Believing not in chance but in God’s providence, she understood this clear sign without any room for doubt: prepare yourself! From that moment she had no need of any biopsy, which was why they were going to the provincial hospital. They looked at each other, and even Samuel, who habitually blurted out everything that came into his head, said nothing.
They didn’t bother with a biopsy in Simferopol but operated on him two days later, removing a major part of his large intestine, made an outlet in his side, a colostomy, and three weeks later Medea brought him home to die.
After the operation, however, he gradually felt better and better. Strangely enough he grew stronger, although he was extremely emaciated. Medea fed him only porridges and gave him herbal drinks, picking the herbs herself. A few days after his return from the hospital, he began reading those ancient books, and in the last year of his life the most useless pupil of the Olshansk heder, blessing unknown Chaim, returned to his people; and Orthodox Medea rejoiced. She had never studied theology and perhaps just because of that felt that the bosom of Abraham was situated not all that far distant from the regions inhabited by the souls of Christians.
This last year of his life was wonderful. The autumn outside was so still and mild, and unusually generous. The old Tatar vineyards, not pruned or tended for many years, bestowed their last harvest on the earth. In the following years the vines degenerated finally, and centuries of hard work went to waste.
Pears and peaches broke their boughs and tomatoes their stems. There were queues for bread, and not the remotest prospect of sugar. Housewives boiled and marinated tomatoes, dried fruit on their roofs, and the knowledgeable ones like Medea made Tatar pastilla without sugar. The Ukrainian pigs fattened on all the sweet windfalls, and the honeyed aroma of moldering fruit hung over the Village.
Medea was managing the hospital then. Only in 1955 was a doctor sent, and until then she was the only nurse in the Village. In early morning she would come into her husband’s room with a bowl of warm water, take off the clumsy, crudely made apparatus from his sick side, and cleanse and wash the wound with a decoction of chamomile and sage.
He grimaced not with pain but with embarrassment and muttered, “What justice is there in the world? I get a bag of gold and you get a bag of shit.”
She fed him watery porridge, gave him a herbal infusion to drink from a half-liter mug, and waited, placing a trough beneath his side until the porridge, having completed its short passage, poured out of the open wound. She knew what she was doing: the herbs sluiced the poison of his illness out of him, but the food was hardly assimilated. His death, for which both of them were readying themselves, was to come from starvation, not from poisoning.
Samuel at first turned away squeamishly, embarrassed at the exposing of this unpleasant physiology, but then he detected that Medea was not having to make the slightest effort to conceal revulsion, and that she was much more concerned about the inflamed edge of the wound or a delay in the outpouring of porridge which had only slightly changed its appearance than about the unpleasant smell emanating from the wound.
The pain was very great, but inconsistent. Sometimes several days would pass peacefully before some internal obstruction would form; then Medea would rinse the stoma with boiled sunflower oil, and everything would settle down again. After all, this too was life, and Medea was prepared to bear the burden indefinitely.
In the mornings she would spend three hours or so by her husband’s side, going off to work at half-past eight and running home at lunchtime. Sometimes, when Tamara Stepanovna, an old registered nurse, was on duty with her, she could leave at lunchtime and she didn’t have to go back to work in the afternoon.
Then Samuel could go out to the yard. She would arrange him in the chair and sit herself beside him on a low bench, cutting the skin off pears with a little knife whose blade had been almost completely worn away, or peeling blanched tomatoes.
Toward the end of his life Samuel became taciturn, and they sat quietly, enjoying each other’s presence, the stillness, and their love in which there was now no fault. Medea, ever mindful of his rare natural lack of malice and the event which he considered his ineradicable disgrace, but which she saw as a true manifestation of his meek soul, rejoiced now in the quiet courage with which he bore his pain, fearlessly approaching death and literally pouring gratitude out of his heart to all God’s world, and in particular to her, Medea.
He usually had his chair so that he could see the table mountains and the rounded hills in their pink and grey haze. “The hills here are like the hills of Galilee,” he repeated after Alexander Stepanyan, whom he had never seen, any more than he had seen the hills of Galilee. He knew of him only from what Medea had told him.
The book from which he had read excerpts worse than anyone else at the celebration of his Jewish coming of age half a century before, he now read slowly. Forgotten words rose like air bubbles from the bottom of his memory, and if they didn’t and the square letters chose not to reveal their hallowed meaning to him, he looked for an approximate paraphrase in the parallel Russian text.
He quickly realized that the book did not lend itself to exact translation. On the bourne of life things began to reveal themselves of which he had had no idea: that thoughts are not fully conveyed by words, but only with a large amount of approximation; that there is a certain gap, a breach, between the thought and the word, and it is filled in by hard work on the part of consciousness, which makes up for the deficiencies of language. In order to break through to the thought itself, which Samuel now imagined as resembling a crystal, you had to leave the text behind. In itself language clogged the precious crystal with inaccurate words whose boundaries fluctuated over time, with the physical appearance of words and letters, and with the different sound of the spoken word. He noticed that a certain shift of meaning occurred: the two languages he knew, Russian and Hebrew, had slightly different ways of expressing thought.
“National in form,” Samuel smiled, paraphrasing Stalin, “and divine in content.” Even now he couldn’t stop joking.
He had little strength left. Everything he did he did very slowly, and Medea noticed how his movements had changed, how meaningfully and even solemnly he raised the cup to his mouth, and wiped with his withered fingers the mustache he had grown over the last few months and the short beard streaked with grey. But, as if in compensation for this physical decline, or perhaps it was the effect Medea’s herbs had, his mind was clear and his thoughts, although slow, were very precise. He understood that he had little of his lifetime left, but surprisingly enough the sense of always being in a rush and the fussiness which had always been a part of him completely left him. He slept little now, his days and nights were very long, but this did not burden him: his consciousness had become attuned to a different timescale. Looking into the past, he was amazed at the instantaneousness of the life he had lived, and at the length of each minute he was spending in the wicker chair, sitting with his back to the sunset, his face to the east, to the darkening, lilac-blue sky, to the hills which in the course of half an hour could turn from pink to a brooding blue.
Looking in that direction, he made another discovery: it transpired that all his life he had lived not only in a rush, but also in a state of profound fear, which he had hidden even from himself. More exactly, many fears, of which the most acute was the fear of killing. Remembering now that appalling event in Vasilishchevo, the shootings which he was to have conducted and which he had not in the end seen, having ignominiously collapsed in a nervous fit, he now thanked God for that weakness so unbecoming in a man, for his behaving like a high-strung lady, which had saved his soul from damnation.
“I’m a coward, a coward,” he admitted to himself, but even here could not miss an opportunity for ironic creativity: “She loved him so because he was a coward, he loved her for forgiving that in him.” “And I always hid my cowardice,” as Samuel now judged himself, “by running after women.”
A
psychoanalyst might have extrapolated from Samuel’s case some complex with a mythological name, and would at the very least have explained the dentist’s heightened sexual aggression as a subconscious driving out of fear of the bloodiness of life by means of simple thrusting movements in the yielding soft tissue of generously endowed ladies. Marrying Medea, he hid from his eternal fear behind her courage. His pranks and jokes and the constant desire to get those around him to smile were associated with an intuitive realization that laughter kills fear. He found out now that a mortal illness too could free you of the fear of living.
The last fierce dog waiting to bite every Jew’s heel was cosmopolitanism. Even before the term became generally accepted, sprouting its rigid expanded definition of “a reactionary bourgeois ideology,” from Zhdanov’s first publication Samuel anxiously followed the newspapers in which this bubble sometimes expanded and sometimes shrank. From his socially insignificant but materially more than tolerable position as district dental prosthetist, ever since his disgraceful flight from the ranks of the directly involved perpetrators of history into the herd of passive observers under experiment, Samuel foresaw the next of Stalin’s migrations of the peoples. The Crimean Tatars, the Germans, in part the Pontic Greeks, and the Karaims had already been deported from the Crimea by this time, and he had the inventive idea of preempting the blow and taking contract work in the north of Russia for five years or so, by which time, with any luck, it would all have blown over.
Even before his illness he often walked with his friend Pavel Nikolaevich Shimes, a consulting physiotherapist at the Sudak sanatorium, through the manicured park which had formerly adjoined the Stepanyans’ dacha, and they had whispered discussions about the sweeping course of history in the practical terms of those who currently found themselves at its sharp end. Early one Sunday morning at the end of October 1951, Dr. Shimes came from Sudak to see him, bearing a half-liter bottle of dilute surgical spirit, an extremely strange gift for a teetotaler to bring, and to Samuel’s great surprise he asked Medea to leave them on their own.
Medea and Her Children Page 18