Thereupon, rattling with false teeth which had not been very well fitted—not by Samuel, be it said—and drumming his fingers on the table’s edge, he announced that the end had come. There had been a Party meeting at the sanatorium the previous day at which, with provincial intellectual obtuseness, he had been accused of cosmopolitanism because of the wretched Charcot shower which the doctor had been promoting for many years alongside other physiotherapeutic methods, all of which had been devised by foreign physiologists at the end of the nineteenth century.
“That moron who runs the sanatorium thought ‘Sharko’ was a Ukrainian. Somebody enlightened him about that. I tell you though, Samuel, what I thought I might do. How would it be if I were to show him the certificate? We’ve got it safe at home,” Shimes whispered.
“What certificate? That Charcot was a Ukrainian?” Samuel asked in surprise.
“That I’ve been christened. They think I’m a Jew, that’s what it’s all about, but my father was baptized and had the whole family christened back in 1904, just before the pogrom. What do you think I should do, eh? What should I do?” He dropped his bald head onto his hands.
He had nevertheless remained a real Jew, because at such a moment no Russian would ever have allowed himself to forget the bottle of spirits he had brought. Samuel scratched his little beard before answering in his usual manner: “Keep that certificate of yours for your funeral, so your priests can chant that Christian Kaddish of theirs over you. That’s no solution. For Russians you are still a Jew, and for Jews you are worse than a goy. But as regards Charcot, you announce to those donkeys that Dr. Charcot stole his invention. From Botkin, say, or from Spasokukotsky. Or better still from Academician Pavlov. What are you looking at me like that for? Write up in your treatment room, ‘Academician Pavlov Shower,’ and they will all go back to sleep. And Pavlov won’t mind: he died before the war.” Samuel smiled waspishly and added, “And if you are as Orthodox as all that, you can even light a candle in church for him. My Medea will show you how, she knows all about that sort of thing.”
Poor Shimes took offense and left, but after further thought he did hang up a notice in large red letters reading, “Academician Pavlov Shower.” Alas, it was too late: he was fired from his job, although the notice hung on the door for more than two years. But at that time, after Shimes had gone off, Samuel felt his fear gradually being replaced by regret that there should be such rank stupidity all around. Or perhaps his illness was already beginning its secret work in Samuel’s apparently still-healthy body.
It stayed warm for much longer than was usual in these parts, right through to the end of November. But then, from the first days of December, the cold rains began, quickly turning into snow and storms. Although the sea was quite far away and considerably lower, bad weather at sea affected the Village, especially at night. The wind bore masses of visible and invisible water, and the thick cushion of water vapor over the earth was so dense that it was impossible to imagine that a mere five kilometers or so above this cold porridge there shone the inexhaustible, infinite sun.
Samuel ceased going outside. Medea took his wicker chair back to the summer kitchen and put on the winter padlock. She was cooking now on a cooker in the house and in addition lit a small wood stove which had been installed by a Theodosia stove setter the year they moved here. Tatars did not put stoves in their houses, and left the floors earthen. Samuel and Medea had them covered over a year after they moved in.
Samuel asked her to hang heavy curtains in his room. He did not like the transition of twilight and would pull down the heavy blue blinds and light the table lamp. When they had a power cut, which was fairly often, he would light an older miner’s lamp which gave a bright whitish light.
They kept the windows closed now, and Medea was forever burning oil infused with herbs in little homemade lamps, and the house was filled with a sweet oriental fragrance.
Samuel no longer read the newspapers; even the periodical fishing out of cosmopolitans in all areas of science and culture ceased to interest him.
By now he had read his way to the Book of Leviticus. This relatively less engrossing book, by comparison with the first two books of the Pentateuch, was addressed primarily to priests and contained almost half the 613 commandments which supported the Jewish way of life.
Samuel immersed himself in this strange book for a long time but still couldn’t see why “of every winged crawling thing that goeth upon all four” you could eat only those which “have legs above their feet with which to leap upon the earth.” But even of those the only ones pronounced fit for eating were the locust, and the hargol and harab which nobody had ever heard of, while all the rest were considered an abomination.
There was absolutely no logical explanation given for this. It was rough and inflexible, this law, and a lot of space was devoted to all manner of rituals connected with service in the Temple, which was complete nonsense given that there had long been no Temple and there was no prospect of its ever being restored. Then he noticed that the overall design of this ungainly law, sketched already in Exodus and fully developed in the Talmud, examined every imaginable and unimaginable situation in which a human being might find himself, and gave precise instructions on how to behave in these circumstances, and that all these chaotically imposed prohibitions were in pursuance of a single aim: the holiness of the life of the people of Israel and an associated total rejection of the laws of the Land of Canaan.
This path had been offered to him in the days of his youth, and he had rejected it. More than that, he had rejected even the laws of the Land of Canaan, which promised, if not holiness, then at least a certain relative orderliness founded on justice, and as a young man he had managed to work for the destruction of both of them.
Researching now the ancient Jewish legislation, he came to a realization of the profound lawlessness in which the people of his country were living, and he among them. This was no less than the universal rule of lawlessness which, worse than the laws of Canaan, overruled the distinction between innocence and brazenness, intelligence and stupidity. The only person, he now recognized, who was truly living in accordance with a law of her own was his wife Medea. The quiet stubbornness with which she had brought up the children, toiled and prayed and kept her fasts, could be seen now not to be an extension of her strange personality, but an obligation freely assumed, the observance of a law long since repealed everywhere by everyone else.
He did actually know other people of a similar disposition— his Uncle Ephraim, randomly killed by a drunken soldier who disappeared around the end of the street without looking back; and possibly Rais, the feebleminded cleaner, was someone of the same kind, a young Tatar who had just two rules in his little head: to smile at everyone; and to meticulously—idiotically meticulously—sweep the paths of the sanatorium park.
Samuel, who had been used to blurting out everything that came into his head to Medea, kept his present thoughts to himself, not from fear of not being understood, but rather from a feeling that he could not express them with total accuracy. From what he did say, Medea understood how much his inner life had changed and was glad about that, but she was too concerned about his physical condition to delve more deeply. He had begun to have back pain, and now she was giving him injections to enable him to sleep.
December passed, the storms abated, but it was as dismal and cold as ever. By the middle of January they were looking forward to the coming of spring. Medea, who had previously replied promptly to letters from her relatives, now responded only with brief postcards. “Received your letter, thank you, everything with us is as it was, Medea, Samuel.”
She had no time for letter-writing. In all that winter she wrote only two real letters—to Elena and Alexandra.
February seemed to go on forever, and as luck would have it, this had to be a leap year. But then, in the third week of March the sun appeared, and from then on never missed an hour, and immediately everything started turning green. On the way home from work
Medea climbed up a sun-warmed hill, picked a few violets and asphodels, and arranged them in a dish beside Samuel. He was hardly getting out of bed now and didn’t even sit up because sitting seemed to make the pain worse. He was eating only once a day because the business of eating was too exhausting. His expression was continuing to change, and Medea found him full of spirituality and marvelous.
The last Sunday of March was a warm day with no wind, and Samuel asked her to take him outside. She washed the chair, dried it in the sun, and covered it with an old blanket. Then she dressed Samuel, and it seemed to her that his coat weighed more than he did himself. He walked the twenty steps from his bed out to the chair with immense difficulty.
On a nearby slope the tamarisks were doing their best, their branches laden with lilac color which they were still holding back within themselves. He looked toward the table mountains and they looked back at him in a friendly way, as equals regarding an equal.
“God, how wonderful, how beautiful,” he said again and again, and tears flowed from the inner and outer corners of his eyes at the same time and were lost in the pointed beard he had grown.
Medea was sitting next to him on the bench and did not notice the moment when he ceased to breathe, because tears continued to flow for a few minutes more from his eyes.
He was buried on the fifth day. His withered body waited patiently for the relatives to come, showing no signs of decay. Alexandra came with Sergei, Fyodor with Georgii and Natasha, brother Dimitry with his son Gvidas from Lithuania, and all the men of the family from Tbilisi. The men bore him to the local graveyard and sat down afterward to a modest meal in his memory.
Medea did not allow any baking of pies or a big funeral party. There was traditional kutiya with rice, raisins and honey, there was bread, cheese, a bowl of Central Asian greens, and hard-boiled eggs. When Natasha asked Medea why she had arranged it this way, she replied: “He was a Jew, Natasha, and Jews don’t have funeral parties at all. They come back from the graveyard, sit on the floor, pray and fast for a set number of days. I have to say that seems to me a good custom. I don’t like our parties where people always eat and drink too much. Let it be this way.”
After the death of her husband, Medea put on widow’s weeds and surprised everyone with her beauty and an expression of unusual gentleness which people had not noticed in her before. With this new expression she embarked upon her long widowhood.
All that year, as we have said, Medea read the Psalter and waited for news from beyond the grave from her husband as diligently as one might wait for the postman to bring an overdue letter. But nothing came. Several times it seemed to her that the long-awaited dream was beginning, that everything was full of her husband’s presence, but her anticipation was dispelled by the unexpected arrival, in her dream, of some hostile stranger, or in reality by a strong gust of wind slamming the window and driving sleep away.
He first appeared to her in early March, shortly before the first anniversary of his death, but the dream was strange and brought her no comfort. Several days passed before its meaning became clear.
She dreamed of Samuel in a white doctor’s coat. That was good. His hands were covered in plaster or chalk, and his face was very pale. He was sitting at his work table tapping with a little hammer at some unpleasant jagged metal object, but it was not a set of dentures. Then he turned to her and stood up, and he was holding a portrait of Stalin which for some reason was upside down. He took the hammer, tapped it on the edge of the glass, and removed him neatly; but while he was fiddling with the glass, Stalin disappeared, to be replaced by a large photograph of the young Alexandra.
That very day it was announced that Stalin was ill, and a few days later that he had died. Medea observed the spontaneous grief and sincere tears, and also the unutterable curses of those who could not share that grief, but she herself was completely unmoved by the event. She was much more concerned about the second half of the dream: why was Alexandra in it and what did her being there presage? Medea had a vague sense of alarm and even wondered about going to the post office to ring through to Moscow.
A further two weeks passed and the anniversary of Samuel’s death came around. That day the weather was rainy, and Medea was completely soaked by the time she got back home from the graveyard. The following day she decided to go through her husband’s belongings, give some of the things away, but mainly she wanted to find some instruments and a small German electric motor which she had promised to the son of a friend in Theodosia.
She made a pile of his folded shirts and set aside his good suit for Fyodor, who might have a use for it. There were also two sweaters which retained the living smell of her husband, and she held them for a while in her hands before deciding not to give them away to anyone but keep them for herself. In the very bottom of the cupboard she found a map case with various documents: one certifying completion of the course in dental prosthetics of the Commissariat of Health; one about graduating from the workers’ faculty course; several deeds and official congratulatory letters.
“I’ll put them away in the trunk,” Medea thought, and opened an inconspicuous side section of the map case. A thin envelope lay in there, written in Alexandra’s handwriting. The letter was addressed to S. Ya. Mendez, Sudak Post Office. That was odd.
She opened the envelope mechanically and was stopped short by the first line: “Dear Samsy,” Alexandra had written. Nobody called him that. Older people called him Sam, the younger ones Samuel Yakovlevich. “You have turned out to be much better at arithmetic than I thought,” Medea read.
You are absolutely right, but it doesn’t mean anything at all, and it would be best if you forgot about your discovery straightaway and forever. I and my sister are complete opposites. She is a saint and I am a swine three times over, but I would rather die than that she should discover who the father of this child is. For this reason I beg you to destroy this letter straightaway. The girl is completely mine, only mine, and please do not think that you have a child—this is simply another of Medea’s many relatives. She is a splendid little girl, redheaded and smiling, and looks as though she’s going to be a bundle of fun, and I just hope she doesn’t look like you—by which I mean so that this secret will remain between the two of us. Thank you for the money. It was not unwelcome but, to tell the truth, I do not know whether I want help from you. The main thing is that my sister shouldn’t suspect anything. I’m suffering pangs of conscience enough as it is, and really where would I be if she ever found out?
And where would she be? Look after yourself and enjoy your life, Samsy.
Sandra
Medea read the letter standing up, very slowly, and then she read it again. Yes, of course. They had often gone down to the coves together that summer, Alexandra and Samuel. And it was that summer that Alexandra had lost her maiden’s ring.
Medea sat down. A blackness the like of which she had never known engulfed her. Until late evening she sat there, not moving, then she got up and started packing her things. She didn’t go to bed that night.
In the morning she was standing at the bus stop with her black shawl neatly tied, with a large rucksack on her back and carrying a carryall she had made herself. At the bottom of the carryall, in an old-fashioned carpetbag, lay her application for leave which she had decided to send when already on her way, her identity documents, some money, and the ill-starred letter. She caught the first morning bus to Theodosia.
CHAPTER 12
Standing at the bus stop with the rucksack on her shoulders, Medea felt herself a second Odysseus. Probably, indeed, even more heroic, since Odysseus standing on the shores of Troy, while he might have been unaware of the many years that would have to pass before his return, did at least have a fairly good idea of the distance separating him from home.
Medea, however, was accustomed to measuring distance in terms of hours of her brisk walking, and could not begin to imagine the length of the journey she had embarked on. Odysseus, moreover, was an adventurer and a mariner, an
d did not pass up any opportunity to delay his return, mostly just pretending that his ultimate destination was the crude habitation in Ithaca called the king’s palace and the embraces of his aged and domesticated wife.
Up to that time Medea had spent her whole life in the Crimea, apart from that single journey to Moscow with Alexandra and her firstborn, Sergei, and this rooted life, which had itself been subject to violent and rapid change—revolutions, changes of government, the Reds, the Whites, the Germans, the Romanians; some neighbors being deported, new neighbors, outsiders with no ties, imported—had finally given Medea the stolidity of a tree which has put down its twining roots into the stony soil, living beneath the unchanging sun as it completes its daily and yearly rounds, and exposed to the same winds with their seasonal smells of seaweed drying on the shore, or fruit shriveling in the sun, or bitter wormwood.
For all that, she was a maritime person. From an early age the men of her family went to sea. Her father had died at sea, and Alexander Stepanyan had gone away forever over the sea, taking with him Anait and Arsik; a decrepit steamer had taken her aunt and two of her brothers from Batumi; and even her sister Anelya, who had married a Georgian from mountainous Tiflis, had left home long ago from the new dock at dear Theodosia.
Although there were no direct sea routes to the far-off city to which Medea had been intending to travel for decades, and for which she had now packed her bags and set out in a single night, she decided to go at least part of the way, the first part, by sea, from Kerch to Taganrog. The first two legs of the journey, from the Village to Theodosia, and from Theodosia to Kerch, were as familiar as crossing her own yard. Arriving that evening in Kerch, she found herself on the frontiers of her oikoumene, which had the ancient Pantikapeia as its easternmost point.
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