In the port Medea learned that passenger sailings began only in May, and that the few ships which were now sailing between Kerch and Taganrog carried only freight and no passengers. She was nonplussed, recognizing her first mistake: she should after all have gone directly via Dzhankoy, not allowing herself to be tempted by marine digressions.
Turning away with some aversion from the brackish, yellowy-grey maeotian waters, she went to see her old friend Tasha Lavinskaya, who had dedicated herself from the days of her youth to “bone-grubbing,” as it was jocularly described by her husband, old Dr. Lavinsky, an intellectual and bibliophile who was almost as much of a local sight as the Vault of Diana. They lived at the back of the museum, and their apartment looked like an annex of it: fragments of crumbling Kerch stone, ancient dust, and dry paper filled the house.
Tasha did not immediately recognize Medea. They had not seen each other for several years, since Samuel had fallen ill, when her small number of friends, some from a feeling of tact, some for selfish reasons, had almost ceased to visit them in the Village. Having recognized her, however, Tasha fell upon Medea’s neck, not giving her time even to take off her rucksack.
“Wait, wait, Tashenka, let me get these things off first,” Medea said, fending her off. “Let me get washed. Samuel used to say Kerch was the world’s pole for dust.” It was a damp springtime and there was no dust in evidence at all, but such was Medea’s confidence in what her late husband said that she felt covered in dust.
Sweeping piles of tattered books and sundry sheets of paper, covered with tiny drawings and infrequent illegible lines of writing, from the edge of the table with a practiced gesture, Tasha laid out the food on a newspaper, making no attempt to disguise its paucity and unprepossessing appearance. Sergei Illarionovich, the majestic old husband of a once-young beauty who magnanimously failed to notice how old and ugly she had become at an early age, the occasional coarse hairs sprouting from her chin, or her increasingly buck teeth, all his life viewed Tasha’s extreme aversion to housework as a delightful foible. He had not lost an archaic ability to play the host, and plied Medea with dried and tinned fish, which was a complete absurdity in this fishing town.
But the wine was good. Someone had given it to them. Although long retired, Sergei was still practicing a little, and the intimates he treated would bring gifts of food to the house in addition to the customary fee, as they had in the past years of famine which had already almost faded from people’s short memories. Hearing of the hitch in his guest’s traveling plans, he immediately phoned the director of the port, who promised to see Medea on her way in the morning on the first available vessel, although he warned that he could give the traveler no guarantees regarding comfort.
They sat up until late into the night, the three of them at the table, drinking the good wine, then drinking bad tea, and Tasha, who showed no interest in why Medea might need to be going to Taganrog, launched into a long narrative about some kind of grid she had discovered from the Azov Mesolithic period. For a long while Medea couldn’t grasp why she was so excited, until Tasha placed before her, on top of the remains of the fish, some very soiled little pictures drawn by an expert hand, depicting what looked like a grid for tic-tac-toe, and announced that this grid was one of the most persistent sacred symbols, found in the Paleolithic period and discovered in Egypt, on Crete, in pre-Columbian America, and now if you please here too, in the Azov region. Sergei Illarionovich, overcome by the drowsiness of old age and dozing in his armchair, was roused from time to time by his innate courtesy to nod a sleepy head in agreement and murmur some word of approbation before relapsing into slumber.
Not in the least interested in Tasha’s scholarly researches, Medea waited patiently for the lecture to end, surprised that she had said not a word either about her daughter or granddaughter who were living in Leningrad. At each turning point in Tasha’s speech Medea nodded in agreement and reflected on how stubborn human nature is, how persistent a passion can sometimes be, as unchanging as these grids of hers, these ovals and dots which, having once been imprinted, live on for millennia in every remotest corner of the world, in the cellars of museums, in rubbish dumps, scratched in the dry earth and on ramshackle fences by children at play.
In the morning a burly man in a maritime uniform without epaulettes came and collected Medea from the sleeping Lavinsky household, and an hour later she was being rocked in the middle of the Bay of Kerch on an ancient cargo steamer of a type so familiar that it might have belonged to the old armada of her grandfather Harlampy. Wheezing and straining powerlessly like an old man, the little steamship struggled into Taganrog only toward evening. By this time the drizzle had turned into a grey light rain and Medea, having sat twelve hours on a wooden bench on the deck with her back straight and her knees tightly together, walked down the gangplank feeling more like a part of the wooden bench from which she had just torn herself than a live human being.
On the landing stage she looked around her: apart from a single streetlamp and a boy who had traveled with her all the way from Kerch, who had been reading a thick tome during the hours of daylight, there was nobody and nothing around. The boy was in that final stage of childhood when being called “young man” still causes confusion.
“Can you tell me, young man, which the best way would be to get to Rostov-on-Don: train or bus?”
“Bus,” he replied laconically.
Beside the boy stood a two-handled basket wrapped in old material with a pleasantly familiar pattern. Medea’s eye lingered on it: faded, barely discernible daisies in round posies … The boy seemed to catch her gaze and said something that didn’t make sense, pushing the basket with his foot: “If it fits in the boot, there’ll be room for you too.”
“What did you say?” Medea asked in surprise.
“My brother’s coming from Rostov to pick me up. In his car. I think there’ll be room in it for you.”
“Really? Splendid.”
The spiritual darkness which had enveloped her without relinquishing its grip for an instant since she had read that dreadful, hurried, offhand letter, did not stop her from rejoicing: “Lord, I thank you that you have not forsaken me in my travels, and that you send me your wayside angel as you did to Tobias.”
The youth who, unknown to himself, was performing the office of wayside angel, moved the basket aside with the squared toe cap of his boot and explained to Medea, “He has a large car, a Victory, but he might already be transporting something in it.”
The boy’s speech was correct, and his intonation seemed familiar. He sounded as if he came from a good family. Evidently the thick volumes he read had done him some good.
Some fifteen minutes later a thickset young man came up, kissed the boy, and slapped him on the shoulder. “Well done, Leshenka! Why didn’t you bring Auntie?”
“She said she’ll come in the summer. Her legs are hurting her.”
“Poor woman. How’s she managing there on her own?” It wasn’t an idle question: he was listening for the answer.
“It seemed to me she was getting by. She’s renting one room. The lodger’s a decent man, from Leningrad. He works at the meteorological station. He brought her some firewood in his car. Look, she’s sent some presents.” He nodded at the basket. “I didn’t want to take them, but she insisted.”
The man shrugged. “That’s just how it has to be.”
He went to pick up the basket. The boy stopped him. “Tolya, this lady’s going to Rostov too. Have you got room for her?”
Tolya turned to Medea as if he had only just noticed her, although she had been standing alongside throughout the conversation. “I do have room. I can give you a lift. Where do you need to get to in Rostov?”
“The train station.”
“Give me your rucksack,” he stretched out a hand and slipped it onto his shoulder.
Medea was still murmuring to herself, “Lord, I thank you for all your goodness, for all that you send, and may I have room for it in my heart, reject
ing nothing.” This was her ongoing conversation with God, a mixture of prayers memorized long ago and her own voice, alive and grateful.
Medea, who had barely had time to straighten her old bones after sitting so long on the deck, now climbed into the car where it was warm and comfortable. Her damp clothing, if it didn’t exactly dry out, was at least soon suffused with her own warmth. She nodded off and through her half-sleep heard scraps of the brothers’ conversation: something about their sister’s wedding; about the teacher training institute where the boy was a fresh-man; about Simferopol; about the aunt whom he had been visiting in Old Crimea.
“I really ought to visit Nina,” Medea thought blearily through her sleep, remembering her former Theodosia neighbor who had moved to Old Crimea after a fire destroyed her house in their street. Through her drowsiness Medea remembered Nina, and her old mother who had gone out of her mind that very night, and her younger sister whose arm had been burned and to whom Medea had given first aid using a primitive but effective folk remedy.
They brought Medea to the train station in complete darkness in the middle of the night. The driver took Medea’s rucksack and saw her to the ticket office. At one window there was a long, silent queue; the other two windows were shut so firmly it was difficult to believe they were ever open.
Medea stopped in front of one of these unpromising windows and thanked the driver. He took the rucksack off his shoulder, put it on the ground, and said uncertainly, “Would you perhaps like me to take you home for now and you can go on from here in the morning? Just look at this queue.”
Before Medea could thank him, the window by her shoulder opened, and without having time to be taken aback, she asked for a ticket to Tashkent.
“Reserved seats only,” the cashier warned her, “and you’ll have to change twice, at Saratov and Salsk.”
“Fine,” Medea said.
The crowd immediately stampeded with much shrieking and yelling toward the window which had unexpectedly opened, and a furious argument broke out, with some people wanting to keep the old order of the queue, while those who had been at the back and now found themselves nearer the front didn’t think that was at all a good idea.
A moment later, squeezing her way with difficulty through a seething crowd up in arms in pursuit of justice, her ticket in her hand, Medea took the rucksack from Tolya. He could only spread his arms wide in amazement: “Well, that really was a stroke of luck!”
They went out onto the platform and consequently didn’t see that the window from which Medea’s ticket had been issued was promptly closed again, and the crowd, now split in two, seethed in front of both of the closed windows, impatient fists drumming on unyielding plywood.
Medea’s train arrived twelve minutes later, although it was five hours behind schedule. It was only when they were out of Rostov that she realized why the cloth with the daisy pattern had seemed so familiar: it was her own curtain, which she had given to Nina along with many other essentials after the fire thirty years ago. So the aunt in Old Crimea that they had been talking about was her own former neighbor Nina, and the young men were the children of the girl whose burn Medea had treated that night.
Medea smiled to herself and felt reassured. Despite being so much more crowded and having so much more hustle and bustle, the world still functioned in its old way, the way she understood, with small miracles happening, people coming together and parting, and all of it forming a wonderful pattern.
She got two rusks out of her rucksack and a large German thermos with a lid. The tea poured into it back in Kerch was hot and sweet. Medea sat for about four days by the carriage window, stretching out occasionally on the lower bunk and falling into a fitful and vibrating sleep on the bottom of which lay that black, insoluble precipitate of darkness.
The train rumbled slowly on, making countless little stops and standing for long senseless periods at the dual-track passing places. The entire timetable had been vitiated when the train was dispatched with a long delay to its point of departure. At every station and every halt it was met by a crowd wearied by their waiting. Not many people in the slow, dirty train were making as long a journey as Medea. Most of them got in with their baskets, sacks, and bundles for a few stops, crowding the corridors and, when they got out, leaving behind them pungent smells and the husks of sunflower seeds.
Although she had lived through many unsettled times in the Crimea, and remembered the typhoid-infected huts, the famine, and the cold, Medea had never been directly caught up in the huge migrations which have accompanied Russia’s history, and knew only by hearsay about the goods vans, the cattle trucks full of people, and the queues for boiling water at the stations. Now, when she had passed fifty, she had for the first time torn herself away from her dear settled life of her own free will, and observed with astonishment what uncountable hordes were on the move over this vast, uncared-for land littered with rusting metal and broken stones. Down the railway embankments, just beneath the spare spring grass, lay the remains of a war which had ended eight years before, eroded shell craters full of stagnant water, ruins and bones embedded in the ground which filled the landscape from Rostov to Salsk and from Salsk to Stalingrad.
It seemed to Medea that the war was etched more deeply in the memory of the land than in that of all this multitude of people so loudly and uniformly lamenting the recent death of Stalin. Only a few weeks had passed since he died, and all her fellow travelers were constantly mentioning it as they talked among themselves.
She heard a lot of fantastic nonsense: an elderly railway worker, on the way back from his own mother’s funeral, told in a whisper of the great slaughter which had occurred in Moscow on the day the nation was bidding farewell to Stalin, and about the Jewish conspiracies which had been at the root of it; another gloomy individual, with a wooden leg and a chest bright with medal ribbons, told of an underground city full of top-secret American weapons which had supposedly been dug up by chance in the middle of Moscow; two schoolmarms on their way to a regional meeting of some description endlessly debated in strained professional tones between themselves who there now was to lead the country to the Communist dream. In contrast, a tipsy traveler who had not taken off his cap with its earflaps all the way from Ilovinskaya to Saratov, and who had been listening the whole journey to their loud chatter without saying a word, as he was getting off the train suddenly pulled the hat from his head to reveal a patchy baldness, spat on the floor and said in a powerful voice, “You’re two daft old biddies! It can’t get worse than this under anybody.”
Medea smiled out of the window. From her early years she had become used to treating political changes like changes in the weather—something you just had to put up with: in the winter you were cold, in the summer you sweated. She did, however, take care to prepare for each season in good time, getting in firewood for the winter; stockpiling sugar, if such a thing were anywhere to be found, for jam making in the summer. She never expected anything good from any authorities, kept her guard up, and stayed well away from people who were part of the power structure.
As for the Great Leader, the family had long had a bone to pick with him. Well before the Revolution, in Batumi, he had turned the head of her aunt’s husband Iraklii, and landed him in a thoroughly unsavory episode involving a bank robbery from which he had to be extricated by his family putting together a very large sum of money.
In the Village on the day the Leader died, flags of mourning were put out and a meeting called. A party boss came from Sudak—not the top boss, someone fairly new. He gave his speech; they turned on some solemn music; two local women, Sonya from the food shop and Valentina Ivanovna the teacher, burst into tears; and everyone decided to send a telegram expressing their grief to “The Kremlin, Moscow.” Medea, more appropriately dressed than any of them in her mourning clothes, stood at the meeting for as long as was necessary and then went to her vineyard and pruned it until evening.
For Medea all this was the distant echo of a life in which she had n
o part. Her present traveling companions, individuals who collectively constituted the Russian people, were now loud in their anxiety, fearful of their future as orphans, weeping; others, unspeaking, were quietly rejoicing at the tyrant’s death; but all of them had now to resolve things in a new way, and to learn to live in a world which had changed overnight.
What was strange was that Medea too, in quite a different connection, was experiencing something similar. The letter lying deep in her bag was forcing her to see herself, her sister, and her late husband in a new light, and first and foremost to reconcile herself to a fact which seemed to her completely impossible.
An affair between her husband, who all the years of their marriage had deified her, extolling her merits, which he had partly invented himself, to excess, and her sister Alexandra, someone she could read like a book, was an impossibility not only on practical grounds. Some higher interdict, Medea felt, had been flouted, but judging by Alexandra’s pert letter and its easy tone, she had not even noticed this incestuous and sacramental wrongdoing. All she was concerned about was ensuring that the secret did not inconveniently become public knowledge.
A special torment was that the present situation called for neither decisions nor action. All the previous misfortunes in her life—the death of her parents, her husband’s illness—had called for physical and moral exertion: what had happened now was just the echo of something long past. Sam was no longer alive, his daughter Nike was, and there was no possibility of having a posthumous showdown with him.
She had been degraded by her husband, betrayed by her sister, abused by fate itself, which had denied her children while the child fathered by her husband, the child that by rights was hers, had been placed in her sister’s relaxed and fun-loving body. The gloom in her soul was made deeper also by the fact that Medea, who had always been on the move herself, was being forced to sit for days at a time by this window where all the movement was outside, in the rolling by of the changing scenery through the window and, to some extent, in the restless movement of other people in the railway carriage.
Medea and Her Children Page 20