Her journey lasted three and a half days, and as the route was quite whimsical, veering far up into the heart of the Continent, she appeared to overtake the spring in its northward progress: she left the Crimea where the leaves were coming out, and again saw snow lying in the ravines in the pre-Urals, the bare earth still gripped by frosts at night; and then, traveling to the east and the south, she came back to the spring with the hot steppes of Kazakhstan in full flower and dotted with vivid tulips.
The train arrived in Tashkent in early morning. She got out with her now-depleted rucksack and, knowing that her relatives lived not far from the station, asked which direction to take.
The street was called Twelve Poplars, but if poplars ever had grown here, they had meekly yielded to the flowering apricot trees planted along the irrigation ditch at the roadside. It was earliest, newborn morn, the time Medea loved best, and after her taxing days on the dirty train, she was particularly alive to this God-given purity and the smells of the morning, in which familiar mingled with unfamiliar: the smoke from a different fuel, and the spicy smell of an unknown meat dish. Everything, however, was overpowered by the heady perfume of the lilac hanging out its trusses of blossom as blue and heavy as bunches of grapes above the clay walls and plank fences. Even the birds seemed to be singing in a foreign language, not so much singing as chirping.
As Medea walked down the interminably long road, enjoying the exercise, slightly swinging her shoulders, which were pulled back by the rucksack straps beneath which she had tucked her light coat in soldierly fashion, she was taking in, in addition to the numbers of the houses, all sorts of little details and surprises. On a fence a brown and pink turtledove was sitting as cool as could be: it was a bird she had been familiar with since she was a girl, only in the Crimea it was very wild and timid and never flew into the town.
The heavy mood of her journey, which she had seemed to be carrying on her shoulders, was washed away by the gentle waves of the morning breeze which, as she knew, always sprang up at sunrise. She heard a sudden shouting in the distance, carried over from the east on the breeze. It too seemed to roll in like a wave, and these were the piping voices of children.
“Water! The water’s coming! Suvgia!”
Several little children immediately came dancing out of the gates, and other children’s heads peeped over fences. A fat old woman in felt boots and a Ukrainian shirt which had worn through on her bosom waddled out to the ditch.
Medea stopped. She knew what was about to happen and had been waiting for just this moment. The bottom of the shallow ditch was covered over with a smooth, pale brown film of what looked like the skin skimmed from boiled milk, and, blown by the dawn breeze, pink petals of apricot blossom which had just fallen from the trees slowly settled on it; now there came the grumbling sound of water, and in front of its brown tongue there rose a pink cloud of apricot-blossom debris.
The shout passed down the street, the water was gurgling in the ditch. Young children and old men opened the ditch inlets to their yards. The time for the morning irrigation had begun.
Immediately outside Elena’s house Medea collided with a little blond boy of about ten. He had just let the water into the yard and was washing his freckled face in the brown, rather suspicious-looking water.
“Hello, Shurik,” Medea said to him.
He took a step backward in surprise and disappeared into the bushes with a shout: “Mamunya! Someone’s here to see you.”
Medea stopped in the yard and looked around: three small houses, one with a verandah and a high porch, and two more straightforward, whitewashed ones, formed a square in the center of which stood a platform for tea drinking, and from the summer kitchen with its side awning there came walking slowly toward her, greying, fat, wearing a white apron pinned up high in front, dear Elena. She did not recognize Medea at once, but when she did, she threw her arms open wide and ran toward her with a silly, joyful cry: “My own dear heart has come back to me!”
Doors and windows banged. The old sheepdog in its kennel finally woke up and started energetically barking, aware of having neglected its duty. The yard filled up with what seemed to Medea to be a huge crowd, but these were her own people: Elena’s daughter Natasha with her seven-year-old son Pavlik; Georgii, Elena’s younger son, who had grown over the past winter into a handsome young man; and a thin little old woman with a crutch.
“Old Nanny Galya,” Medea guessed.
Up on the porch, inclining the arrogant face of an oriental beauty to one side, stood thirteen-year-old Shusha, Natasha’s older daughter, wearing a white nightgown which her shining Asian hair almost entirely covered. Little blond Shurik peeped out from behind the trunk of a peach tree.
“Oh, Lord, Fyodor is away on a business trip. He left only yesterday!” Elena said, crestfallen, still not releasing Medea from her hug. “But why didn’t you warn us? Georgii could have come to meet you.”
Elena’s family stood around, waiting their turn for a kiss from their aunt or great-aunt. Only Old Galya muttered something to herself and hobbled off to the forgotten stove where some domestic crisis had occurred: black smoke was rising from a frying pan.
“Oh, I’ll get you some tea, some tea! Oh, what am I saying, coffee, coffee! Oh, my own dear heart has come back to me!” Elena clucked, repeating every word and flapping at the air around her head with a gesture totally unique to herself.
Seeing this movement of Elena’s small hand, which had quite slipped her memory, Medea suddenly felt very happy.
Since 1920, when Medea saw her brother Fyodor off from the Theodosia station to his new job with his new wife, entrusted to him only the previous day after Medea’s firm hand had matched the two of them, the friends had seen each other only twice: in 1932 soon after Medea and Samuel moved to the Village; and in 1940 when the entire Tashkent branch of the Sinoply family had come to visit.
That last summer before the war Medea had had a great family congress: Alexandra with Sergei and Lidia; her brother Constantine, who was killed a year later in the very first days of the war; Tasha Lavinskaya … There had been no room to move in the house. Everything was alive with children’s voices, the July sun, and Crimean wine.
That year Fyodor won the State Prize and was expecting a new appointment, almost at ministerial level.
Medea had been unable to get off work and had had to go in every day and then come home and cook and cook and cook. Her sister and the young bride would have been glad to help, but Medea didn’t like other people getting involved in her housework, moving things from where they belonged and generally not doing things her way. Only with the passing years and the coming of old age had she resigned herself to letting young relatives busy themselves in her kitchen and never being able to find anything.
There had been so many people there and the kitchen had constantly been so busy that the friends hardly had a chance to talk. Medea remembered only their last conversation the night before they parted, when they were washing up in the kitchen after the farewell supper and Elena, drying a pile of plates with a long towel, had complained bitterly that Fyodor was putting his head straight in the lion’s mouth. She was prudent enough to be fearful of his successful career and transformation from a modest surveyor into virtually the top official in charge of the irrigation system of Uzbekistan.
“How can he not understand?” Elena asked despairingly. “My father was a member of the Crimean government. He’s never mentioned that in a single curriculum vitae. And the higher you rise, the more exposed you become.”
Immediately after Elena and Fyodor left, Anelya had arrived from Tiflis with her family, then the younger Nastya with her young husband, and in a short interval between visitors Medea had written Elena a letter which concluded with the words “What a shame that we hardly saw each other. We’re probably doomed to correspond for the rest of our lives.”
Now in Tashkent, Medea was the only, and a profoundly welcome, guest. In the mornings after the children had been sent to school
, Elena and Medea went to the Chorsinsky Bazaar not far from the house, bought mutton, early greens, sometimes chickens: two weren’t quite enough for dinner, but three were too many.
Everyone in the family was used to eating a lot, to Medea’s amazement. The end of March was a lean time and there was none of the summer lushness of an Asian bazaar, but they stuffed their bags full and went home in the tram.
The table was usually set for dinner late, at around eight when Fyodor got back from work. Before that the children nibbled, helping themselves to a piece of bread or whatever. Dinner, however, lasted a couple of hours, and in addition to the usual local food, sapsa dumplings and noodle soup, there was always an Armenian delicacy of some kind on the table—Elena was still a dab hand at making baklava.
Late in the evenings, when the house was quiet, they would sit together for a long time by the cleared table, laying out an intricate game of patience, which came out for Elena not more than once a year, going over early memories, beginning with their school days; they hooted with laughter, they sighed, they wept for those they had loved and who had been lost in the chaos of the past.
A heavy rock slowly shifted at the bottom of Medea’s heart, but their conversation did not move in a direction which would have allowed her to mention the letter. Something stopped her, and the tragedy she had experienced so recently suddenly began to seem to her quite simply indecent.
In the heat of the day, added to by the heat from the summer stove, the hearth in the yard and the constantly boiling water for the laundry, whose blueness and crackly starchiness was Elena’s special pride, Medea observed how Elena’s life was structured and noted approvingly the customs of the old Stepanyan house, a mixture of generosity toward those around and a certain stinginess where cooking was concerned. Elena counted the eggplants and the walnuts, but money—never.
Fate had taken Elena’s close family from her when she was very young, and her nineteen-year-old elder son in the war years, but at least it had never let her experience poverty. It was as if she had been destined from birth always to wear gold and eat from silver. Amazingly enough, in her first year of living in Tashkent she had been sought out, not without help from Medea, by Old Ashkhen, the servant of her Tiflis aunt, who had died a rich, childless widow. Ashkhen walked all the way from Tiflis, carrying a dirty traveling bag containing the family treasures bequeathed to Elena by her aunt.
Elena, who by then had lost everything that she had left from the old life, promptly put two rings on her fingers, one with a pearl, the second with a blue diamond; she put black agate discs with a small pearl in the center on her ears, and put the rest in the bottom of a basket in which she was laying down the dowry for her firstborn, whose appearance in the world seemed imminent. Old Ashkhen lived six more years in her house, right up until her death.
Elena set about arranging her house in Tashkent, this same house which Fyodor had been allocated immediately upon his arrival, in the manner customary in her family, with such modifications as their very modest means dictated. She named the best room the study and gave it to her husband; she returned to the bedroom two beds which had been taken from the house and put in a shed by the Uzbeks who had occupied the house after its previous owner, the deputy governor, shot himself in a fit of senile depression at the beginning of 1917.
In the same shed Elena discovered the remaining furniture which had not been consigned to the stove. She created the semblance of bedside cabinets from two stools she covered with bright scarves, bought a quantity of copper pots and pans at the bazaar, and their residence began in some elusive way to resemble the old house in Tiflis, the dacha at Sudak, and their apartment in Geneva. The tastes of the late Armik Tigranovna were everywhere in evidence.
They later bought the second house in their yard for Natasha, and were currently negotiating with their remaining neighbors to buy the third one, which stood to the right of the central house. Elena had plans to settle Georgii in it.
Medea knew all this from Elena’s letters, in which she mentioned every remotely significant event, but in which for both of them the most important things were still the mode in which they communicated, girlish and confidential, and their writing style, their handwriting and, of course, the French language which they both easily slipped into. Each letter was a secret oath of loyalty, although three-quarters of them were devoted to dreams and presentiments, or descriptions of a wayside tree or of someone they had met.
Describing her daughter’s wedding, Elena wrote in immense detail about the unusually heavy rain which fell in only one district of the city at just the moment when the newlyweds were coming out of the Registry Office, and of how the material of Natasha’s white dress got wet and shrank, creeping up and exposing her plump knees, but for all that Elena did not mention that Natasha had married Victor Kim, a Korean communications engineer, who even then had gained a reputation throughout the city for his extraordinary linguistic abilities. Apart from the standard Russian, the Korean he spoke at home, and the German and optional Uzbek he had learned at school, he had somehow managed by the age of twenty-five to learn English as well and was studying Chinese, although he anticipated having to spend not less than five years on mastering it.
Only six months or so after the wedding, describing in one of the letters her trip to the suburb of Kuilyuk and the tiny paddy fields sprouting bright rows of narrow-leaved rice, Elena had mentioned the parents of Natasha’s husband in passing, a wrinkled Korean couple whose outward appearance was so similar and so sexless that it was difficult to tell which of the two was the husband and which the wife. At all events, when another six months later Medea received the first photograph of newborn Shusha, she was not surprised by the pretty little round face with narrow slit eyes from which you would never have anticipated today’s beauty.
Sometimes during the day Elena would put Medea on a tarpaulin folding bed under the awning, which was almost completely covered with young vine shoots, and thrust into her hands a French book from the library she had assembled here from the only antiquarian bookseller in town, and Medea, absentmindedly leafing through Les Liaisons dangereuses or La Chartreuse de Parme, for the first time in her life enjoyed being indolent, totally relaxed, as if the current which maintained tension in her muscles had suddenly been turned off and every fibril was smoothed out in bliss.
She read a little and dozed a little and watched the children a little. Shusha kept herself distant and aloof but had the appearance of someone immersed in her own thoughts. Her younger brother, Pavlik, played the violin for days at a time and, when he did appear in the yard, was just a bit too polite. Medea looked in vain for family traits in them: their Asian blood had totally overwhelmed the Greco-Armenian.
Oddly enough, it was the fair-skinned little blond Shurik, whom they had adopted, who gave every indication of being a Sinoply: although his light, downy hair had not the least tinge of the family’s russet, his narrow, pale face was covered in deep ginger freckles. Even more significant—Medea did not immediately notice this, but when she did, she was amazed—his little finger was short, barely reaching the end of the first knuckle of his fourth finger. She did not, however, pass on her observations.
“What a good boy he is,” Medea said quietly, glancing over toward Shurik, who was whittling a seasoned lilac branch in order to replace the charred handle of the coffeepot.
“He’s just like my own son to me,” Elena responded. “Although nobody can ever replace Alexander in my heart. But Shurik—yes, he’s a very good boy. His mother was a deported Volga German. She worked in Kokand at one of Fyodor’s projects. She died of tuberculosis immediately after the war. He was sent to an orphanage at first and had a hard time there. Fyodor visited him once, and then a second time, and then brought him home. He has fitted into the family very well. Very well.”
Medea listened, said nothing, and looked. When she had been there five days, she noticed Elena taking a bowl of soup after dinner into a side room by the entrance, where Galya live
d.
Catching Medea’s glance, she explained, “We have Musya living in there, Galya’s younger sister.”
“Musya?” Medea asked in surprise, never having heard the name.
“Well yes, Musya. She’s paralyzed, poor thing. Her daughter rejected her and Galya took her in,” Elena answered. Medea immediately remembered Armik Tigranovna’s paralyzed wet nurse whom the Stepanyans took everywhere with them for ten years or so, whether to the Crimea or Switzerland, in a specially made German chair of tubular brass, and Armik Tigranovna fed the wordless, withered old woman herself because she would not accept food from anyone else.
How everything recurs.
“God will always send them riches,” Medea reflected, although the family’s current prosperity could hardly be called riches. “Nobody knows better than Elena how to put them to good use.”
When Elena had fed Musya, whom Medea never did get to see, she immediately went to tell Galya off for throwing out half a jar of vine leaves prepared the previous year for making dolma. New, fresh leaves were fluttering above Medea’s head and she smiled.
At last Fyodor, having completed his official trip to the lower reaches of the Amu-Daria and the Aral Sea, called from Nukus to tell Elena he would be back home soon.
“Splendid, I’ll just see him and then go back home. Yes, home again in time for Easter,” Medea decided.
But Fyodor arrived only on Lazarus Saturday, the eve of Palm Sunday, in the middle of the day. A car snorted and Shurik rushed headlong to open the gate, but Fyodor was already walking through the yard. A fresh crimson tan shone out from beneath his provincial white hat. Shurik flew up to his chest and hugged him around the neck. Fyodor kissed the white top of his head and detached him from himself. Putting his hand on Shurik’s head, he walked through the garden.
“Papa is back home!” Elena shouted from the window in a ringing voice, as if he had been away not two weeks but two years.
Medea and Her Children Page 21