Medea quickly took her feet off the couch but hadn’t time to get up before he caught her under the arms, lifted her up, and pressed her to himself like a child. “My kid sister, my clever girl, you’ve come to see me!”
Medea breathed in the smell of his hair and his body, and recognized the half-forgotten smell of her father’s working sweaters, which few people would have found pleasant but which for Medea’s retentive memory was a precious gift.
Everything began to revolve around Fyodor exactly as it had around Medea the morning she had arrived. The chauffeur who had driven him opened the gate and started unloading the car. He pulled out an assortment of parcels and sacks. These were valuable presents, and Elena immediately got to work on an enormous salted sturgeon. Shurik stood beside her, cautiously touching the fish’s mean face with his finger. Although Elena had made the preparations for her husband’s return, the sturgeon threw her, and telling Natasha and Galya to set the table, she got to work on the fish. She armed herself with a knife and poked her shortsighted face into its ripped open belly.
The chauffeur, another Fyodor, was a handsome man of around forty but with cheeks pocked by gunpowder. He pulled a case of anonymous unlabeled bottles out of the bottomless expeditionary vehicle.
At the meal Fyodor ate little, drank much, and without removing his heavy arm from around Medea’s shoulder, told them all about his latest trip in the confident voice of a boss. And Fyodor’s deputy came, a couple of elderly friends, and a pretty young Greek girl, Maria, a postwar political refugee, the first real Corinthian Medea had met in her life.
Shurik and Pavlik sat quietly on the children’s side of the table, and Elena scurried into the summer kitchen or out to the brazier in the yard. The unlabeled bottles contained something strong and tangy along the lines of a cheap brandy, but Medea found it to her taste. Fyodor drank out of a large silver goblet, and his face, fiery with his fresh tan, gradually turned purple and heavy.
Then two of Georgii’s classmates came in, and they too sat down at the table. Elena, true to her principles, took the hot dishes away as soon as they got cold and brought in new ones held up high in the air.
Medea, who had only recently completed an immensely long journey throughout which she had eaten only small grey rusks, rejoiced from the bottom of her heart at the abundance of the feast but, like Fyodor, barely touched the food. It was Lent, and Medea, taught from early childhood to observe the fasts, not only accepted them freely and joyfully, but managed somehow to grow stronger during them. Elena, on the contrary, had always found obligatory fasting hard to take and since moving to Central Asia had stopped even going to church, let alone observing the fasts.
Medea knew all this very well, but she also knew what fits of apparently groundless wretchedness overwhelmed Elena from time to time, and explained them by her having lapsed from the Church. This was another of the topics of their correspondence. They were both sufficiently enlightened women to understand that a person’s spiritual life is not by any means confined to their relationship with the Church, but Medea saw life within the Church as the only way possible for her.
“For me, with my limited understanding and self-willed character,” she wrote to Elena long before the war when the little Greek church whose dean was Harlampy’s younger brother, Dionisy, was closed and she started going to the Russian one, “the discipline of the Church is as necessary as medicine for a chronically sick person. It has been a stroke of great good fortune in my life that my mother instructed me in the faith. She was a simple person of exceptional goodness who had no doubts, and in my life I have never had to rack my brains fruitlessly over philosophical questions which it is by no means essential for each individual to try to resolve. I am content with the traditional Christian resolution of the questions of life, death, good and evil. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill—and there are no circumstances which can turn evil into good. And the fact that the ways of error have become universally accepted has no significance for us whatsoever.”
Elena was fairly immune to the temptations of killing or stealing. She knew only domestic and housekeeping trials which might have been too much for a less doughty woman but which she not only took in her stride but thrived on.
Her family expanded and so did her house, and Elena started taking an interest in the girls in Georgii’s class, assessing which of them might make him a good wife. Future children were accordingly already peeping into her life, promising to add to her family, as it had been added to by the adoption of Shurik and by unseen Musya. Accepting these people into her home was her religion, as Medea fully understood.
By midnight the guests had departed, the table was bare, but Fyodor still hadn’t taken his arm from Medea’s shoulder. “Well, then, sister,” he said in Greek. “Do you like my house?”
“Very much, Fyodor, very much,” she said, lowering her head.
Elena was clearing the dishes away and had long ago sent Galya off to bed. Medea wanted to help, but Fyodor held her back.
“Sit here, she can manage by herself. What do you think about my youngest? Did you recognize our blood?”
He asked in Greek, and this shared blood of theirs, mingled in the boy with that of someone else, made Medea’s face flush, and she lowered her head even more. “I did. Even the little finger.”
“You recognized it all, but she is a holy fool like you and sees nothing,” he said in an unexpectedly mean and harsh tone.
Medea stood up and, in order to terminate the conversation, replied to him in Russian: “It’s late, brother. Sleep well. And you sleep well too, Elena.”
She couldn’t sleep for a long time between the hard starched sheets, her head resting on the plump pillows, and tried putting together words heard long ago, fleeting glances, words not said, and having put everything together realized that the secret of Alexandra’s last child was no secret from anyone apart from herself, and that to judge by everything, even Elena knew, but for all her garrulousness had spared Medea the knowledge. But was Elena really as trusting as herself? Or did she perhaps know full well that she had taken into her house a half brother of her own children?
“Wise Elena, greathearted Elena,” Medea thought. “She wants to know nothing about it.”
Her unexpected discovery, which might have made the friends even closer if they had spoken about it, kept Medea from sleeping.
It got light outside the window, the birds began singing, and Medea started quietly getting ready to go to church. She had loved Palm Sunday ever since she was a child.
She got to the church on Hospital Street too early, an hour before the service began, before the doors were even open. The market, however, was already humming and she walked past the stalls, looking absently to either side.
There were almost no women among the traders: they were all Uzbek men in thick coats. The customers, however, were all women, and mainly Russians. In fact, Tashkent seemed to Medea to be a completely Russian city. She had seen Uzbeks only at the station on the day she arrived and at the bazaar. Living in the Russian center, she had not got as far as the old city with the Asian layout she was so familiar with from the old Tatar Crimea, and especially from Bakhchisarai.
“They’ve beaten everyone down,” she thought. “It’s turned into a huge provincial Russian town.”
She made a circuit of the bazaar and approached the church again. It was open now. By the church box an old woman in a white head scarf who looked like a fat rabbit was scuffling about. On the box stood a tumbler in which there were several sprigs of sparrow-grey pussy willow.
“Ah, it grows here too,” Medea thought with pleasure.
She took two scraps of paper, and writing on one “May they rest in peace,” she wrote out the names in their customary order: Father Dionisy, Father Varfolomey, Harlampy, Antonida, Georgii, Magdalina … The other, still-living part of the family she listed on another piece of paper under the words “May they be well.”
Every time in this place, writing out the
names of her dear ones in large copperplate letters, she had exactly the same feeling: as if she were sailing on a river and in front of her, like a spreading triangle, were her brothers and sisters, their young and infant children, and behind, fanning out in the same way but much longer, until they disappeared in a rippling of the water, were her dead parents, her grandparents, all the ancestors whose names she knew, and those whose names had been lost in time long past. She had no difficulty at all in containing all these many, many people within herself, the quick and the dead, and she wrote each name mindfully, recalling the face, the presence, even, if such a thing is possible, the taste of that person.
It was at this unhurried labor that Elena found her. She touched her shoulder. They kissed. Elena looked about her: the people in the church were pathetic looking, the old women so ugly.
Through the sweet smell of the incense came the unmistakable smell of dirty, worn-out clothing and old, unhealthy bodies. The old woman standing next to them smelled of cats.
“Can there really be this kind of poverty and squalor even in Tiflis, in the little Armenian church in Solulaki, which we went up to along that terraced street?” Elena wondered. How fine and solemn it had been when she was a child, when her grandmother in her lilac velvet hat with the silk ribbons tied under her soft chin, her mother elegant in a light-colored dress, and her sister Anait were standing at the front of the laypeople, opposite the sole icon of Hripsime and Gayane hanging on a whitewashed wall, and everything smelled of wax, incense, and flowers.
A voice rang out, “Blessed is the Kingdom …” The service began.
Elena looked at Medea, who was standing firmly with her eyes closed and her head bowed. She possessed the art of standing for a long time without changing her position, not shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
“She stands like a rock in the midst of the sea,” Elena thought tenderly, and suddenly shed tears for Medea’s fate, for the bitterness of her loneliness, for the curse of childlessness, for the wrongs of deception and betrayal. Medea, however, was thinking nothing of the sort. Three old women’s rattly voices were chanting the Beatitudes, and new tears suddenly flowed from Elena’s eyes, no longer for Medea but for all of life. It was an acute experience in which there merged a tenfold sense of the loss of her motherland, the living closeness of her dead parents and of her son killed in the war, and it was a happy moment of complete self-forgetfulness, a momentary filling of her heart not with her own, vain preoccupations, but with something from God, something light, and her heart ached so greatly from this overflowing that she said to herself, “Lord, take me like Sephora, here am I.”
But nothing of the sort happened. Not only did she not fall down dead; on the contrary, the moment of acute happiness passed and she found that the service was already halfway through. The priest was whispering inaudible words which she had known by heart from childhood.
Elena suddenly felt bored. Her legs ached and her heart was weary. She felt like going out but couldn’t leave Medea.
The priest came forward with the communion cup: “Come in the fear of God and in faith,” but nobody came and he went off into the altar.
Barely waiting for Medea to kiss the cross, Elena came out of the church. They wished each other well on this festival day, and kissed solemnly and chastely.
Not one word did Medea say to Elena about her bitter hurt, and right up until death parted them, they would write tender letters to each other, full of dreams, memories, impressions, announcements of the birth of new children, and new recipes for jam.
Medea left three days later. Fyodor tried to persuade his sister to stay but, seeing the inexorable look in her eyes, bought her an air ticket and on Spy Wednesday took her to the airport.
It was the first time in Medea’s life that she had flown in an airplane, but she proved completely unmoved by the event. She wanted to get back home as soon as possible. Elena, sensing her impatience, was even slightly hurt. Now the letter lying in the bottom of Medea’s rucksack had entirely ceased to trouble her. The plane landed in Moscow, and Medea spent eight hours at Vnukovo Airport waiting for the connecting flight to Simferopol. She didn’t telephone Alexandra. Then or ever.
CHAPTER 13
Medea had a partial changeover on the fifth of May. Nike, Katya, and Artyom left in the morning, and after dinner the Lithuanians arrived: Gvidas, the son of Medea’s brother Dimitry, who had died three years previously from neglected heart disease, his wife Aldona, and their disabled son Vitalis.
The little boy was paralyzed, permanently seized in a painful convulsion. He moved awkwardly and could hardly speak. Gvidas and Aldona, crushed by their son’s illness, were mesmerized by one agonizing and unanswerable question: why us?
They came here every year in early spring, lived with Medea for a couple of weeks until the beginning of the swimming season, and then Gvidas took them to Sudak, rented a convenient apartment in the former German colony beside the sea from Aunt Polly, a friend of Medea’s, and left. He reappeared in mid-July to take them from the heat back to the cool of the Baltic coast.
Vitalis passionately loved the sea and felt happy only in water. He also loved Liza and Alik, the only children he was friends with. It was difficult to say whether he remembered them during the winter months, but the first time he met them again the following spring was a special day for him.
The adults prepared the children for Vitalis’s arrival, and they were primed with good intentions. Liza selected the best animal to give him from her menagerie of dogs and bears. Alik built a palace in a heap of sand for Vitalis to demolish. They had a game which consisted of Alik building things and Vitalis knocking them down, and it made both of them happy.
Masha moved to Samuel’s room, freeing the larger Blue Room for the Lithuanians. She had been in a state of chaotic inspiration since morning: words and lines of poetry were overwhelming her, barely giving her time to commit them to memory. There gradually formed, “Accept too that beyond all measure, like heaven’s grace on heaven’s grace, like rain, like snow, like faith to treasure, like that with which we can’t keep pace …” That was all there was so far.
At the same time, and quite independently, Masha was comforting Liza, who was doing her best to be a big girl but soon after her mother’s departure did nevertheless burst into tears; then she fed the children, put them to bed, and, abandoning the dirty dishes, lay down in Samuel’s room with the blinds drawn, rolled herself up in a ball, and mentally reran the whole of yesterday evening from the barmaid’s gold jacket to the movement with which Butonov had rotated the dial of the telephone. She recalled too the way her body had responded to that first chance touch from him on their outing, when her arm had burned and she had become feverish.
“It’s a turning point in my destiny, another turning point,” she thought. “The first was when my parents drove out that morning onto the Mozhaisk highway when I was seven; the second was when Alik came over to me at the studio when I was sixteen; and now again, at twenty-five. A change in my life. A watershed of my destiny. I was waiting for it, I had a presentiment. Dear Alik, the only person out of all of them who could understand. Poor Alik, he has a better understanding than anyone else of destiny, a feeling for destiny. There’s nothing I can do. It can’t be undone. I can’t help it.”
And neither could anybody do anything to help her: she had a feeling for destiny all right, but no experience in adultery.
“Love comes sometimes as a guest, a mistress, sometimes as a horse thief, or a horse, sometimes at midday comes as coolness, at midnight comes as fire and force …” She fell asleep.
In the evening it was party time as usual. Instead of Nike and her guitar, the proceedings were presided over by Gvidas the Hun with his red mustache and by his wife Aldona with her mannish face and undulating feminine locks manufactured at the hair salon.
Next to Georgii sat Nora. Stilted conversation, awkward pauses. They were missing Nike, whose mere presence rendered any social gathering smoo
th and relaxed. Medea was pleased. Gvidas had as usual brought presents from Lithuania and had, in addition, given Medea a decent sum of money to repair the house.
Now he and Georgii were discussing the water supply. There was a water main in the Lower Village, but it had never been extended to the Upper Village, although this had been promised for many years. There were not many houses here, and they all used imported water that was kept either in old reservoir wells or in tanks. Georgii didn’t have too much faith in the pumping station and doubted whether the water would make it up to them.
Aldona often went out of the kitchen to listen at the door of the Blue Room and see whether Vitalis was asleep. Usually he woke up several times a night with a shriek, but now, after the exhausting journey, he was sleeping well.
Masha took no part in the conversation. It was past ten and she hadn’t yet lost hope that Butonov might look in. Seeing Nora get up, she was pleased: “Shall I walk back with you?”
Georgii stopped talking in midsentence before regaining his presence of mind: “I’ll see her back, Masha.”
“I want a walk anyway,” Masha said, getting up.
They walked in silence and in single file to the Kravchuks’ house. They stopped at the back gate. It was dark and quiet in Nora’s cottage. Tanya was asleep, and Nora regretted having left so early. Georgii had it on the tip of his tongue to say something to her, but wasn’t quite sure what, and in any case Masha was crowding them.
Masha looked closely at the Kravchuks’ profitable homestead with its sheds, annexes, and terraces, but could see light coming only from the owners’ house.
“I’ll go and see Aunt Ada.”
She knocked at the Kravchuks’ door and went in. Ada was reclining in front of the television with her pink bosom boiling over à la Madame Recamier.
“Oy, Mash, is that you? Come on in, dearie. Can’t say we’ve seen much of you. Nike came to visit us, but you’re too up in the air. Oy, you’re so scraggy, look at you!” Ada commented disapprovingly.
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