Masha was mortified: “Nike, what are you saying? Have you gone crazy? I’ve never asked you to do anything like this before! You have a new affair every season of the year, but I’ve never known anything like this!”
“Oh, to hell with it! I’ll go tomorrow,” Nike agreed.
“Nike, I beg you! Today! Go this evening!” Masha implored.
The next morning Masha again walked all the way to Sudak with the children. They romped around the town, went to a café, and had an ice cream. She didn’t manage to get through to Nike, though. There was no one at home.
That evening Little Alik fell sick. His temperature went up and he started coughing. It was his chronic asthmatic bronchitis, which was the reason Masha stayed down here with him for two months at a time in the Crimea.
Masha was dancing attendance on him for a whole week and only on the eighth day did she get to Sudak. There was still no letter for her. Actually there was, but only from Alik. She phoned straight through to Nike who reported drily: “I went to Rastorguevo. I saw Butonov. He has received your letters, but he hasn’t replied.”
“But is he going to?” Masha asked stupidly.
“How should I know?” Nike responded testily.
By now she had actually been to Rastorguevo a number of times. On the first occasion Butonov had been surprised, but everything had been relaxed and fun. Nike really had only intended to run Masha’s errand but ended up staying the night in his large, half-redecorated house.
He had started renovating the house two years before, after the death of his mother, but somehow things had come to a halt and the half which had been redone stood in striking contrast to the half-wrecked part which was cluttered with wooden trunks, rough peasant furniture left over from his great-grandfather’s time, and lengths of handwoven cloth. There, in the wrecked half, Nike built their hurried little nest. Leaving in the morning, she did remember to ask him: “Why don’t you reply to her letters? She’s really upset.”
Butonov was used to being informed on but didn’t like being told off. “I’m a doctor, not a writer.”
“Well, try very hard,” Nike suggested.
The situation struck Nike as comical: Masha, as clever as clever could be, had fallen in love with this very basic stud. He suited Nike admirably: she was in the middle of getting divorced; her husband was being a complete bastard and making all sorts of demands, even to the point of wanting his share of the apartment; her fill-in lover had finished his film production course in Moscow and left; and her long-term Kostya was annoyingly eager to embark on a life of matrimonial bliss with her as soon as he heard about the divorce.
“If it’s that important, write them yourself,” Butonov muttered.
Nike laughed uproariously. The suggestion struck her as wild. How she and Masha would laugh together about all this nonsense once her sister got over being so hot for him.
CHAPTER 15
Medea retired from her job in the autumn, on the Revolution Day holiday in November. Her immediate plan for filling her new free time was to mend the quilts, which became tatty unbelievably quickly over a summer season. In readiness she got in satin material and a boxful of good bobbin thread, but discovered the first evening she laid a distressed quilt on the table that its flowers were detaching themselves from their faded background while others, three-dimensional and shifting, came floating in to replace them.
She was running a temperature, Medea guessed, and closed her eyes to shut off the stream of flowers. Happily, Nina had come from Tbilisi only the day before.
It seemed to be the same illness from which she had suffered just before her marriage, when Samuel had looked after her so zealously and with such tremulous love and tenderness that he had every reason to quip later, “Other people have a feverish honeymoon, but Medea and I had a honeymonth of fever.” In the intervals between attacks of furious shivering and fuddled semiconsciousness, Medea lapsed into a state of serene tranquility in which it seemed to her that Samuel was in the next room and would come in to see her in a minute, awkwardly bearing a tumbler in both hands and with his eyes slightly bulging because the tumbler was hotter than he had expected.
Instead of Samuel, however, it was Nina who emerged from the semidarkness, enveloped in the fragrance of St.-John’s-wort and dissolving honey, with a thick glass tumbler in her thin, flat hands and her matte-black eyes deep-set like Samuel’s, and Medea realized something she seemed to have been waiting for for a very long time, and now it finally had come to her like a revelation: Nina was their daughter, Samuel’s and hers, their little girl; she had always known that but for some reason had forgotten it for a long time, but now it had come back to her and it was such a joy. Nina helped her up from the pillow, gave her the fragrant drink, and said something, but the meaning didn’t quite get through to Medea, as if she were speaking a foreign language: “Yes, yes, Georgian,” Medea remembered.
But the intonation was so rich and clear that she could understand everything just from the expressions on Nina’s face, the movements of her hand, and also from the taste of the drink. It was surprising too that Nina could anticipate her wishes, and even opened and closed the curtains a moment before Medea was going to ask her to do it.
Medea’s relatives in Tbilisi were the descendants of her two sisters: Anelya, who was the elder, and Anastasia, whom Anelya had brought up after the death of their parents. Anastasia had left a son, Robert, who was unmarried and seemed to be slightly touched in the head. Medea had no contact with him.
Anelya had not had any children of her own. Nina and Timur were adopted, so the Tbilisi relatives were a grafted branch of the family. These children were blood relatives of Anelya’s husband Lado, his nephew and niece. Lado’s brother Grigol and his wife Susanna were an absurd and unhappy couple: he was a fervent champion of a fair deal for traditional craftsmen; she was the city’s madwoman, with a penchant for Communist Party work.
Lado Alexandrovich was a musician and professor at the Tbilisi Conservatory. He taught cello and had nothing in common with his brother, whom he had hardly seen since the mid-1920s.
Lado and Anelya first saw their nephew and niece early one morning in May 1937. They were brought to their house by a distant relative after the arrest of both parents in the night.
The law of pairs is only a particular instance of a more general law of recurrence of the same event, whose purpose seems sometimes to be character formation, sometimes the accomplishing of destiny. In Anelya’s life it operated very precisely. Exactly ten years had passed since Anastasia married and left home, and now fate had again brought orphans into their house, but two this time.
Anelya was already past forty, and Lado was ten years or so older. Their bloom had faded, their skin withered, and they were preparing themselves for a peaceful old age, not the lifestyle of young parents. The old age they had anticipated never came to pass. It took time to bring the neglected children around, and then the war began. Lado did not survive the rigors of the times and died of pneumonia in 1943.
Anelya set the children on their feet by realizing the assets of a once-prosperous household. She died in 1957, shortly after the return from exile of Susanna, who was by now completely demented. Nina was a young woman by then, and had a much loved stepmother replaced by her natural mother, a one-eyed harpy full of spite and paranoid devotion to the Leader. Nina had been looking after her for twenty years now.
The three or four days Nina had been planning to spend with Medea stretched to eight, and as soon as she had Medea back on her feet, she returned to Tbilisi.
Medea’s illness had not completely passed. It spread to her joints, and she had now to treat herself with her home remedies. She bound her knees with thick bandages of old wool over cabbage leaves, or beeswax, or large boiled onions, and having completely lost her usual agility, hobbled around the house, but sat most of the time repairing quilts. As she did so, she was thinking about Nina and her crazy mother, and about Nike, who had spent the whole of September in
Tbilisi because the theater was on tour there and, to judge even by Nina’s toned-down stories, had staged quite a few performances of her own.
“Idle thoughts,” Medea decided, stopped herself there, and reverted to doing what old Dionisy had taught her in her youth: “If worldly thoughts are troubling you and you can’t let go of them, don’t struggle but think prayerfully, addressing them to God.”
“Poor Susanna. Forgive her, Lord, for the dreadful and stupid things she has done. Soften her heart and let her see how Nina is suffering because of her. And help Nina. She is meek and patient. Give her strength, Lord. And protect Nike from all manner of evil. The girl is following a dangerous path. She’s so kind, so lively. Show her the way, Lord.”
She again recalled Nina’s account of how Nike had turned the life of a famous actor’s family upside down. She had embarked on a wild romance in full view of the citizens of Tbilisi, sparkling, dazzling, chortling, and the actor’s poor wife, dressed in black and consumed by jealousy, had rushed around to her husband’s friends at night, trying to force her way through closed doors in the hope of catching her faithless spouse in flagrante delicto. Which, in the end, she did. There was a smashing of crockery, and people leaping out of windows; there was screaming and passion and a total breakdown of all propriety.
Perhaps most surprising was that back in October Medea had received a short note from Nike describing her visit to Tbilisi, the great success the theater had enjoyed, and even congratulating herself that her costumes for the production had been written about separately. “It’s ages since I enjoyed myself so much and had such fun,” the letter concluded. “But in Moscow the weather is dreadful, the divorce is dragging on forever, and I would give anything just to live somewhere a bit sunnier.”
As regards the weather, Nike was absolutely right. The summer had ended in August and late autumn set in immediately. The trees had no time to turn properly yellow, and the leaves fell to the ground quite green, bludgeoned from the trees by strong, cold rain. Her merry September in Tbilisi was followed by an unendurable October in Moscow. The weather got no better in November, but at least Nike’s mood improved as a lot of work came her way.
She had another production to complete in her theater. She was forever looking into the workshops where, without her beady eye, the seamstresses were far too slapdash; and on top of that she was earning money on the side from work she was doing for the Romany Theater.
She was seduced by the Gypsy ambience, but found working for the theater very difficult indeed. Those same free and easy Gypsy ways which looked so enchanting in city squares and trams and on the stage, were a complete nightmare at the workplace: meetings arranged by the producer had to be rescheduled half a dozen times, and all the actresses threw terrible tantrums to back their impossible demands. Then, on the very day when one of the most strident of them, a lady already past her prime, threw in Nike’s face the burgundy-red costume she had been given instead of the lacy white one she had wanted, and Nike equally adroitly shot it straight back at her, lining it with solid theater swear words the way small weights used to be sewn into the hems of light dresses, something very unpleasant happened which Nike had been doing her best to avoid.
Shortly before midnight Masha came to see her. No sooner had she opened the door than Nike realized that the long-expected unpleasantness had occurred. Masha rushed to hug her. “Nike, say it isn’t true! It can’t be true, say it!”
Nike stroked her hair slippery with rain and said nothing.
“I know it can’t be true,” Masha insisted, crumpling in her hands a crepe de Chine head scarf with a lilac, grey, and black diamond pattern. “What was it doing there? Why was it there?”
“Shush, shush! You’re all tensed up.” Nike made a warning gesture in the direction of the children’s room.
Nike had been expecting this inevitable storm for so long, ever since July, that now, if anything, she felt relieved. The whole ridiculous business had dragged on all summer. When she left the Village in May, Nike had genuinely intended to give a secret present to Masha by letting her have Butonov, but things hadn’t worked out that way.
All the time Masha had been taking the children for walks in the Crimea, Nike had been seeing Butonov, saying to herself that time would tell. They had slipped into an amazingly relaxed relationship. Butonov was delighted by Nike’s forthrightness, the way she could talk about absolutely anything, and her complete lack of possessiveness; but when he did one time try to express this in his halting way, she stopped him: “Butonchik, the head on your shoulders is not your greatest asset. I know what you are trying to say. You are quite right. The point is that I have a male psychology. Just like you, I’m afraid of getting stuck in a long affair, in obligations, in marriage, for heaven’s sake. You might like to bear in mind that means I’m always the first to dump my men.”
It wasn’t quite true, but it sounded good.
“Okay, but I’ll need two weeks’ notice,” Butonov joked.
“Valerii, if you are going to be so witty, I shall fall head over heels in love with you, and that would be dangerous.” Nike burst into peals of laughter, throwing her head back and making her mane of hair and her breasts shake.
She was constantly laughing: in the tram, at meals, in the swimming pool they had gone to one time, and Butonov, who didn’t usually laugh much himself, was infected by her laughter, guffawing till he sobbed, till his sides ached and he couldn’t speak. They laughed themselves silly in bed too.
“You are a unique lover,” Nike said admiringly. “Laughing usually deflates erections.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know, perhaps you just haven’t made me laugh hard enough.”
As soon as Masha got home at the beginning of July, she dropped the children on Alexandra and immediately rushed off to Rastorguevo. She was doubly in luck: she found Butonov at home, and she didn’t find Nike there, because she had left the day before.
Masha’s arrival coincided with the height of the renovations abandoned two years previously. The day before, Butonov had cleaned out his grandmother’s half, in which nobody had lived for twenty years, and now two men he had hired to help him had arrived. Nike persuaded him not to line the walls with paneling as he had planned, but rather to strip everything down to the logs, clean and recaulk them, and repair the rough-hewn furniture left from the distant past.
“Mark my words, Butonov, you are using this furniture as firewood today, but in twenty years’ time these will be museum pieces.”
Butonov was amazed, but he consented, and now he and the workmen were stripping off the many layers of wallpaper.
“Butonov!” a woman’s voice shouted up from the street. “Valerii!”
He came out in a cloud of dust, wearing his old doctor’s hat. Masha was standing at the gate, although he didn’t recognize her immediately. She had a deep and very attractive Crimean tan, and a wide grin which filled her slender face. Pushing her hand through a space between the pickets, she drew back the latch and, while he was still slowly wondering what to do, rushed up the winding path and threw herself at him like a puppy, burying her face in his chest.
“It’s been so terrible! So terrible! I was beginning to think I would never see you again!”
A strong smell of the sea came from the top of her head and he again heard, like that time in the Crimea, the thunderous pounding of her heart. “What’s going on?! I can hear your heart as if I were listening through a stethoscope.”
She was radiating heat and light like the white-hot coil of a powerful lamp, and Butonov remembered all he had forgotten about the way she furiously, desperately struggled with him in the little room in Medea’s house; and he forgot what he had remembered: her long letters full of poetry and reflections on things which were not exactly beyond his understanding, but of no earthly use to anyone.
She pressed her lips to the dusty white doctor’s coat and breathed out hot air. She raised her face. The smile had gone and she was so pale that he could clear
ly see the two inverted crescents of dark freckles running from her cheekbones to her nose.
“Here I am.”
If Grandmother’s half of the house was in a mess from the redecorating, then the attic, which they climbed up to, was a complete dump. Neither his grandmother nor his mother ever threw anything out: old washing troughs with holes in them, boilers, the bric-a-brac of a hundred years. The house had been built by his great-grandfather at the end of the nineteenth century when Rastorguevo was still a trading village, and there was a good century’s worth of dust in the attic. It was impossible to lie down, so Butonov sat Masha on a rickety cabinet; and she looked just like a pottery money-box cat, only thinner and without the slit on the top of her head.
It was all so powerful and over so quickly that Butonov couldn’t tear himself away, so he carried her over to an armchair which was in tatters and again he was seared by the tightness of the chair and even more by the tightness of her childlike body. Tears flowed down her otherworldly face, and he licked them off and they tasted of seawater. God Almighty!
Masha soon left, and Butonov went back to stripping wallpaper with the workmen, who seemed not even to have noticed his absence. He was as empty as a stovepipe or, more precisely, as empty as a rotten nut, because his emptiness was enclosed and rounded and now had no outlet. He fancied he had given away more than he meant to.
“Well, those sisters”—he didn’t know their exact relationship—“are a complete contrast. One laughs, the other cries. They go well together.”
For three days Masha could not catch Nike at home, although she phoned constantly and Alexandra had told her Nike was in town. Finally she got through.
“Nike! Where on earth have you been?”
It never occurred to her that Nike had been avoiding her, feeling ill prepared for this meeting.
Medea and Her Children Page 26