Medea and Her Children Read online

  Much love from

  Medea

  It was the end of April. Medea’s vineyard had been pruned, all the neat borders in her vegetable garden were sprouting vigorously, and for the last two days a gigantic flounder some fishermen she knew had brought her had been lying dissected in the fridge.

  First to appear were her nephew Georgii and his thirteen-year-old son Artyom. Georgii threw off his rucksack and stood in the middle of the little yard, frowning in the powerful direct sunlight and breathing in the sweet, heavy aroma.

  “You could slice it and eat it,” he said to his son, but Artyom didn’t understand.

  “Medea’s hanging the washing out over there,” Artyom said, pointing.

  Medea’s house stood in the highest part of the village, but her land was stepped in terraces and had a well at the very bottom of it. There was a rope stretched there between a large nut tree and an old vinegar tree, and Medea, who usually spent her lunch break on household chores, was hanging out the heavily blued laundry. Dark blue shadows played over the light blue line of mended sheets, and they slowly billowed like sails, threatening to slew round and float away into the deeper blue of the sky.

  “I should just pack it all in and buy a house here,” Georgii thought, climbing down toward his aunt, who hadn’t yet noticed them. “Zoyka can do as she pleases. I could keep Artyom and Sashka.”

  For the last ten years this had been the thought which invariably came into his mind during the first minutes at Medea’s home in the Crimea. Medea finally noticed Georgii and his son, threw the last sheet, which she had wrung out tightly, into the empty basin, and straightened up.

  “Ah, you’re here. I’ve been expecting you these last two days. Just a minute, just a minute, I’ll be up directly, Georgiou.”

  Only Medea called him that, in the Greek way. He kissed the old woman. She ran her hand over the familiar black hair with its copper tinge, and stroked his son’s too.

  “He’s grown.”

  “Can I have a look how much, on the door?” the boy asked.

  Both sides of the doorframe were scarred with innumerable notches where the children had marked off their height as they grew.

  Medea pegged the last sheet and it flew up, half covering a baby cloud which had strayed into the bare sky. Georgii lifted the empty basins and they went back up: Medea in black, Georgii in a crumpled white shirt, and Artyom in his red T-shirt. They were being watched from the neighboring homestead through the stunted, twisted vines of the Soviet farm by Ada Kravchuk, along with her husband Mikhail and their lodger from Leningrad, the white-mouse-like Nora.

  “We get dozens of them coming down here! All Mendez’s nephews and nieces and what have you. That’s Georgii arrived. He’s always first,” Ada enlightened her paying guest, although whether approvingly or with irritation it was hard to tell.

  Georgii was only a few years younger than Ada. They had run around together as children, and now Ada couldn’t forgive him for the fact that she had grown old and lost her looks, while he was still young and had only just started going grey.

  Nora gazed over enchanted to where the gorge met a hill and there seemed to be a long, meandering fold in the earth, and a house with a tiled roof nestled there in its groin, its clean windows sparkling to welcome three graceful figures, one black, one white, and one red. She gazed appreciatively at the composition and thought with a sublime sense of regret, “If only I could paint that; but no, it’s beyond me.” She had graduated less than brilliantly from art college, but some of the things she painted came out well: watercolors of ethereal flowers, phloxes, lilacs, or artless bouquets of wildflowers.

  Even now, barely arrived for a holiday, she had had her eye caught by the wisteria and was looking forward to putting just the racemes, quite without leaves, into a glass jar on the pink tablecloth, and when her daughter was having her daytime nap, she would sit down to draw them in the rear courtyard. However, this curve of space with its primeval bend stirred her, urging her to paint it even though she thought it more than she could convey. Meanwhile the three figures had climbed up to the house and disappeared from view.

  In the little square halfway between the verandah and the summer kitchen, Georgii was unpacking two boxes he had brought and Medea was deciding what should be put where. It was a ritual moment. Every new arrival brought presents, and Medea received them as if not for herself but on behalf of the house.

  Four pillow slips, two plastic bottles of imported washing-up liquid, some household soap which had been unobtainable last year but had reappeared this year, some tins, coffee—the old lady was pleasantly excited by it all. She put it away in the cupboards and dressers, told Georgii not to open the second box before she returned, and hurried off back to work. The lunch break was over and she didn’t usually allow herself to be late.

  Georgii ascended to the highest point of his aunt’s domains, where the wooden hut of the toilet erected by the late Mendez rose like a watchtower. He went inside and sat down without the least need on the smoothly planed wooden seat. He looked around. There was a bucket of ash with a broken scoop beside it, while a faded cardboard notice on the wall gave instructions for use of the toilet written with his characteristic wry humor by Mendez himself. It concluded with the words, “When departing, look back to ensure that your conscience is clean.”

  In a contemplative mood Georgii looked over the short door, which shut off only the lower part of the toilet, into the rectangular window formed above it and saw the twin mountain ranges falling quite steeply away to a distant scrap of sea and the ruins of an ancient fortress visible only to a keen eye and even then only on a clear day. He loved looking at this land, with its weathered mountains and its rounded foothills. It had been Scythian, Greek, Tatar, and although now it was part of the Soviet farming system and had long been languishing, unloved and slowly dying from the ineptitude of its masters, history had not forsaken it but was hovering in this blissful springtime, every stone, every tree reminding him of its presence. Medea’s relatives had long ago reached consensus that the best view in the world was to be seen from her lavatory.

  Just outside the door Artyom was dancing from one foot to the other, waiting to ask his father a question which he knew would get him nowhere right now but which, when his father did finally emerge, he asked nevertheless, “Dad, when can we go to the sea?”

  The sea was a fair distance from here, which was why no tourists stayed in the Lower Village, let alone the Upper Village. You had either to take the bus to the municipal beach at Sudak or walk to the coves twelve kilometers or more away, a major expedition which could last for several days and involve camping.

  “Just grow up!” Georgii snapped back. “This is no time to be thinking about the seaside. Go and get yourself ready, we’re going to the graveyard.”

  Artyom didn’t want to go to the graveyard, but now he had no choice and went to put on his sneakers. For his part, Georgii took a canvas bag and put a German sapper’s spade in it. Then he hesitated over whether or not to take a tin of silver paint and decided to leave this time-consuming chore for the next occasion. He took down a faded hat from a hook in the shed, part of a Central Asian soldier’s uniform which he had brought here once himself, banged it on his knee, releasing a cloud of fine dust, and, after locking the door of the house, popped the key in its special place, his heart warming in passing to the triangular stone with its double point, which he remembered from his childhood.

  Georgii had been a geologist and loped along with an easy professional gait. Artyom scurried behind him. Georgii didn’t look around. He could see Artyom rushing along, breaking into a run, with eyes in the back of his head.

  “He isn’t growing. He’s going to be like Zoyka,” Georgii thought with a familiar pang of regret.

  His younger son, three-year-old Sashka, was much more to his liking, with a scowling fearlessness and indeflectable stubbornness which suggested he would develop into someone much more unambiguously masculine than his f
irstborn, with his diffidence and girlish chatter. Artyom for his part worshiped his father, was proud of his so evident manliness, and was already coming to realize that he would never be as strong, steady, and confident; and the sweetness of his love for his father had an aftertaste of bitterness.

  But right now Artyom was feeling as good as if he had succeeded in persuading his father to take him to the sea. He himself didn’t fully understand that what mattered to him was not going to the sea but stepping out together with his father on this road, which had not yet become dry and dusty but was fresh and young, and just walking along with him whatever the destination, even to the graveyard.

  The graveyard sloped up from the road. Above was the ruined Tatar section with what remained of the mosque. The eastern slope was Christian, but after the deportation of the Tatars, Christian burials had begun to creep over onto Tatar territory, as if even the dead were involved in depriving them of their land.

  All the Sinoply forebears had been laid to rest in the old Theodosia cemetery, but by this time it was closed and in part even demolished, and Medea had buried her Jewish husband here with an easy mind, a good distance from her mother. Redheaded Matilda, a good Christian in every respect, was zealously Orthodox, had no time for Muslims, feared the Jews, and had an aversion for Catholics. Her views on sundry Buddhists, Taoists, and the like are not known, if indeed she had ever heard of them.

  Over the grave of Medea’s husband stood an obelisk with a star on its point and an inscription in flattened letters on the pedestal: “Samuel Mendez, Soldier of the ChON Special Detachments, Party Member from 1914. 1890–1952.” The inscription was in accordance with the wishes of the deceased, expressed long before his death, soon after the war. Medea had amended the symbolism of the five-pointed Soviet star, silvering not only it but also the point of the obelisk to which it was attached, with the result that it acquired a sixth, inverted ray and looked more like the Christmas star as depicted on pre-Soviet greeting cards and also hinted at more ancient associations.

  To the left of the obelisk stood a small stele with the oval photograph of round-faced little Pavlik Kim, with his clever, narrow, smiling eyes, Georgii’s nephew who had drowned in 1954 on the beach at Sudak in front of his mother, father, and grandfather, Medea’s older brother, Fyodor.

  Georgii’s critical scrutiny failed to find anything out of order. As usual, Medea had beaten him to it. The railing was painted and the flower border dug over and planted with wild crocuses taken from the eastern hills.

  For the sake of something to do, Georgii firmed the edge of the border, then wiped the blade of the spade, folded it, and threw it in the bag. Father and son sat for a time on the low bench, and Georgii smoked a cigarette. Artyom did not interrupt his father’s silence, and Georgii placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder in gratitude.

  The sun was declining toward the western ridge, aiming at a gully between the rounded Twin Hills like a billiard ball heading into a pocket. In April the sun set between the Twins: the September sun disappeared behind the horizon, slitting its belly on the pointed hat of Mount Kiyan.

  Year by year the springs were running dry, the vineyards dying, the land falling into decay, a land he had hiked over as a boy, and only the outlines of the hills maintained the familiar structure of the region. Georgii loved them as one can love a mother’s face or the body of a wife: by heart, with your eyes closed, for all time.

  “Let’s go,” he said abruptly to his son, and began the descent to the road, striding in a straight line, oblivious of the broken slabs with their Arabic script.

  It seemed to Artyom as he looked down that the grey road below was moving, like an escalator in the underground, and he stopped short for a moment in astonishment. “Dad!” Then he laughed out loud: it was the sheep coming up, blocking the road with their brown mass and spilling over onto the shoulder. “I thought the road was moving.” Georgii smiled indulgently.

  They watched the flowing of the leisurely river of sheep and were not the only people observing the road. Some fifty meters away two girls were sitting on a knoll, a teenager and one who was only little.

  “Let’s walk around the side of the flock,” Artyom suggested.

  Georgii nodded agreement. As they passed close to the girls, they saw that it was not the sheep they were staring at but something they had found on the ground. Artyom craned his neck: between two dry runners of a caper bush a snake skin was standing straight up. It was the color of an old man’s nail, half transparent, twisted in places, here and there it had split, and the little girl, afraid to touch it, was prodding it apprehensively with a twig. The teenager proved to be a grown woman. It was Nora. Both of them were fair-haired, both were wearing light head scarves, long colorful skirts, and identical blouses with pockets.

  Artyom squatted down beside the snake skin too. “Dad, was it poisonous?”

  “A racer,” Georgii said, taking a close look at it. “Constrictor. Lots of them around here.”

  “We’ve never seen anything like it,” Nora said with a smile. She recognized him as the man from this morning, the figure in the white shirt.

  “I once found a snake pit here when I was a child,” Georgii said, picking the rustling skin up and spreading it out. “This one is still fresh.”

  “It’s thoroughly nasty,” Nora said, shuddering.

  “I’m scared of it,” the girl said in a whisper, and Georgii noticed that, with their round eyes and little pointed chins, mother and daughter bore a comical resemblance to a pair of kittens.

  “What sweethearts,” Georgii thought, and put their scary skin down on the ground. Then he asked, “Who are you staying with?”

  “Aunt Ada,” the woman answered without taking her eyes off the snake skin.

  “Ah,” he nodded, “we’ll be seeing you then. Come and visit us. We live over there.” He gestured in the direction of Medea’s farm and, without looking around, ran on down. Artyom bounded after him.

  The flock of sheep had meanwhile passed by, and only an arrière-garde sheepdog, totally uninterested in the passersby, trotted along the road covered in sheep droppings.

  “He’s got big legs, like an elephant,” the girl said damningly.

  “He’s nothing like an elephant,” Nora protested.

  “I didn’t say he is, just his legs are,” the girl insisted.

  “If you really want to know, he’s like a Roman legionary.” Nora trod resolutely on the snake skin.

  “Like what?”

  Nora laughed at her silly habit of talking to her fiveyear-old daughter as if she were a grown-up, and corrected herself. “He doesn’t really look like a Roman legionary either, because they shaved and he has a beard.”

  “And legs like an elephant.”

  Late in the evening of that day, when Nora and Tanya were sound asleep in the little cottage they had been allotted and Artyom was curled up like a cat in Mendez’s room, Medea was sitting with Georgii in the summer kitchen. She usually started using it from the beginning of May, but spring had come early this year. The weather had become really quite warm in late April, and she had opened up the kitchen and cleaned it thoroughly even before her first visitors arrived. It got colder toward evening, however, and Medea put on a worn sleeveless velvet jacket with a fur lining. Georgii donned a Tatar robe which had been serving all Medea’s family members for many years now.

  The kitchen was constructed of natural stone after the manner of a clay saklya. One wall was built into the hill where the slope had been dug out, and low, irregularly shaped windows had been made in the side walls. A hanging oil lamp cast a dim light over the table, and in its circle stood one last bottle of homemade wine which Medea had been keeping for just this occasion and an already opened bottle of her favorite apple vodka.

  A slightly odd routine had long ago been established in the house: they usually had supper with the children between seven and eight, put them to bed early, and then came together again in the night for a late meal which was as bad for
the digestion as it was good for the soul. Now, at a late hour, having finished numerous chores around the house, Medea and Georgii were sitting in the light of the oil lamp and enjoying each other’s company. They had a lot in common: both were agile, quick on their feet, appreciated small pleasures, and brooked no interference in their private lives.

  Medea set a plate of the fried flounder on the table. Her generous nature was amusingly combined with parsimony: her helpings were invariably slightly smaller than one might wish, and she was fully capable of refusing a child a second helping with a dismissive “That’s quite sufficient. If you aren’t full, take another piece of bread.”

  The children soon got used to this strange leveling down of all who ate at her table, and relatives who didn’t like the way she ran her house didn’t come back.

  Propping her head up with her hand, she observed Georgii adding a small log to the open hearth, a primitive approximation to a fireplace.

  A car drove along the upper road, stopped, and gave two hoarse honks. It was the night post. A telegram then. Georgii went up. He knew the postwoman, but the driver was new. They exchanged greetings and she gave him the telegram.