Medea and Her Children Page 4

  Their letters spent a long time being shaken around in tarpaulin mail sacks in postal carriages, and the correspondence lagged two or three months behind life. Three months later Medea received a reply. It was one of the longest letters Elena wrote, and it was written in the schoolgirl handwriting so similar to Medea’s own.

  She thanked her for the letter and wrote that she had shed many tears recollecting those terrible years when it had seemed that everything was lost. Further, Elena confessed that she herself had experienced a similar mystical encounter on the eve of the family’s hasty evacuation on the night of November 17, 1918.

  Three days before that, Mama suffered a stroke. She looked terrible, much worse than when you saw her three weeks later when we reached Theodosia. Her face was blue, one eye was staring up behind the eyelid, we were expecting her to die at any minute. There was shooting throughout the city, and at the port the military-headquarters staff and the civilian population were embarking at a furious pace. As you know, Papa was a member of the Crimean government, and it was quite impossible for him to remain behind. Arsik was suffering one of his endless angina attacks and Anait, who had always been so full of joy and happiness, just couldn’t stop crying. Father was spending all his time in the town, returning for just a few minutes, laying his hand on Mama’s head and going off again. I told you all this before except, perhaps, for the most important thing.

  That evening I put Arsik and Anait to bed, lay down next to Mama, and immediately drifted off. The rooms were all connecting, in enfilade, and I mention this advisedly because it is relevant. Suddenly, in my sleep, I heard someone coming in. “Father,” I thought, and didn’t realize straight away that whoever it was had come in through the right-hand door, from inside the apartment, whereas the entrance from the street was to the left. I meant to get up, to get tea for Father, but I felt fettered, I couldn’t move at all. Father, as you will remember, was not tall, yet the person standing by the door was a big man and, as it seemed to me, wearing a dressing gown. I could only vaguely make out an old man whose face was very white and seemed to be shining. I was scared but also, can you believe it, very curious. I realized this was someone close, a relative, and immediately someone seemed to say aloud to me, “Shinararyan.” Mama had told me about one amazing branch of her ancestors who built Armenian churches. He somehow glided over to me and said quite clearly, in a singsong voice, “Let them all leave, but you, maid, stay behind. You will go to Theodosia. You have nothing to fear.”

  And then I noticed that he wasn’t a complete person but only the upper part, and below was just mist, as if the specter hadn’t had time to form completely.

  And that is how everything turned out. We parted in early morning, weeping absolute buckets. They left on the last steamer, and Mama and I stayed behind. Twenty-four hours later the city was taken by the Reds. In those dreadful days, when people were being murdered and shot by firing squads, nobody touched us. Yusim, the carter of the late princess in whose palace we were living all that time, first took Mama and me away to a suburb to his relatives, and a week later he put us in a phaeton and took us away from there. We were two weeks on the road to Theodosia, and you know everything about that journey. I had the feeling as I was traveling back to you that I was coming home, but my heart stopped when we saw that the gates of your house were boarded up. I didn’t guess at first that you had started using the side entrance.

  Neither Mama nor Papa have ever appeared to me even in a dream—probably because I sleep too soundly: you simply wouldn’t get through to me. What a joy you have been given, Medea, receiving such a live greeting from your parents. Don’t be disturbed, don’t trouble yourself with questions of why or wherefore. We’ll never guess the answer ourselves anyway. Do you remember reading me your favorite passage from St. Paul about seeing through a glass darkly? Everything will become clear with time, or outside of time. In my childhood, in Tbilisi, the Lord lived in our house alongside us, the angels walked in our rooms, but here in Asia everything is different. He is far away from me, and the church here feels empty. But it is a sin to complain. All is well. Natasha has been ill but is almost completely recovered now; she’s just coughing a bit still. Fyodor has gone off on an expedition for a week. I have some exciting news: I’m going to have another baby, very soon now. There is nothing I so dream of as your coming to see us. Perhaps you could just pack the boys’ things and come in the spring?

  CHAPTER 3

  Medea always got up early, but this morning it was Artyom who was first out of bed. The sun was not yet bright, the morning rather pale with patches of shining mist, and cool. A few minutes later, roused by the noise of his son washing under the tap, Georgii emerged. This time Medea was the last to rise.

  Taciturn by nature, Medea was particularly short on conversation in the mornings. Everyone knew this and saved up their questions for her until evening. This morning too she gave only a nod and went off to the toilet, and from there to the kitchen to light the Primus stove. There was no water left, so she brought out an empty bucket and put it at Georgii’s feet. It was one of the customs of the house that nobody could go to the well after sundown. Out of respect for Medea this and other inexplicable laws were strictly observed by all visitors, and the more inexplicable the law, the more force it had.

  Georgii went off down to the well. It was a deep stone reservoir constructed by the Tatars at the end of the last century. Precious water brought from elsewhere was kept in it, and it had constantly to be refilled. Just now the level was low, and Georgii, pulling up the bucket, took a long, close look at it. The water was murky and the hardness in it could even be seen. For him, born in Central Asia, the water shortage in the Crimea was nothing out of the ordinary.

  “I’ll need to put down an artesian borehole,” he thought for the second time in two days, climbing back to the house up an awkwardly stepped path which seemed to have been designed to suit the gait of a woman carrying a pitcher on her head.

  Medea put the kettle on and went outside, the hem of her faded black skirt sweeping the clay floor of the kitchen. Georgii sat down on the bench and looked at the neat bundles of herbs hanging from a beam in the ceiling. Tatar copper pots and pans stood on the high shelves, and in the corners enormous cauldrons were piled on top of each other. A copper kungan pitcher crowned the pyramid. All these items were cruder and simpler than the familiar Uzbek ones sold in the Tashkent bazaar, but Georgii, who had a keen and slightly ascetic eye, preferred these poor relations to the others with all their lavish craftwork and garrulous Asiatic ornamentation.

  “Dad, how about the seaside?” Artyom butted in.

  “Hardly,” he retorted, concealing his irritation. His son was well versed in the nuances of his father’s speech and understood that there was no prospect of going to the sea.

  His natural inclination was to whine and keep pestering his father, but the sensitivity of his nature took in the wonder of the morning stillness and he kept quiet.

  While the water was heating on the stove, Medea made her bed, putting away the pillows and blankets in a chest at the foot of the bed, and murmured a short morning injunction to herself in the long-familiar words of a prayer which, however worn-out it might be, did in some unfathomable way help her in what she was asking for: to accept the new day with its toil, its disappointments, other people’s empty talk, and her own weariness toward evening; to live through to the evening joyfully, without losing her temper with anyone and without taking umbrage. She had known since childhood that she had a bad habit of taking offense, and had been fighting it for so long she failed to notice that it was already many years since she had last taken offense at anyone. Only one old hurt from many years back still rankled, hanging over her like a dark shadow. “Am I really going to take it to my grave?” she wondered before moving on.

  Having murmured this last, she meticulously braided her hair with movements practiced over many years, tied it in a knot, and wrapped the black silk shawl around her head. She freed the
long tail of hair from beneath the bun down onto her neck, and suddenly, in the oval mirror encrusted with seashells, saw her own face. Of course, she tied her shawl in front of the mirror every morning but saw only a fold of cloth, a cheek, the collar of her dress. Today, however—and this was somehow connected with Georgii’s arrival—she suddenly saw her own face and was surprised by it. With the years, it had come to look even longer, probably as a result of the hollowed cheeks with two deep wrinkles etched into them. Her nose was the Sinoply nose, and the years had not detracted from it. It was fairly long but not in the least protruding, quite flat at the end and with rounded nostrils.

  She had a face like a rather handsome horse. This had been especially true in the years immediately after her marriage, when she unexpectedly cut her fringe and for a short time had her hair styled instead of wearing it in the invariable bun which hung heavily and irksomely on her neck.

  Medea examined her face with some surprise, not glancing at it sideways but viewing it attentively and severely, and suddenly realized that she liked it. As a young girl, she had been distressed by her appearance: she had red hair, she was too tall, her mouth was too big. She was embarrassed by her large hands and the man-sized shoes she wore.

  “I’ve turned into a fine-looking old woman.” She smiled and shook her head. To the left of the mirror, among the clutch of photographs, a young couple looked out at her from a black rectangular frame, a woman with a low fringe and a man with a grand head of hair; a thin, patrician, Levantine face; and a mustache that was too large for it.

  Medea shook her head once more: what had she been so upset about in her youth? She had been given a good face, a good height, she was strong and had a beautiful body, as Samuel, her dear husband Samuel, had assured her. She shifted her gaze to the portrait, enlarged from the last photograph of him, with the black mourning ribbon in the corner. In it he still had his splendid hair but with two bald spots encroaching on it and raising his low forehead; his mustache had faded and become less dashing, and there was a gentleness in his eyes and an overall kindliness in his face.

  “All’s well. It’s all in the past,” Medea told herself, driving away the shadow of old pain. She came out of the room and closed the door behind her. For all visitors her room was an inner sanctum which nobody entered without special invitation.

  Georgii had already made the coffee. He did it in exactly the same way that Medea and his mother Elena did, the Turkish way. The little copper coffeepot was standing in the middle of the table on an unpolished tray. For all her pedantic tidiness, Medea did not enjoy polishing copper. Perhaps she preferred it with a patina. Medea poured the coffee into a crude china cup she had been drinking out of for the past fifteen years. It was a heavy, clumsy cup, a present from her niece Nike, one of her first ventures into ceramics, the fruit of a short-lived enthusiasm for modeling in clay. It was painted dark blue and red and had runs of dried glaze; its surface was rough and it was too ornate for everyday use, but for some reason Medea had taken to it and to this day Nike was proud to have pleased her aunt so much.

  As she started drinking the coffee, Medea thought about Nike, and that she would be coming today with her children and Masha. Masha was an early grandniece and Nike a belated daughter of her sister Alexandra, and there was little difference in their ages.

  “I expect they’ll come on the morning flight, so they’ll be here in time for lunch,” Medea said, addressing herself to nobody in particular.

  Georgii made no reply, although he himself was thinking of going down to the market for some wine and some little seasonal treat like spring greens or medlars.

  “Not, it’s too early for medlars,” he calculated, and shortly afterward asked his aunt whether she would be coming back home for lunch.

  She nodded and finished drinking her coffee in silence.

  When she had left, Artyom launched a further halfhearted attack on his father, but Georgii told him to get ready to go to the bazaar.

  “It’s always the same, first the graveyard, then the bazaar,” Artyom grumbled.

  “You can stay here if you’d rather,” his father proposed mollifyingly, but Artyom had already decided that actually going to the bazaar wasn’t that bad either.

  Half an hour later they were walking down the road. Both were carrying rucksacks, and Artyom was wearing a canvas panama, while Georgii had a tarpaulin soldier’s cap which gave him a jaunty, military air. At almost the exact same spot as yesterday, they saw the mother and daughter, and they were again dressed identically, except that this time the woman was sitting on a small folding stool and drawing at a child’s easel.

  Spotting them from the road, Georgii called to ask whether he could get them anything from the bazaar, but the light breeze carried his words away and the woman signaled with her hand that she could not hear him.

  “Run up and ask whether they need anything,” he told his son, and Artyom ran up the hillside in a flurry of small stones.

  Georgii looked up with pleasure. The grass was still young and fresh, and on the brow of the hill a tamarisk with never a leaf to be seen was dusted with lilac-pink flowers.

  The woman said something to Artyom, but then gave up and came running downhill herself. “Could you buy us some potatoes? Two kilos, please. I haven’t got anyone to leave Tanya with, and it’s too far for her to walk, she’d be worn-out. Oh, and a bunch of dill. Only I haven’t got any money on me.” She spoke rapidly, with a slight lisp, and blushing more deeply by the minute.

  She climbed back up to her daughter who was standing next to the easel. Her heart was racing and affecting her throat. “What’s happened? What’s happened?” she blurted. “Nothing’s happened. Two kilos of potatoes and a bunch of dill.”

  She saw how much everything had changed in the few minutes she had run down to the road: The sun had finally burned through the shining mist, and the tamarisks which she was trying to draw were no longer rising like a pink cloud but lay solidly, like cranberry mousse, on the skyline. All the delicate indefiniteness of the scene had gone, and the spot where she was standing suddenly seemed to her to be that fixed center around which everything revolves: worlds, the stars, the clouds, and flocks of sheep.

  This fancy did not, however, calm her pounding heart. It was still galloping somewhere, unable to keep up with itself, and, independently of her mind, her eye was taking in the surroundings, eager to miss nothing, to forget not one feature of this world. Oh, if she could only have picked and pressed this moment with all its different aspects, like a flower she had taken a fancy to, as she had when she was a child with a passion for botany: her daughter standing beside the easel set crookedly in the center of God’s creation; the flowering tamarisk; the road along which two travelers were proceeding with never a backward glance; the distant patch of sea; the folded valley with the furrow of a long-departed river; everything that was behind her back and everything that did not fit into her field of vision: the table mountains neat behind the humpbacked hills which had aged in this place, the table mountains with their lopped-off summits, stretched out in line one behind the other like obedient animals.

  The bus from Simferopol to Medea’s house took about five hours, and until the beginning of the holiday season the service was only once a day; but in any case Nike and Masha usually came by taxi despite the expense. (The two-hour journey by taxi was almost more than the price of a plane ticket from Moscow to Simferopol.)

  As soon as Artyom got back from the bazaar, he went up to the roof armed with an old pair of binoculars and did not take his seeing eye from the gap between the hills where every car coming to the Village was briefly to be glimpsed. Georgii was sorting out his purchases in the kitchen. It had turned out not to be a market day, and there had been few traders and little going on. He had bought a pack of homemade plum pastilla scrolls which had been left to dry in the sun for rather too long, a favorite treat of the children; some spring greens; and a large packet of cheburek meat pastries.

  It was the
hardware shop where Georgii had scored his greatest success. Tourists were always surprised how well stocked it was. This time Georgii had bought a newly fashionable whistling kettle, two dozen glass tumblers, and half a kilo of akhnali, horseshoe nails which his friend Tarasov, the chairman of a collective farm near Novosibirsk, was desperate for. He also bought some Czech glue, which was in short supply in those days, and a fairly hideous oilcloth for the table. He laid all his purchases out and gloated over them. He enjoyed shopping. He liked the sport of choosing, haggling, and bringing home the booty. His wife Zoyka got angry each time he came back from a trip bringing a whole pile of completely unnecessary acquisitions which only cluttered up their house and dacha. She was an economist working in the municipal trading inspectorate and took the view that purchases should be judicious, thought through, and that you shouldn’t just scoop up all sorts of junk.

  He uncorked a bottle of Tauride fortified wine and regretted not having bought more, although it was readily available and he could always get some later in the little store in the Village. Having sorted everything out, he sat down in the doorway with a glass of wine and a cheburek in his hand, only to see the artist and her daughter coming down from the hill.

  “Damn, I forgot the potatoes,” he remembered. “Well, there can’t have been any. If I’d seen them, it would have reminded me.”

  He had, however, bought plenty of dill and so, as a conscientious person, he called to Artyom to come down from the roof and take the vacationer some dill. The inhabitants of Medea’s house never considered themselves to be vacationers, and the local people also treated them as belonging.

  Artyom refused point-blank to take her the dill. The moment when the car would appear was too important and he was afraid of missing it. Indeed, before they had finished arguing over the dill, a yellow Volga did appear in the gap where it was expected.

  “They’re coming!” Artyom yelled in a voice breaking with happiness, and rushed down from the roof and out to the gate.