Medea and Her Children Page 5

  Only a few minutes later a taxi drove up to the house, stopped, its four doors burst open simultaneously and six people bundled out, two of them quite small. While the taxi-driver was retrieving suitcases and cardboard boxes from the boot, a scrum of relatives began kissing and hugging. The taxi had not left by the time Medea returned unnoticed with a bulging bag, smiling with her mouth firmly closed and her eyes narrowed.

  “Auntie! My sunshine! How I’ve missed you! How pretty you look! And you smell of sage!” Tall, redheaded Nike kissed her, but she pushed her away slightly and muttered,

  “What nonsense! I’m reeking of gloss paint. They’ve been redecorating the hospital these past two months and still haven’t finished.”

  Thirteen-year-old Katya, Nike’s elder daughter, was standing beside Medea waiting her turn to be kissed. Wherever Nike was, she had some inalienable right always to be first, and few there were who could dispute it. Masha too was waiting her turn, with her boyish haircut and her adolescent figure, as if she wasn’t a grown woman but a scrawny runt on wobbly legs. But her face was pretty, with a beauty not yet fully revealed, like an unused transfer. Georgii caught her and kissed the top of her head.

  “Shame on you, I’m not talking to you,” Masha said, pushing him away. “You were in Moscow and didn’t even call.”

  Masha’s son, fiveyear-old Alik, and Nike’s younger daughter Liza also embraced, acting out a passionate reunion although they hadn’t been parted since yesterday, as they had all stayed overnight at Nike’s apartment on Zubovskoy Street. The children were almost the same age and it was no exaggeration to say they had loved each other from birth. They amused everyone by constantly replicating adult relationships: feminine flirtatiousness, jealousy, and dashing acts of courtship.

  “Cousinage, dangereux voisinage,” Medea said for the umpteenth time, looking at the cousins.

  “I’ll kiss you as if you were already here,” Alik said, drawing Liza toward himself, but she decided to play hard-to-get, only she couldn’t think of a condition for agreeing to be kissed and so prevaricated,

  “No, first, um, you’ve got to, you’ve got to, um, show me the little doggie!”

  Two of those present exchanged curt nods: Artyom and Katya. There had been a time when they, like Liza and Alik now, had also loved each other passionately, but a couple of years ago everything had fallen apart. Katya had grown up markedly, sprouting hair in various places, which she promptly shaved off, and acquiring a pair of small but indisputably real breasts, and between the cousins there had opened up the abyss of puberty.

  Artyom, his heart deeply wounded by last year’s dismissive-ness, which he had done nothing to deserve, although he had been desperately looking forward to seeing Katya again, now turned defensively away and meditatively dug the toe of his shoe into the pale brown earth.

  Katya had been thrown out of the Bolshoi Ballet School last year for being totally without prospects but retained all the mannerisms of a professional ballerina, for which Nike, although secretly admiring of her wonderful deportment, was constantly ribbing her: “Chin up, shoulders down, chest forward, stomach back, and toes pointing outward.” In just this placement Katya now stood immobile, giving all present the opportunity of delighting in the beauty of ballet, of which she firmly remained the representative.

  “Medea, take a look at our little ones!” Masha said, touching Medea’s shoulder.

  Alik had been to the kennel of Medea’s immensely long, but short-legged, bitch Nyukta and brought back an equally long puppy. Liza was holding it in her arms, and Alik, moving the puppy to one side, was proceeding toward Liza’s promised cheek.

  Everybody laughed. Georgii took two suitcases; Artyom, turning away from Katya, lifted a cardboard box with provisions; and Katya, tripping lightly like a prima ballerina taking her curtain call, ran down to take up her position in the sunlit patch of land between the house and the kitchen and posed there, exquisite and unattainable, like a princess, and Artyom perceived all this with an anguish in his heart the like of which he had never known before, the first victim of this early spring.

  Nora, meanwhile, had again found herself in the role of snooper. Little Tanya was asleep after lunch. Neither potatoes nor dill had that handsome man brought her who looked, she now realized, not in the least like a Roman legionary, but like Odysseus. And then, while she was washing the dishes in Aunt Ada’s kitchen yard, she had seen a taxi drive up and a tall, redheaded woman in a vulgar red dress embrace an old woman while a whole horde of children jumped around; and her breath was taken away by a sudden access of jealousy for people who could be so pleased to see each other and who could make such an occasion out of their meeting up again.

  Another taxi drove into the Village a couple of hours later, but this one stopped at the Kravchuks’ house. Nora, pulling back a corner of the embroidered curtain, saw how, in response to a voice calling for the owners, first Ada and shortly afterward her husband, wiping his greasy mouth with his oily driver’s hand, leapt out of the summer kitchen.

  In the wide-open gate stood a strapping young man with long hair held like a girl’s ponytail by a rubber band, wearing tightfitting white jeans and a pink T-shirt. Ada was quite flabbergasted by the sheer brazenness of his appearance. The new arrival smiled, however, waved a white envelope, and asked, without moving from the garden gate, “The Kravchuks? A letter from your son with new greetings. Saw him yesterday.”

  Ada snatched the envelope, and, without saying a word, the Kravchuks disappeared into the kitchen to read the letter from their only son, Vitka, who since graduating from army college had been living in Moscow province for three years now, and as it seemed from the perspective of the Village was making a great career for himself. The new arrival, showing not the least concern for the taxi-driver who was still waiting by the outside gate, sat himself down on a bench. The Kravchuks had meanwhile read that their son was sending them a very useful contact whom they should under no circumstances charge for accommodation, whose every whim they should indulge, and that the commandant of the entire military district himself queued up for massage at the hands of this same Valerii Butonov.

  Before they had finished reading the letter, the Kravchuks rushed out to the new arrival. “But please come in, do. Where is your luggage?”

  The new arrival brought in his luggage, a leather suitcase with a thick layered handle, covered in foreign stickers. Nora wearied of holding up in the air the old-fashioned smoothing iron with which she was ironing Tanya’s skirt and put it back on its holder. Her landlord and landlady were running in circles around the new arrival: the suitcase had impressed them too.

  He was probably an actor, or a jazz musician, or something of that kind, Nora supposed. The iron had cooled, but she did not want to leave her little cottage to heat it up again in the kitchen. She put the half-ironed skirt aside.

  CHAPTER 4

  Medea had grown up in a house where meals were cooked in cauldrons, eggplants pickled by the barrel, and fruit dried many kilograms at a time on the roof, yielding up its sweet fragrances to the salty sea breeze. While this was going on, brothers and sisters were being born and filling up the house. By mid-season Medea’s present dwelling, lonely and silent in the winter, was reminding her of that childhood home, so crowded and full of children had it become. Laundry was endlessly boiling in great vessels standing on iron tripods; in the kitchen there was always someone drinking coffee or wine; guests were arriving from Koktebel or Sudak. Sometimes free-spirited young people—unshaven students and unkempt girls—would pitch a tent nearby, loudly playing their new music and surprising everyone with their politically daring new songs. And Medea, introverted, childless Medea, although long accustomed to this free-for-all in the summer, did sometimes wonder why it should be her house, baked by the sun and blown by the winds from the sea, that should draw all these tribes from Lithuania, Georgia, Siberia, and Central Asia.

  A new season was beginning. Last night she had been alone with Georgii and this ev
ening eight people sat down to the early supper.

  The younger children, tired from their journey, were put to bed early. Artyom went off too in order to avoid the humiliation of being sent to bed. His voluntary departure went some way toward making him the equal of Katya, whom nobody had packed off to bed for a long time now.

  The early supper developed imperceptibly into the late supper. They drank the wine Georgii had bought. Georgii had lived in Moscow for five years while studying in the Geographical Faculty of Moscow State University. He hadn’t taken to the city, but news of the capital always interested him, and now he was trying to extract it out of his cousins. Nike’s narrative, however, was constantly going off at a tangent, either about herself or moving on to family gossip, and Masha’s tended to politics. Such were the times. No matter where a conversation started, it invariably ended with a conspiratorial lowering of voices and a raising of the temperature by politics.

  This time they were discussing Gvidas the Hun, Medea’s Vilnius nephew, the son of her late brother Dimitry. He had built himself a very extensive house indeed.

  “What about the authorities? Have they allowed it?” Georgii asked, his whole being quivering with interest in just this matter.

  “In the first place, in Lithuania things just are a bit more liberal. In addition to that, he is an architect. And don’t forget, his father-in-law is a top bastard in the Party.”

  “Gvidas doesn’t play those games, does he?” Georgii asked in surprise.

  “Well, how can I put it? On the whole, Soviet power is a bit of a pantomime there. Lithuanians have always taken their smoked sausage, eels, and beer more seriously than meetings of the Communist Party, that’s for sure. Cannibalism is less widespread there,” Nike explained.

  Masha flared up: “You’re talking complete rubbish, Nike. After the war half of Lithuania was put in prison, almost half a million young men. More than they lost in the war. Some pantomime!”

  Medea got up. She had been wanting to get to bed for a while. She knew she had missed her usual time when she slipped easily and smoothly into sleep, and now she would be tossing and turning till morning on her mattress stuffed with marine eel-grass. “Good night,” she said, and went out.

  “Look at that,” Masha said, chagrined. “No one can deny what a great personality our Medea is, hard as flint, yet even she is downtrodden. She didn’t say a word and just left.”

  That made Georgii angry.

  “You’re a half-wit, Masha. You think all the evil in the world comes down to Soviet power. She had one of her brothers killed by the Reds, another by the Whites; in the war one was killed by the Fascists, and another by the Communists. For her all governments are the same. My grandfather Stepanyan was an aristocrat and a monarchist, and he sent her money when she was orphaned as a young girl. He sent her everything they had in the house at that time. And my mother was married by my father, who was, forgive my mentioning it, a red-hot revolutionary, just because Medea told him, ‘We’ve got to save Elena.’ What does it matter to her who’s in power? She’s a Christian, her allegiance is to a higher authority. And never say again that she’s afraid of anything.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Masha shouted. “That’s not what I meant at all! I only meant she left as soon as we started talking politics.”

  “Well, why should she want to talk to a half-wit like you, anyway?” Georgii retorted.

  “That’s enough now,” Nike intervened lazily. “Have we got anything tucked away in the reserve?”

  “Need you ask?” Georgii said, cheering up immediately. He rummaged behind his back and pulled out the bottle he had started earlier in the day.

  Masha’s mouth was trembling and she was just waiting to rush into battle, but Nike, who hated quarrels, moved a glass in her direction and began singing. “The river is flowing over the sand, washing the shore, a handsome young fellow, a dashing young rascal, is begging his foreman …”

  Her voice was quiet and moist at first. Georgii and Masha relaxed, leaning against each other as members of one family, and all the disputation ended of its own accord. Nike’s voice poured like light out through the chink of the partly open door, through the small, irregular windows, and the simple, semioutlaw song lit up the whole of Medea’s realm.

  Valerii Butonov came out into the night to relieve himself and, rather than bothering to walk all the way to the little planked house, disconcerted the tomato seedlings by giving them an unexpected warm watering. Now he gazed up into the star-studded southern sky dissected by lascivious searchlights probing the coastal strip in search of cinematographic spies in black frogmen’s suits. At this time of the year, however, not even the buttocks of lovers on the beach were to be seen gleaming in the moonlight.

  The earth was shrouded in darkness and a single window shone with a pure yellow light from a valley in the hills; he even seemed to hear the sound of a woman’s singing coming from there. Valerii listened. Occasionally a dog barked.

  The night truly was a sleepless one, but Medea had been used to sleeping little since she was young and, now that she was old, one sleepless night did not unsettle her. She lay in her narrow maidenly bed in her nightgown with its worn embroidery on the front, and her loosely braided nighttime plait rested alongside her, grown sparser with the years but still extending down to her hip.

  The house was soon filled with little recognizable sounds: Nike shuffling past barefoot, Masha clinking the lid of the chamber pot, whispering “Piss-piss” to a sleeping child, and the little stream flowing audibly and musically. A light switch clicked, followed by muffled giggling.

  Neither her hearing nor her eyesight were yet letting Medea down, and being naturally observant, she picked out many things in her young relatives’ lives which they themselves were quite unaware of. The young mothers with babies or toddlers usually arrived at the beginning of the season; their working husbands didn’t stay long, a couple of weeks, rarely a month. Friends of some sort would come, rent a bed in the Lower Village, and at night they would come secretly to the house, moaning and crying out on the other side of Medea’s wall. Then those mothers separated from one husband and married another. The new husbands brought up the old children and fathered new ones; the stepbrothers and stepsisters visited each other, and then the ex-husbands came back with their new wives and new children to spend the holidays together with the older ones.

  When Nike married Katya’s father, a promising young film producer who never did fulfill his promise, for years she brought with her Misha, the producer’s ungainly and uncouth son from his first marriage. Katya did all she could to make his life a misery, but Nike was kind to him and looked after him, and when she swapped the producer for a physicist, she continued dragging the boy around with her for many years. Medea was witness to a change of partners between two married couples, an ardent romance between a brother-and sister-in-law with an age difference of thirty years, and several youthful flings between cousins which fully validated the French proverb.

  The life of the postwar generation, especially of those who were now around twenty, seemed to her to be not quite serious. She could not detect in either their marriages or their parenting the sense of responsibility which from an early age had defined her own life. She was never judgmental but had immense respect for those who, like her mother, her grandmother, and her friend Elena, performed the least significant and the most important acts in the only way that was possible for Medea herself: seriously and definitively.

  Medea had lived her life as the wife of one husband and continued to live as his widow. Her life as a widow was good, not a whit worse than her marriage. Over the long years, almost thirty of them, since he died, the past itself had changed radically, and the only bitter hurt her husband had caused her, strangely enough when he was already dead, had dissolved away and in her memory he had become a man of monumental importance, something of which there had been not the slightest evidence while he was alive.

  She had been a widow considerab
ly longer than she had been a wife, and her relationship with her departed husband was as good as ever and was even improving with the years.

  Although experiencing her semiwakefulness as insomnia, Medea was actually in a subtle drowsy sleep which did not inhibit her usual thinking processes: half-prayer, half-conversation, half-reminiscence, it sometimes even casually strayed beyond the limits of what she personally knew or had seen.

  Recalling almost word for word all her husband had told her about his childhood, she could remember him now as a boy, even though she hadn’t met him until he was approaching forty. Samuel Yakovlevich was the son of a widow who prized the affronts and misfortunes she suffered above any property. With inexplicable pride she would point out her weakling son’s defects to her sisters: “Just look how skinny he is, he looks like a chicken, in the whole of our street there is not another child so puny. And look at his scabs! He’s completely scrofulous. And he’s got red blotches on his hands.”

  Little Sam grew bigger nevertheless, together with his spots and pimples and boils, and was in truth both skinny and pale but in that differed little from other children of his age. At thirteen he began to experience a certain special perturbation associated with a tenting of his trousers, raised from within by a rapidly sprouting shoot which inconvenienced him extremely.

  The boy regarded his new condition as one of his numerous illnesses which his mother took such pride in talking about, and he adapted a drawstring from her underskirt to constrain the wayward organ and stop it troubling him. Meanwhile two more visible parts of his body, his ears and nose, entered a phase of irrepressible growth. Out of the good-looking boy there hatched a ridiculous creature with rounded, overhanging eyebrows and a long and motile nose. His skinniness acquired a new quality at this time: no matter where he sat down he felt he was sitting on two sharp stones. His late father’s striped grey trousers hung on him as if he were a scarecrow in the kitchen garden, and it was now he received the hurtful nickname of “Sammy Empty-Pants.”