Medea and Her Children Read online

  At the age of fourteen, soon after the celebration of his bar mitzvah, which for Sam was remarkable only for his having made five times as many mistakes in the reading of the prescribed texts as the five other boys from poor families who had completed their synagogal studies at public expense, and after an exasperatingly evasive correspondence between his mother and an elder brother of his late father, he was finally sent to Odessa, where he began his career in the style and dignity of office boy with a round of interminable and ill-defined duties.

  The post of office boy left him almost no free time, but he nevertheless managed to fit in an acquaintance with the Jewish Enlightenment, which even then was outdated, at the hands of Ephraim, the eldest of his father’s brothers. Ephraim was a self-taught Jewish intellectual who hoped, despite all evidence to the contrary, that well-founded education would resolve all the world’s thorny problems, including such misunderstandings as anti-Semitism.

  Sam did not stand for long beneath the noble but seriously faded banners of the Jewish Enlightenment and defected, to his uncle’s great distress, to the contiguous camp of Zionism, which turned its face away from the Jew trying to raise his educational level to that of other civilized peoples and instead backed the Natural Jew, who had taken the straightforward but two-edged decision to plant his orchard once more in Canaan.

  Sam’s cousin had already managed to emigrate to Palestine, was now living in a place no one had ever heard of called Ein Gedi, working as a farm laborer, and was sending infrequent but enthusiastic letters urging Sam to follow. To the displeasure of his office uncle, Sam enrolled in the Jewish agricultural courses for settlers. His studies took up an inordinate amount of working time; his uncle was displeased and halved Sam’s wages, which he had in any case never once got around to paying; his wife, however, Aunt Genichka, was a real Jewish woman with designs to marry Sam to her no-longer-young niece who had, moreover, a slight congenital dislocation of the hip joint.

  Sam attended the courses diligently for two months, delving into the arts of vaccination and inoculation, but his fickle heart couldn’t wait for the laid eggs of intention to hatch into accomplished actions, and even as the other students were being drawn ever more deeply into the world of horticulture and viticulture, he transferred to another class: a clandestine Marxist study circle organized for workers in the engineering workshops and port services. The enticements of small-scale Jewish socialism in provincial Palestine stood no chance against the world-girdling perspectives of the proletariat.

  His office uncle, whose interests did not extend beyond the market price of wheat, had reacted with considerable disinterest to all his nephew’s previous hobbyhorses, but Marxism was too much and he told him to find another place to stay. To be fair, he did seem to have grasped from Sam’s account what surplus value was, but displayed an unexpected hostility to the young economic genius and shouted in a rage, “You think he knows better than I do what to do with surplus value? Let him first try getting it!”

  Sam suspected that his uncle was confusing surplus value with pure profit, but wasn’t given an opportunity to explain this to him properly. His uncle assured him that he would land himself in jail in the very near future, words which proved to be prophetic, although almost two years were to pass before they were fulfilled. During this time Sam learned the metalworker’s trade, acquired a great deal of varied book-learning, and himself conducted a study circle to bring light into the benighted consciousness of the People.

  At the end of 1912 he was subjected to administrative exile in Vologda province, where he spent two years, afterward traveling from town to town, carrying raw propaganda literature of his own devising in a doctor’s bag, meeting in conspiratorial apartments with unknown but clearly very important personages, and engaging in agitation and more agitation. For the rest of his life he styled himself a professional revolutionary and was in Moscow for the Revolution, where he became a middle-ranking leader since he was good at working with the proletarian masses; and then he was outfitted in ChON Special Detachment leather and sent to Tambov province, at which point his glorious biography mysteriously breaks off. Part of the story is glaringly missing, and then he reappears as someone entirely run-of-the-mill, devoid of any higher interests in life, a dental prosthetist enthused only by the sight of ample ladies.

  The meeting between Medea, already withering after having inconspicuously spent the golden years of maidenhood in the daily caring for her younger brothers Constantine and Dimitry and her sister Alexandra (whom she had accompanied with her firstborn baby, Sergei, to her new husband in Moscow not long before), and the jolly dentist, whose smile revealed large short teeth along with a strip of pale raspberry-colored gum, took place in a sanatorium. The therapeutic Crimean mud was believed to stimulate fertility, and Nurse Medea Georgievna facilitated the process by applying mud compresses to barren loins.

  There hadn’t been a dentist in the sanatorium before, but the chief consultant had managed to get the post established by the Commissariat of Health. The dentist duly appeared and created in this tranquil and slightly mysterious place a quite unholy hullabaloo. He was loud, he joked, he waved his nickel-plated instruments around, he flirted with all his patients at the same time, he offered unscheduled services for the promotion of childbirth, and Medea Georgievna, the best nurse in the sanatorium, was allocated to him as his assistant in these stomatological tours de force. She mixed the amalgam for fillings with a spatula on a specimen glass slide, passed him the instruments, and was quietly amazed at the dentist’s unparalleled impudence, and even more by the mind-boggling wantonness of most of the women suffering from infertility, who would consent to a rendezvous with him before they were even out of the dentist’s chair.

  With a curiosity which grew by the day, she observed this thin Jew whose baggy trousers were inelegantly gathered around his thin waist by a Caucasian belt and who wore an old blue shirt. After donning his white coat he assumed a marginally more prepossessing appearance.

  “He is a doctor, I suppose,” Medea reflected in explanation of his manifest success with the ladies. “And witty in his way.”

  While Medea was filling in the patient’s record card, even before the patient had trustingly opened her mouth, his keen eye would have completed a benevolent and professional masculine examination from the crown of her head down to her ankle. Nothing escaped the connoisseur’s gaze, and the first compliment, Medea deduced, related exclusively to the upper story: hair, complexion, eyes. Receiving a favorable reaction, and in this respect the dentist showed great delicacy, he would throw himself into a purposeful outpouring of eloquence.

  Medea observed the doctor surreptitiously, and was amazed how he came to life at the sight of each woman entering and how his face fell when he was alone with himself, that is, with stern Medea. He had subjected her to his critical analysis on the first day of their acquaintance, had praised her wonderful copper hair but, receiving no encouragement, had not returned to the subject of her physical merits.

  After a time Medea recognized, to her surprise, that he really did have a keen eye and could pick out a woman’s most elusive merits in an instant; indeed, he was the more sincerely pleased to discover these the less obvious they were.

  To one improbably fat woman manifestly suffering from obesity, he said admiringly as she was squeezing her soft backside into the seat of his dentist’s chair, “If we lived in Istanbul, you would be considered the most beautiful woman in the city!”

  The bloated woman blushed, her eyes filled with tears, and she squeaked in a hurt voice, “What do you mean by that?”

  “My God,” Samuel said in great concern. “Of course, I mean it as a great compliment. Everybody wants lots of something good.”

  It even seemed to Medea that by the end of his reception hours he was tired less by the work itself than by his superhuman efforts to find a compliment for each woman based on their actual, if sometimes well hidden, virtues.

  With the few members of the male
sex who chanced to come his way (the basic specialization of the sanatorium was after all the treatment of infertility, although it also had a small orthopedics department), he was stiff, even, perhaps, timid. Medea smiled at her observation. It occurred to her that the merry dentist was afraid of men. She was later to discover how painful the reality behind that casual observation was.

  Medea was nearing thirty at this time. Dimitry was preparing to enter the military academy at Taganrog. Constantine was fifteen and hoping to become a geologist.

  Her sister Anelya, who had taken Anastasia, the youngest of the children, to Tbilisi, had long been urging Medea to come and visit her. Anelya had her eye on a certain charming and still-young widower who was one of her husband’s relatives, and had it in mind to introduce them. Medea, who had no inkling of these plans, was also intending to visit her sisters, only not in the spring but in the autumn after she had laid in her supplies for the winter. If Anelya’s plans had come to fruition, this house, possibly the last Greek house in the Crimea, would not have survived, and the next generation of the Sinoply family, Greeks in Tashkent, Tbilisi, and Vilnius, would have forgotten its seafaring heritage. But things turned out differently.

  In the middle of March 1929 all the sanatorium staff were called to an urgent meeting; absolutely all, including even feebleminded Rais with the asymmetrical smile on half his face. If Rais had been told to come, it was an indication that the meeting was on a matter of national importance.

  The municipal Party boss, enormous Vyalov, was ranting at a table covered with glossy red material. He had already read out the Party directive and was now improvising on the subject of everyone’s wonderful tomorrow and the grandeur of the idea of collective farms. The mainly female staff of the sanatorium were listening obediently. These were mostly women who lived in the suburbs, owned half a house, a kitchen garden extending to a few hundredths of a hectare, a couple of small trees, half a dozen hens, and received a wage from working for the state. They were disinclined to heckle. Firkovich, the sanatorium’s chief consultant, was a native Crimean from a scholarly Karaim family and had been kicked about quite a bit in his time. He had been drafted into the Red Army in 1918 and worked in hospitals but had never joined the Communist Party. He still feared for his family so was always willing to keep his head down and make available the time and place for anyone else who wanted to speechify.

  “Who’s got something to say?” Vyalov inquired, and immediately up jumped stout Filozov, the secretary of the Party cell.

  Samuel Yakovlevich was sitting in the back row twitching, even bouncing up and down on his chair slightly and looking all around. Medea was sitting next to him and covertly observing his inexplicable agitation. Catching her eye, he seized her hand and whispered in her ear, “I have to speak. It’s imperative that I should speak.”

  “Well, why are you getting so excited, Samuel Yakovlevich? Get up and speak if you want to.” She gently extricated her hand from his grasp.

  “I’ve been a member of the Party, do you see, since 1912. It’s my duty.” His paleness was not a noble pallor, but an ashen, frightened greyness.

  A new doctor, a curly-headed woman with a flat lock of hair to the left of her part and a German surname, spoke at length about collectivization, and kept repeating, “From the standpoint of the present moment in time …”

  Clutching Medea’s hand, Samuel calmed down and sat that way through to the end of the meeting, his face twitching, mouthing something. When the meeting had thundered to an end, people started going out, but he was still holding her hand.

  “This is a terrible day, believe me, a terrible day. Don’t leave me alone,” he begged her, and his eyes, light hazel, imploring, were completely feminine.

  “All right.” Medea unexpectedly found herself readily agreeing, and they walked together out of the sanatorium’s lime-washed gate, past the bus station, and turned into a quiet street inhabited by railway workers ever since the railway had been brought to the town.

  Samuel Yakovlevich rented a room with its own front door and a front garden in which there were two old vines growing and a table so gnarled and mossy it might have grown here at the same time as the trees. The vine had already twined itself around wires stretched above the table. The tiny courtyard was contained on one side by a rickety fence, and on the other by the clay wall of the neighboring house.

  Sitting at the table, Medea watched Samuel Yakovlevich hopping around by the Primus stove in the entrance hall, taking down some goat’s cheese wrapped in a napkin from behind the door lintel, pouring vegetable oil into the frying pan, and managing to do everything rather fussily but nonetheless expeditiously. Medea looked at her watch. Her brothers would not be back today because both of them were in Koktebel at the gliding center and would stay there, most likely with Medea’s old friend who owned a dacha well known in those parts.

  “I’m not in any hurry to go anywhere,” Medea noted to herself in surprise. “I am visiting.”

  Samuel Yakovlevich didn’t stop chattering, and was so quick and at ease that you would have thought quite another person had just been clutching Medea’s hand.

  “What an odd and changeable man,” Medea thought, and offered to help him prepare the tea.

  But he asked her to sit still and enjoy the wonderful sky through the little leaves of the vine. “Let me tell you a secret, Medea Georgievna. I’ve done many things in my life. I even completed a course in farming for Jewish settlers, and now as I look at that vine,” he gestured sweepingly toward the two gnarled bushes, “I think to myself what a splendid job that is. Much better than fitting false teeth, eh? What do you think?”

  Then he served supper at the table, and they ate potatoes which smelled of paraffin, and goat’s cheese, and she kept thinking it was time to get up and leave, but for some reason didn’t.

  Later he escorted Medea right across town, telling her about himself, the minor and major upsets in his life, the times he’d been out of luck and the times he’d fallen on his nose. Yet he seemed not to be complaining, but laughing about it and wondering at it all. Then he respectfully took his leave of her and left her quite perplexed as to what it was about him that was so touching. Perhaps it was that he didn’t take himself very seriously.

  They met again the next morning as usual, in the stomatology department. He seemed to have been replaced by a quite different dentist who didn’t talk much, was very correct with his lady patients, and didn’t joke at all. By lunchtime Medea had the impression there was something he wanted to tell her, and sure enough, when the last patient before lunch left, he spread out his doorstep sandwiches next to Medea’s slim, flat scones sandwiched around the first spring onions, shook his head, clicked his tongue, and asked, “How would it be, Medea Georgievna, if I were to invite you to dinner at the Caucasus restaurant?”

  Medea smiled. He had invited not a few of his chosen lady patients to the Caucasus restaurant. She also found his grammar amusing: “How would it be if …”

  “I would think about it,” Medea replied wryly.

  “Well, what is there for you to think about?” he asked heatedly. “We’ll finish work and just go there.”

  Medea understood that he really was very keen to take her to this restaurant of his. “Well, at the least I shall have to go home first to change,” Medea resisted weakly.

  “Stuff and nonsense! Do you think all the ladies are wearing sables?” the dentist pressed home his attack.

  That day Medea was wearing a grey serge dress with a round white collar and cuffs which made her look like a chambermaid or an old-age pensioner; one of the probably one hundred dresses of exactly the same style which she had worn all her life since she was a schoolgirl and which she could have sewn with her eyes shut: one of those widow’s dresses which she was wearing to this day.

  The evening at the Caucasus restaurant was a delight. Samuel Yakovlevich was trying to cut a bit of a dash. He knew the waiter and was pleased about that. Bending at the waist and liftin
g his sharp little mustache with a smile, the waiter cast hors d’oeuvres in little transparent dishes down on the table in a casual but symmetrical cross. Among the plush and the palm trees of the restaurant, Medea Georgievna seemed more attractive to the dentist than yesterday when she had been sitting in his little garden with her classical Greek profile silhouetted against the whitewashed wall.

  Breaking off a piece of lavash bread, she dipped it in the chakhokhbili stew and ate it so delicately that she didn’t get the slightest orange outline around her mouth. Watching the relaxed and amiably absentminded look on her face as she was eating, hardly looking down at the plate, he supposed that she had good manners and it struck him that he himself had never been taught good table manners. He quite lost his appetite for a minute. The chakhokhbili suddenly seemed bitter.

  He moved the metal bowl and plate to one side. He refilled his wineglass with dark, heavy Khvanchkara from the round decanter, gulped it down, put the glass back on the table, and said emphatically, “You keep eating, Medea Georgievna, and pay no attention to what I am about to say.”

  She looked at him expectantly. It was cosy in the niche where they were sitting, if a bit on the dark side.

  “I need to explain my behavior yesterday to you. I mean at the meeting. Bear in mind that I am a professional revolutionary. I was known throughout Odessa and spent three years in political exile. I tried to organize the escape from prison of someone so important that it would be simply improper to mention his name now. And I am no coward, believe me.”

  He was very agitated now, moved the plate of chakhokhbili back, impaled a large piece of meat, and chewed at it, smacking his lips like a gourmet. His appetite had evidently returned.

  “You see, I simply have a nervous i-illness.” He moved the plate away again. “I am thirty-nine years old: no longer young, but not yet old. I have no contact with my family. I am as good as orphaned,” he joked.