Medea and Her Children

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 evening 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 considerably 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.”

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 lifting 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.

He leaned forward, and some of his thick hair, which he combed back, tumbled onto his forehead. His hair really was very attractive.

“He’s going to propose,” Medea surmised.

“I have never been married and, just between ourselves, had no intention of changing that. Only, you see, I had a slight attack yesterday, when we were sitting in that meeting, and purely because you were there it passed off quite without any consequences. Then you came home with me and we sat together all evening and I didn’t feel a thing.”

“He’s so daft it’s comical,” Medea thought, smiling to herself.

“You see,” the dentist battled on, “you really aren’t my type at all . . .”

Such frankness seemed, even to someone as devoid of flirtatiousness as Medea, to be going too far, but by now she was completely at sea and had no idea where this conversation was leading. Then the dentist made an abrupt turn, as if twisting his molar forceps: “In general I like smaller women, solid, firmly planted, you know, on the ground in the Russian style. No, don’t think I’m a simpleton, I realize that you are something of a princess, but since I was a young man I haven’t been accustomed to looking in the direction of princesses. Laundresses, cafeteria assistants, forgive me, nurses . . .”

“He is a scream, but I have a pile of laundry at home waiting to be ironed,” she thought. Samuel Yakovlevich speared a piece of the by now cold meat with his fork, hastily chewed and swallowed it, and now Medea could see how nervous he was.

“When you took my hand, Medea Georgievna . . . No, forgive me, it was I who took your hand, I felt that by your side I feared nothing. The whole evening I felt nothing for you, only that by your side I feared nothing. I escorted you back, then I came back home, lay down, and decided immediately that I must marry you.”

The information left Medea completely unmoved. She was an old maid of twenty-nine and for many years had contemptuously rejected propositions of various kinds made to her by a rather small number of men.

“And then I dreamed of my mother!” he exclaimed dramatically. “If you only knew what a dreadful personality she had, but that’s beside the point. I have never in my life dreamt of her before, but last night I did. She came very close to me, and I could even smell her hair, you know, her old grey hair, and she said to me sternly, ‘Yes, Sam, yes.’ And that was it. I can only think myself that it’s ‘yes.’ ”

Medea was sitting bolt upright. She always did carry herself very upright. Her collar was slightly crumpled on the left, but she did not notice it. She was wondering how to turn this eccentric down gently, so as not to offend him. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that she might say no.

“Yes, Medea Georgievna, and there is one more thing I should tell you about myself as your future husband. The point is, I am a certified psychiatric patient. That is, I am perfectly all right. It is an old story, but I should nevertheless tell it to you. In 1920, I was drafted into a subdivision of the ChON Special Detachments and sent out to requisition grain. It was a matter of the highest priority, I always understood that. And grain, of course, we duly found in the village of Vasilishchevo in Tambov province. I am quite sure there was grain hidden in every homestead, but we found it in two, which didn’t at all look to be among the richest. We had our orders: anyone found concealing grain was to be shot as an example to others. The Red Army soldiers arrested three peasants and took them outside the village boundary. As they were taking them away, all the people of the village followed. Two of the men were brothers with a shared farm, and the other was an older peasant. Their wives were running after us, and their children. An old paralyzed woman, the mother of the older man, was crawling after us. We took away a hundredweight and a half of grain from them in total, and from the brothers a measly half a hundredweight. There was I, Medea Georgievna, the commanding officer of the grain squad. We lined the three of them up, the Red Army soldiers facing them with their rifles. Well, then the women and the little children raised such a shriek that something struck me in the head and I fell down. I’d had something like an epileptic seizure. After that, of course, I remember nothing. They put me in the cart, right there on top of the grain, and took me back to the city. I was told I turned black, and my arms and legs were like sticks, completely rigid. Three months I was in the hospital, and then they sent me to a sanatorium and then set up a commission and decided that I had weak nerves. After the commission they wanted to transfer me to work for the Party administering the economy, but I had second thoughts and asked them to let me be a dentist. They took my weak nerves into account and released me. You may perhaps have noticed that I am a good dentist. I know the prophylactic side, and all about dentures. I have not changed my Party views, only physically I really am weak. Whenever I need to support a Party decision, my spirit is all for it, but my flesh relapses into weakness and fear that I might be about to have another fit, a nervous fever . . . like at yesterday’s meeting. I am telling you all this as a very big personal secret, although actually it’s all written down in my medical record. I had an opportunity to have it removed, but I thought, ‘No, I’m not going to. What if the Party were to call me again to do my duty in operational work. I just can’t do it. Shoot me like a dog, but I still can’t do it.’ But I have no other failings, Medea Georgievna.”

Medea then reflected, “God help us, my brother Philip was shot by the Reds; my brother Nikifor was hanged by the Whites, but before that both of them had become murderers themselves. This one couldn’t do it, and he’s lamenting his weakness. Truly, the wind of the Spirit blows where it wills.”

Samuel saw her back to her house. The road glistened dimly beneath their feet. That part of the suburbs was a desolate place then, not built up, and strewn with rubbish. It was about four kilometers to Medea’s house. Samuel, who talked ceaselessly, suddenly fell silent when they were halfway there. He had actually said everything there was to say about himself. In the years of their marriage he only added minor details to what he had told her that evening.

Medea too was silent. He was holding her arm with his thin, strong hand, but she nevertheless had the feeling that it was she who was leading him.

When they reached Harlampy’s old estate, the moon came out, silvering the trees in the orchard; the gates had long ago been barricaded and the house’s residents used two gates at the side and back. They stopped by the side gate. He coughed and asked brusquely, “So, when shall we go to the Registry Office?”

“We shan’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I need to think about it.”

“What is there to think about?” he asked in surprise. “Today we have collectivization of agriculture, tomorrow there will be something else. Of course, life is just getting better all the time, but I think we shall find it easier to get through this wonderful life together, if you see what I mean.”

It was quiet in the house. She took off the grey dress and put on another very similar one for wearing at home. Then she sat down to write a letter to Elena. It was a long, sad letter. She wrote not a word about the comical dentist and his ridiculous courtship but told Elena only about how the boys had grown up and were leaving her; and about how it was night now and she was alone at home, and that her youth had passed, and she was feeling tired.

A wind blew up toward morning, and Medea developed a severe headache. She wrapped an old scarf around her head and lay down in her cold bed. The following day her temperature rose and her joints ached. The influenza was severe and lasted a long time. Samuel Yakovlevich nursed her zealously. By the time she recovered, he was head over heels in love with her, and she felt immeasurably and undeservedly happy: she could never remember anybody bringing her tea in bed before, boiling broth for her, and tucking her blankets in at the sides. After the illness they got married, and their marriage was happy from its first day to its last.

Medea knew his main weakness: after a few vodkas he would start furiously boasting about his revolutionary past and looking victoriously at the women present. Then she would quietly get up from the table and say, “Home, Sam!” and he would hurry guiltily after her. It was a small thing, and she forgave him for it.

On the other side of the wall a child started crying—Alik or Liza, Medea couldn’t tell which. A new day was beginning and Medea was unsure whether she had slept that night or not. She had been having ill-defined nights of this sort ever more frequently of late.

The child, and now it was clearly Liza, was demanding to be taken to the seaside right away.

Nike scolded her: “I’m sure I don’t know what all this crying is about! Get up, get washed, have breakfast, and then we’ll decide where we’re going.”