Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 6

The ring which Medea had found in the coves truly had once belonged to Alexandra. In Medea’s memory the summer of 1946 was the time they had been closest as sisters, meeting then for the first time after the war. Throughout the war Medea had gone nowhere, not only not leaving the Crimea, but not even going out of the Village. Alexandra too had stayed the whole time in Moscow, flatly refusing to be evacuated to Kuibyshev, to which families of the military were moved at the beginning of the war. That year, in 1946, it was as if the age difference between them had been evened out and Medea could finally stop worrying all the time about what her younger sister might get up to next.

Alexandra was a war widow with three children, worn down by the years of hardship and already past her prime. There was nothing to suggest that this would be the moment she would pull off another of her stunts.

The loss of the ring had been unimportant in every respect. Alexandra was always losing things. Possessions did not stay with her for long, and she did not become attached to them. Nevertheless, Medea could not get the finding of this ring which had been lost thirty years before out of her head, perhaps because she knew that, apart from the usual links of cause and effect, there are other links between events, sometimes evident, sometimes hidden, and sometimes completely unfathomable.

“Never mind, if it’s something I need to know it will be explained,” she decided, with total confidence in the One to whom all things are known, and stopped worrying.

Alexandra had a whole collection of rings. Almost since childhood she had been tricking herself out in all sorts of frippery, and this despite the fact that she was young at just the time when this harmless feminine weakness was most heavily frowned on by public opinion. In the 1920s, when Medea was shielded from trouble by being an orphan with many children to look after, by her unsmiling seriousness and her unremitting concern for the younger ones, Alexandra, frivolous by nature but nobody’s fool, inflated her forgivable weakness like a balloon until it seemed she might at any moment fly off wherever she fancied in pursuit of who knows what.

Over time, her innocent failing developed to such an extent that all manner of ideological missionaries from the Russian League of Communist Youth and elsewhere called off all attempts to lay claim to her soul. Her civic deficiencies were manifest, and her incurable frivolity became a diagnosis freeing her from participation in the great cause of building—well, exactly what, Alexandra didn’t bother to find out.

Medea, the only member of the family to have received a full grammar-school education, had not really been properly taught during the times of war and revolution, and she longed to give her younger siblings a good start in life. With Alexandra she clearly failed. Alexandra was a poor student, although not without ability. In the municipal school she attended, there were still teachers left from the old grammar school, and it was not a bad school. Medea would sometimes come to collect her sister, and the old geography teacher, Nikolai Leopoldovich Velde, a great expert on the Crimea, would sit Medea down in the teachers’ common room, volubly curse today’s pupils for their lack of interest in studying, and lapse with heartfelt nostalgia into reminiscing about the days when he used to take well-bred young ladies on excursions to the wildest and most remote corners and crevices of Karadag. In this there could be detected a secret hope that everything might yet return to normal—that is, to life as it was before the war and before the Revolution.

But although life did not return to normal, things gradually settled down and became more tolerable. The boys grew out of infancy. Like all the Sinoply men, they were drawn to the sea. Fishing, since time immemorial a favorite pastime of boys, was a means of putting food on the table for them from an early age, and old Uncle Grisha Porchelli, a descendant of Genoese settlers who had worked for Harlampy since he was a lad, took them with him when he went out night fishing for mullet, which was not the easiest of pastimes.

In 1924, Alexandra finished her secondary schooling in the seventh grade. Medea racked her brains wondering where she could find her a job. Although the famine had passed, unemployment was still terrible.

Medea spent two days mulling, even in her dreams, over how best to fix her up, and on the third day as she was going to work early in the morning—she was working at the time in the obstetrics unit of the Theodosia city hospital—she ran into Nikolai Leopoldovich Velde, who was out taking his morning constitutional in the direction of the Quarantine district. She had barely opened her mouth to tell him about her problem before he told her, as if he had already thought everything through and decided the matter for her, to come and see him after work.

When Medea went to see him, he had the whole business practically sewn up. He had prepared her a letter addressed to the director of the Karadag research station, who was an old friend of his.

“I don’t know what sort of staff numbers he has there, but the station is under the auspices of the State Science Committee now, so perhaps they have got a bit of extra funding; the more so in the summer because they receive visiting scientists and have more work.” He held out the envelope for her.

As Medea accepted the envelope, which was made of grey poor-quality paper, she immediately had a sense that things were going to work out. Every time she encountered these old ties or had dealings with old, prerevolutionary people, everything fell into place.

She knew the station very well. She knew its present director, and she even remembered Terentii Ivanovich Vyazemsky, who had founded it. That first summer she had stayed at the Stepanyans’ dacha in Sudak. He used to come and visit them on matters concerning the station, a neglected old man in a frock coat which had acquired a reddish tinge with age, with a woman’s scarf tied in the manner of an old fashioned cravat; and he was accompanied by a second, no less remarkable personage, but of a completely different kind, with a round face, a paunch, thick salt-and-pepper eyebrows, and with an equally strong Jewish accent in Russian and French: Solomon Solomonovich Krym, a member of the prerevolutionary Russian Duma and a local celebrity.

Stepanyan, a great philanthropist and patron of the arts, declined for some reason to support his petitioners on that occasion, and in the evening, after supper, related what an original and unusual person this Dr. Vyazemsky was—a physiologist, a crusader for temperance, and a proponent of the strangest ideas. He was particularly keen for many years on the most unusual of these: he was concerned that, by locking its intellectuals up in prison, the state was losing their wonderful mental energy, which it could be putting to good use for the benefit of the state itself, and that by establishing penal scientific laboratories that energy could be conserved in the interests of society. Terentii Ivanovich enthusiastically propounded this idea to the then minister of education, Count Delyanov, who thought the whole notion bizarre and even dangerous, although it was successfully taken up by the state a few decades later.

“C’est un grand original,” Armik Tigranovna murmured, and sent the children upstairs to bed.

At that time everybody fortunately forgot the harebrained idea of the magnanimous madman. A few years later he sank all his fortune in a better-conceived project: creating a research station on his estate at Karadag which would be at the disposal of any serious scientist, even if he lacked formal academic qualifications and even, and indeed so much the better, if he were not in good health, because he could then restore his health right here in the course of productive scientific work, even if he were in straitened circumstances, because Dr. Vyazemsky would also open a sanatorium here and use the income from it to underwrite the expenses of research work.

The very next day Medea and her sister went to the station. The director kissed Medea on both cheeks. His older daughter, Xenia Ludskaya, had been in Medea’s class at the grammar school, had worked with her at the hospital, and had died in 1919 of typhoid.

Old Ludsky went off to arrange for the station’s external hygiene worker, or, in prerevolutionary parlance, the yard-sweeper, to vacate a small corner room in the station’s residences for Alexandra. Then they drank tea at length, recalling mutual acquaintances, of whom there were more than a few, and parted on the warmest of terms.

Three days later Alexandra moved to the station and started learning everything she would need to know to facilitate the fieldwork of the students coming that year from Moscow, Leningrad, Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod. She was a great success that first season and had lots of fun. First she had an affair with a category-two research worker from Kharkov, and when he left after collecting the requisite number of earthworms, the nicest geologist turned up who was compiling a large-scale geological map of Karadag, and she was allocated to him since his surveying could only be done with a partner. They proved excellent partners, both tall with a hint of rust in their hair, and hazel eyes, both cheerful and fun loving, and the geologist, whose name was Alexander, which both of them also found amusing, marked a faint cross on his new map in all the good, private locations they found, and from July until the last days of October, Alexandra never spared herself in underpinning the upward progress of science, beginning with the Beregovoy Ridge, and charting all its five massifs, from Lobovoy to Kok-Kai. After that the weather broke and the geologist departed, postponing the culmination of his efforts to the following year.

The winter didn’t drag. Alexandra worked hard in the library and the station museum and proved to have the requisite degree of common sense, literacy, and numeracy to cope with the demands made of her. In late March all manner of scientists began arriving and things livened up again. In addition the gliding center, which had been in decline for a few years, revived and broad-shouldered sportsmen and romantic inventors were soon to be found not far away on St. Clement’s Hill in quiet Koktebel. As a result, by the time last year’s geologist returned, Alexandra was already in love with a glider pilot whom she swapped a month later for his twin brother, who resembled him so closely that Alexandra barely noticed the moment of transition.

Medea made no attempt to pry into her sister’s personal life, and was only glad that she had a good job where she was not ill treated and, indeed, on the contrary, spoiled. She was much more worried about the younger ones. Dimitry showed great promise in mathematics and dreamed of going to the artillery college. Medea did her best to tactfully steer him away from the military profession, but he was profoundly sensitive to her maneuvering, clammed up, distanced himself from her, and, although he never said a word, left her in no doubt that he considered Medea a bourgeois relic and ballast left behind by the ancien régime. Constantine, although only two years older, had no leanings in that direction and continued to go out fishing with Uncle Grisha Porchelli, and seemed to dream of nothing more complex than standing nets and dragnets.

A certain coolness which developed between Medea and her younger brothers upset her deeply, the more so since she now saw Alexandra quite infrequently as well. Alexandra would come to Theodosia a couple of times a month, run around to see her friends, and in passing, over supper, tell Medea about life at the station, mainly about her trips out and things she had found, leaving her tempestuous private life strictly private. Medea had little trouble, however, in guessing that her kid sister was not missing out on anything, diving for pearls in any sea, and sipping honey from any flower. This led her to reflect sadly that her own life was not fulfilled, and probably never would be.

She was not in demand. Her iconic face, her small head, even then bound with a scarf, her flat-chestedness—in the estimation of the men of Theodosia, her general thinness did not attract admirers.

“Evidently my intended was killed in the war,” Medea decided, and quickly reconciled herself to the idea. She thought, however, that she needed to get Alexandra married off as soon as possible.

Alexandra had been working at the station for three years. It would have been closer to the facts to say three seasons. Meanwhile her future husband was already packing his bags in Moscow, on Polyanka Street, in preparation for a research visit to Karadag.

Alexei Kirillovich Miller belonged to a rather prominent St. Petersburg family which had what at one time was a slightly dangerous aura of “progressiveness” and long-established humanitarian traditions. His most prominent ancestor was one of Peter the Great’s Germans; both grandfathers, paternal and maternal, were professors. His father had shown promise of going far in the natural sciences and had been educated in England but died young, before reaching thirty, on an expedition to the North. Alexei Kirillovich, brought up by a rich aunt, an educated woman very active in the publishing business of her husband, also studied in England for a time but, because of the outbreak of war with Germany, returned to Russia before receiving his doctorate.

Congenital shortsightedness, which was actually quite minor, exempted him from military service, and after defending his doctoral dissertation at Moscow University, he remained there, first as an assistant professor and subsequently as a full professor. He was an entomologist and studied insects with complex social behavior. In effect, he was one of the first specialists in socio-zoology. His favorite research subjects were earth wasps and ants. These wordless creatures were able to tell the observant researcher about the interesting and highly enigmatic events occurring in their city-states of many thousands of inhabitants, with all their complex administrative, economic, and military structures.

Many years later, finding himself in southern Germany with the indefinite status of displaced person and the position of research worker in a secret scientific institution which brought together the intellectual potential of occupied Europe, organized in accordance with the principle once proclaimed by the late Terentii Ivanovich Vyazemsky, he even wrote a short work full of deeply pessimistic elegance, in which he tried to separate out common behavioral patterns in colonies of social insects and in the prisoner-of-war camps where he had spent almost a year as a translator before being transferred to the laboratory.

This work, in which he provided a sad theoretical basis for racism as a biological phenomenon, perished in early 1945 during the bombing. Unfortunately together with its author.

But in that summer of 1925 in the Crimea he first succeeded in observing from start to finish the drama of the conquest of one race of ants by another, beginning with the first invasion of the newcomers, relatively smaller, but with more massive jaws. Sitting over an anthill by the hour and peering into the deceptively purposeful life of beings incapable of existing as individuals, he felt himself almost like the Lord God and well able to understand but unable to express in his customary scientific language the notion that in the innocent to-and-fro of the ants there was both a mystery and a destiny and a lesson for humanity. Not only biology was at work here, there was much else besides: he had the presentiment of an imminent discovery, he was in an excellent mood, and he felt a surge of energy.

Alexei Kirillovich was not yet forty. He belonged to that breed of people who are respectable from birth, fixed at a predetermined age once and for all. Possibly he had been feeling so good these last few years precisely because this personal age of his, which was independent of the passing of years, currently coincided with his age by the calendar.

He had gone bald early, but even before the hair fell naturally from his round head with its gleaming, symmetrical bumps, he had begun to shave it and to grow a small beard and mustache. To complete his image, spectacles in a gold frame were required, and a prerevolutionary-style linen or silk suit of a size even more expansive than was demanded by his early but entirely muscular stoutness. He was light on his feet, an excellent swimmer, and, something you would hardly have suspected of him, an excellent player of all ball games, from tennis to soccer. His English schooling, no doubt.

That year volleyball was all the rage at the Karadag station. In the hour before sundown a very varied, socially mixed group of local and visiting researchers and students on field trips would pick their way back to shore over slippery rocks after their evening dip and play a relaxed game of ring volleyball. The prim and proper Alexei Kirillovich took the ball lightly on his sensitive phalanxes, passed it with precision, and, rising to the most difficult passes, rolled under the ball like an ocean wave. Alexandra leapt in a flurry of elbows and long shins with their sural muscles attached high up to the tendons, lost the ball, shrieked and chortled, opening her mouth so wide in the process that her pink gullet showed.

“What a charming young woman,” Alexei Kirillovich thought to himself in an abstract, contemplative sort of way. He had married long ago; his wife was a professor, a hydrobiologist with a reputation no less solid than his own. Many years before, she had left her first husband for Alexei Kirillovich, then still a student, and they had married in the Registry Office.

There had been a time when she, born and brought up a Lutheran, had even thought of converting to Orthodoxy in order to legitimize her marriage officially, but in the postrevolutionary years the idea was dropped and even seemed risible. The profound disagreements between the denominations dissipated without a trace in the air of a new world which had no interest whatsoever in any Articles of Schmalkalden.

The couple lived in civil marriage in peace and harmony, exchanging professional information over the dinner table and not inclining in the least toward adultery. That merest flicker of a flame catching light in his bosom under its thick coat of furlike hair might well have remained unnoticed even by Alexei Kirillovich had not Alexandra herself felt attracted to this droll, old-fashioned professor, and had she not assiduously fanned the flame of unfocused, barely smoldering interest.

At first she gave him three days, but he made no approach beyond positioning himself opposite her in the volleyball circle and only passing the ball to her. Then she gave him another two days. Every evening they went swimming together with a noisy group of friends, then played ball, and still he made no approach, only casting quick, frightened glances in her direction and intriguing her more and more. They did not see each other during the working day: he went off to his plots to watch the ants, and she helped the botanists with their work in the herbarium.

For people of strong moral principles and decent physical habits, such as Alexei Kirillovich undoubtedly was, life lays the simplest traps, but also the most effective. The final twist came when he had all but emerged as victor in a contest which had never begun. Actually, the twist came in Alexandra’s ankle in a moment of abandon on the volleyball court. It was impossible for her to stand on it.

The male research workers took turns carrying Alexandra from the shore to the house. First, two postgraduates bore her on hands linked to make a seat; then Botazhinsky, an ichthyologist, carried her piggyback; finally, for the last third of the way, it was Alexei Kirillovich’s turn. That evening she was his, elbows, knees, sprained ankle and all.

He could remember perfectly well carrying her to the corner room and then going over to Junge’s dacha to get a bandage from the dispensary, a prerevolutionary German bandage from the supplies of the late Vyazemsky, no less, and returning to Alexandra to wrap her swollen and inflamed foot. The half-hour which passed between the act of bandaging and the moment when, without even closing the door, he plunged into the muscular grip of the novice volleyball player, disappeared without trace from his memory.

Possibly, Alexandra conceived that very evening, and two months later, departing before the end of his period of research leave, Alexei Kirillovich went back to Moscow leaving her unambiguously pregnant and quite certain that he would be returning for her in the very near future. However, the rearrangement of his former life which this romantic history entailed needed more time than he had supposed.

His wife took Alexei Kirillovich’s announcement of the new circumstances with Lutheran calm and even perhaps rather coldly. The only condition she stipulated was, however, unexpected and not easily met: she asked him to resign from the university where they both worked. Before September he had no means of looking for teaching work since the higher education institutions were all on vacation. In September a vacancy came up at the Timiryazev Academy, but now there were problems with accommodation. The apartment on Polyanka Street went to his wife. The Timiryazev had staff accommodation, but time was needed to complete the necessary applications and obtain the essential signatures and resolutions.

Time passed. Alexandra was not conspicuously pregnant and did not have to let out her clothes until the seventh month. She received weekly letters from Alexei Kirillovich and, thanks to her carefree nature, gave not a thought to what would happen if he were to disappear as unexpectedly as he had appeared. Or perhaps her equanimity was based on confidence that if need be Medea would take on this child too, as she had once taken on Alexandra and her brothers.

In the meantime neither sister said anything, although Medea did go through the old linen and set aside a few bits and pieces for diapers. Only when she saw an old-fashioned baby’s bonnet in Medea’s hands, on the border of which she was finely embroidering a crisscross pattern, did Alexandra tell her about Alexei Kirillovich, tossing her hair and perhaps protesting a little too much: “I do like him very much . . . he really is a very interesting man . . . he is someone you already know very well . . .”

Medea did indeed remember him from the days of her childhood, when Alexei Kirillovich, who was a student at the time, had rented a room in their house before he went to England. The Crimea attracted a lot of naturalists then. Now both the Sinoply sisters were waiting for Alexei Kirillovich’s return.

He, meanwhile, had been allocated his accommodations, a winter dacha beside the Timiryazev park. The dacha was so run-down it had to be hastily redecorated, and additionally Alexei Kirillovich had a major new lecture course to prepare on general entomology, as well as a special course on “orchard pests.”

Alexandra’s son didn’t, however, wait for them to move to Moscow and was born under the supervision of his Aunt Medea at the same Theodosia city hospital in which Matilda had given birth to all of her children. Only Dr. Lesnichevskii was no longer in the land of the living.

Two weeks later, without advance warning, Alexei Kirillovich arrived at Medea’s door. He knew from Alexandra’s letters that shortly before the birth she had moved in with her sister. He found a young woman sitting by the window on a bentwood Vienna chair with cropped ginger hair half-concealing her face, and a round-headed baby sucking at her bluish-white breast. This was his family. It took his breath away.

Two days later, Alexei Kirillovich and his new family departed for Moscow. There was no need for Medea to travel with them, but by now she had become so attached to her nephew, whom she had already christened, becoming his godmother in the process, that she took time off work and went with them to help Alexandra settle into her new home. That month, the first month of little Sergei’s life, she vicariously experienced to the full the motherhood that would never be hers.

Sometimes it seemed to her that her own breasts were filling with milk. She returned to Theodosia with a sense of profound inner emptiness and loss. “My youth is over,” Medea guessed.