Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 10

Toward evening, clouds built up over the mountains in the place known as Rotting Dell, and in the house an atmosphere built up of silent expectation. Nike was expecting Butonov to look in. As she saw it, after their nocturnal romp it was for him to make the next move. The more so since she could not remember whether she had told him she was preparing to leave.

Masha was waiting too, her expectation all the more tense since she could not decide who she wanted to see more: her husband Alik who was taking some of his holiday entitlement to come down for a few days, or Butonov. She could still see him running down the hill, leaping over the thorn bushes and jumping up and down on the scree. Perhaps her infatuation might indeed have been dispelled if she had sat in the kitchen and talked to him.

“He’s completely thick,” she recalled Nike’s words, resorting to a saving but meaningless logic which proposed that someone who was completely thick couldn’t be the object of an infatuation.

The person most acutely tormented by expectation was little Liza. That morning, after all her petty squabbling and displeasure with Tanya the day before, she had discovered that really she couldn’t live without her. She had been waiting all day for her to come, pestering everyone, and now in the evening, tired of waiting, was wringing her hands and throwing a tantrum. Nike never took Liza’s excessive demands on life too seriously, but this time she smiled: she too was having an affair of the heart. “She’s just like me. If I want something, I want it now.”

And right now the wishes of mother and daughter partly coincided. Both were eager to continue their romance.

“Oh, do stop it. Get dressed and let’s go to see your Tanya,” Nike mollified her daughter, who ran to put on her best dress.

With the buttons on the back of her dress undone and with a whole armful of toys, Liza returned to Nike in the kitchen to ask which toy she could give to Tanya.

“Whichever one you don’t mind parting with,” Nike smiled.

Medea looked at her tear-stained granddaughter and thought to herself, “So hot-blooded. How enchanting she is.”

“Liza, come here. I’ll do up your buttons,” Medea commanded, and the little girl obediently came over and turned her back.

It was difficult to get the small buttons into the even smaller buttonholes. Her fair hair still had that familiar sweet baby smell.

Fifteen minutes later they were at Nora’s, sitting in her little house decked with arrangements of wisteria and tamarisk. The tiny summer house had a Ukrainian coziness about it, was cleanly whitewashed, and the earthen floor was covered with mats.

Liza had hidden the hare she had brought under her skirt and was trying to intrigue Tanya, but Tanya had her eyes down and was eating her porridge. Nora, as ever, was complaining mildly that they had got very tired yesterday, that the sun had been too hot, that the walk had really turned out to be very long. She went on and on. Nike sat by the window constantly glancing over toward the owners’ residence.

“Valerii hasn’t come out all day, either,” Nora said, nodding in the direction of the Kravchuks’ house. “He’s watching television.”

Nike got lightly to her feet, turned at the door, and said, “I’m just going to see Aunt Ada for a minute.”

The television was turned up full volume, and there was a big meal on the table. Landlord Mikhail didn’t like small portions, and Ada’s saucepans, for all the modest size of her family, were practically the size of buckets. She worked in the kitchens of one of the sanatoriums and had all the resources of the state catering organization at her command, which also reflected gratifyingly on the rations of the two pigs she kept.

Valerii and Mikhail were sitting looking slightly dazed after their heavy meal, while Ada herself had just gone down to the cellar for the stewed fruit. She came into the room behind Nike with two three-liter jars. Ada and Nike kissed.

“Plums,” Nike guessed.

“Nike, do sit down. Mikhail, pour something,” Ada ordered her husband.

Butonov stared fixedly at the television.

“I won’t, I just came in to say hello. My Liza is visiting your lodgers,” Nike excused herself.

“You don’t come to see us yourself. You only visit our tenants,” Ada reproached her.

“No, really, I’ve come ’round several times, but you were either out at work or driving around looking up your friends,” Nike said.

Ada furrowed her little brow and rubbed her nose, which was barely visible on her fat face.

“That’s right enough, we went to Kamenka to see my godmother.”

Mikhail had meanwhile already poured her a glass of chacha. He was good at all sorts of practical things, as Valerii had already heard from his neighbor Vitka: distilling chacha, smoking meat, salting fish. No matter where Mikhail lived, in Murmansk, in the Caucasus, in Kazakhstan, what interested him most was what people ate, and he made a mental note of all the best practices.

“Here’s to our meeting,” Nike exclaimed. “Your health!”

She held out the glass to Butonov too, and he finally tore himself away from the television. She gave him a look which Butonov did not like. Right now he didn’t like Nike. Her head was tightly bound with an ancient green scarf which concealed her lively hair and made her face seem too long, and her dress was the color of dilute iodine. Little did Butonov know that Nike had put on precisely the things which most suited her, and in which she had posed for a famous artist. It was he who had told her to wear the scarf tight, and had gazed at her for a long time almost in tears, repeating over and over again, “What a face . . . my God, what a face . . . it’s a Fayum portrait.”

But Butonov knew nothing about Fayum portraiture, and was just feeling ratty that she had come trolloping over here to him without an invitation, a right he hadn’t conferred on her yet.

“This is a friend of our Vitka. He’s a famous doctor,” Ada boasted.

“Yes, we went to the coves with Valerii yesterday. We’re already acquainted.”

“You always were quick off the mark,” Ada said waspishly, alluding to something Butonov didn’t know about.

“Yes, that’s the truth,” Nike replied brazenly.

At that point Liza started squealing and Nike, vaguely aware that something wasn’t right with her new romance, slipped out through the door, swishing her long iodine-colored dress as she went.

Nike spent the evening with Masha. Nobody came to see them. They had plenty of time to smoke a cigarette together, to sit in silence together, to talk together. Masha confessed to Nike that she had fallen in love, read the poem she had written during the night and another two besides, and Nike for the first time in her life reacted wryly to her favorite cousin’s poetry.

All day she had been unable to find a moment to tell Masha about yesterday’s conquest and now it had soured completely, and in any case she did not want to upset Masha with this fortuitous rivalry. Masha, however, was engrossed in her own thoughts and didn’t notice anything.

“What should I do, Nike? What should I do?”

She was so concerned about her newly acquired condition of being in love, and was looking up at Nike with such expectation, the way she did as a child. Nike, suppressing her irritation with Butonov, who had evidently decided to punish her for some reason, and with her daft niece who had found a fine one to fall in love with, the idiot, shrugged and replied, “Give him one and calm down.”

“What do you mean, ‘Give him one’?” Masha asked.

Nike got even more exasperated: “ ‘What do you mean? What do you mean?’ Are you a child? Just grab him by the balls.”

“It’s as simple as that?” Masha asked in astonishment.

“It’s simpler than a steamed turnip,” Nike snorted, and thought, “What a hopelessly innocent idiot. Love poems and all! If she wants to land in the shit, so be it.”

“You know, Nike,” Masha suddenly decided, “I’ll go to the post office right now and ring Alik. Perhaps he’ll come and everything will settle down again.”

“Perhaps he’ll come! That’s just the problem!” Nike laughed unkindly.

“ ’Bye!” Masha said, suddenly jumping up from the bench and, grabbing a jacket on the way out, ran to the road. The last bus to town, the ten o’clock, was leaving in five minutes’ time.

At the city post office the first person Masha saw was Butonov. He was standing in a telephone booth with his back to her. The telephone receiver seemed tiny in his big hand, and he had to dial with his little finger. Without having talked, he hung up and came out. They said hello. Masha was standing at the end of the queue, with two other people in front of her. Butonov took a step to one side, letting the next person in, looked at his watch, and said, “It’s been engaged for forty minutes now.”

The streetlamps, flickering bluish wands, were very close together and gave off something like daylight; the light was stark, like in a horror movie when something’s about to happen, and Masha felt frightened that this big, movie-star-like man in his blue denim shirt might make her reasonable and well-ordered life collapse. But he moved toward her, his mind still on the same tack.

“Women gossiping, or the telephone’s out of order.”

Now it was Masha’s turn. She dialed the number, desperately hoping to hear Alik’s voice, which would settle everything down again, but nobody answered.

“Engaged too?” Butonov asked.

“Nobody home,” Masha answered, swallowing hard.

“Let’s take a walk along the embankment and then try calling again,” Butonov suggested.

He suddenly noticed she had a nice face and a round ear which stuck out touchingly on her closely cropped head. In a friendly gesture he put an arm on the thin velveteen of her jacket.

Masha’s head came up to his chest, and she was thin and angular like a boy. “She’d make a good partner as a trapeze artist,” he thought.

“I heard there’s some kind of barrel on the embankment and a special wine.”

“Novy Svet champagne,” Masha responded, already walking.

They walked down to the embankment, and Masha suddenly saw them from one side, as if they were on a screen, walking quickly, looking both relaxed and purposeful at the same time, whirling past the backdrop of a resort with oleanders planted in urns and carried out and placed at the sanatorium entrances, past the fake plaster pillars, the glittering eternally green boxtree, past the shoddy palms worn out by pavilion living, and the local prostitute Serafima with her fat face, and several sturdy miners with goggling eyes were there to be glimpsed in the depths of the frame, and the soundtrack was “Oh, the Sea at Gagry,” of course. And while all this was going on, her feet were joyfully dancing along in time to his walking, and her body was full of a holiday lightness and even a kind of wordless merriment, as if the champagne were already working.

Butonov liked the little cellar Masha took him to. The champagne they were brought was cold and delicious. The movie which had started on the way there was still running. Masha saw herself sitting on a round stool, as if she was positioned slightly to the right of herself and back a bit; she saw Butonov, who had been moved a half-turn toward her; and most amusing of all was that at the same time she could see the gold-toothed barmaid in her gold jacket, who was behind her back, and the boys who were half loaders, half waiters, who were dragging crates from the cellar through the back entrance. Everything took on the expansiveness of cinema and at the same time the flatness of a movie.

Masha also noticed that she herself looked pretty as a shadow on the screen, sitting calm and upright, with a good figure and her hair coming attractively together at the back, like a narrow promontory, onto her long neck.

Oh yes, a movie allowed you to act, allowed easy ways, passion, the bursting of champagne bubbles, he and she, a man and a woman, the sea at night, Nike, you are a genius, you are so gifted, no heaviness of being, no forced striving toward self-cognition, toward self-improvement, toward self—

“Isn’t it a breeze here,” she said, affecting Nike’s intonation.

“Nice little wine. Some more?”

Masha nodded. Clever Masha, educated Masha, Masha the first in their entire company to begin reading Berdyaev and Florensky, who loved the commentaries to the Bible, Dante, and Shakespeare more than the originals; who had taught herself English and Italian, if you didn’t count the second-rate extramural course at the teacher training institute, who had written two slim volumes of poetry, admittedly yet to be published; Masha, who could talk to a visiting American professor about Ezra Pound and about the Nicene Council with an Italian Catholic journalist, said nothing. There was nothing she wanted to say.

“Some more?” Butonov looked at his watch. “Well then, shall we try calling once more?”

“Where to?” Masha asked in surprise.

“Home, that’s where to,” Butonov laughed. “You’re priceless.”

The movie ambience seemed to recede slightly, giving way to her earlier disquiet, but the holiday-resort scenery was rerun as they retraced their steps to the post office. Butonov got through immediately, asked a few short, businesslike questions, learned from his wife that his trip to Sweden had been postponed, and hung up.

Masha phoned immediately after him, and now the thing she most wanted was for Alik not to be home. He wasn’t. She didn’t bother ringing Alexandra. She and Ivan Isaevich went to bed early, and anyway Nike would be in Moscow tomorrow and she had already written Alexandra a letter.

“Didn’t you get through?” Butonov asked absently.

“There’s nobody at home. My husband’s taken off somewhere.”

The words were a complete lie. She didn’t believe anything of the sort. Most likely Alik was on duty. Moreover, the casual way she said it made it even more of a lie.

But in the context of the movie, which was still running, everything was just fine.

“Well, then, shall we go?” Butonov asked, and looked at Masha doubtfully. “Perhaps we should take a taxi?”

“No, there aren’t any taxis here. All our lives we’ve walked home at night. It’s a two-hour walk.”

They turned off the lit road onto a side street and walked some fifty meters. No streetlamps or oleanders were in evidence here; the street was abruptly, rustically, black. In addition the road would sometimes veer off uphill, stumble, and come back down again. The darkness on the ground was impenetrable, but the sky was less uniformly black. Over the sea the sky seemed lighter, and the western horizon retained a faint memory of the sunset. Even the stars seemed insignificant, as if only turned on at half-power.

“We’ll cut a bit off here,” Masha said, plunging down a much-trampled clay path to what was either a flight of steps or a small footbridge.

“Can you really see anything?” Butonov asked, touching her shoulder.

“I’m like a cat, I have night vision.”

In the darkness, unable to see her smile, he decided she was joking.

“It occurs in our family. Actually it’s very useful: you see things that nobody else can.”

It was a highly meaningful feminine way of giving a signal, throwing a line in order to reduce the distance between two people which was as vast as the depths of the sea, but which could shrink to nothing in an instant.

It would be too much to say that Masha had thought up a plan. It was more as if a plan had thought up Masha. Like the ball in a children’s game, she had slipped through some opening and was now rolling along a channel from which the only way out was into the empty hole of a pocket enmeshed in a fine lattice of strings. All this, however, would be for Masha to reflect on later, in the hours of her long winter insomnias.

Meanwhile she was leading Butonov by the hand across the bridge and up the steps, and then up along a track and, having indeed cut off about a kilometer and a half, she brought him out onto a firm earthen road lined with pyramidal poplars. This was a shortcut which had developed from a footpath; it led to the main road. At the main road their hands separated. Butonov marched ahead with a quick, confident step, and Masha had trouble keeping up. His mind was on Moscow matters, the postponement of his trip, and he was wondering what might be behind it. Butonov’s back, which Masha could see two paces ahead of her, was the embodiment of total self-absorption, and there were moments when she wanted to hurl herself at it with sharp little fists, to rip that blue shirt and scream.

They entered the Village, and Masha registered that in a few minutes they would part and that this could not be allowed to happen. “Stop!” she said to his back as they were walking past the Hub. “This way.”

He obediently turned aside. Now Masha was in front. “Here,” she said, and sat down on the ground.

He stopped beside her. It suddenly seemed to him that he could hear her heart beating, and she herself felt her heart was a tocsin for the whole neighborhood to hear.

“Sit down,” she requested, and he squatted down beside her.

She took his head in her hands. “Kiss me.”

Butonov smiled, the way one smiles at a pet. “You really want me to?”

She nodded.

He did not feel the least bit aroused, but the practiced habits of a conscientious professional obliged him. He pressed her to himself and kissed her and was amazed how hot her mouth was.

Always one for respecting the rules, he duly observed them now: first undress your partner, then undress yourself. He ran his hand along the zipper of her trousers and met her own hands feverishly undoing the stiff zipper. She slipped awkwardly out of her clothes and started tugging at the buttons of his shirt. He laughed.

“Don’t they ever feed you at home?”

Her comical enthusiasm excited Butonov somewhat, but he was not altogether ready yet and played for time. The feverish groping of her hands—“Nike, Nike, I’ve got his balls!”—her desperate groan, “Butonov! Butonov!” and he could feel that he was ready to perform.

He found her more attractive inside than out, and unexpectedly hot.

“What have you got in there, a stove?” he laughed.

But she was far from laughing, her face wet with tears, and she only murmured, “Butonov, you’re wonderful. Butonov, you . . .”

Butonov detected that this girl was well ahead of him in her sexual achievements, and guessed that she belonged to the same breed as Rosa—quick firing, frantic, and even outwardly a bit similar, only without the African hairstyle. He grasped her little head, squeezing her ears painfully, and thrust so deep he could feel the pounding of her heart as if he were inside her rib cage. He was afraid he might have hurt her, but it was already too late.

“Forgive me, forgive me, little one.”

When he got to his knees and looked up, it seemed to him that they had been caught in the beam of a searchlight: the air was lit up with a bluish light and every blade of grass was clearly visible. There was no searchlight: high in the sky a round moon was riding, enormous, completely flat and silver-blue.

“Sorry, the show’s over.” He slapped her on the hip.

She got up from the ground, and he saw that she was well proportioned, except that she was slightly bowlegged and, as with Rosa, her legs were set in such a way that they didn’t quite come together at the top. He liked this narrow chink of light: it was certainly better than fat thighs rubbing against each other till they got red marks, like Olga’s.

He was already dressed, but she was still standing naked in the moonlight and he misunderstood her languor. Now all he wanted was to sleep, and before doing so he wanted to finish thinking through why his trip might have been set back.

The Village was now as clearly visible as the palm of his hand, and Butonov saw a path which led directly to Vitka’s house, to the back of Ada’s yard. He gave Masha a squeeze and ran his finger along the thin ridge of her spine.

“Do you want me to see you back or will you run up there on your own?”

“On my own.” But she didn’t go, she held him back. “You didn’t say you loved me.”

Butonov laughed. He was in a good mood. “Well, what have we just been doing right here?”

Masha ran home. Everything was new: her hands, her legs, her lips. Some physical miracle had occurred. What delirious happiness! Could this be the thing Nike had been hunting for all her life? Poor Alik.

Masha looked in on the children: in the middle of the room stood an already packed rucksack. Liza and Alik Junior were sleeping on folding beds. Katya was stretched out on the ottoman. Nike wasn’t there. “She’s probably gone to sleep in Samuel’s room,” Masha surmised. She was greatly tempted to waken her without more ado and lay everything out before her but decided she shouldn’t disturb her in the middle of the night. She didn’t open the door to Samuel’s room, and tiptoed through to the Blue Room.

Butonov’s adventures that night were not yet over. He found the door to Vitka’s house half-open and was surprised: he remembered latching it from outside, although he hadn’t pad-locked it. He went in, making the door creak, threw his sneakers down on the mat, and went through to the second room, where he usually slept.

On the high bed, made up in the complicated Ukrainian fashion with a valance, a bedspread, a mound of pillows which Ada rearranged in strict order every morning, on the white woven blanket with her long hair spread out over the chaotically disordered pillows, slept Nike. The truth was that she had been wakened by the sound of the door creaking. She now opened her eyes and beamed a slightly theatrical happy smile: “A surprise just for you! With home delivery!”

Butonov always performed better on the apparatus the second time. Nike was straightforward and fun, and didn’t darken their last night with foolish reproaches or say any of the things that might have been said by a woman scorned.

Butonov, still conducting himself by the same rules for treating a lady, the first of which he had been unable to implement this evening because of Masha’s alacrity, now availed himself of the second and most important one: never explain yourself to a woman.

At dawn, to their complete mutual satisfaction, Nike left Butonov, not forgetting to write her telephone number in his little black book. When she got back, Medea was already sitting with a cup from which there rose the aroma of morning coffee, and there was no telling from her expression whether she had seen Nike’s return through the kitchen window. Actually there was really no need to try to hide anything from Medea: the young people were always sure she knew everything about everyone. Nike kissed her on the cheek and immediately went out.

Medea’s perspicacity was in general greatly exaggerated, but this night she really had found herself right at the epicenter: some time after two in the morning, having patiently but fruitlessly waited for sleep to come, she had gone out to the kitchen to take some of her “sleeplessness potion,” as she called the spoonful of poppy seeds she boiled in honey. The moon came out at the same time as she did, lighting up the mound on which a young couple were disporting themselves, their white, unidentified bodies gleaming dazzlingly. A little later, when she had finished drinking her decoction with little mindful sips and was lying in her room, she heard the adjoining door open and springs creak softly. “Masha’s back,” Medea thought, and dozed off.

Now, seeing Nike return, Medea was puzzled for a moment: there was, after all, only one young man to go around the entire neighborhood, the athlete Valerii with his iron body and the long, priestly hair constrained by a rubber band. Medea noted this occurrence with a certain bafflement and filed it away where she kept her other observations of the life of her young relatives with their ardent romances and unstable marriages.

Nike came in again with a pile of laundry she had just taken off the line. “I washed it ready for the Lithuanians. I’ll iron it before I leave.”

At midday a neighbor took Nike, Katya, and Artyom off to Simferopol. Half an hour previously Nike had taken a stack of fresh laundry into the Blue Room, which Masha was relinquishing in favor of the Lithuanians, and here it was that, having a moment alone with Masha for the first time that morning, Nike received her confession and was immeasurably surprised.

“Nike, it’s so awful!” Masha’s gaunt face beamed at her. “I’m so happy! It was all so simple . . . and amazing! If you hadn’t said, I’d never have dared.”

Nike sat down on the stack of laundry. “Never have dared what?”

“I grabbed him like you said.” Masha gave a rather silly giggle. “But you were absolutely right. You always are. I just had to stretch out my hand.”

“When?” was all Nike could ask in a strangled voice.

Masha embarked on a detailed account of how at the post office . . . But Nike stopped her. She no longer had time for long explanations and asked just one, seemingly quite odd, question: “Where?”

“At the Hub! It all happened right at the Hub. Like in an Italian movie. Now we can put a cross there in memory of my unshakable fidelity to my husband.” And Masha smiled her clever smile, just the same as it always had been.

Nike had never imagined that her crosspatch advice would be acted on with such precipitate literalness. But Butonov was obviously no dud.

“Well then, Masha, now you’ll have something to write poetry about, love lyrics,” Nike predicted, and was entirely correct.

“What a mess . . . Should I perhaps make her a present of this sports doctor?” Nike wondered. “Never mind, I’m leaving anyway. What will be, will be.”