Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 11

The small leather trunk bound with strips of molded wood, lined inside with glued white-and-pink-striped calico, full of partitioned boxes which interacted ingeniously to form a series of little shelves and compartments, had once belonged to Elena Stepanyan. This was the trunk with which she had returned from Geneva in 1909; and she had traveled with it from St. Petersburg to Tiflis; she had come with it to the Crimea in 1911. With this small trunk she returned to Theodosia in 1919 and there, immediately before her departure for Tashkent, she had presented it to Medea.

Three generations of little girls had swooned over it longingly, persuaded that Medea’s little trunk was full of treasure. There were indeed a few poor treasures in there: a big mother-of-pearl cameo, without its frame, which had helped feed them in the lean year of 1924; three silver rings and an inlaid Caucasian belt for a man, and for one with a very slender waist at that. But apart from these insignificant treasures the little trunk housed everything Robinson Crusoe could ever have dreamt of. There stayed there, securely packed and faultlessly tidy, candles, matches, threads of every color, needles and buttons of every size, spools for no longer extant sewing machines, fastenings for trousers and fur coats, hooks for fishing and needles for knitting; postage stamps—tsarist, Crimean, German occupation; shoelaces, braid, lace edgings, and insertions; thirteen locks of hair of various colors from the first haircut of yearling babes of the Sinoply family, wrapped in cigarette paper; a hoard of photographs; old Harlampy’s pipe; and much more besides. In the two lower drawers were letters, arranged by year and all of them in their original envelopes, neatly slit open down the side with a paper knife.

Here too various documents were kept safe, including some which were quite curious, for example a form concerning the requisitioning of a bicycle from Citizen Sinoply for the transport needs of the Volunteer Army. It was a true family archive, and like any worthwhile archive, it concealed secrets not to be made public before the time was ripe. These secrets were in trustworthy hands, and as far as it lay within Medea’s power, they were kept fairly scrupulously. At least the greatest and earliest of them was.

This secret was contained in a letter addressed to Matilda Tsyruli and dated February 1892. The letter had come from Batumi, was written in extremely bad Russian, and was signed with the Georgian name Medea. The present Medea knew, of course, of the existence of her Batumi namesake, Matilda’s sister-in-law, the wife of her elder brother, Sidor. According to family legend, the Georgian Medea had died of grief at the funeral of her husband, who had been killed in an accident. It was in her honor that Medea had received her own name, which was unusual among Greeks. The letter, with its spelling and grammar corrected, ran as follows:

Matilda, my dear friend, we heard it said a week ago that they had drowned, your Teresii and the Karmak brothers. The day before yesterday his body was washed ashore at Kobulety. The witnesses who identified him were Vartanyan and Kursua the Cap. He was buried and may the Kingdom of Heaven be his, I can say no more. When you ran away, his temper became even more foul, he beat up Uncle Plato, and was always fighting with Nikos. God granted you a lucky escape. My legs are very bad. Last winter I could hardly walk on them. Sidor helps me, great will be his reward. Get married straightaway now. I send you my love, and God be with you. Medea.

Medea found this letter a few years after the death of her parents and had kept it from her brothers and sisters. When the young Alexandra started on her first escapades, Medea had told her the story with some vague didactic intention, as if trying to conjure Alexandra’s destiny, to forestall the misfortunes and the difficult search for the meaning of her life which, this letter seemed to testify, had been the lot of their mother Matilda. Medea was deeply convinced that frivolity led to unhappiness, and had no inkling that levity can equally well lead to happiness or, for that matter, lead nowhere at all. From childhood, however, Alexandra behaved exactly as her wayward heart dictated, and Medea could never understand waywardness, whims, urgent desire, caprice, or passion. The second family secret was linked precisely to this peculiarity of Alexandra’s and, until its time came, had been hidden from Medea herself on the lower shelf of a single wardrobe, in the officer’s map case of Samuel Yakovlevich.

Medea had made herself a little corner of her own in the small room where Samuel had spent the last, agonizing year of his life. She placed her husband’s chair with its back to the window, put the small trunk at its side, and laid out on it the few books which she read constantly. She continually changed the white curtains in the room for even whiter ones, and dusted the whitish Crimean dust off the bookshelf and the cupboard where Samuel’s things were kept. She did not touch his belongings.

For the whole of that year she read the Psalter, one kathisma each evening, and when she got to the end, she started again at the beginning. Her Psalter was an old one, in Church Slavonic, left from her school days. Another, Greek, which had belonged to Harlampy, was difficult for her because it was written not in the language of the Pontic Greeks but in modern Greek. She also had in the house a Russian-Hebrew parallel-text Psalter published in Vilnius at the end of the nineteenth century, and this, together with two other books in Hebrew, now lay on the lid of the small trunk. Medea tried sometimes to read the Psalter in Russian, but although this made the meaning clearer in some places, the mysterious veiled beauty of the Church Slavonic was lost.

Medea well remembered the brown face of the young man with the thick, crudely split upper lip, his pointed nose, and the big flat lapels of his brown jacket, who came firmly up to Samuel sitting on a bench near the Theodosia bus station waiting for the bus to Simferopol. The young man was pressing three books to his side with his elbow. He stopped next to Samuel and asked him very directly, “Excuse me, are you a Jew?”

Samuel, tormented with pain, nodded silently, choosing not to come out with one of his customary dazzling jokes.

“Please take these. Our grandfather has died and nobody knows the language.” The young man began pushing the dog-eared volumes into Samuel’s hands, and it became clear that he was terribly confused. “Perhaps you will read them some time. My grandfather’s name was Chaim.”

Samuel silently opened the top one.

“The Siddur. I studied so badly in the heder, young man,” Samuel said thoughtfully, and the youth, seeing his indecision, hurried to say,

“Do please take them. I can’t just throw them out, can I? What use are they to us? We aren’t religious.”

And the brown youth ran off, leaving the three volumes on the bench beside Samuel. Samuel looked at Medea with large eyes: “There, do you see that, Medea,” he halted, because he guessed that she could see everything he could see and a few more things besides, and deftly wriggled out of his predicament. “Now we’ll have to drag all this weight to Simferopol and back.”

The last leaf of hope had fallen from the tree. Believing not in chance but in God’s providence, she understood this clear sign without any room for doubt: prepare yourself! From that moment she had no need of any biopsy, which was why they were going to the provincial hospital. They looked at each other, and even Samuel, who habitually blurted out everything that came into his head, said nothing.

They didn’t bother with a biopsy in Simferopol but operated on him two days later, removing a major part of his large intestine, made an outlet in his side, a colostomy, and three weeks later Medea brought him home to die.

After the operation, however, he gradually felt better and better. Strangely enough he grew stronger, although he was extremely emaciated. Medea fed him only porridges and gave him herbal drinks, picking the herbs herself. A few days after his return from the hospital, he began reading those ancient books, and in the last year of his life the most useless pupil of the Olshansk heder, blessing unknown Chaim, returned to his people; and Orthodox Medea rejoiced. She had never studied theology and perhaps just because of that felt that the bosom of Abraham was situated not all that far distant from the regions inhabited by the souls of Christians.

This last year of his life was wonderful. The autumn outside was so still and mild, and unusually generous. The old Tatar vineyards, not pruned or tended for many years, bestowed their last harvest on the earth. In the following years the vines degenerated finally, and centuries of hard work went to waste.

Pears and peaches broke their boughs and tomatoes their stems. There were queues for bread, and not the remotest prospect of sugar. Housewives boiled and marinated tomatoes, dried fruit on their roofs, and the knowledgeable ones like Medea made Tatar pastilla without sugar. The Ukrainian pigs fattened on all the sweet windfalls, and the honeyed aroma of moldering fruit hung over the Village.

Medea was managing the hospital then. Only in 1955 was a doctor sent, and until then she was the only nurse in the Village. In early morning she would come into her husband’s room with a bowl of warm water, take off the clumsy, crudely made apparatus from his sick side, and cleanse and wash the wound with a decoction of chamomile and sage.

He grimaced not with pain but with embarrassment and muttered, “What justice is there in the world? I get a bag of gold and you get a bag of shit.”

She fed him watery porridge, gave him a herbal infusion to drink from a half-liter mug, and waited, placing a trough beneath his side until the porridge, having completed its short passage, poured out of the open wound. She knew what she was doing: the herbs sluiced the poison of his illness out of him, but the food was hardly assimilated. His death, for which both of them were readying themselves, was to come from starvation, not from poisoning.

Samuel at first turned away squeamishly, embarrassed at the exposing of this unpleasant physiology, but then he detected that Medea was not having to make the slightest effort to conceal revulsion, and that she was much more concerned about the inflamed edge of the wound or a delay in the outpouring of porridge which had only slightly changed its appearance than about the unpleasant smell emanating from the wound.

The pain was very great, but inconsistent. Sometimes several days would pass peacefully before some internal obstruction would form; then Medea would rinse the stoma with boiled sunflower oil, and everything would settle down again. After all, this too was life, and Medea was prepared to bear the burden indefinitely.

In the mornings she would spend three hours or so by her husband’s side, going off to work at half-past eight and running home at lunchtime. Sometimes, when Tamara Stepanovna, an old registered nurse, was on duty with her, she could leave at lunchtime and she didn’t have to go back to work in the afternoon.

Then Samuel could go out to the yard. She would arrange him in the chair and sit herself beside him on a low bench, cutting the skin off pears with a little knife whose blade had been almost completely worn away, or peeling blanched tomatoes.

Toward the end of his life Samuel became taciturn, and they sat quietly, enjoying each other’s presence, the stillness, and their love in which there was now no fault. Medea, ever mindful of his rare natural lack of malice and the event which he considered his ineradicable disgrace, but which she saw as a true manifestation of his meek soul, rejoiced now in the quiet courage with which he bore his pain, fearlessly approaching death and literally pouring gratitude out of his heart to all God’s world, and in particular to her, Medea.

He usually had his chair so that he could see the table mountains and the rounded hills in their pink and grey haze. “The hills here are like the hills of Galilee,” he repeated after Alexander Stepanyan, whom he had never seen, any more than he had seen the hills of Galilee. He knew of him only from what Medea had told him.

The book from which he had read excerpts worse than anyone else at the celebration of his Jewish coming of age half a century before, he now read slowly. Forgotten words rose like air bubbles from the bottom of his memory, and if they didn’t and the square letters chose not to reveal their hallowed meaning to him, he looked for an approximate paraphrase in the parallel Russian text.

He quickly realized that the book did not lend itself to exact translation. On the bourne of life things began to reveal themselves of which he had had no idea: that thoughts are not fully conveyed by words, but only with a large amount of approximation; that there is a certain gap, a breach, between the thought and the word, and it is filled in by hard work on the part of consciousness, which makes up for the deficiencies of language. In order to break through to the thought itself, which Samuel now imagined as resembling a crystal, you had to leave the text behind. In itself language clogged the precious crystal with inaccurate words whose boundaries fluctuated over time, with the physical appearance of words and letters, and with the different sound of the spoken word. He noticed that a certain shift of meaning occurred: the two languages he knew, Russian and Hebrew, had slightly different ways of expressing thought.

“National in form,” Samuel smiled, paraphrasing Stalin, “and divine in content.” Even now he couldn’t stop joking.

He had little strength left. Everything he did he did very slowly, and Medea noticed how his movements had changed, how meaningfully and even solemnly he raised the cup to his mouth, and wiped with his withered fingers the mustache he had grown over the last few months and the short beard streaked with grey. But, as if in compensation for this physical decline, or perhaps it was the effect Medea’s herbs had, his mind was clear and his thoughts, although slow, were very precise. He understood that he had little of his lifetime left, but surprisingly enough the sense of always being in a rush and the fussiness which had always been a part of him completely left him. He slept little now, his days and nights were very long, but this did not burden him: his consciousness had become attuned to a different timescale. Looking into the past, he was amazed at the instantaneousness of the life he had lived, and at the length of each minute he was spending in the wicker chair, sitting with his back to the sunset, his face to the east, to the darkening, lilac-blue sky, to the hills which in the course of half an hour could turn from pink to a brooding blue.

Looking in that direction, he made another discovery: it transpired that all his life he had lived not only in a rush, but also in a state of profound fear, which he had hidden even from himself. More exactly, many fears, of which the most acute was the fear of killing. Remembering now that appalling event in Vasilishchevo, the shootings which he was to have conducted and which he had not in the end seen, having ignominiously collapsed in a nervous fit, he now thanked God for that weakness so unbecoming in a man, for his behaving like a high-strung lady, which had saved his soul from damnation.

“I’m a coward, a coward,” he admitted to himself, but even here could not miss an opportunity for ironic creativity: “She loved him so because he was a coward, he loved her for forgiving that in him.” “And I always hid my cowardice,” as Samuel now judged himself, “by running after women.”

A psychoanalyst might have extrapolated from Samuel’s case some complex with a mythological name, and would at the very least have explained the dentist’s heightened sexual aggression as a subconscious driving out of fear of the bloodiness of life by means of simple thrusting movements in the yielding soft tissue of generously endowed ladies. Marrying Medea, he hid from his eternal fear behind her courage. His pranks and jokes and the constant desire to get those around him to smile were associated with an intuitive realization that laughter kills fear. He found out now that a mortal illness too could free you of the fear of living.

The last fierce dog waiting to bite every Jew’s heel was cosmopolitanism. Even before the term became generally accepted, sprouting its rigid expanded definition of “a reactionary bourgeois ideology,” from Zhdanov’s first publication Samuel anxiously followed the newspapers in which this bubble sometimes expanded and sometimes shrank. From his socially insignificant but materially more than tolerable position as district dental prosthetist, ever since his disgraceful flight from the ranks of the directly involved perpetrators of history into the herd of passive observers under experiment, Samuel foresaw the next of Stalin’s migrations of the peoples. The Crimean Tatars, the Germans, in part the Pontic Greeks, and the Karaims had already been deported from the Crimea by this time, and he had the inventive idea of preempting the blow and taking contract work in the north of Russia for five years or so, by which time, with any luck, it would all have blown over.

Even before his illness he often walked with his friend Pavel Nikolaevich Shimes, a consulting physiotherapist at the Sudak sanatorium, through the manicured park which had formerly adjoined the Stepanyans’ dacha, and they had whispered discussions about the sweeping course of history in the practical terms of those who currently found themselves at its sharp end. Early one Sunday morning at the end of October 1951, Dr. Shimes came from Sudak to see him, bearing a half-liter bottle of dilute surgical spirit, an extremely strange gift for a teetotaler to bring, and to Samuel’s great surprise he asked Medea to leave them on their own.

Thereupon, rattling with false teeth which had not been very well fitted—not by Samuel, be it said—and drumming his fingers on the table’s edge, he announced that the end had come. There had been a Party meeting at the sanatorium the previous day at which, with provincial intellectual obtuseness, he had been accused of cosmopolitanism because of the wretched Charcot shower which the doctor had been promoting for many years alongside other physiotherapeutic methods, all of which had been devised by foreign physiologists at the end of the nineteenth century.

“That moron who runs the sanatorium thought ‘Sharko’ was a Ukrainian. Somebody enlightened him about that. I tell you though, Samuel, what I thought I might do. How would it be if I were to show him the certificate? We’ve got it safe at home,” Shimes whispered.

“What certificate? That Charcot was a Ukrainian?” Samuel asked in surprise.

“That I’ve been christened. They think I’m a Jew, that’s what it’s all about, but my father was baptized and had the whole family christened back in 1904, just before the pogrom. What do you think I should do, eh? What should I do?” He dropped his bald head onto his hands.

He had nevertheless remained a real Jew, because at such a moment no Russian would ever have allowed himself to forget the bottle of spirits he had brought. Samuel scratched his little beard before answering in his usual manner: “Keep that certificate of yours for your funeral, so your priests can chant that Christian Kaddish of theirs over you. That’s no solution. For Russians you are still a Jew, and for Jews you are worse than a goy. But as regards Charcot, you announce to those donkeys that Dr. Charcot stole his invention. From Botkin, say, or from Spasokukotsky. Or better still from Academician Pavlov. What are you looking at me like that for? Write up in your treatment room, ‘Academician Pavlov Shower,’ and they will all go back to sleep. And Pavlov won’t mind: he died before the war.” Samuel smiled waspishly and added, “And if you are as Orthodox as all that, you can even light a candle in church for him. My Medea will show you how, she knows all about that sort of thing.”

Poor Shimes took offense and left, but after further thought he did hang up a notice in large red letters reading, “Academician Pavlov Shower.” Alas, it was too late: he was fired from his job, although the notice hung on the door for more than two years. But at that time, after Shimes had gone off, Samuel felt his fear gradually being replaced by regret that there should be such rank stupidity all around. Or perhaps his illness was already beginning its secret work in Samuel’s apparently still-healthy body.

It stayed warm for much longer than was usual in these parts, right through to the end of November. But then, from the first days of December, the cold rains began, quickly turning into snow and storms. Although the sea was quite far away and considerably lower, bad weather at sea affected the Village, especially at night. The wind bore masses of visible and invisible water, and the thick cushion of water vapor over the earth was so dense that it was impossible to imagine that a mere five kilometers or so above this cold porridge there shone the inexhaustible, infinite sun.

Samuel ceased going outside. Medea took his wicker chair back to the summer kitchen and put on the winter padlock. She was cooking now on a cooker in the house and in addition lit a small wood stove which had been installed by a Theodosia stove setter the year they moved here. Tatars did not put stoves in their houses, and left the floors earthen. Samuel and Medea had them covered over a year after they moved in.

Samuel asked her to hang heavy curtains in his room. He did not like the transition of twilight and would pull down the heavy blue blinds and light the table lamp. When they had a power cut, which was fairly often, he would light an older miner’s lamp which gave a bright whitish light.

They kept the windows closed now, and Medea was forever burning oil infused with herbs in little homemade lamps, and the house was filled with a sweet oriental fragrance.

Samuel no longer read the newspapers; even the periodical fishing out of cosmopolitans in all areas of science and culture ceased to interest him.

By now he had read his way to the Book of Leviticus. This relatively less engrossing book, by comparison with the first two books of the Pentateuch, was addressed primarily to priests and contained almost half the 613 commandments which supported the Jewish way of life.

Samuel immersed himself in this strange book for a long time but still couldn’t see why “of every winged crawling thing that goeth upon all four” you could eat only those which “have legs above their feet with which to leap upon the earth.” But even of those the only ones pronounced fit for eating were the locust, and the hargol and harab which nobody had ever heard of, while all the rest were considered an abomination.

There was absolutely no logical explanation given for this. It was rough and inflexible, this law, and a lot of space was devoted to all manner of rituals connected with service in the Temple, which was complete nonsense given that there had long been no Temple and there was no prospect of its ever being restored. Then he noticed that the overall design of this ungainly law, sketched already in Exodus and fully developed in the Talmud, examined every imaginable and unimaginable situation in which a human being might find himself, and gave precise instructions on how to behave in these circumstances, and that all these chaotically imposed prohibitions were in pursuance of a single aim: the holiness of the life of the people of Israel and an associated total rejection of the laws of the Land of Canaan.

This path had been offered to him in the days of his youth, and he had rejected it. More than that, he had rejected even the laws of the Land of Canaan, which promised, if not holiness, then at least a certain relative orderliness founded on justice, and as a young man he had managed to work for the destruction of both of them.

Researching now the ancient Jewish legislation, he came to a realization of the profound lawlessness in which the people of his country were living, and he among them. This was no less than the universal rule of lawlessness which, worse than the laws of Canaan, overruled the distinction between innocence and brazenness, intelligence and stupidity. The only person, he now recognized, who was truly living in accordance with a law of her own was his wife Medea. The quiet stubbornness with which she had brought up the children, toiled and prayed and kept her fasts, could be seen now not to be an extension of her strange personality, but an obligation freely assumed, the observance of a law long since repealed everywhere by everyone else.

He did actually know other people of a similar disposition— his Uncle Ephraim, randomly killed by a drunken soldier who disappeared around the end of the street without looking back; and possibly Rais, the feebleminded cleaner, was someone of the same kind, a young Tatar who had just two rules in his little head: to smile at everyone; and to meticulously—idiotically meticulously—sweep the paths of the sanatorium park.

Samuel, who had been used to blurting out everything that came into his head to Medea, kept his present thoughts to himself, not from fear of not being understood, but rather from a feeling that he could not express them with total accuracy. From what he did say, Medea understood how much his inner life had changed and was glad about that, but she was too concerned about his physical condition to delve more deeply. He had begun to have back pain, and now she was giving him injections to enable him to sleep.

December passed, the storms abated, but it was as dismal and cold as ever. By the middle of January they were looking forward to the coming of spring. Medea, who had previously replied promptly to letters from her relatives, now responded only with brief postcards. “Received your letter, thank you, everything with us is as it was, Medea, Samuel.”

She had no time for letter-writing. In all that winter she wrote only two real letters—to Elena and Alexandra.

February seemed to go on forever, and as luck would have it, this had to be a leap year. But then, in the third week of March the sun appeared, and from then on never missed an hour, and immediately everything started turning green. On the way home from work Medea climbed up a sun-warmed hill, picked a few violets and asphodels, and arranged them in a dish beside Samuel. He was hardly getting out of bed now and didn’t even sit up because sitting seemed to make the pain worse. He was eating only once a day because the business of eating was too exhausting. His expression was continuing to change, and Medea found him full of spirituality and marvelous.

The last Sunday of March was a warm day with no wind, and Samuel asked her to take him outside. She washed the chair, dried it in the sun, and covered it with an old blanket. Then she dressed Samuel, and it seemed to her that his coat weighed more than he did himself. He walked the twenty steps from his bed out to the chair with immense difficulty.

On a nearby slope the tamarisks were doing their best, their branches laden with lilac color which they were still holding back within themselves. He looked toward the table mountains and they looked back at him in a friendly way, as equals regarding an equal.

“God, how wonderful, how beautiful,” he said again and again, and tears flowed from the inner and outer corners of his eyes at the same time and were lost in the pointed beard he had grown.

Medea was sitting next to him on the bench and did not notice the moment when he ceased to breathe, because tears continued to flow for a few minutes more from his eyes.

He was buried on the fifth day. His withered body waited patiently for the relatives to come, showing no signs of decay. Alexandra came with Sergei, Fyodor with Georgii and Natasha, brother Dimitry with his son Gvidas from Lithuania, and all the men of the family from Tbilisi. The men bore him to the local graveyard and sat down afterward to a modest meal in his memory.

Medea did not allow any baking of pies or a big funeral party. There was traditional kutiya with rice, raisins and honey, there was bread, cheese, a bowl of Central Asian greens, and hard-boiled eggs. When Natasha asked Medea why she had arranged it this way, she replied: “He was a Jew, Natasha, and Jews don’t have funeral parties at all. They come back from the graveyard, sit on the floor, pray and fast for a set number of days. I have to say that seems to me a good custom. I don’t like our parties where people always eat and drink too much. Let it be this way.”

After the death of her husband, Medea put on widow’s weeds and surprised everyone with her beauty and an expression of unusual gentleness which people had not noticed in her before. With this new expression she embarked upon her long widowhood.

All that year, as we have said, Medea read the Psalter and waited for news from beyond the grave from her husband as diligently as one might wait for the postman to bring an overdue letter. But nothing came. Several times it seemed to her that the long-awaited dream was beginning, that everything was full of her husband’s presence, but her anticipation was dispelled by the unexpected arrival, in her dream, of some hostile stranger, or in reality by a strong gust of wind slamming the window and driving sleep away.

He first appeared to her in early March, shortly before the first anniversary of his death, but the dream was strange and brought her no comfort. Several days passed before its meaning became clear.

She dreamed of Samuel in a white doctor’s coat. That was good. His hands were covered in plaster or chalk, and his face was very pale. He was sitting at his work table tapping with a little hammer at some unpleasant jagged metal object, but it was not a set of dentures. Then he turned to her and stood up, and he was holding a portrait of Stalin which for some reason was upside down. He took the hammer, tapped it on the edge of the glass, and removed him neatly; but while he was fiddling with the glass, Stalin disappeared, to be replaced by a large photograph of the young Alexandra.

That very day it was announced that Stalin was ill, and a few days later that he had died. Medea observed the spontaneous grief and sincere tears, and also the unutterable curses of those who could not share that grief, but she herself was completely unmoved by the event. She was much more concerned about the second half of the dream: why was Alexandra in it and what did her being there presage? Medea had a vague sense of alarm and even wondered about going to the post office to ring through to Moscow.

A further two weeks passed and the anniversary of Samuel’s death came around. That day the weather was rainy, and Medea was completely soaked by the time she got back home from the graveyard. The following day she decided to go through her husband’s belongings, give some of the things away, but mainly she wanted to find some instruments and a small German electric motor which she had promised to the son of a friend in Theodosia.

She made a pile of his folded shirts and set aside his good suit for Fyodor, who might have a use for it. There were also two sweaters which retained the living smell of her husband, and she held them for a while in her hands before deciding not to give them away to anyone but keep them for herself. In the very bottom of the cupboard she found a map case with various documents: one certifying completion of the course in dental prosthetics of the Commissariat of Health; one about graduating from the workers’ faculty course; several deeds and official congratulatory letters.

“I’ll put them away in the trunk,” Medea thought, and opened an inconspicuous side section of the map case. A thin envelope lay in there, written in Alexandra’s handwriting. The letter was addressed to S. Ya. Mendez, Sudak Post Office. That was odd.

She opened the envelope mechanically and was stopped short by the first line: “Dear Samsy,” Alexandra had written. Nobody called him that. Older people called him Sam, the younger ones Samuel Yakovlevich. “You have turned out to be much better at arithmetic than I thought,” Medea read.

You are absolutely right, but it doesn’t mean anything at all, and it would be best if you forgot about your discovery straightaway and forever. I and my sister are complete opposites. She is a saint and I am a swine three times over, but I would rather die than that she should discover who the father of this child is. For this reason I beg you to destroy this letter straightaway. The girl is completely mine, only mine, and please do not think that you have a child—this is simply another of Medea’s many relatives. She is a splendid little girl, redheaded and smiling, and looks as though she’s going to be a bundle of fun, and I just hope she doesn’t look like you—by which I mean so that this secret will remain between the two of us. Thank you for the money. It was not unwelcome but, to tell the truth, I do not know whether I want help from you. The main thing is that my sister shouldn’t suspect anything. I’m suffering pangs of conscience enough as it is, and really where would I be if she ever found out?

And where would she be? Look after yourself and enjoy your life, Samsy.

Sandra

Medea read the letter standing up, very slowly, and then she read it again. Yes, of course. They had often gone down to the coves together that summer, Alexandra and Samuel. And it was that summer that Alexandra had lost her maiden’s ring.

Medea sat down. A blackness the like of which she had never known engulfed her. Until late evening she sat there, not moving, then she got up and started packing her things. She didn’t go to bed that night.

In the morning she was standing at the bus stop with her black shawl neatly tied, with a large rucksack on her back and carrying a carryall she had made herself. At the bottom of the carryall, in an old-fashioned carpetbag, lay her application for leave which she had decided to send when already on her way, her identity documents, some money, and the ill-starred letter. She caught the first morning bus to Theodosia.