Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 12

Standing at the bus stop with the rucksack on her shoulders, Medea felt herself a second Odysseus. Probably, indeed, even more heroic, since Odysseus standing on the shores of Troy, while he might have been unaware of the many years that would have to pass before his return, did at least have a fairly good idea of the distance separating him from home.

Medea, however, was accustomed to measuring distance in terms of hours of her brisk walking, and could not begin to imagine the length of the journey she had embarked on. Odysseus, moreover, was an adventurer and a mariner, and did not pass up any opportunity to delay his return, mostly just pretending that his ultimate destination was the crude habitation in Ithaca called the king’s palace and the embraces of his aged and domesticated wife.

Up to that time Medea had spent her whole life in the Crimea, apart from that single journey to Moscow with Alexandra and her firstborn, Sergei, and this rooted life, which had itself been subject to violent and rapid change—revolutions, changes of government, the Reds, the Whites, the Germans, the Romanians; some neighbors being deported, new neighbors, outsiders with no ties, imported—had finally given Medea the stolidity of a tree which has put down its twining roots into the stony soil, living beneath the unchanging sun as it completes its daily and yearly rounds, and exposed to the same winds with their seasonal smells of seaweed drying on the shore, or fruit shriveling in the sun, or bitter wormwood.

For all that, she was a maritime person. From an early age the men of her family went to sea. Her father had died at sea, and Alexander Stepanyan had gone away forever over the sea, taking with him Anait and Arsik; a decrepit steamer had taken her aunt and two of her brothers from Batumi; and even her sister Anelya, who had married a Georgian from mountainous Tiflis, had left home long ago from the new dock at dear Theodosia.

Although there were no direct sea routes to the far-off city to which Medea had been intending to travel for decades, and for which she had now packed her bags and set out in a single night, she decided to go at least part of the way, the first part, by sea, from Kerch to Taganrog. The first two legs of the journey, from the Village to Theodosia, and from Theodosia to Kerch, were as familiar as crossing her own yard. Arriving that evening in Kerch, she found herself on the frontiers of her oikoumene, which had the ancient Pantikapeia as its easternmost point.

In the port Medea learned that passenger sailings began only in May, and that the few ships which were now sailing between Kerch and Taganrog carried only freight and no passengers. She was nonplussed, recognizing her first mistake: she should after all have gone directly via Dzhankoy, not allowing herself to be tempted by marine digressions.

Turning away with some aversion from the brackish, yellowy-grey maeotian waters, she went to see her old friend Tasha Lavinskaya, who had dedicated herself from the days of her youth to “bone-grubbing,” as it was jocularly described by her husband, old Dr. Lavinsky, an intellectual and bibliophile who was almost as much of a local sight as the Vault of Diana. They lived at the back of the museum, and their apartment looked like an annex of it: fragments of crumbling Kerch stone, ancient dust, and dry paper filled the house.

Tasha did not immediately recognize Medea. They had not seen each other for several years, since Samuel had fallen ill, when her small number of friends, some from a feeling of tact, some for selfish reasons, had almost ceased to visit them in the Village. Having recognized her, however, Tasha fell upon Medea’s neck, not giving her time even to take off her rucksack.

“Wait, wait, Tashenka, let me get these things off first,” Medea said, fending her off. “Let me get washed. Samuel used to say Kerch was the world’s pole for dust.” It was a damp springtime and there was no dust in evidence at all, but such was Medea’s confidence in what her late husband said that she felt covered in dust.

Sweeping piles of tattered books and sundry sheets of paper, covered with tiny drawings and infrequent illegible lines of writing, from the edge of the table with a practiced gesture, Tasha laid out the food on a newspaper, making no attempt to disguise its paucity and unprepossessing appearance. Sergei Illarionovich, the majestic old husband of a once-young beauty who magnanimously failed to notice how old and ugly she had become at an early age, the occasional coarse hairs sprouting from her chin, or her increasingly buck teeth, all his life viewed Tasha’s extreme aversion to housework as a delightful foible. He had not lost an archaic ability to play the host, and plied Medea with dried and tinned fish, which was a complete absurdity in this fishing town.

But the wine was good. Someone had given it to them. Although long retired, Sergei was still practicing a little, and the intimates he treated would bring gifts of food to the house in addition to the customary fee, as they had in the past years of famine which had already almost faded from people’s short memories. Hearing of the hitch in his guest’s traveling plans, he immediately phoned the director of the port, who promised to see Medea on her way in the morning on the first available vessel, although he warned that he could give the traveler no guarantees regarding comfort.

They sat up until late into the night, the three of them at the table, drinking the good wine, then drinking bad tea, and Tasha, who showed no interest in why Medea might need to be going to Taganrog, launched into a long narrative about some kind of grid she had discovered from the Azov Mesolithic period. For a long while Medea couldn’t grasp why she was so excited, until Tasha placed before her, on top of the remains of the fish, some very soiled little pictures drawn by an expert hand, depicting what looked like a grid for tic-tac-toe, and announced that this grid was one of the most persistent sacred symbols, found in the Paleolithic period and discovered in Egypt, on Crete, in pre-Columbian America, and now if you please here too, in the Azov region. Sergei Illarionovich, overcome by the drowsiness of old age and dozing in his armchair, was roused from time to time by his innate courtesy to nod a sleepy head in agreement and murmur some word of approbation before relapsing into slumber.

Not in the least interested in Tasha’s scholarly researches, Medea waited patiently for the lecture to end, surprised that she had said not a word either about her daughter or granddaughter who were living in Leningrad. At each turning point in Tasha’s speech Medea nodded in agreement and reflected on how stubborn human nature is, how persistent a passion can sometimes be, as unchanging as these grids of hers, these ovals and dots which, having once been imprinted, live on for millennia in every remotest corner of the world, in the cellars of museums, in rubbish dumps, scratched in the dry earth and on ramshackle fences by children at play.

In the morning a burly man in a maritime uniform without epaulettes came and collected Medea from the sleeping Lavinsky household, and an hour later she was being rocked in the middle of the Bay of Kerch on an ancient cargo steamer of a type so familiar that it might have belonged to the old armada of her grandfather Harlampy. Wheezing and straining powerlessly like an old man, the little steamship struggled into Taganrog only toward evening. By this time the drizzle had turned into a grey light rain and Medea, having sat twelve hours on a wooden bench on the deck with her back straight and her knees tightly together, walked down the gangplank feeling more like a part of the wooden bench from which she had just torn herself than a live human being.

On the landing stage she looked around her: apart from a single streetlamp and a boy who had traveled with her all the way from Kerch, who had been reading a thick tome during the hours of daylight, there was nobody and nothing around. The boy was in that final stage of childhood when being called “young man” still causes confusion.

“Can you tell me, young man, which the best way would be to get to Rostov-on-Don: train or bus?”

“Bus,” he replied laconically.

Beside the boy stood a two-handled basket wrapped in old material with a pleasantly familiar pattern. Medea’s eye lingered on it: faded, barely discernible daisies in round posies . . . The boy seemed to catch her gaze and said something that didn’t make sense, pushing the basket with his foot: “If it fits in the boot, there’ll be room for you too.”

“What did you say?” Medea asked in surprise.

“My brother’s coming from Rostov to pick me up. In his car. I think there’ll be room in it for you.”

“Really? Splendid.”

The spiritual darkness which had enveloped her without relinquishing its grip for an instant since she had read that dreadful, hurried, offhand letter, did not stop her from rejoicing: “Lord, I thank you that you have not forsaken me in my travels, and that you send me your wayside angel as you did to Tobias.”

The youth who, unknown to himself, was performing the office of wayside angel, moved the basket aside with the squared toe cap of his boot and explained to Medea, “He has a large car, a Victory, but he might already be transporting something in it.”

The boy’s speech was correct, and his intonation seemed familiar. He sounded as if he came from a good family. Evidently the thick volumes he read had done him some good.

Some fifteen minutes later a thickset young man came up, kissed the boy, and slapped him on the shoulder. “Well done, Leshenka! Why didn’t you bring Auntie?”

“She said she’ll come in the summer. Her legs are hurting her.”

“Poor woman. How’s she managing there on her own?” It wasn’t an idle question: he was listening for the answer.

“It seemed to me she was getting by. She’s renting one room. The lodger’s a decent man, from Leningrad. He works at the meteorological station. He brought her some firewood in his car. Look, she’s sent some presents.” He nodded at the basket. “I didn’t want to take them, but she insisted.”

The man shrugged. “That’s just how it has to be.”

He went to pick up the basket. The boy stopped him. “Tolya, this lady’s going to Rostov too. Have you got room for her?”

Tolya turned to Medea as if he had only just noticed her, although she had been standing alongside throughout the conversation. “I do have room. I can give you a lift. Where do you need to get to in Rostov?”

“The train station.”

“Give me your rucksack,” he stretched out a hand and slipped it onto his shoulder.

Medea was still murmuring to herself, “Lord, I thank you for all your goodness, for all that you send, and may I have room for it in my heart, rejecting nothing.” This was her ongoing conversation with God, a mixture of prayers memorized long ago and her own voice, alive and grateful.

Medea, who had barely had time to straighten her old bones after sitting so long on the deck, now climbed into the car where it was warm and comfortable. Her damp clothing, if it didn’t exactly dry out, was at least soon suffused with her own warmth. She nodded off and through her half-sleep heard scraps of the brothers’ conversation: something about their sister’s wedding; about the teacher training institute where the boy was a fresh-man; about Simferopol; about the aunt whom he had been visiting in Old Crimea.

“I really ought to visit Nina,” Medea thought blearily through her sleep, remembering her former Theodosia neighbor who had moved to Old Crimea after a fire destroyed her house in their street. Through her drowsiness Medea remembered Nina, and her old mother who had gone out of her mind that very night, and her younger sister whose arm had been burned and to whom Medea had given first aid using a primitive but effective folk remedy.

They brought Medea to the train station in complete darkness in the middle of the night. The driver took Medea’s rucksack and saw her to the ticket office. At one window there was a long, silent queue; the other two windows were shut so firmly it was difficult to believe they were ever open.

Medea stopped in front of one of these unpromising windows and thanked the driver. He took the rucksack off his shoulder, put it on the ground, and said uncertainly, “Would you perhaps like me to take you home for now and you can go on from here in the morning? Just look at this queue.”

Before Medea could thank him, the window by her shoulder opened, and without having time to be taken aback, she asked for a ticket to Tashkent.

“Reserved seats only,” the cashier warned her, “and you’ll have to change twice, at Saratov and Salsk.”

“Fine,” Medea said.

The crowd immediately stampeded with much shrieking and yelling toward the window which had unexpectedly opened, and a furious argument broke out, with some people wanting to keep the old order of the queue, while those who had been at the back and now found themselves nearer the front didn’t think that was at all a good idea.

A moment later, squeezing her way with difficulty through a seething crowd up in arms in pursuit of justice, her ticket in her hand, Medea took the rucksack from Tolya. He could only spread his arms wide in amazement: “Well, that really was a stroke of luck!”

They went out onto the platform and consequently didn’t see that the window from which Medea’s ticket had been issued was promptly closed again, and the crowd, now split in two, seethed in front of both of the closed windows, impatient fists drumming on unyielding plywood.

Medea’s train arrived twelve minutes later, although it was five hours behind schedule. It was only when they were out of Rostov that she realized why the cloth with the daisy pattern had seemed so familiar: it was her own curtain, which she had given to Nina along with many other essentials after the fire thirty years ago. So the aunt in Old Crimea that they had been talking about was her own former neighbor Nina, and the young men were the children of the girl whose burn Medea had treated that night.

Medea smiled to herself and felt reassured. Despite being so much more crowded and having so much more hustle and bustle, the world still functioned in its old way, the way she understood, with small miracles happening, people coming together and parting, and all of it forming a wonderful pattern.

She got two rusks out of her rucksack and a large German thermos with a lid. The tea poured into it back in Kerch was hot and sweet. Medea sat for about four days by the carriage window, stretching out occasionally on the lower bunk and falling into a fitful and vibrating sleep on the bottom of which lay that black, insoluble precipitate of darkness.

The train rumbled slowly on, making countless little stops and standing for long senseless periods at the dual-track passing places. The entire timetable had been vitiated when the train was dispatched with a long delay to its point of departure. At every station and every halt it was met by a crowd wearied by their waiting. Not many people in the slow, dirty train were making as long a journey as Medea. Most of them got in with their baskets, sacks, and bundles for a few stops, crowding the corridors and, when they got out, leaving behind them pungent smells and the husks of sunflower seeds.

Although she had lived through many unsettled times in the Crimea, and remembered the typhoid-infected huts, the famine, and the cold, Medea had never been directly caught up in the huge migrations which have accompanied Russia’s history, and knew only by hearsay about the goods vans, the cattle trucks full of people, and the queues for boiling water at the stations. Now, when she had passed fifty, she had for the first time torn herself away from her dear settled life of her own free will, and observed with astonishment what uncountable hordes were on the move over this vast, uncared-for land littered with rusting metal and broken stones. Down the railway embankments, just beneath the spare spring grass, lay the remains of a war which had ended eight years before, eroded shell craters full of stagnant water, ruins and bones embedded in the ground which filled the landscape from Rostov to Salsk and from Salsk to Stalingrad.

It seemed to Medea that the war was etched more deeply in the memory of the land than in that of all this multitude of people so loudly and uniformly lamenting the recent death of Stalin. Only a few weeks had passed since he died, and all her fellow travelers were constantly mentioning it as they talked among themselves.

She heard a lot of fantastic nonsense: an elderly railway worker, on the way back from his own mother’s funeral, told in a whisper of the great slaughter which had occurred in Moscow on the day the nation was bidding farewell to Stalin, and about the Jewish conspiracies which had been at the root of it; another gloomy individual, with a wooden leg and a chest bright with medal ribbons, told of an underground city full of top-secret American weapons which had supposedly been dug up by chance in the middle of Moscow; two schoolmarms on their way to a regional meeting of some description endlessly debated in strained professional tones between themselves who there now was to lead the country to the Communist dream. In contrast, a tipsy traveler who had not taken off his cap with its earflaps all the way from Ilovinskaya to Saratov, and who had been listening the whole journey to their loud chatter without saying a word, as he was getting off the train suddenly pulled the hat from his head to reveal a patchy baldness, spat on the floor and said in a powerful voice, “You’re two daft old biddies! It can’t get worse than this under anybody.”

Medea smiled out of the window. From her early years she had become used to treating political changes like changes in the weather—something you just had to put up with: in the winter you were cold, in the summer you sweated. She did, however, take care to prepare for each season in good time, getting in firewood for the winter; stockpiling sugar, if such a thing were anywhere to be found, for jam making in the summer. She never expected anything good from any authorities, kept her guard up, and stayed well away from people who were part of the power structure.

As for the Great Leader, the family had long had a bone to pick with him. Well before the Revolution, in Batumi, he had turned the head of her aunt’s husband Iraklii, and landed him in a thoroughly unsavory episode involving a bank robbery from which he had to be extricated by his family putting together a very large sum of money.

In the Village on the day the Leader died, flags of mourning were put out and a meeting called. A party boss came from Sudak—not the top boss, someone fairly new. He gave his speech; they turned on some solemn music; two local women, Sonya from the food shop and Valentina Ivanovna the teacher, burst into tears; and everyone decided to send a telegram expressing their grief to “The Kremlin, Moscow.” Medea, more appropriately dressed than any of them in her mourning clothes, stood at the meeting for as long as was necessary and then went to her vineyard and pruned it until evening.

For Medea all this was the distant echo of a life in which she had no part. Her present traveling companions, individuals who collectively constituted the Russian people, were now loud in their anxiety, fearful of their future as orphans, weeping; others, unspeaking, were quietly rejoicing at the tyrant’s death; but all of them had now to resolve things in a new way, and to learn to live in a world which had changed overnight.

What was strange was that Medea too, in quite a different connection, was experiencing something similar. The letter lying deep in her bag was forcing her to see herself, her sister, and her late husband in a new light, and first and foremost to reconcile herself to a fact which seemed to her completely impossible.

An affair between her husband, who all the years of their marriage had deified her, extolling her merits, which he had partly invented himself, to excess, and her sister Alexandra, someone she could read like a book, was an impossibility not only on practical grounds. Some higher interdict, Medea felt, had been flouted, but judging by Alexandra’s pert letter and its easy tone, she had not even noticed this incestuous and sacramental wrongdoing. All she was concerned about was ensuring that the secret did not inconveniently become public knowledge.

A special torment was that the present situation called for neither decisions nor action. All the previous misfortunes in her life—the death of her parents, her husband’s illness—had called for physical and moral exertion: what had happened now was just the echo of something long past. Sam was no longer alive, his daughter Nike was, and there was no possibility of having a posthumous showdown with him.

She had been degraded by her husband, betrayed by her sister, abused by fate itself, which had denied her children while the child fathered by her husband, the child that by rights was hers, had been placed in her sister’s relaxed and fun-loving body. The gloom in her soul was made deeper also by the fact that Medea, who had always been on the move herself, was being forced to sit for days at a time by this window where all the movement was outside, in the rolling by of the changing scenery through the window and, to some extent, in the restless movement of other people in the railway carriage.

Her journey lasted three and a half days, and as the route was quite whimsical, veering far up into the heart of the Continent, she appeared to overtake the spring in its northward progress: she left the Crimea where the leaves were coming out, and again saw snow lying in the ravines in the pre-Urals, the bare earth still gripped by frosts at night; and then, traveling to the east and the south, she came back to the spring with the hot steppes of Kazakhstan in full flower and dotted with vivid tulips.

The train arrived in Tashkent in early morning. She got out with her now-depleted rucksack and, knowing that her relatives lived not far from the station, asked which direction to take.

The street was called Twelve Poplars, but if poplars ever had grown here, they had meekly yielded to the flowering apricot trees planted along the irrigation ditch at the roadside. It was earliest, newborn morn, the time Medea loved best, and after her taxing days on the dirty train, she was particularly alive to this God-given purity and the smells of the morning, in which familiar mingled with unfamiliar: the smoke from a different fuel, and the spicy smell of an unknown meat dish. Everything, however, was overpowered by the heady perfume of the lilac hanging out its trusses of blossom as blue and heavy as bunches of grapes above the clay walls and plank fences. Even the birds seemed to be singing in a foreign language, not so much singing as chirping.

As Medea walked down the interminably long road, enjoying the exercise, slightly swinging her shoulders, which were pulled back by the rucksack straps beneath which she had tucked her light coat in soldierly fashion, she was taking in, in addition to the numbers of the houses, all sorts of little details and surprises. On a fence a brown and pink turtledove was sitting as cool as could be: it was a bird she had been familiar with since she was a girl, only in the Crimea it was very wild and timid and never flew into the town.

The heavy mood of her journey, which she had seemed to be carrying on her shoulders, was washed away by the gentle waves of the morning breeze which, as she knew, always sprang up at sunrise. She heard a sudden shouting in the distance, carried over from the east on the breeze. It too seemed to roll in like a wave, and these were the piping voices of children.

“Water! The water’s coming! Suvgia!”

Several little children immediately came dancing out of the gates, and other children’s heads peeped over fences. A fat old woman in felt boots and a Ukrainian shirt which had worn through on her bosom waddled out to the ditch.

Medea stopped. She knew what was about to happen and had been waiting for just this moment. The bottom of the shallow ditch was covered over with a smooth, pale brown film of what looked like the skin skimmed from boiled milk, and, blown by the dawn breeze, pink petals of apricot blossom which had just fallen from the trees slowly settled on it; now there came the grumbling sound of water, and in front of its brown tongue there rose a pink cloud of apricot-blossom debris.

The shout passed down the street, the water was gurgling in the ditch. Young children and old men opened the ditch inlets to their yards. The time for the morning irrigation had begun.

Immediately outside Elena’s house Medea collided with a little blond boy of about ten. He had just let the water into the yard and was washing his freckled face in the brown, rather suspicious-looking water.

“Hello, Shurik,” Medea said to him.

He took a step backward in surprise and disappeared into the bushes with a shout: “Mamunya! Someone’s here to see you.”

Medea stopped in the yard and looked around: three small houses, one with a verandah and a high porch, and two more straightforward, whitewashed ones, formed a square in the center of which stood a platform for tea drinking, and from the summer kitchen with its side awning there came walking slowly toward her, greying, fat, wearing a white apron pinned up high in front, dear Elena. She did not recognize Medea at once, but when she did, she threw her arms open wide and ran toward her with a silly, joyful cry: “My own dear heart has come back to me!”

Doors and windows banged. The old sheepdog in its kennel finally woke up and started energetically barking, aware of having neglected its duty. The yard filled up with what seemed to Medea to be a huge crowd, but these were her own people: Elena’s daughter Natasha with her seven-year-old son Pavlik; Georgii, Elena’s younger son, who had grown over the past winter into a handsome young man; and a thin little old woman with a crutch.

“Old Nanny Galya,” Medea guessed.

Up on the porch, inclining the arrogant face of an oriental beauty to one side, stood thirteen-year-old Shusha, Natasha’s older daughter, wearing a white nightgown which her shining Asian hair almost entirely covered. Little blond Shurik peeped out from behind the trunk of a peach tree.

“Oh, Lord, Fyodor is away on a business trip. He left only yesterday!” Elena said, crestfallen, still not releasing Medea from her hug. “But why didn’t you warn us? Georgii could have come to meet you.”

Elena’s family stood around, waiting their turn for a kiss from their aunt or great-aunt. Only Old Galya muttered something to herself and hobbled off to the forgotten stove where some domestic crisis had occurred: black smoke was rising from a frying pan.

“Oh, I’ll get you some tea, some tea! Oh, what am I saying, coffee, coffee! Oh, my own dear heart has come back to me!” Elena clucked, repeating every word and flapping at the air around her head with a gesture totally unique to herself.

Seeing this movement of Elena’s small hand, which had quite slipped her memory, Medea suddenly felt very happy.

Since 1920, when Medea saw her brother Fyodor off from the Theodosia station to his new job with his new wife, entrusted to him only the previous day after Medea’s firm hand had matched the two of them, the friends had seen each other only twice: in 1932 soon after Medea and Samuel moved to the Village; and in 1940 when the entire Tashkent branch of the Sinoply family had come to visit.

That last summer before the war Medea had had a great family congress: Alexandra with Sergei and Lidia; her brother Constantine, who was killed a year later in the very first days of the war; Tasha Lavinskaya . . . There had been no room to move in the house. Everything was alive with children’s voices, the July sun, and Crimean wine.

That year Fyodor won the State Prize and was expecting a new appointment, almost at ministerial level.

Medea had been unable to get off work and had had to go in every day and then come home and cook and cook and cook. Her sister and the young bride would have been glad to help, but Medea didn’t like other people getting involved in her housework, moving things from where they belonged and generally not doing things her way. Only with the passing years and the coming of old age had she resigned herself to letting young relatives busy themselves in her kitchen and never being able to find anything.

There had been so many people there and the kitchen had constantly been so busy that the friends hardly had a chance to talk. Medea remembered only their last conversation the night before they parted, when they were washing up in the kitchen after the farewell supper and Elena, drying a pile of plates with a long towel, had complained bitterly that Fyodor was putting his head straight in the lion’s mouth. She was prudent enough to be fearful of his successful career and transformation from a modest surveyor into virtually the top official in charge of the irrigation system of Uzbekistan.

“How can he not understand?” Elena asked despairingly. “My father was a member of the Crimean government. He’s never mentioned that in a single curriculum vitae. And the higher you rise, the more exposed you become.”

Immediately after Elena and Fyodor left, Anelya had arrived from Tiflis with her family, then the younger Nastya with her young husband, and in a short interval between visitors Medea had written Elena a letter which concluded with the words “What a shame that we hardly saw each other. We’re probably doomed to correspond for the rest of our lives.”

Now in Tashkent, Medea was the only, and a profoundly welcome, guest. In the mornings after the children had been sent to school, Elena and Medea went to the Chorsinsky Bazaar not far from the house, bought mutton, early greens, sometimes chickens: two weren’t quite enough for dinner, but three were too many.

Everyone in the family was used to eating a lot, to Medea’s amazement. The end of March was a lean time and there was none of the summer lushness of an Asian bazaar, but they stuffed their bags full and went home in the tram.

The table was usually set for dinner late, at around eight when Fyodor got back from work. Before that the children nibbled, helping themselves to a piece of bread or whatever. Dinner, however, lasted a couple of hours, and in addition to the usual local food, sapsa dumplings and noodle soup, there was always an Armenian delicacy of some kind on the table—Elena was still a dab hand at making baklava.

Late in the evenings, when the house was quiet, they would sit together for a long time by the cleared table, laying out an intricate game of patience, which came out for Elena not more than once a year, going over early memories, beginning with their school days; they hooted with laughter, they sighed, they wept for those they had loved and who had been lost in the chaos of the past.

A heavy rock slowly shifted at the bottom of Medea’s heart, but their conversation did not move in a direction which would have allowed her to mention the letter. Something stopped her, and the tragedy she had experienced so recently suddenly began to seem to her quite simply indecent.

In the heat of the day, added to by the heat from the summer stove, the hearth in the yard and the constantly boiling water for the laundry, whose blueness and crackly starchiness was Elena’s special pride, Medea observed how Elena’s life was structured and noted approvingly the customs of the old Stepanyan house, a mixture of generosity toward those around and a certain stinginess where cooking was concerned. Elena counted the eggplants and the walnuts, but money—never.

Fate had taken Elena’s close family from her when she was very young, and her nineteen-year-old elder son in the war years, but at least it had never let her experience poverty. It was as if she had been destined from birth always to wear gold and eat from silver. Amazingly enough, in her first year of living in Tashkent she had been sought out, not without help from Medea, by Old Ashkhen, the servant of her Tiflis aunt, who had died a rich, childless widow. Ashkhen walked all the way from Tiflis, carrying a dirty traveling bag containing the family treasures bequeathed to Elena by her aunt.

Elena, who by then had lost everything that she had left from the old life, promptly put two rings on her fingers, one with a pearl, the second with a blue diamond; she put black agate discs with a small pearl in the center on her ears, and put the rest in the bottom of a basket in which she was laying down the dowry for her firstborn, whose appearance in the world seemed imminent. Old Ashkhen lived six more years in her house, right up until her death.

Elena set about arranging her house in Tashkent, this same house which Fyodor had been allocated immediately upon his arrival, in the manner customary in her family, with such modifications as their very modest means dictated. She named the best room the study and gave it to her husband; she returned to the bedroom two beds which had been taken from the house and put in a shed by the Uzbeks who had occupied the house after its previous owner, the deputy governor, shot himself in a fit of senile depression at the beginning of 1917.

In the same shed Elena discovered the remaining furniture which had not been consigned to the stove. She created the semblance of bedside cabinets from two stools she covered with bright scarves, bought a quantity of copper pots and pans at the bazaar, and their residence began in some elusive way to resemble the old house in Tiflis, the dacha at Sudak, and their apartment in Geneva. The tastes of the late Armik Tigranovna were everywhere in evidence.

They later bought the second house in their yard for Natasha, and were currently negotiating with their remaining neighbors to buy the third one, which stood to the right of the central house. Elena had plans to settle Georgii in it.

Medea knew all this from Elena’s letters, in which she mentioned every remotely significant event, but in which for both of them the most important things were still the mode in which they communicated, girlish and confidential, and their writing style, their handwriting and, of course, the French language which they both easily slipped into. Each letter was a secret oath of loyalty, although three-quarters of them were devoted to dreams and presentiments, or descriptions of a wayside tree or of someone they had met.

Describing her daughter’s wedding, Elena wrote in immense detail about the unusually heavy rain which fell in only one district of the city at just the moment when the newlyweds were coming out of the Registry Office, and of how the material of Natasha’s white dress got wet and shrank, creeping up and exposing her plump knees, but for all that Elena did not mention that Natasha had married Victor Kim, a Korean communications engineer, who even then had gained a reputation throughout the city for his extraordinary linguistic abilities. Apart from the standard Russian, the Korean he spoke at home, and the German and optional Uzbek he had learned at school, he had somehow managed by the age of twenty-five to learn English as well and was studying Chinese, although he anticipated having to spend not less than five years on mastering it.

Only six months or so after the wedding, describing in one of the letters her trip to the suburb of Kuilyuk and the tiny paddy fields sprouting bright rows of narrow-leaved rice, Elena had mentioned the parents of Natasha’s husband in passing, a wrinkled Korean couple whose outward appearance was so similar and so sexless that it was difficult to tell which of the two was the husband and which the wife. At all events, when another six months later Medea received the first photograph of newborn Shusha, she was not surprised by the pretty little round face with narrow slit eyes from which you would never have anticipated today’s beauty.

Sometimes during the day Elena would put Medea on a tarpaulin folding bed under the awning, which was almost completely covered with young vine shoots, and thrust into her hands a French book from the library she had assembled here from the only antiquarian bookseller in town, and Medea, absentmindedly leafing through Les Liaisons dangereuses or La Chartreuse de Parme, for the first time in her life enjoyed being indolent, totally relaxed, as if the current which maintained tension in her muscles had suddenly been turned off and every fibril was smoothed out in bliss.

She read a little and dozed a little and watched the children a little. Shusha kept herself distant and aloof but had the appearance of someone immersed in her own thoughts. Her younger brother, Pavlik, played the violin for days at a time and, when he did appear in the yard, was just a bit too polite. Medea looked in vain for family traits in them: their Asian blood had totally overwhelmed the Greco-Armenian.

Oddly enough, it was the fair-skinned little blond Shurik, whom they had adopted, who gave every indication of being a Sinoply: although his light, downy hair had not the least tinge of the family’s russet, his narrow, pale face was covered in deep ginger freckles. Even more significant—Medea did not immediately notice this, but when she did, she was amazed—his little finger was short, barely reaching the end of the first knuckle of his fourth finger. She did not, however, pass on her observations.

“What a good boy he is,” Medea said quietly, glancing over toward Shurik, who was whittling a seasoned lilac branch in order to replace the charred handle of the coffeepot.

“He’s just like my own son to me,” Elena responded. “Although nobody can ever replace Alexander in my heart. But Shurik—yes, he’s a very good boy. His mother was a deported Volga German. She worked in Kokand at one of Fyodor’s projects. She died of tuberculosis immediately after the war. He was sent to an orphanage at first and had a hard time there. Fyodor visited him once, and then a second time, and then brought him home. He has fitted into the family very well. Very well.”

Medea listened, said nothing, and looked. When she had been there five days, she noticed Elena taking a bowl of soup after dinner into a side room by the entrance, where Galya lived.

Catching Medea’s glance, she explained, “We have Musya living in there, Galya’s younger sister.”

“Musya?” Medea asked in surprise, never having heard the name.

“Well yes, Musya. She’s paralyzed, poor thing. Her daughter rejected her and Galya took her in,” Elena answered. Medea immediately remembered Armik Tigranovna’s paralyzed wet nurse whom the Stepanyans took everywhere with them for ten years or so, whether to the Crimea or Switzerland, in a specially made German chair of tubular brass, and Armik Tigranovna fed the wordless, withered old woman herself because she would not accept food from anyone else.

How everything recurs.

“God will always send them riches,” Medea reflected, although the family’s current prosperity could hardly be called riches. “Nobody knows better than Elena how to put them to good use.”

When Elena had fed Musya, whom Medea never did get to see, she immediately went to tell Galya off for throwing out half a jar of vine leaves prepared the previous year for making dolma. New, fresh leaves were fluttering above Medea’s head and she smiled.

At last Fyodor, having completed his official trip to the lower reaches of the Amu-Daria and the Aral Sea, called from Nukus to tell Elena he would be back home soon.

“Splendid, I’ll just see him and then go back home. Yes, home again in time for Easter,” Medea decided.

But Fyodor arrived only on Lazarus Saturday, the eve of Palm Sunday, in the middle of the day. A car snorted and Shurik rushed headlong to open the gate, but Fyodor was already walking through the yard. A fresh crimson tan shone out from beneath his provincial white hat. Shurik flew up to his chest and hugged him around the neck. Fyodor kissed the white top of his head and detached him from himself. Putting his hand on Shurik’s head, he walked through the garden.

“Papa is back home!” Elena shouted from the window in a ringing voice, as if he had been away not two weeks but two years.

Medea quickly took her feet off the couch but hadn’t time to get up before he caught her under the arms, lifted her up, and pressed her to himself like a child. “My kid sister, my clever girl, you’ve come to see me!”

Medea breathed in the smell of his hair and his body, and recognized the half-forgotten smell of her father’s working sweaters, which few people would have found pleasant but which for Medea’s retentive memory was a precious gift.

Everything began to revolve around Fyodor exactly as it had around Medea the morning she had arrived. The chauffeur who had driven him opened the gate and started unloading the car. He pulled out an assortment of parcels and sacks. These were valuable presents, and Elena immediately got to work on an enormous salted sturgeon. Shurik stood beside her, cautiously touching the fish’s mean face with his finger. Although Elena had made the preparations for her husband’s return, the sturgeon threw her, and telling Natasha and Galya to set the table, she got to work on the fish. She armed herself with a knife and poked her shortsighted face into its ripped open belly.

The chauffeur, another Fyodor, was a handsome man of around forty but with cheeks pocked by gunpowder. He pulled a case of anonymous unlabeled bottles out of the bottomless expeditionary vehicle.

At the meal Fyodor ate little, drank much, and without removing his heavy arm from around Medea’s shoulder, told them all about his latest trip in the confident voice of a boss. And Fyodor’s deputy came, a couple of elderly friends, and a pretty young Greek girl, Maria, a postwar political refugee, the first real Corinthian Medea had met in her life.

Shurik and Pavlik sat quietly on the children’s side of the table, and Elena scurried into the summer kitchen or out to the brazier in the yard. The unlabeled bottles contained something strong and tangy along the lines of a cheap brandy, but Medea found it to her taste. Fyodor drank out of a large silver goblet, and his face, fiery with his fresh tan, gradually turned purple and heavy.

Then two of Georgii’s classmates came in, and they too sat down at the table. Elena, true to her principles, took the hot dishes away as soon as they got cold and brought in new ones held up high in the air.

Medea, who had only recently completed an immensely long journey throughout which she had eaten only small grey rusks, rejoiced from the bottom of her heart at the abundance of the feast but, like Fyodor, barely touched the food. It was Lent, and Medea, taught from early childhood to observe the fasts, not only accepted them freely and joyfully, but managed somehow to grow stronger during them. Elena, on the contrary, had always found obligatory fasting hard to take and since moving to Central Asia had stopped even going to church, let alone observing the fasts.

Medea knew all this very well, but she also knew what fits of apparently groundless wretchedness overwhelmed Elena from time to time, and explained them by her having lapsed from the Church. This was another of the topics of their correspondence. They were both sufficiently enlightened women to understand that a person’s spiritual life is not by any means confined to their relationship with the Church, but Medea saw life within the Church as the only way possible for her.

“For me, with my limited understanding and self-willed character,” she wrote to Elena long before the war when the little Greek church whose dean was Harlampy’s younger brother, Dionisy, was closed and she started going to the Russian one, “the discipline of the Church is as necessary as medicine for a chronically sick person. It has been a stroke of great good fortune in my life that my mother instructed me in the faith. She was a simple person of exceptional goodness who had no doubts, and in my life I have never had to rack my brains fruitlessly over philosophical questions which it is by no means essential for each individual to try to resolve. I am content with the traditional Christian resolution of the questions of life, death, good and evil. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill—and there are no circumstances which can turn evil into good. And the fact that the ways of error have become universally accepted has no significance for us whatsoever.”

Elena was fairly immune to the temptations of killing or stealing. She knew only domestic and housekeeping trials which might have been too much for a less doughty woman but which she not only took in her stride but thrived on.

Her family expanded and so did her house, and Elena started taking an interest in the girls in Georgii’s class, assessing which of them might make him a good wife. Future children were accordingly already peeping into her life, promising to add to her family, as it had been added to by the adoption of Shurik and by unseen Musya. Accepting these people into her home was her religion, as Medea fully understood.

By midnight the guests had departed, the table was bare, but Fyodor still hadn’t taken his arm from Medea’s shoulder. “Well, then, sister,” he said in Greek. “Do you like my house?”

“Very much, Fyodor, very much,” she said, lowering her head.

Elena was clearing the dishes away and had long ago sent Galya off to bed. Medea wanted to help, but Fyodor held her back.

“Sit here, she can manage by herself. What do you think about my youngest? Did you recognize our blood?”

He asked in Greek, and this shared blood of theirs, mingled in the boy with that of someone else, made Medea’s face flush, and she lowered her head even more. “I did. Even the little finger.”

“You recognized it all, but she is a holy fool like you and sees nothing,” he said in an unexpectedly mean and harsh tone.

Medea stood up and, in order to terminate the conversation, replied to him in Russian: “It’s late, brother. Sleep well. And you sleep well too, Elena.”

She couldn’t sleep for a long time between the hard starched sheets, her head resting on the plump pillows, and tried putting together words heard long ago, fleeting glances, words not said, and having put everything together realized that the secret of Alexandra’s last child was no secret from anyone apart from herself, and that to judge by everything, even Elena knew, but for all her garrulousness had spared Medea the knowledge. But was Elena really as trusting as herself? Or did she perhaps know full well that she had taken into her house a half brother of her own children?

“Wise Elena, greathearted Elena,” Medea thought. “She wants to know nothing about it.”

Her unexpected discovery, which might have made the friends even closer if they had spoken about it, kept Medea from sleeping.

It got light outside the window, the birds began singing, and Medea started quietly getting ready to go to church. She had loved Palm Sunday ever since she was a child.

She got to the church on Hospital Street too early, an hour before the service began, before the doors were even open. The market, however, was already humming and she walked past the stalls, looking absently to either side.

There were almost no women among the traders: they were all Uzbek men in thick coats. The customers, however, were all women, and mainly Russians. In fact, Tashkent seemed to Medea to be a completely Russian city. She had seen Uzbeks only at the station on the day she arrived and at the bazaar. Living in the Russian center, she had not got as far as the old city with the Asian layout she was so familiar with from the old Tatar Crimea, and especially from Bakhchisarai.

“They’ve beaten everyone down,” she thought. “It’s turned into a huge provincial Russian town.”

She made a circuit of the bazaar and approached the church again. It was open now. By the church box an old woman in a white head scarf who looked like a fat rabbit was scuffling about. On the box stood a tumbler in which there were several sprigs of sparrow-grey pussy willow.

“Ah, it grows here too,” Medea thought with pleasure.

She took two scraps of paper, and writing on one “May they rest in peace,” she wrote out the names in their customary order: Father Dionisy, Father Varfolomey, Harlampy, Antonida, Georgii, Magdalina . . . The other, still-living part of the family she listed on another piece of paper under the words “May they be well.”

Every time in this place, writing out the names of her dear ones in large copperplate letters, she had exactly the same feeling: as if she were sailing on a river and in front of her, like a spreading triangle, were her brothers and sisters, their young and infant children, and behind, fanning out in the same way but much longer, until they disappeared in a rippling of the water, were her dead parents, her grandparents, all the ancestors whose names she knew, and those whose names had been lost in time long past. She had no difficulty at all in containing all these many, many people within herself, the quick and the dead, and she wrote each name mindfully, recalling the face, the presence, even, if such a thing is possible, the taste of that person.

It was at this unhurried labor that Elena found her. She touched her shoulder. They kissed. Elena looked about her: the people in the church were pathetic looking, the old women so ugly.

Through the sweet smell of the incense came the unmistakable smell of dirty, worn-out clothing and old, unhealthy bodies. The old woman standing next to them smelled of cats.

“Can there really be this kind of poverty and squalor even in Tiflis, in the little Armenian church in Solulaki, which we went up to along that terraced street?” Elena wondered. How fine and solemn it had been when she was a child, when her grandmother in her lilac velvet hat with the silk ribbons tied under her soft chin, her mother elegant in a light-colored dress, and her sister Anait were standing at the front of the laypeople, opposite the sole icon of Hripsime and Gayane hanging on a whitewashed wall, and everything smelled of wax, incense, and flowers.

A voice rang out, “Blessed is the Kingdom . . .” The service began.

Elena looked at Medea, who was standing firmly with her eyes closed and her head bowed. She possessed the art of standing for a long time without changing her position, not shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

“She stands like a rock in the midst of the sea,” Elena thought tenderly, and suddenly shed tears for Medea’s fate, for the bitterness of her loneliness, for the curse of childlessness, for the wrongs of deception and betrayal. Medea, however, was thinking nothing of the sort. Three old women’s rattly voices were chanting the Beatitudes, and new tears suddenly flowed from Elena’s eyes, no longer for Medea but for all of life. It was an acute experience in which there merged a tenfold sense of the loss of her motherland, the living closeness of her dead parents and of her son killed in the war, and it was a happy moment of complete self-forgetfulness, a momentary filling of her heart not with her own, vain preoccupations, but with something from God, something light, and her heart ached so greatly from this overflowing that she said to herself, “Lord, take me like Sephora, here am I.”

But nothing of the sort happened. Not only did she not fall down dead; on the contrary, the moment of acute happiness passed and she found that the service was already halfway through. The priest was whispering inaudible words which she had known by heart from childhood.

Elena suddenly felt bored. Her legs ached and her heart was weary. She felt like going out but couldn’t leave Medea.

The priest came forward with the communion cup: “Come in the fear of God and in faith,” but nobody came and he went off into the altar.

Barely waiting for Medea to kiss the cross, Elena came out of the church. They wished each other well on this festival day, and kissed solemnly and chastely.

Not one word did Medea say to Elena about her bitter hurt, and right up until death parted them, they would write tender letters to each other, full of dreams, memories, impressions, announcements of the birth of new children, and new recipes for jam.

Medea left three days later. Fyodor tried to persuade his sister to stay but, seeing the inexorable look in her eyes, bought her an air ticket and on Spy Wednesday took her to the airport.

It was the first time in Medea’s life that she had flown in an airplane, but she proved completely unmoved by the event. She wanted to get back home as soon as possible. Elena, sensing her impatience, was even slightly hurt. Now the letter lying in the bottom of Medea’s rucksack had entirely ceased to trouble her. The plane landed in Moscow, and Medea spent eight hours at Vnukovo Airport waiting for the connecting flight to Simferopol. She didn’t telephone Alexandra. Then or ever.