Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 13

Medea had a partial changeover on the fifth of May. Nike, Katya, and Artyom left in the morning, and after dinner the Lithuanians arrived: Gvidas, the son of Medea’s brother Dimitry, who had died three years previously from neglected heart disease, his wife Aldona, and their disabled son Vitalis.

The little boy was paralyzed, permanently seized in a painful convulsion. He moved awkwardly and could hardly speak. Gvidas and Aldona, crushed by their son’s illness, were mesmerized by one agonizing and unanswerable question: why us?

They came here every year in early spring, lived with Medea for a couple of weeks until the beginning of the swimming season, and then Gvidas took them to Sudak, rented a convenient apartment in the former German colony beside the sea from Aunt Polly, a friend of Medea’s, and left. He reappeared in mid-July to take them from the heat back to the cool of the Baltic coast.

Vitalis passionately loved the sea and felt happy only in water. He also loved Liza and Alik, the only children he was friends with. It was difficult to say whether he remembered them during the winter months, but the first time he met them again the following spring was a special day for him.

The adults prepared the children for Vitalis’s arrival, and they were primed with good intentions. Liza selected the best animal to give him from her menagerie of dogs and bears. Alik built a palace in a heap of sand for Vitalis to demolish. They had a game which consisted of Alik building things and Vitalis knocking them down, and it made both of them happy.

Masha moved to Samuel’s room, freeing the larger Blue Room for the Lithuanians. She had been in a state of chaotic inspiration since morning: words and lines of poetry were overwhelming her, barely giving her time to commit them to memory. There gradually formed, “Accept too that beyond all measure, like heaven’s grace on heaven’s grace, like rain, like snow, like faith to treasure, like that with which we can’t keep pace . . .” That was all there was so far.

At the same time, and quite independently, Masha was comforting Liza, who was doing her best to be a big girl but soon after her mother’s departure did nevertheless burst into tears; then she fed the children, put them to bed, and, abandoning the dirty dishes, lay down in Samuel’s room with the blinds drawn, rolled herself up in a ball, and mentally reran the whole of yesterday evening from the barmaid’s gold jacket to the movement with which Butonov had rotated the dial of the telephone. She recalled too the way her body had responded to that first chance touch from him on their outing, when her arm had burned and she had become feverish.

“It’s a turning point in my destiny, another turning point,” she thought. “The first was when my parents drove out that morning onto the Mozhaisk highway when I was seven; the second was when Alik came over to me at the studio when I was sixteen; and now again, at twenty-five. A change in my life. A watershed of my destiny. I was waiting for it, I had a presentiment. Dear Alik, the only person out of all of them who could understand. Poor Alik, he has a better understanding than anyone else of destiny, a feeling for destiny. There’s nothing I can do. It can’t be undone. I can’t help it.”

And neither could anybody do anything to help her: she had a feeling for destiny all right, but no experience in adultery.

“Love comes sometimes as a guest, a mistress, sometimes as a horse thief, or a horse, sometimes at midday comes as coolness, at midnight comes as fire and force . . .” She fell asleep.

In the evening it was party time as usual. Instead of Nike and her guitar, the proceedings were presided over by Gvidas the Hun with his red mustache and by his wife Aldona with her mannish face and undulating feminine locks manufactured at the hair salon.

Next to Georgii sat Nora. Stilted conversation, awkward pauses. They were missing Nike, whose mere presence rendered any social gathering smooth and relaxed. Medea was pleased. Gvidas had as usual brought presents from Lithuania and had, in addition, given Medea a decent sum of money to repair the house.

Now he and Georgii were discussing the water supply. There was a water main in the Lower Village, but it had never been extended to the Upper Village, although this had been promised for many years. There were not many houses here, and they all used imported water that was kept either in old reservoir wells or in tanks. Georgii didn’t have too much faith in the pumping station and doubted whether the water would make it up to them.

Aldona often went out of the kitchen to listen at the door of the Blue Room and see whether Vitalis was asleep. Usually he woke up several times a night with a shriek, but now, after the exhausting journey, he was sleeping well.

Masha took no part in the conversation. It was past ten and she hadn’t yet lost hope that Butonov might look in. Seeing Nora get up, she was pleased: “Shall I walk back with you?”

Georgii stopped talking in midsentence before regaining his presence of mind: “I’ll see her back, Masha.”

“I want a walk anyway,” Masha said, getting up.

They walked in silence and in single file to the Kravchuks’ house. They stopped at the back gate. It was dark and quiet in Nora’s cottage. Tanya was asleep, and Nora regretted having left so early. Georgii had it on the tip of his tongue to say something to her, but wasn’t quite sure what, and in any case Masha was crowding them.

Masha looked closely at the Kravchuks’ profitable homestead with its sheds, annexes, and terraces, but could see light coming only from the owners’ house.

“I’ll go and see Aunt Ada.”

She knocked at the Kravchuks’ door and went in. Ada was reclining in front of the television with her pink bosom boiling over à la Madame Recamier.

“Oy, Mash, is that you? Come on in, dearie. Can’t say we’ve seen much of you. Nike came to visit us, but you’re too up in the air. Oy, you’re so scraggy, look at you!” Ada commented disapprovingly.

“I’ve always been like that, forty-eight kilograms . . .”

“. . . of skin and bones,” Ada retorted.

Masha came to an agreement about renting a room for a Moscow friend from the first of June, and asked whether Mikhail Stepanovich could meet her in Simferopol.

“How should I know? He’s got a chart. Ask him yourself. He’s in the shed talking about something with the lodger. It’s bedtime, but there they are . . .”

Like all the local people, Ada went to bed early.

Masha went over to the shed. The door was half-open and the light, hung on a long cord from a nail on the wall, threw an oval patch of light in which two heads were lowered: those of Mikhail Stepanovich and Butonov.

“Well, what is it?” Mikhail asked without turning around.

“Uncle Misha, I came to ask about a car.”

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, surprised. “I thought it was Ada.”

Butonov looked at her out of the light into the darkness, and Masha couldn’t tell whether he had recognized her or not. She stepped into the light and smiled.

His mouth was clamped shut. Two braids of hair not held by the rubber band were hanging down, and he pushed them aside with the back of a hand which was gleaming with black oil. His eyes said nothing.

Masha was frightened: Was this him? Had she dreamed being scorched yesterday by the moon?

She forgot why she had come. Actually she did know why: to see him, to touch him, and obtain proof of something which by its nature can be neither proved nor disproved—something that has happened.

“What car is that?” Mikhail Stepanovich asked, and Masha came to herself.

“To collect my friend from Simferopol.”

“When?”

“On the first of June. She’s going to be living with you, in the guest room.”

“Hey-ho!” Mikhail Stepanovich hemmed. “We might not live till then. Come back nearer the time.”

Masha hesitated, waiting to see whether Butonov would say anything, or at least look in her direction; but he was frowning at the metal, shifted his shoulders inside a taut T-shirt, didn’t look up but smiled wryly to himself: Kitty’s little pussy was on fire!

“Right then,” Masha whispered, and going outside, leaned against the wall of the shed.

“The engine’s absolutely fine, Stepanovich,” she heard Butonov’s voice.

“What did I say?” he responded. “It’s the spark plugs pinking, that’s what I reckon.”

“Didn’t he recognize me? Or did he not want to recognize me?” Masha agonized, unwilling to reconcile herself to either possibility. No third possibility suggested itself. It was dark. Yesterday’s mischievous moon was lighting up other hills and mounds; other lovers were disporting themselves in its theatrical light, its frozen magnesium flash.

Barely holding back her tears, she returned home not by the short path but over the Hub, to convince herself that at least the place was real where everything had happened yesterday. What was going on? Could it be that for one person something could signal a changing of their destiny, an abyss, a rending of the heavens, while the other simply had not noticed anything had happened?

She sat down cross-legged in the very middle of the Hub. Her left hand pressed down on the ground, and her right pressed into her own plaid handkerchief which had lain here for twenty-four hours and whose crumpled, starchy texture did indeed prove that yesterday’s event had taken place. She finally began to cry, and, having cried a little, from the force of a habit of many years of translating her thoughts and feelings into more or less short, rhymed lines of poetry, she murmured: “I’ll cancel all I cancel can—myself, and you, and cares and caring, intoxicated lover’s daring, inveterately sober life.”

It didn’t quite work, but it had something . . . “I’ll cancel all I cancel can, forgetfulness, forgetting self, myself . . .”

It didn’t make anything clearer, but she felt a bit better. Shoving the handkerchief into her pocket, she went into the house. Everybody was asleep. She went into the children’s room, which was all faint moving currents of light and darkness from the striped curtains. The children were sleeping. Alik asked clearly, without waking, “Masha?” and murmured something incomprehensible.

Masha went to bed in Samuel’s room next door without washing her feet or switching on the light. She couldn’t sleep, the lines of poetry wouldn’t compose themselves. Regretting that Nike had left and there was no one to share her new experiences with, Masha lit the table lamp and took from her pile of books the most dog-eared one: it was consoling Dickens.

Soon she heard a quiet knock at the window. She moved the dark blind aside—the little window was blocked by Butonov. “Are you going to open the door or the window?”

“You won’t get through the window,” Masha replied.

“My head will, and the rest can follow,” Butonov answered in a voice which sounded grumpy.

Masha pulled back the bolt. “Wait, I’ll move the table away.” Butonov climbed in. He looked in a bad mood and said not a word, and she only gasped weakly when he pressed her to himself with both arms.

To the touch she really was like Rosa. The heavens were again rent for Masha, and the gate into them proved to be not at all in the place where she had diligently and consciously sought it, leafing through Pascal, Berdyaev, and the cinnamon-scented wisdom of the East.

Now Masha slipped easily, without the least effort, through to the place where time was absent and there was only an unearthly space, a high alpine space radiating a brilliant light, with movement free of the necessity of following the laws of physics, with flight and sailing and total forgetfulness of all that was beyond the bounds of the sole reality of the outer and inner surfaces of a body which had dissolved with happiness.

She was slowly sliding down from the last summit, a fold of skin on his arm firmly squeezed between her lips, when she heard the artlessly plebeian enquiry “I don’t suppose you’ve got a cigarette, have you?”

“I have,” she replied, her delicate foot coming down to earth on the boarded floor.

She felt around with her foot—the cigarette packet was somewhere on the floor. She found it, reached down, lit up the cigarette herself, and passed it to him.

“Actually, I don’t usually smoke,” he told her confidentially.

“I didn’t think you would come. You didn’t even look at me,” she replied, lighting a second cigarette.

“You pissed me off. Why did you have to come bouncing in on me like that? I really hate it,” he explained straightforwardly. “I’m tired. I’ll go.”

He got up, pulled on his clothes, and she moved back the blind. It was getting light.

“Are you going to let me out the door, or do I have to climb through the window?” he asked.

“Through the window,” she laughed. “It’s closer for you.”

Vitalis’s amusements were wholly infantile: He threw everything that came into his hands down on the ground, so Aldona always had enameled rather than glass cups and plates for him. He enjoyed breaking toys, and would laugh in a reedy little voice while tearing up books. Sometimes he would have fits of aggressiveness, and then he would wave his little clenched fists and scream with rage.

By being born, the boy had brought a lot of dissension into the lives of those around him. Gvidas was still profoundly at odds with his mother Aushra, who had in any case been against his early marriage to Aldona, who was much older and who, on top of that, had a child from her first marriage. At his mother’s insistence Gvidas delayed getting married for a long time; but he married immediately when Aldona came out of the maternity hospital with her incurably sick child, something that was established within minutes of his birth. Aushra hadn’t even seen her grandson.

Aldona’s elder son, Donatas, put up with the dubious advantages a healthy child has over a sick one for two years, but gradually progressed from secret jealousy to open hostility toward his brother, to whom he invariably referred as “the damned crab,” and went to live with his father. Shortly afterward, unable to settle in his father’s new family, he moved to his paternal grandmother’s in Kaunas.

Poor Aldona had this to put up with too. Once a week, on Sundays, with bags she had packed with food and toys, she would set off for Kaunas on the first train of the day, returning on the last one. Her former mother-in-law, who had many sorrows of her own, as a Lithuanian smallholder, an exile, and a widow, accepted the food without thanks. Hiding the happy or greedy gleam in his eyes, handsome, broad-shouldered Donatas would take the expensive toys out of her hands and show her his neat notebooks, full of boring “Good’s” combined with an equal quantity of “Average’s.” She helped him with his mathematics and Lithuanian, and then he saw her as far as the gate. Grandmother wouldn’t let him go farther than that.

With a heavy heart Aldona left Vilnius in the morning, leaving the little one with Gvidas, and with a heavy heart she left Kaunas in the evening; but the bitterest thing was the feeling that she was a means to an end: everybody needed her care, her help, her efforts, but nobody needed herself or her love. For the younger one she was still a womb providing nourishment and warmth; the older one seemed only to put up with her for the sake of her presents.

Gvidas, who had married her after a major reversal in love here, in the Crimea, had a smooth, steady relationship with her, devoid of emotional attachment.

“It’s just too Lithuanian,” she had said to him in a rare moment of irritation.

“But how else, Aldona? It’s the only way we can get through this. It’s only possible by being Lithuanian,” he confirmed, and she, a Lithuanian born and bred and with a strain of Teutonic blood, was suddenly seared by an unusual feeling: “If only I were a Georgian, or an Armenian, or even a Jewess.”

But she did not receive the gift either of the joyous relief of wailing, or of the wringing of hands, or of liberating prayer— only of endurance, rocklike peasant endurance. Indeed, she was an agronomist. Before the birth of Vitalis she had managed a hothouse enterprise. In the first year of her child’s life, deprived of her usual green solace, she suffered cruelly, painstakingly learning to be the mother of a chronic invalid, not letting her twisted babe out of her arms. When she did lower him into his cot, he emitted a faint rasping, wholly nonhuman sound.

The second year, in early spring, she made cardboard flowerpots, sowed seeds, and created a vegetable garden beside the window. She sank her fingers into the soil, and all the bad static electricity generated by her superhuman endurance and tension flowed away into the crumbly sandy-brown border planted with the arrows of spring onions and the rosettelike tops of radishes. The more acidic vegetables grew particularly well in her borders.

By then they had already moved to a half-built house in a suburb of Vilnius. Gvidas put up a high fence even before building began: neighbors’ eyes focused on their little cripple were unendurable.

Gvidas put all his passion into the building. The house was a fine one, and life became a little easier in it. It was in this house that Vitalis got to his feet. It would be too much to say that he learned to walk: rather, he began to rise out of his sitting position and to get around.

Changes for the better were also to be seen in the boy after he had been living at the seaside, and Gvidas and Aldona did not cancel their annual pilgrimage to the Crimea after the building work was completed, although it was difficult for them to leave their house for the sake of something as frivolous as a holiday.

Dozens of small children had passed through Medea’s hands, including Dimitry, the late grandfather of the little freak. Her arms knew the inconsistent feel of the weight of a child’s body, from the eight-pound newborn baby, when the bundle of the little sleeping bag, the blanket, and diapers seems greater than what they contain, to the sturdy one-year-old who has not yet learned to walk and who stretches your arms in the course of the day like a sack weighing several stones. Then the little fatty grows up, learns to walk and run, and three years later, having added a few insignificant kilograms, now rushes to throw himself at your neck and again seems as light as a feather.

And at ten years of age, when a child became seriously ill and lay in a fever, unconscious, with a rash, he was so heavy you could hardly lift him when he needed to be moved over into another bed.

Medea had made another small discovery while looking after other people’s children: up until the age of four all of them were engaging, bright, acute, and sensible, but between four and seven something elusive but important occurred, and in the last summer before school, when the parents invariably brought their future schoolchild to the Crimea, as if it had to be inspected by Medea, some proved to be indubitably clever now and for the rest of time, while others were simply not too bright.

Of Alexandra’s children Medea put Sergei and Nike down as clever, while Masha was under a question mark; and of Elena’s the clever one, who in addition had a captivating personality, was Alexander who was killed in the war. Neither Georgii nor Natasha, in Medea’s view, were clever, but she valued kindness and good character no less. Medea had a saying, which Nike was fond of quoting: “Cleverness covers any failing.”

In this season it was Vitalis who was particularly close to Medea’s heart. He was the youngest Sinoply—the son of adopted Shurik was due to appear in the world two weeks later in the form of Athanasii Sinoply, so for the time being he did not count.

In the evenings Medea would often hold Vitalis on her knee, pressing his back to her bosom and stroking his little head and sluggish neck. He liked being stroked. Touching probably partly compensated him for the lack of interaction through speech.

“I’ll let them go off to Yalta on Saturday and Sunday,” Medea decided to herself. “Aldona can go for walks in the Botanical Gardens, and they can stay overnight with Kastello.”

Medea had an old friend, Kastello, who for a good twenty years or so had been in charge of some interminable building program in the Nikitsky Botanical Gardens. Medea would also have liked Aldona to liberate herself from the eternal slavery of motherhood, and to sit late at night with her, drinking some of the rowanberry or apple vodka she had stored away, and sigh, “God knows, I’m completely worn out.” And she would complain and perhaps cry, and then Medea, silently taking a few sips from the heavy liqueur glass, would explain to her that suffering and calamities are given to us so that the question “Why us?” should be replaced by the question “What is this for?” And then sterile attempts to find a culprit can end, and attempts at selfjustification, gathering evidence of one’s own guiltlessness; and then the law devised by cruel and unmerciful people that punishment is proportionate to sin would be seen to be invalid, because God does not have punishments he visits upon innocent little children.

Perhaps too Medea would have told her in quiet and simple words about various events in life which occur not because of unfairness but just because of the nature of life. She would have remembered the most wonderful of Elena’s children, Alexander, killed at the front, and little Pavlik who had drowned, and the little newborn girl who had been taken together with her own mother, and possibly after a while everything inside Aldona would have shifted of its own accord, simply with the passing of time, in the right direction, and she would have been healed just by getting used to things, a cure which is as strong as a callus.

But Medea was never the first to start a conversation. She needed an invitation, a lead-in, and of course a ready willingness to listen.

A few days later, after the lunchtime nap which divided the children’s day into two unequal halves, a perambulating brigade of three mothers, Masha, Nora, and Aldona, and four children, after various hesitancies over the route, reached the hospital. Vitalis was usually taken out in a wheelchair, his back to the road and facing his mother. On this occasion his wheelchair was being pushed by Liza and Alik. Medea saw them through the window and came out onto the porch.

Liza, squatting down in front of Vitalis, was prizing his little fingers open, singing, “Thieving magpie was baking some bread, thieving magpie’s babies got fed . . .” And gently waggling his little finger, she squealed: “But she didn’t give any to this one!”

He shrieked piercingly, and there was no telling whether he was laughing or crying.

“He likes it,” Aldona explained, with her invariable awkward smile.

Medea looked over toward the children, adjusted the shawl wrapped around her head, looked at Liza again, and said to Aldona: “I’m so pleased, Aldona, that you bring Vitalis here. Our little Liza is a willful, spoiled child, but she plays with him so well. Let her spend lots of time with him. It will be good for everyone.” Medea sighed and said, perhaps reflecting an old sorrow, perhaps in pity: “It’s so sad: everybody wants to love the strong and the good-looking. Off you go home, girls, I’ll be back soon.”

They headed off back home. Masha picked a thick green blade of grass with a sweet stem and chewed it. What had Medea meant when she talked about the strong and good-looking? Was it a hint about her guest in the night? No, that wasn’t like Medea. She didn’t hint. She either said something straight out or kept her peace.

Butonov came to Masha every night, knocking on the window, squeezing each of his brawny shoulders through its narrow opening in turn, completely filling the space of the small room with himself, and all of Masha’s body and soul, and departed at dawn, leaving her each time immersed in a tingling sensation of the newness of her whole being and of renewal of her life. She fell into a brief, potent sleep in which he was still present, to wake a couple of hours later and get up in a ghostlike state of infinite strength and equally infinite weakness. She woke the children, cooked, washed, and everything happened easily and by itself, only the glass tumblers got broken more often than usual, and the silver-plated spoons fell soundlessly onto the kitchen’s earthen floor. Imperfect lines of poetry appeared in the bubble-like space, turned sideways and floated off, wagging their awkward tails behind them.

Butonov for his part used no words other than the most elementary: “Come here . . . move . . . wait . . . I need to smoke.” He didn’t even once say he would come the next day.

One evening he visited Medea in the kitchen. He drank tea and talked to Georgii, who had been putting off his departure from one day to the next but had finally packed his bags. Masha tried to catch Butonov’s eye from the dark corner of the kitchen, but the air hung motionless around his beloved face and his motionless shoulders, and no indications of intimacy were forthcoming. Masha was in despair: could this be the same man who came to her in the night? She speculated briefly on the possibility of an incubus.

Saying goodbye to Georgii and not saying the least word to her, he left, but came again that night, secretly, and everything was as it had been, only when they were resting on the shore after their passion had receded, he said, “My first real lover was like you. She was a horse-rider.”

Masha asked him to tell her about the horse-rider. He smiled. “What is there to tell? She was a good horsewoman, thin, bowlegged. Before I met her, I thought making babies was just so unbelievably boring. She disappeared, although my guess is that her husband killed her.”

“Was she beautiful?” Masha asked, almost reverently.

“Of course she was.” He put his hand on her face, touching the cheekbones and her chin, which narrowed lower down. “All my women are beautiful, Masha. Except my wife.”

For a long time after he left, she pictured first the horsewoman, then his wife, then herself—as a horsewoman.

Three vast nights passed, as long as three lives, and three ghostly days, and on the fourth day Butonov arrived unexpectedly, while Aldona was washing the dinner dishes in the kitchen and Masha was hanging up the children’s laundry by the well. He came down and sat silently on a flat rock.

“What’s wrong?” Masha asked, frightened, and threw some pajamas she had just wrung out back into the bowl.

“I’m leaving, Masha. I’ve come to say goodbye,” he said levelly.

She was horrified.

“Forever?”

He laughed.

“Will you never come to me again?”

“Well, perhaps you’ll come to see me some time in Rastorguevo, eh?” He slowly got up, brushed off his white trousers, and kissed her tight-lipped mouth. “What is it? Are you upset?”

She was silent. He glanced at his watch and said, “Okay, let’s go. I’ve got fifteen minutes to fill.”

For the first time they went into Samuel’s room by the light of day, successfully avoiding Aldona, who was intently scrubbing plates, and fifteen minutes later he left for real.

“The way gods depart. As if he had never existed,” Masha thought, hugging the striped floor covering which had skidded right across the room with her. “I just hope Alik comes soon.”

Now, when everything had ended just as suddenly as it had begun, and all she had left was a thin pile of coarse grey half-sheets of paper written all over with a blotchy ballpoint pen, she wanted to read Alik her new poems as soon as possible and tell him, just him, about how the roof had fallen in on her.

At this moment Alik was approaching Sudak, and Butonov, heading toward him, was being driven to Simferopol in Mikhail Stepanovich’s old Moskvich in order to catch the same plane Alik had arrived on and return to Moscow that evening. Medea was on her way back from work and was the first to see Alik walking up from the Lower Village—wearing a navy-blue peaked cap and sunglasses on his town dweller’s untanned face. Shortly afterward Alik was spotted also by Masha, who was walking with the children in the high grass of the Hub.

With shrieks of “Alik! Alik! Daddy’s come!” they rushed down the road. He stopped, cast the small tightly packed rucksack from his shoulders, and threw his arms wide open for a communal hug. Masha got there first and threw her arms around his neck with the sincerest joy. Liza and Little Alik were jumping up and down with shrieks of delight.

By the time Medea came up to them, half the rucksack had been turned out. Masha had opened one of the letters he had brought her. Liza was pressing to her person a bag of toffees and a pale-looking doll the size of a mouse, a present from Nike, and little Alik was pulling open a box with a new game. Big Alik was trying to stuff everything that had been pulled out of the rucksack back into it.

He kissed Medea three times and immediately pressed a cardboard box into her hands, his usual professional contribution: “An aid package from our Red Cross to your Red Cross.”

There were various medicines which were in short supply, a couple of packs of plasters, and some standard rubber gloves which it had been impossible to obtain in Sudak last year.

“Thank you, Alik. I’m glad you’ve come.”

“Oh, Medea Georgievna, I’ve brought you such a wonderful book!” he interrupted her. “It’s a surprise! You’re looking really well.” He put his hand on top of his son’s head: “Alik, you’ve grown a whole head higher.” He opened his fingers a thimble’s breadth: “A mosquito’s head.”

Masha was shifting impatiently from one foot to the other and jumping up and down: “Let’s go now, Alik. At last!”

Medea went on ahead. “How strange. Masha really is glad her husband has come. She’s not embarrassed, she doesn’t look guilty. Does marital fidelity mean nothing at all to them? As if this athlete didn’t come to her every night. And I, old poker that I am,” Medea smiled to herself. “Well, what business is it of mine? It’s just I like Alik. He’s like Sam: not his facial features, but the quickness of his dark eyes, his liveliness, and the same unhurtful quick wit. I must be susceptible to Jews, the way other people are susceptible to colds or constipation. Especially to the grasshopper kind, thin and agile. It is interesting, though: how is Masha going to get out of her romance now?”

Medea did not know that Butonov had already left, and supposed ruefully that she would again have to watch other people’s comings and goings in the night, their love trysts and their lying.

“How lucky I am that I was completely blind to all this side of things when it involved me. And now thirty years have passed, thank God, since that summer. There now, they forgot to say it in the Beatitudes: Blessed are the idiots.”

Medea looked around: Alik was carrying Liza on his back and the rucksack in his hand, his white teeth gleaming in a broad smile. He didn’t look at all like an idiot.