Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 1

Medea Mendez had the maiden name of Sinoply and was, if we disqualify her younger sister Alexandra who moved to Moscow in the late 1920s, the last remaining pure-blooded Greek of a family settled since time immemorial on the Tauride coast, a land still mindful of its ties with Ancient Greece. She was also the last member of the family who could speak passably the medieval Pontic Greek which survived only in the Tauride colonies and lagged one thousand years behind modern Greek, the same length of time it was separated from the language of antiquity.

There had long been no one for her to talk to in this worn-out, resonant language from which the majority of philosophical and religious terms had sprung and which retained to this day a pristine literalness in words like metaphorisis, which meant “transportation.” The other Tauride Greeks of Medea’s generation had either died or been deported, but she had lived on in the Crimea by the grace of God, as she supposed, but partly no doubt also because of the Spanish surname bequeathed by her late husband, a jolly Jewish dentist with vices which were minor but not insignificant, and virtues which were great but meticulously concealed.

She was a widow for many years but didn’t remarry, ever the stereotypical figure in black, and the color suited her very well. For the first ten years she wore only black, then relented and allowed a scattering of white spots or small polka dots, but still on black. She wound a black shawl around her head in a way that was neither Russian nor rustic and fastened it with two knots, one of which hung to the right of her forehead. The long end of the shawl fell away in small classical folds to her shoulders and covered her wrinkled neck. Her eyes were brown, clear, and dry, and the dark skin of her face also fell in small dry folds. When she sat framed in the painted registration window of the Village’s little hospital wearing her back-fastening medical white coat, she looked like a portrait Goya had omitted to paint.

She entered notes in the hospital records in large, sweeping handwriting, and she stalked the land in these parts no less sweepingly. She thought nothing of rising before daybreak on a Sunday, putting the twenty kilometers to Theodosia behind her, standing through the liturgy, and walking back home toward evening.

For local people Medea Mendez had long been a part of the landscape. When she was not sitting on her stool in the white frame of the registration window, her dark figure was to be seen out on the eastern hills or on the rocky slopes to the west of the Village. She was not strolling idly but gathering sage, thyme, mountain mint, barberry, mushrooms, and rose hips, and she did not neglect the carnelian, the layered and structured rock crystal, or the dark antique coins with which the dull soil of this minor arena of world history was brimming.

She knew the region near and far like the inside of her own buffet, and not only remembered when and where a useful plant could be picked, but also noted to herself how the green mantle was gradually changing over the decades: the runners of mountain mint advancing down the spring flood channels on the eastern slope of Mount Kiyan; the barberry being killed by a canker which ate away its lower branches; the chicory attacking underground, its rhizomes stifling the delicate spring flowers.

The Crimea had always been generous in yielding up its treasures to Medea, and in return she appreciatively remembered every detail about every one of her finds: the time, the place, and all the nuances of feeling she had experienced, beginning with July 1, 1906, when as a little girl she had discovered, in the middle of the abandoned road to Ak-Mechet, a magic circle of nineteen identical-sized little mushrooms with pale green caps, the local variant of the white boletus. The most wonderful of all her nonedible finds was a flat gold ring with a lackluster aquamarine, cast at her feet by the sea as it was subsiding after a storm, on a little beach near Koktebel on August 20, 1916, her sixteenth birthday. She was still wearing that ring, which had become deeply embedded in her finger and hadn’t been taken off for some thirty years now.

She could feel the goodness of this land through the soles of her feet. It was in a poor state now, but she wouldn’t have changed it for anywhere else and had been outside the Crimea only twice in her life, for a total of six weeks.

Medea was born in Theodosia, or more precisely in a great rambling house, once well proportioned, in the Greek colony which had long ago been swallowed up by the outskirts of Theodosia. By the time of her birth the house had lost its original elegance, sprouting annexes, terraces, and verandahs to accommodate the rapid expansion of the family in the first decade of a century which had such a cheerful beginning.

The fast growth of the family was accompanied by the slow bankruptcy of her grandfather, Harlampy Sinoply, a wealthy merchant who owned four cargo ships registered to what was then the new port of Theodosia. In old age Harlampy lost his earlier driving and insatiable avarice, and looked on in wonder as fate, which had sorely tried him with many years of waiting for an heir, and visited on him six stillborn babies and innumerable miscarriages from both his wives, prodigally endowed his only son, Georgii (whom he had managed to produce only after thirty years of tribulation), with progeny. Georgii’s fruitfulness might, however, have been the merit of Harlampy’s second wife, Antonida, who walked in pilgrimage to Kiev in fulfilment of a vow and, having given birth to and weaned her son, fasted in thanksgiving for the rest of her life. Or perhaps his son’s fecundity came from the scrawny redheaded bride, Matilda, whom he had brought from Batumi and who entered the house already scandalously with child and thereafter gave birth to a round-headed baby once every two years, in late summer, with unfathomable but cosmic regularity.

As the number of his grandchildren increased, old Harlampy declined, growing kindlier until by the end of his life he had lost along with his wealth even the appearance of a hard, authoritarian, and shrewd merchant. His blood proved strong, however, not yielding to other lines, and those of his posterity who were not winnowed by the bloodthirsty times inherited robustness of spirit and talent from him, while his renowned avarice manifested itself in his male issue in great energy and a passion for building. In the women, as in Medea, it turned into thrift, a heightened interest in material things, and a practical resourcefulness.

Harlampy’s family was blessed with so many members it might have provided an admirable subject for a research project into the distribution of hereditary characteristics. No suitably motivated geneticist appeared, but Medea with her characteristic urge to bring system and order to everything, from the teacups on the table to the clouds in the sky, did more than once in her life, for fun, rank her brothers and sisters in order of the gingerishness of their hair—in her mind’s eye, necessarily, since she could not remember the entire family gathered together in one place at any one time. One or another of the elder brothers was invariably absent. Their mother’s coppery hair was passed on to some extent to all of them, but only Medea herself and the youngest of her brothers, Dimitry, were radically redheaded. Alexandra’s hair was a complex mahogany hue, and even had the highlights of mahogany.

Other family traits were passed on: the stunted little finger of their grandfather was occasionally inherited but, for some reason, only by the boys; their grandmother’s earlobe had been attached to her cheek, and she had had exceptional night vision. These features Medea inherited. All these family peculiarities and a few less obvious ones were at play among Harlampy’s descendants.

Even the family’s fertility split clearly along two lines. Some, like Harlampy, struggled for years to bring forth even the tiniest child. Others, in contrast, scattered copper small change about the world without giving the matter a second thought. From 1910, Harlampy lay in the Greek cemetery of Theodosia, at its highest point, with a view of the bay where right up until the Second World War the last two of his steamers plied the waves, registered as in earlier times to the port of Theodosia.

Many years later the childless Medea would gather her numerous nephews and nieces, grandnephews and grandnieces together in her Crimean home and subject them to quiet, unscientific observation. It was assumed that she loved them all dearly, although what kind of love a childless woman has for other people’s children is uncertain. At all events, she took a lively interest in them, and this even grew stronger when she was old.

The seasonal influxes of her extended family were not burdensome to Medea, but neither was her solitude in autumn and winter. The first relatives usually arrived in late April when, after the rains of February and the gales of March, the Crimean spring sprouted from the earth with the lilac blooming of wisteria, the pink of tamarisks, and the Chinese yellow of the broom.

The first group visit was usually brief: a few days around the First of May holiday, with one or two people staying on until the ninth. Then there would be a short break, and in the last ten days of May the girls would congregate: the young mothers with preschool-age children. There were around thirty younger members of the family, so a roster would be drawn up the preceding winter: there was no way the four-room house could accommodate more than twenty people at one time.

The taxi-drivers of Theodosia and Simferopol who transported vacationers for a living were very familiar with Medea’s house. Sometimes they gave her family members a modest discount, but specified that they would not take them up the hill if it was raining but set them down in the Lower Village.

Medea did not believe in chance, and her life had been full of portentous meetings, strange coincidences, and surprises which came together in a quite incredible manner. Someone she had once met would return many years later and change the whole direction of her life; threads would be drawn tighter, joined together, would form stitches and make a pattern which became ever clearer as the years passed.

In mid-April the weather seemed to have settled when there was suddenly an extremely dull day. It turned colder and a dreary rain set in which looked as though it might turn to snow.

Medea drew the curtains and turned the light on rather early. She threw a handful of firewood and two logs into her small, clever stove, which used little fuel and gave out a lot of heat, spread out a worn sheet on the table and was in the process of deciding whether to cut it up for kitchen towels or discard the torn middle part and make it into a cot sheet.

At just this moment there came a loud knock at the door. She opened it. Outside stood a young man in a wet coat and a fur hat. Medea took him for one of her less frequently visiting relatives and let him in.

“Are you Medea Georgievna Sinoply?” the young man asked, and Medea realized he was not a relative.

“Yes, I am, although I’ve borne a different surname these last forty years,” Medea smiled.

The young man was pleasant looking, with light-colored eyes and a thin, drooping black mustache.

“Do take your coat off.”

“Forgive me, I’ve landed in on you quite without warning.” He shook a dusting of snow from his wet hat. “I am Ravil Yusupov, from Karaganda.”

Everything that transpired that evening and night Medea described in a letter to her sister Elena probably written the following day but never sent. Many years later it was to come into the hands of her nephew Georgii and explain to him the riddle of a completely unexpected will which he had found in the same bundle of papers and which was dated April 11, 1976. The letter read:

Dear Elena,

Although I wrote to you only a week ago, something really quite extraordinary has happened, and that is what I would like to tell you about. It is one of those stories which begin a long, long time ago. Of course you will remember Yusim, the carter who drove you and Armik Tigranovna to Theodosia in December 1918. Imagine, his grandson has managed to find me through friends in Theodosia. Isn’t it amazing to think that to this day you can find a person in a big city entirely without address books! It is a fairly common story for these parts. They were deported from Alushta after the war, when Yusim had already passed away. Ravil’s mother was sent to Karaganda, despite the fact that the father of her little children had died fighting at the front. My young man had known since he was a child what happened (I mean your evacuation), and even remembers the sapphire ring you gave Yusim then in gratitude. Ravil’s mother wore it for many years and exchanged it for a sack of flour when the famine was at its worst. But this was only the introduction to a conversation which, I will say frankly, touched me deeply. It brought back memories of things we aren’t that keen to remember, the ordeals of those years. Then Ravil revealed that he is a member of a movement for the Tatars to return to the Crimea, and that they long ago began to take official and unofficial measures.

He eagerly asked me in great detail about the old Tatar Crimea. He even produced a tape recorder and recorded me so that his Uzbek and Kazakh Tatars could hear what I had to relate. I told him what I could remember about my old neighbors in the Village, Galya and Mustapha, and Grandfather Akhmet the ditcher who cleaned the irrigation aryks here from dawn to dusk, pulling out every speck of rubbish like a mote from someone’s eye. I told him of how the Tatars were deported from here at two in the morning, without being given time to gather their belongings, and how Shura Gorodovikova the Party boss came herself when they were being sent away, and helped them pack their things, and cried buckets, and the very next day had a stroke and had to stop being a boss and hobbled around her land for another ten years with her face twisted and couldn’t speak so anyone would understand her. In our region there was nothing like it even under the Germans, although it wasn’t Germans but Romanians we had here. I know, of course, they took the Jews, but not in our region.

I told him too about how in 1947, in the middle of August, the order came to cut down the nut groves here which the Tatars had planted. No matter how we begged them, the dimwits came and cut down those wonderful trees, not even waiting for us to gather the harvest. So there the murdered trees lay all along the road, their branches laden with unripened nuts, and then the order came to burn them. Tasha Lavinskaya from Kerch was staying with me at the time, and we sat and cried as we watched that barbaric bonfire.

Thank God, my memory is still good. It retains everything, and we talked beyond midnight and even drank some wine. The old Tatars, you’ll remember, wouldn’t touch wine. We agreed that the next day I would take him around and show him all there is to see. And then he asked me a secret favor: to buy him a house in the Crimea, but in my name, because apparently houses can’t be sold to Tatars. There is a special government decree on the matter which dates back to Stalin’s time.

Do you remember, Elena, what the Eastern Crimea used to be like when the Tatars were here? And Central Crimea? What orchards there were in Bakhchisarai! And now as you travel the road to Bakhchisarai, there’s not a tree to be seen: they’ve flattened them all, destroyed the lot. I had just made up a bed for Ravil in Samuel’s room when I heard a car drive up to the house. A minute later there was a knock at the door. He looked at me so sadly: “They’ll have come for me, Medea Georgievna.”

He suddenly seemed terribly tired, and I realized that he wasn’t in fact all that young—past thirty probably. He pulled the tape out of the tape recorder and threw it in the stove. “You’ll be in trouble, forgive me. I’ll tell them I just came in to find a room for the night, no more than that.” That tape, with all my long narrative, was gone in an instant.

I went to open the door. There were two men there. One was Petka Shevchuk, the son of Ivan Gavrilovich, a local fisherman. He says to me as brazen as can be it’s a passport check to make sure I’m not renting out rooms illegally.

Well, I gave him a piece of my mind. “How dare you come bursting into my house at night! No, I’m not letting out rooms, but just now I do have a guest in the house,” and they can take themselves off wherever they like, but not disturb me till morning. That swine dared to come to my house. You may remember I kept our little hospital going all through the war. Apart from me, there were absolutely no medical personnel here. How many furuncles I treated him for, and one was in his ear. I had to lance it. I was scared to death. It was no joking matter, a five-year-old child with all the symptoms of a cerebral lesion, and what was I? A nursing assistant. Think of the responsibility . . . They turned and left, but the car did not drive off. They parked it by the house up the hill.

Ravil, my Tatar boy, smiles serenely: “Thank you, Medea Georgievna, you are unusually courageous. I haven’t come across that very often. It’s a shame you won’t be able to show me the valley or the eastern hills tomorrow. But I will come back here. Times will change, I am sure of that.”

I got out another bottle of wine and we decided to forget sleep and talk instead. Then we drank some coffee, and when dawn broke, he had a wash. I baked him a cake and wanted to give him some tinned food from Moscow which I still had from last summer, but he wouldn’t take it. He said they would only confiscate it. I saw him to the gate, right to the top. The rain had stopped, the day was so lovely. Petka was standing by his car with the other one next to him. I said goodbye to Ravil. They had the door open already. So there we are, Elena, that’s my adventure. Oh yes, and he forgot his fur hat. Well, I thought, fine. Perhaps that means he’ll retrace his steps. The Tatars will come back, and I’ll be able to return his hat. It would be no more than simple justice. Well, God’s will be done. But the reason I am writing to you in such haste is just that, although I have never in my life got drawn into any political shenanigans— Samuel was the specialist in that—just imagine, perhaps at the end of my life, just when things are getting a bit more relaxed, they might start giving an old woman a hard time. I’d like you to know where to look for me. Oh yes, in the last letter I forgot to ask how you’re finding the new hearing aid, although, to tell the truth I’m not sure that most of what people around you say is worth listening to, so you may not have been missing much.

Much love from

Medea

It was the end of April. Medea’s vineyard had been pruned, all the neat borders in her vegetable garden were sprouting vigorously, and for the last two days a gigantic flounder some fishermen she knew had brought her had been lying dissected in the fridge.

First to appear were her nephew Georgii and his thirteen-year-old son Artyom. Georgii threw off his rucksack and stood in the middle of the little yard, frowning in the powerful direct sunlight and breathing in the sweet, heavy aroma.

“You could slice it and eat it,” he said to his son, but Artyom didn’t understand.

“Medea’s hanging the washing out over there,” Artyom said, pointing.

Medea’s house stood in the highest part of the village, but her land was stepped in terraces and had a well at the very bottom of it. There was a rope stretched there between a large nut tree and an old vinegar tree, and Medea, who usually spent her lunch break on household chores, was hanging out the heavily blued laundry. Dark blue shadows played over the light blue line of mended sheets, and they slowly billowed like sails, threatening to slew round and float away into the deeper blue of the sky.

“I should just pack it all in and buy a house here,” Georgii thought, climbing down toward his aunt, who hadn’t yet noticed them. “Zoyka can do as she pleases. I could keep Artyom and Sashka.”

For the last ten years this had been the thought which invariably came into his mind during the first minutes at Medea’s home in the Crimea. Medea finally noticed Georgii and his son, threw the last sheet, which she had wrung out tightly, into the empty basin, and straightened up.

“Ah, you’re here. I’ve been expecting you these last two days. Just a minute, just a minute, I’ll be up directly, Georgiou.”

Only Medea called him that, in the Greek way. He kissed the old woman. She ran her hand over the familiar black hair with its copper tinge, and stroked his son’s too.

“He’s grown.”

“Can I have a look how much, on the door?” the boy asked.

Both sides of the doorframe were scarred with innumerable notches where the children had marked off their height as they grew.

Medea pegged the last sheet and it flew up, half covering a baby cloud which had strayed into the bare sky. Georgii lifted the empty basins and they went back up: Medea in black, Georgii in a crumpled white shirt, and Artyom in his red T-shirt. They were being watched from the neighboring homestead through the stunted, twisted vines of the Soviet farm by Ada Kravchuk, along with her husband Mikhail and their lodger from Leningrad, the white-mouse-like Nora.

“We get dozens of them coming down here! All Mendez’s nephews and nieces and what have you. That’s Georgii arrived. He’s always first,” Ada enlightened her paying guest, although whether approvingly or with irritation it was hard to tell.

Georgii was only a few years younger than Ada. They had run around together as children, and now Ada couldn’t forgive him for the fact that she had grown old and lost her looks, while he was still young and had only just started going grey.

Nora gazed over enchanted to where the gorge met a hill and there seemed to be a long, meandering fold in the earth, and a house with a tiled roof nestled there in its groin, its clean windows sparkling to welcome three graceful figures, one black, one white, and one red. She gazed appreciatively at the composition and thought with a sublime sense of regret, “If only I could paint that; but no, it’s beyond me.” She had graduated less than brilliantly from art college, but some of the things she painted came out well: watercolors of ethereal flowers, phloxes, lilacs, or artless bouquets of wildflowers.

Even now, barely arrived for a holiday, she had had her eye caught by the wisteria and was looking forward to putting just the racemes, quite without leaves, into a glass jar on the pink tablecloth, and when her daughter was having her daytime nap, she would sit down to draw them in the rear courtyard. However, this curve of space with its primeval bend stirred her, urging her to paint it even though she thought it more than she could convey. Meanwhile the three figures had climbed up to the house and disappeared from view.

In the little square halfway between the verandah and the summer kitchen, Georgii was unpacking two boxes he had brought and Medea was deciding what should be put where. It was a ritual moment. Every new arrival brought presents, and Medea received them as if not for herself but on behalf of the house.

Four pillow slips, two plastic bottles of imported washing-up liquid, some household soap which had been unobtainable last year but had reappeared this year, some tins, coffee—the old lady was pleasantly excited by it all. She put it away in the cupboards and dressers, told Georgii not to open the second box before she returned, and hurried off back to work. The lunch break was over and she didn’t usually allow herself to be late.

Georgii ascended to the highest point of his aunt’s domains, where the wooden hut of the toilet erected by the late Mendez rose like a watchtower. He went inside and sat down without the least need on the smoothly planed wooden seat. He looked around. There was a bucket of ash with a broken scoop beside it, while a faded cardboard notice on the wall gave instructions for use of the toilet written with his characteristic wry humor by Mendez himself. It concluded with the words, “When departing, look back to ensure that your conscience is clean.”

In a contemplative mood Georgii looked over the short door, which shut off only the lower part of the toilet, into the rectangular window formed above it and saw the twin mountain ranges falling quite steeply away to a distant scrap of sea and the ruins of an ancient fortress visible only to a keen eye and even then only on a clear day. He loved looking at this land, with its weathered mountains and its rounded foothills. It had been Scythian, Greek, Tatar, and although now it was part of the Soviet farming system and had long been languishing, unloved and slowly dying from the ineptitude of its masters, history had not forsaken it but was hovering in this blissful springtime, every stone, every tree reminding him of its presence. Medea’s relatives had long ago reached consensus that the best view in the world was to be seen from her lavatory.

Just outside the door Artyom was dancing from one foot to the other, waiting to ask his father a question which he knew would get him nowhere right now but which, when his father did finally emerge, he asked nevertheless, “Dad, when can we go to the sea?”

The sea was a fair distance from here, which was why no tourists stayed in the Lower Village, let alone the Upper Village. You had either to take the bus to the municipal beach at Sudak or walk to the coves twelve kilometers or more away, a major expedition which could last for several days and involve camping.

“Just grow up!” Georgii snapped back. “This is no time to be thinking about the seaside. Go and get yourself ready, we’re going to the graveyard.”

Artyom didn’t want to go to the graveyard, but now he had no choice and went to put on his sneakers. For his part, Georgii took a canvas bag and put a German sapper’s spade in it. Then he hesitated over whether or not to take a tin of silver paint and decided to leave this time-consuming chore for the next occasion. He took down a faded hat from a hook in the shed, part of a Central Asian soldier’s uniform which he had brought here once himself, banged it on his knee, releasing a cloud of fine dust, and, after locking the door of the house, popped the key in its special place, his heart warming in passing to the triangular stone with its double point, which he remembered from his childhood.

Georgii had been a geologist and loped along with an easy professional gait. Artyom scurried behind him. Georgii didn’t look around. He could see Artyom rushing along, breaking into a run, with eyes in the back of his head.

“He isn’t growing. He’s going to be like Zoyka,” Georgii thought with a familiar pang of regret.

His younger son, three-year-old Sashka, was much more to his liking, with a scowling fearlessness and indeflectable stubbornness which suggested he would develop into someone much more unambiguously masculine than his firstborn, with his diffidence and girlish chatter. Artyom for his part worshiped his father, was proud of his so evident manliness, and was already coming to realize that he would never be as strong, steady, and confident; and the sweetness of his love for his father had an aftertaste of bitterness.

But right now Artyom was feeling as good as if he had succeeded in persuading his father to take him to the sea. He himself didn’t fully understand that what mattered to him was not going to the sea but stepping out together with his father on this road, which had not yet become dry and dusty but was fresh and young, and just walking along with him whatever the destination, even to the graveyard.

The graveyard sloped up from the road. Above was the ruined Tatar section with what remained of the mosque. The eastern slope was Christian, but after the deportation of the Tatars, Christian burials had begun to creep over onto Tatar territory, as if even the dead were involved in depriving them of their land.

All the Sinoply forebears had been laid to rest in the old Theodosia cemetery, but by this time it was closed and in part even demolished, and Medea had buried her Jewish husband here with an easy mind, a good distance from her mother. Redheaded Matilda, a good Christian in every respect, was zealously Orthodox, had no time for Muslims, feared the Jews, and had an aversion for Catholics. Her views on sundry Buddhists, Taoists, and the like are not known, if indeed she had ever heard of them.

Over the grave of Medea’s husband stood an obelisk with a star on its point and an inscription in flattened letters on the pedestal: “Samuel Mendez, Soldier of the ChON Special Detachments, Party Member from 1914. 1890–1952.” The inscription was in accordance with the wishes of the deceased, expressed long before his death, soon after the war. Medea had amended the symbolism of the five-pointed Soviet star, silvering not only it but also the point of the obelisk to which it was attached, with the result that it acquired a sixth, inverted ray and looked more like the Christmas star as depicted on pre-Soviet greeting cards and also hinted at more ancient associations.

To the left of the obelisk stood a small stele with the oval photograph of round-faced little Pavlik Kim, with his clever, narrow, smiling eyes, Georgii’s nephew who had drowned in 1954 on the beach at Sudak in front of his mother, father, and grandfather, Medea’s older brother, Fyodor.

Georgii’s critical scrutiny failed to find anything out of order. As usual, Medea had beaten him to it. The railing was painted and the flower border dug over and planted with wild crocuses taken from the eastern hills.

For the sake of something to do, Georgii firmed the edge of the border, then wiped the blade of the spade, folded it, and threw it in the bag. Father and son sat for a time on the low bench, and Georgii smoked a cigarette. Artyom did not interrupt his father’s silence, and Georgii placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder in gratitude.

The sun was declining toward the western ridge, aiming at a gully between the rounded Twin Hills like a billiard ball heading into a pocket. In April the sun set between the Twins: the September sun disappeared behind the horizon, slitting its belly on the pointed hat of Mount Kiyan.

Year by year the springs were running dry, the vineyards dying, the land falling into decay, a land he had hiked over as a boy, and only the outlines of the hills maintained the familiar structure of the region. Georgii loved them as one can love a mother’s face or the body of a wife: by heart, with your eyes closed, for all time.

“Let’s go,” he said abruptly to his son, and began the descent to the road, striding in a straight line, oblivious of the broken slabs with their Arabic script.

It seemed to Artyom as he looked down that the grey road below was moving, like an escalator in the underground, and he stopped short for a moment in astonishment. “Dad!” Then he laughed out loud: it was the sheep coming up, blocking the road with their brown mass and spilling over onto the shoulder. “I thought the road was moving.” Georgii smiled indulgently.

They watched the flowing of the leisurely river of sheep and were not the only people observing the road. Some fifty meters away two girls were sitting on a knoll, a teenager and one who was only little.

“Let’s walk around the side of the flock,” Artyom suggested.

Georgii nodded agreement. As they passed close to the girls, they saw that it was not the sheep they were staring at but something they had found on the ground. Artyom craned his neck: between two dry runners of a caper bush a snake skin was standing straight up. It was the color of an old man’s nail, half transparent, twisted in places, here and there it had split, and the little girl, afraid to touch it, was prodding it apprehensively with a twig. The teenager proved to be a grown woman. It was Nora. Both of them were fair-haired, both were wearing light head scarves, long colorful skirts, and identical blouses with pockets.

Artyom squatted down beside the snake skin too. “Dad, was it poisonous?”

“A racer,” Georgii said, taking a close look at it. “Constrictor. Lots of them around here.”

“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Nora said with a smile. She recognized him as the man from this morning, the figure in the white shirt.

“I once found a snake pit here when I was a child,” Georgii said, picking the rustling skin up and spreading it out. “This one is still fresh.”

“It’s thoroughly nasty,” Nora said, shuddering.

“I’m scared of it,” the girl said in a whisper, and Georgii noticed that, with their round eyes and little pointed chins, mother and daughter bore a comical resemblance to a pair of kittens.

“What sweethearts,” Georgii thought, and put their scary skin down on the ground. Then he asked, “Who are you staying with?”

“Aunt Ada,” the woman answered without taking her eyes off the snake skin.

“Ah,” he nodded, “we’ll be seeing you then. Come and visit us. We live over there.” He gestured in the direction of Medea’s farm and, without looking around, ran on down. Artyom bounded after him.

The flock of sheep had meanwhile passed by, and only an arrière-garde sheepdog, totally uninterested in the passersby, trotted along the road covered in sheep droppings.

“He’s got big legs, like an elephant,” the girl said damningly.

“He’s nothing like an elephant,” Nora protested.

“I didn’t say he is, just his legs are,” the girl insisted.

“If you really want to know, he’s like a Roman legionary.” Nora trod resolutely on the snake skin.

“Like what?”

Nora laughed at her silly habit of talking to her five-year-old daughter as if she were a grown-up, and corrected herself. “He doesn’t really look like a Roman legionary either, because they shaved and he has a beard.”

“And legs like an elephant.”

Late in the evening of that day, when Nora and Tanya were sound asleep in the little cottage they had been allotted and Artyom was curled up like a cat in Mendez’s room, Medea was sitting with Georgii in the summer kitchen. She usually started using it from the beginning of May, but spring had come early this year. The weather had become really quite warm in late April, and she had opened up the kitchen and cleaned it thoroughly even before her first visitors arrived. It got colder toward evening, however, and Medea put on a worn sleeveless velvet jacket with a fur lining. Georgii donned a Tatar robe which had been serving all Medea’s family members for many years now.

The kitchen was constructed of natural stone after the manner of a clay saklya. One wall was built into the hill where the slope had been dug out, and low, irregularly shaped windows had been made in the side walls. A hanging oil lamp cast a dim light over the table, and in its circle stood one last bottle of homemade wine which Medea had been keeping for just this occasion and an already opened bottle of her favorite apple vodka.

A slightly odd routine had long ago been established in the house: they usually had supper with the children between seven and eight, put them to bed early, and then came together again in the night for a late meal which was as bad for the digestion as it was good for the soul. Now, at a late hour, having finished numerous chores around the house, Medea and Georgii were sitting in the light of the oil lamp and enjoying each other’s company. They had a lot in common: both were agile, quick on their feet, appreciated small pleasures, and brooked no interference in their private lives.

Medea set a plate of the fried flounder on the table. Her generous nature was amusingly combined with parsimony: her helpings were invariably slightly smaller than one might wish, and she was fully capable of refusing a child a second helping with a dismissive “That’s quite sufficient. If you aren’t full, take another piece of bread.”

The children soon got used to this strange leveling down of all who ate at her table, and relatives who didn’t like the way she ran her house didn’t come back.

Propping her head up with her hand, she observed Georgii adding a small log to the open hearth, a primitive approximation to a fireplace.

A car drove along the upper road, stopped, and gave two hoarse honks. It was the night post. A telegram then. Georgii went up. He knew the postwoman, but the driver was new. They exchanged greetings and she gave him the telegram.

“Your family coming?”

“Yes, it’s that time already. How is your Kostya?”

“Well, how would he be? Half the time he’s drunk and the rest he’s ill. He really knows how to live.”

Georgii read the telegram by the light of the headlamps: “ARRIVING THIRTIETH NIKE MASHA CHILDREN.”

He placed the telegram before Medea. She read it and nodded.

“Well, Auntie, how about that drink?” He unscrewed the vodka bottle and poured them both a glass.

“What a pity,” he thought, “that they’re coming quite so soon. It would have been good to have Medea to myself for a bit longer.”

All her relatives liked having Medea to themselves.

“Tomorrow morning I’ll run an overhead cable through,” Georgii said.

“Come again?” Medea asked, puzzled.

“I’ll run the main electricity through to the kitchen,” Georgii elaborated.

“Yes, yes, you’ve been meaning to do that for a while,” Medea recalled.

“Mother asked me to have a word with you,” Georgii began, but Medea wanted nothing of this long-familiar topic.

“Here’s to your stay, Georgiou,” she said, taking up her glass.

“This is the only place I really feel at home,” he said, as if complaining.

“And that’s why every year you bother me with this foolish talk,” Medea grunted.

“Mother asked—”

“Yes, I got her letter. It’s all nonsense, of course. The winter is over, there’s the summer to look forward to. I’ve no intention of living in Tashkent either in the winter or in the summer. I don’t invite Elena to come and stay here. At our age you don’t go to live in a new place.”

“I was there in February. Mother’s grown older. It’s impossible to speak to her on the telephone now. She can’t hear. She’s reading a lot, even the newspapers, watching television.”

“Your great-grandfather read all the newspapers too. Mind you, there weren’t so many of them in those days.” They were silent for a long time.

Georgii threw a few more sticks on the fire, and they crackled and lit up the kitchen.

What a good life he could have here in the Crimea, if he could just make up his mind to write off these ten lost years, the discovery he had never made, the dissertation he had never finished and which sucked him into itself like an evil quagmire if he went anywhere near it. And yet, no sooner were Akademgorodok and that moldering pile of papers out of sight than his dissertation contracted into a dark little lump which he tended to forget. He should build a house here. He knew the top officials in Theodosia—they were all the children of friends of Medea’s. He could build it at Atuzy or on the road to Novy Svet. He’d seen someone’s gaunt, half-ruined dacha there. He should find out whose it was.

Medea was thinking along the same lines. It was him, Georgii, she would like to see come back here, so that the Sinoply family should again be living in these parts.

They drank the vodka slowly, the old woman dozing off and Georgii mulling over how to make an artesian well: it would be good if he could get hold of an industrial drill.