Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 2

Elena Stepanyan, Georgii’s mother, belonged to a highly cultured Armenian family and had had no expectation at all of becoming the wife of a rather simple Greek from a suburb of Theodosia, the elder brother of her bosom schoolmate.

Medea Sinoply was the star in the firmament of the girls’ grammar school: her exemplary exercise books were to be shown to future generations of school students. The girls’ friendship began with covert but intense rivalry. That year, 1912, the Stepanyan family had not left to spend the winter in St. Petersburg as they usually did, because Elena’s younger sister, Anait, was suffering from a chest complaint. The family stayed behind to winter in their dacha at Sudak, and Elena and her governess spent the whole year in Theodosia, living in a hotel. She attended the girls’ school and provided a formidable challenge to Medea’s reputation as its cleverest pupil.

Plumpish and affable, Elena didn’t seem flummoxed in the least and indeed appeared not to be competing with anyone. It was behavior explicable as angelic magnanimity, or satanic pride. Elena didn’t care two hoots about her successes: the Stepanyan sisters had received a good education at home and had been taught French and German by governesses. They had, moreover, spent their early childhood in Switzerland, where their father had held a post in the diplomatic service.

Both Medea and Elena finished the third grade with top marks in all subjects, but there was nevertheless a difference between their marks. Elena’s were effortless, with plenty in reserve: Medea’s were the hard-won product of sweat and toil. For all the unequal weight of their marks, they received identical awards at the prize-giving at the end of the year: dark green volumes of the selected works of Nekrasov, with gold lettering on the cover and a calligraphic inscription on the flyleaf.

The day after school ended, at about five in the evening, the entire complement of the Stepanyan family drove up unannounced to the Sinoply mansion. All the women of the house, with Matilda at their head, her by now somewhat faded hair tidied under a white head scarf, were drawing out the dough for baklava beside a large table in the shade of two old mulberry trees. The easier part of the procedure, performed on the table itself, had been completed and now they were teasing out the edges of the dough on the backs of their hands. Medea was taking a full part in this, together with her sisters.

Madame Stepanyan threw up her hands. When she was a child in Tiflis, they had made baklava in exactly this way.

“My grandmother could do it better than anyone else!” she exclaimed, asking for an apron.

Stepanyan père, smoothing his greying mustache with one hand, observed the women enjoying their work with a benevolent smile, admiring the quick movements of their buttered hands in the dappled shade, and the light and delicate way they tugged the leaf of dough.

Afterward, Matilda invited them up to the terrace, and they drank coffee with candied fruits, and Armik Tigranovna again melted at a childhood memory of this dry allotrope of jam. Their shared culinary preferences, which had Turkish roots, disposed the illustrious lady even more in favor of this hardworking and united family, and the project which had initially struck her as dubious, of inviting a little-known girl from the family of a port mechanic to be the young companion of her daughter, seemed now to be eminently sensible.

The proposal came as a surprise to Matilda but was flattering, and she promised to consult her husband that very day. This evidence of proper matrimonial respect in such a simple family won Armik Tigranovna over even more.

Four days later Medea and Elena were packed off to Sudak, to a splendid villa on the coast which stands to this day, refurbished now as a sanatorium, not too far from the Upper Village to which many years later the common descendants of Armik Tigranovna and red-haired Matilda, who had teased out the baklava dough so deftly, would come to stay.

Each of the girls found perfection in the other. Medea appreciated the aristocratic directness and radiant kindness of Elena, and Elena greatly admired Medea’s fearlessness, her self-reliance, and a particular womanly giftedness of her hands, partly inherited, partly learned from her mother.

At night, lying on their firm, medically approved German folding beds, they engaged in long, deeply meaningful conversations and retained from that time for the whole of the rest of their lives a deep emotional bond, although in later years they were barely able to recall what it was that they had talked about so confidentially until dawn.

However, Medea distinctly remembered Elena telling the story of how one night when she was ill she had seen a vision of an angel against the background of a wall which suddenly became transparent, and beyond which she could see a young, brightly lit forest; and what impressed themselves on Elena’s memory were Medea’s tales of the numerous finds in which her life was so rich. She went on to amply demonstrate her talent that summer by assembling a whole collection of Crimean gemstones.

One further incident they remembered was a fit of laughter which overcame them one night when they imagined their singing teacher, an affected young man with a limp, marrying the headmistress, a stern, enormous woman before whom even the flowers in the window boxes trembled.

When autumn came, Elena was moved to St. Petersburg, and that was the beginning of a correspondence which, with a few breaks, had already lasted more than sixty years. For the first few years they wrote to each other exclusively in French, which in those years Elena wrote considerably better than Russian. Medea made no small effort to achieve the same degree of fluency her friend had acquired strolling along the shores of Lake Geneva with her governess. The girls, following the intellectual fashion of those years, confessed their willful thoughts and intentions to each other (“. . . and I suddenly felt a strong desire to hit her on the head! . . . I knew the story of the inkwell, but said nothing, and I think that was a real deception on my part . . . and Mama to this day is convinced that Fyodor took the money, and I could hardly keep myself from saying that Galya had done it . . .”). And all this in French.

This touching baring of souls was abruptly interrupted by Medea’s letter of October 10, 1916. The letter was written in Russian and was short and to the point. It communicated the information that on October 7, 1916, the ship The Empress Maria had been blown up in the vicinity of the Bay of Sebastopol and that among the casualities was Georgii Sinoply, ship’s mechanic. Sabotage was suspected. The circumstances of a war which passed smoothly over into revolution and a chaotic civil war in the Crimea made it impossible to raise the ship at the time of its sinking, and only three years later, already in Soviet times, did further investigation show that an explosive device had indeed been placed in the ship’s engine. One of Georgii’s sons, Nikolai, was a member of the team of divers working to raise the sunken vessel.

That October, Matilda was about to give birth to her fourteenth child, who had decided to be born not in August like all her other children but in mid-October. Ten days after the loss of Georgii both of them, Matilda and her little pink-headed girl, followed him in death.

Medea was the first to learn of her mother’s death. She went to the hospital in the morning to be met by Fatima the nurse, who stopped her on the stairs and said in the Crimean Tatar language which many inhabitants of the Crimea knew in those days, “Don’t go in there, my dear, go and see the doctor. He is expecting you.”

Dr. Lesnichevskii came out to see her, his face wet with tears. He was a plump little old man; Medea was taller than him by a head. He said, “My dear, dear child!” and reached up to pat her head. He and Matilda had begun their complementary labors in the same year, she giving birth to babies and he running the obstetrics department, and he had delivered all her babies himself.

That left thirteen of them, thirteen children who had just lost their father and not yet come to terms with the reality of that death. The symbolic funeral for sailors who died at sea, with an orchestra and volleys of gunfire, had seemed to the younger children to be some kind of military entertainment, like a parade. In 1916 death had not yet become as cheapened as in 1918 when the dead were buried in pits, barely clothed and without coffins. Although the war had been going on for a long time, it was far away, while here, in the Crimea, death was still an individual matter.

Matilda was dressed in her finest, her strident hair covered in black lace and her unbaptized little girl laid beside her. Her older sons bore the coffin first to the Greek church and then on to the old graveyard, to rest beside Harlampy.

Even the youngest child, two-year-old Dimitry, remembered his mother’s funeral. Four years later he told Medea about two things which had made an impression on him that day. The funeral was held on a Sunday, and a wedding had been scheduled in the church for an earlier hour. On the narrow road leading from the church, the wedding party encountered the funeral procession. There was an awkward moment before those carrying the coffin had to step aside onto the shoulder in order to let the car through, on the back seat of which there sat in glory, like a fly in sour cream, a frightened dark-haired bride in a white cloud of wedding dress with a bald bridegroom beside her. This was almost the first car in the town and belonged to the wealthy Muruzi family, and it was green. Dimitry described the car to Medea. “It really was green,” she recalled. The second incident was puzzling. The boy asked her what those white birds were called which were sitting beside mother’s head.

“Seagulls?” Medea asked in surprise.

“No, one was big and one was little, and they had different faces, not like seagulls have,” Dimitry explained.

Beyond that he could remember nothing. That year Medea was sixteen. There were five children older than her and seven younger. Two were missing that day, Philip and Nikifor. They were both away at the war. Both were later killed, one by the Reds, the other by the Whites, and throughout her life Medea wrote their names on the same line on the requiem slip.

Sophia, Matilda’s younger widowed sister, came from Batumi for the funeral and thought it would make sense for her to take the two older boys back with her. Since her husband’s death she had had a large farm to cope with, and she and her three daughters were barely managing. In the not-too-distant future, fourteen-year-old Athanasii and twelve-year-old Plato would be growing into the men she so much needed in her household.

They were not, however, destined to revive the fortunes of their aunt’s farm, because two years later Sophia wisely sold what remained of her property and took all the children first to Bulgaria and later to Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, Athanasii, still a callow young man, became a novice in an Orthodox monastery and moved from there to Greece where all trace of him was lost. The last anyone heard was that he was living in the mountains of Meteora, which nobody knew anything about. Sophia, her daughters, and Plato finally put down roots in Marseilles, and the summit of her achievement was a little Greek restaurant built up from retail sales of oriental sweetmeats, in particular baklava, the dough for which her busy, ugly daughters were adept at drawing out. Plato, the only man in the house, really was its main support. He saw his sisters married, saw his aunt buried just before the Second World War, and only after the war, when already by no means a young man, married a Frenchwoman and fathered two Frenchmen with the jolly surname of Sinoply.

Ten-year-old Miron was taken by a relative from the Sinoply side, the very charming Alexander Grigorievich, who owned the Diamonds café in Koktebel. He had come to Matilda’s funeral with no intention of taking new children into his home, but his heart softened and he did. The boy died a few years later after a short, incomprehensible illness.

A month later Anelya, Matilda’s older sister, whom people considered the most fortunate of them all, took Nastya to her home in Tbilisi where she lived with her husband, a musician of some renown at that time. She had intended to take the youngest boys as well, but they howled the house down, and it was decided to leave them with Medea for the time being. Eight-year-old Alexandra also stayed with Medea. Alexandra had always been very attached to her, and of late hadn’t strayed from her side.

Anelya was perplexed: how could she leave three small children in the hands of a sixteen-year-old girl? At this point old Pelagea, their one-eyed nurse, intervened. All her life she had worked in their house, and she had been a distant relative of Harlampy.

“For as long as I am alive, let the littlest ones grow up in this house.”

And that was how everything was decided.

Some time later Medea received three letters simultaneously from St. Petersburg: from Elena, Armik Tigranovna, and Alexander Ashotovich. His letter was the shortest: “Our whole family deeply condoles with you in the great sorrow that has befallen and asks you to accept the little help we can offer in this hour of need.”

The “little help” proved to be a very considerable sum of money for those times, half of which Medea spent on a cross of brittle black marble into which were incised the names of her mother and of her father, whose body had dissolved in the pure and potent waters of the Pontus Euxinus, which had received so many of the Sinoply family’s seafaring men.

It was there, in the shadow of the wild olive tree planted on Harlampy’s grave, during the revolutionary holidays of early November 1926, that Medea nodded off on a bench and saw all three of them: Matilda in a halo of red hair, not gathered in a bun as when she was alive but magnificently standing up full length on her head; with a little, naked girl with a pink head in her arms, not newborn but for some reason three years old; and her father, grey haired, with a completely grey beard and looking much older than Medea remembered him, to say nothing of the fact that he had never had a beard while alive.

They radiated love toward her but said nothing, and when they disappeared, Medea knew that she had not been dozing. At all events, she was not conscious of any transition from sleeping to wakefulness, and she sensed a wonderful resinous aroma in the air, dark and ancient. Inhaling the fragrance, she guessed that their appearance, so ethereal yet so solemn, was to thank her for having kept the little ones from harm, and as it were to release her from the authority she had voluntarily assumed so long ago.

Some time passed before she could describe this extraordinary occurrence in a letter to Elena. “Several weeks have passed already, Elena, during which I have been quite unable to sit down to write you a letter describing a very unusual mystical experience.”

After that she slipped into French. All the Russian words she could have used, like “vision,” “apparition,” or “miracle,” seemed completely unsuitable, and it was easier to resort to a foreign language which didn’t carry the same plethora of overtones.

While she was writing the letter, there floated in through the window the same resinous aroma which she had breathed in at the graveyard.

“Qu’en penses-tu?” she concluded in her calligraphic handwriting, whose French variant was more angular and decisive.

Their letters spent a long time being shaken around in tarpaulin mail sacks in postal carriages, and the correspondence lagged two or three months behind life. Three months later Medea received a reply. It was one of the longest letters Elena wrote, and it was written in the schoolgirl handwriting so similar to Medea’s own.

She thanked her for the letter and wrote that she had shed many tears recollecting those terrible years when it had seemed that everything was lost. Further, Elena confessed that she herself had experienced a similar mystical encounter on the eve of the family’s hasty evacuation on the night of November 17, 1918.

Three days before that, Mama suffered a stroke. She looked terrible, much worse than when you saw her three weeks later when we reached Theodosia. Her face was blue, one eye was staring up behind the eyelid, we were expecting her to die at any minute. There was shooting throughout the city, and at the port the military-headquarters staff and the civilian population were embarking at a furious pace. As you know, Papa was a member of the Crimean government, and it was quite impossible for him to remain behind. Arsik was suffering one of his endless angina attacks and Anait, who had always been so full of joy and happiness, just couldn’t stop crying. Father was spending all his time in the town, returning for just a few minutes, laying his hand on Mama’s head and going off again. I told you all this before except, perhaps, for the most important thing.

That evening I put Arsik and Anait to bed, lay down next to Mama, and immediately drifted off. The rooms were all connecting, in enfilade, and I mention this advisedly because it is relevant. Suddenly, in my sleep, I heard someone coming in. “Father,” I thought, and didn’t realize straight away that whoever it was had come in through the right-hand door, from inside the apartment, whereas the entrance from the street was to the left. I meant to get up, to get tea for Father, but I felt fettered, I couldn’t move at all. Father, as you will remember, was not tall, yet the person standing by the door was a big man and, as it seemed to me, wearing a dressing gown. I could only vaguely make out an old man whose face was very white and seemed to be shining. I was scared but also, can you believe it, very curious. I realized this was someone close, a relative, and immediately someone seemed to say aloud to me, “Shinararyan.” Mama had told me about one amazing branch of her ancestors who built Armenian churches. He somehow glided over to me and said quite clearly, in a singsong voice, “Let them all leave, but you, maid, stay behind. You will go to Theodosia. You have nothing to fear.”

And then I noticed that he wasn’t a complete person but only the upper part, and below was just mist, as if the specter hadn’t had time to form completely.

And that is how everything turned out. We parted in early morning, weeping absolute buckets. They left on the last steamer, and Mama and I stayed behind. Twenty-four hours later the city was taken by the Reds. In those dreadful days, when people were being murdered and shot by firing squads, nobody touched us. Yusim, the carter of the late princess in whose palace we were living all that time, first took Mama and me away to a suburb to his relatives, and a week later he put us in a phaeton and took us away from there. We were two weeks on the road to Theodosia, and you know everything about that journey. I had the feeling as I was traveling back to you that I was coming home, but my heart stopped when we saw that the gates of your house were boarded up. I didn’t guess at first that you had started using the side entrance.

Neither Mama nor Papa have ever appeared to me even in a dream—probably because I sleep too soundly: you simply wouldn’t get through to me. What a joy you have been given, Medea, receiving such a live greeting from your parents. Don’t be disturbed, don’t trouble yourself with questions of why or wherefore. We’ll never guess the answer ourselves anyway. Do you remember reading me your favorite passage from St. Paul about seeing through a glass darkly? Everything will become clear with time, or outside of time. In my childhood, in Tbilisi, the Lord lived in our house alongside us, the angels walked in our rooms, but here in Asia everything is different. He is far away from me, and the church here feels empty. But it is a sin to complain. All is well. Natasha has been ill but is almost completely recovered now; she’s just coughing a bit still. Fyodor has gone off on an expedition for a week. I have some exciting news: I’m going to have another baby, very soon now. There is nothing I so dream of as your coming to see us. Perhaps you could just pack the boys’ things and come in the spring?