Medea and Her Children

CHAPTER 3

Medea always got up early, but this morning it was Artyom who was first out of bed. The sun was not yet bright, the morning rather pale with patches of shining mist, and cool. A few minutes later, roused by the noise of his son washing under the tap, Georgii emerged. This time Medea was the last to rise.

Taciturn by nature, Medea was particularly short on conversation in the mornings. Everyone knew this and saved up their questions for her until evening. This morning too she gave only a nod and went off to the toilet, and from there to the kitchen to light the Primus stove. There was no water left, so she brought out an empty bucket and put it at Georgii’s feet. It was one of the customs of the house that nobody could go to the well after sundown. Out of respect for Medea this and other inexplicable laws were strictly observed by all visitors, and the more inexplicable the law, the more force it had.

Georgii went off down to the well. It was a deep stone reservoir constructed by the Tatars at the end of the last century. Precious water brought from elsewhere was kept in it, and it had constantly to be refilled. Just now the level was low, and Georgii, pulling up the bucket, took a long, close look at it. The water was murky and the hardness in it could even be seen. For him, born in Central Asia, the water shortage in the Crimea was nothing out of the ordinary.

“I’ll need to put down an artesian borehole,” he thought for the second time in two days, climbing back to the house up an awkwardly stepped path which seemed to have been designed to suit the gait of a woman carrying a pitcher on her head.

Medea put the kettle on and went outside, the hem of her faded black skirt sweeping the clay floor of the kitchen. Georgii sat down on the bench and looked at the neat bundles of herbs hanging from a beam in the ceiling. Tatar copper pots and pans stood on the high shelves, and in the corners enormous cauldrons were piled on top of each other. A copper kungan pitcher crowned the pyramid. All these items were cruder and simpler than the familiar Uzbek ones sold in the Tashkent bazaar, but Georgii, who had a keen and slightly ascetic eye, preferred these poor relations to the others with all their lavish craftwork and garrulous Asiatic ornamentation.

“Dad, how about the seaside?” Artyom butted in.

“Hardly,” he retorted, concealing his irritation. His son was well versed in the nuances of his father’s speech and understood that there was no prospect of going to the sea.

His natural inclination was to whine and keep pestering his father, but the sensitivity of his nature took in the wonder of the morning stillness and he kept quiet.

While the water was heating on the stove, Medea made her bed, putting away the pillows and blankets in a chest at the foot of the bed, and murmured a short morning injunction to herself in the long-familiar words of a prayer which, however worn-out it might be, did in some unfathomable way help her in what she was asking for: to accept the new day with its toil, its disappointments, other people’s empty talk, and her own weariness toward evening; to live through to the evening joyfully, without losing her temper with anyone and without taking umbrage. She had known since childhood that she had a bad habit of taking offense, and had been fighting it for so long she failed to notice that it was already many years since she had last taken offense at anyone. Only one old hurt from many years back still rankled, hanging over her like a dark shadow. “Am I really going to take it to my grave?” she wondered before moving on.

Having murmured this last, she meticulously braided her hair with movements practiced over many years, tied it in a knot, and wrapped the black silk shawl around her head. She freed the long tail of hair from beneath the bun down onto her neck, and suddenly, in the oval mirror encrusted with seashells, saw her own face. Of course, she tied her shawl in front of the mirror every morning but saw only a fold of cloth, a cheek, the collar of her dress. Today, however—and this was somehow connected with Georgii’s arrival—she suddenly saw her own face and was surprised by it. With the years, it had come to look even longer, probably as a result of the hollowed cheeks with two deep wrinkles etched into them. Her nose was the Sinoply nose, and the years had not detracted from it. It was fairly long but not in the least protruding, quite flat at the end and with rounded nostrils.

She had a face like a rather handsome horse. This had been especially true in the years immediately after her marriage, when she unexpectedly cut her fringe and for a short time had her hair styled instead of wearing it in the invariable bun which hung heavily and irksomely on her neck.

Medea examined her face with some surprise, not glancing at it sideways but viewing it attentively and severely, and suddenly realized that she liked it. As a young girl, she had been distressed by her appearance: she had red hair, she was too tall, her mouth was too big. She was embarrassed by her large hands and the man-sized shoes she wore.

“I’ve turned into a fine-looking old woman.” She smiled and shook her head. To the left of the mirror, among the clutch of photographs, a young couple looked out at her from a black rectangular frame, a woman with a low fringe and a man with a grand head of hair; a thin, patrician, Levantine face; and a mustache that was too large for it.

Medea shook her head once more: what had she been so upset about in her youth? She had been given a good face, a good height, she was strong and had a beautiful body, as Samuel, her dear husband Samuel, had assured her. She shifted her gaze to the portrait, enlarged from the last photograph of him, with the black mourning ribbon in the corner. In it he still had his splendid hair but with two bald spots encroaching on it and raising his low forehead; his mustache had faded and become less dashing, and there was a gentleness in his eyes and an overall kindliness in his face.

“All’s well. It’s all in the past,” Medea told herself, driving away the shadow of old pain. She came out of the room and closed the door behind her. For all visitors her room was an inner sanctum which nobody entered without special invitation.

Georgii had already made the coffee. He did it in exactly the same way that Medea and his mother Elena did, the Turkish way. The little copper coffeepot was standing in the middle of the table on an unpolished tray. For all her pedantic tidiness, Medea did not enjoy polishing copper. Perhaps she preferred it with a patina. Medea poured the coffee into a crude china cup she had been drinking out of for the past fifteen years. It was a heavy, clumsy cup, a present from her niece Nike, one of her first ventures into ceramics, the fruit of a short-lived enthusiasm for modeling in clay. It was painted dark blue and red and had runs of dried glaze; its surface was rough and it was too ornate for everyday use, but for some reason Medea had taken to it and to this day Nike was proud to have pleased her aunt so much.

As she started drinking the coffee, Medea thought about Nike, and that she would be coming today with her children and Masha. Masha was an early grandniece and Nike a belated daughter of her sister Alexandra, and there was little difference in their ages.

“I expect they’ll come on the morning flight, so they’ll be here in time for lunch,” Medea said, addressing herself to nobody in particular.

Georgii made no reply, although he himself was thinking of going down to the market for some wine and some little seasonal treat like spring greens or medlars.

“Not, it’s too early for medlars,” he calculated, and shortly afterward asked his aunt whether she would be coming back home for lunch.

She nodded and finished drinking her coffee in silence.

When she had left, Artyom launched a further halfhearted attack on his father, but Georgii told him to get ready to go to the bazaar.

“It’s always the same, first the graveyard, then the bazaar,” Artyom grumbled.

“You can stay here if you’d rather,” his father proposed mollifyingly, but Artyom had already decided that actually going to the bazaar wasn’t that bad either.

Half an hour later they were walking down the road. Both were carrying rucksacks, and Artyom was wearing a canvas panama, while Georgii had a tarpaulin soldier’s cap which gave him a jaunty, military air. At almost the exact same spot as yesterday, they saw the mother and daughter, and they were again dressed identically, except that this time the woman was sitting on a small folding stool and drawing at a child’s easel.

Spotting them from the road, Georgii called to ask whether he could get them anything from the bazaar, but the light breeze carried his words away and the woman signaled with her hand that she could not hear him.

“Run up and ask whether they need anything,” he told his son, and Artyom ran up the hillside in a flurry of small stones.

Georgii looked up with pleasure. The grass was still young and fresh, and on the brow of the hill a tamarisk with never a leaf to be seen was dusted with lilac-pink flowers.

The woman said something to Artyom, but then gave up and came running downhill herself. “Could you buy us some potatoes? Two kilos, please. I haven’t got anyone to leave Tanya with, and it’s too far for her to walk, she’d be worn-out. Oh, and a bunch of dill. Only I haven’t got any money on me.” She spoke rapidly, with a slight lisp, and blushing more deeply by the minute.

She climbed back up to her daughter who was standing next to the easel. Her heart was racing and affecting her throat. “What’s happened? What’s happened?” she blurted. “Nothing’s happened. Two kilos of potatoes and a bunch of dill.”

She saw how much everything had changed in the few minutes she had run down to the road: The sun had finally burned through the shining mist, and the tamarisks which she was trying to draw were no longer rising like a pink cloud but lay solidly, like cranberry mousse, on the skyline. All the delicate indefiniteness of the scene had gone, and the spot where she was standing suddenly seemed to her to be that fixed center around which everything revolves: worlds, the stars, the clouds, and flocks of sheep.

This fancy did not, however, calm her pounding heart. It was still galloping somewhere, unable to keep up with itself, and, independently of her mind, her eye was taking in the surroundings, eager to miss nothing, to forget not one feature of this world. Oh, if she could only have picked and pressed this moment with all its different aspects, like a flower she had taken a fancy to, as she had when she was a child with a passion for botany: her daughter standing beside the easel set crookedly in the center of God’s creation; the flowering tamarisk; the road along which two travelers were proceeding with never a backward glance; the distant patch of sea; the folded valley with the furrow of a long-departed river; everything that was behind her back and everything that did not fit into her field of vision: the table mountains neat behind the hump-backed hills which had aged in this place, the table mountains with their lopped-off summits, stretched out in line one behind the other like obedient animals.

The bus from Simferopol to Medea’s house took about five hours, and until the beginning of the holiday season the service was only once a day; but in any case Nike and Masha usually came by taxi despite the expense. (The two-hour journey by taxi was almost more than the price of a plane ticket from Moscow to Simferopol.)

As soon as Artyom got back from the bazaar, he went up to the roof armed with an old pair of binoculars and did not take his seeing eye from the gap between the hills where every car coming to the Village was briefly to be glimpsed. Georgii was sorting out his purchases in the kitchen. It had turned out not to be a market day, and there had been few traders and little going on. He had bought a pack of homemade plum pastilla scrolls which had been left to dry in the sun for rather too long, a favorite treat of the children; some spring greens; and a large packet of cheburek meat pastries.

It was the hardware shop where Georgii had scored his greatest success. Tourists were always surprised how well stocked it was. This time Georgii had bought a newly fashionable whistling kettle, two dozen glass tumblers, and half a kilo of akhnali, horseshoe nails which his friend Tarasov, the chairman of a collective farm near Novosibirsk, was desperate for. He also bought some Czech glue, which was in short supply in those days, and a fairly hideous oilcloth for the table. He laid all his purchases out and gloated over them. He enjoyed shopping. He liked the sport of choosing, haggling, and bringing home the booty. His wife Zoyka got angry each time he came back from a trip bringing a whole pile of completely unnecessary acquisitions which only cluttered up their house and dacha. She was an economist working in the municipal trading inspectorate and took the view that purchases should be judicious, thought through, and that you shouldn’t just scoop up all sorts of junk.

He uncorked a bottle of Tauride fortified wine and regretted not having bought more, although it was readily available and he could always get some later in the little store in the Village. Having sorted everything out, he sat down in the doorway with a glass of wine and a cheburek in his hand, only to see the artist and her daughter coming down from the hill.

“Damn, I forgot the potatoes,” he remembered. “Well, there can’t have been any. If I’d seen them, it would have reminded me.”

He had, however, bought plenty of dill and so, as a conscientious person, he called to Artyom to come down from the roof and take the vacationer some dill. The inhabitants of Medea’s house never considered themselves to be vacationers, and the local people also treated them as belonging.

Artyom refused point-blank to take her the dill. The moment when the car would appear was too important and he was afraid of missing it. Indeed, before they had finished arguing over the dill, a yellow Volga did appear in the gap where it was expected.

“They’re coming!” Artyom yelled in a voice breaking with happiness, and rushed down from the roof and out to the gate.

Only a few minutes later a taxi drove up to the house, stopped, its four doors burst open simultaneously and six people bundled out, two of them quite small. While the taxi-driver was retrieving suitcases and cardboard boxes from the boot, a scrum of relatives began kissing and hugging. The taxi had not left by the time Medea returned unnoticed with a bulging bag, smiling with her mouth firmly closed and her eyes narrowed.

“Auntie! My sunshine! How I’ve missed you! How pretty you look! And you smell of sage!” Tall, redheaded Nike kissed her, but she pushed her away slightly and muttered,

“What nonsense! I’m reeking of gloss paint. They’ve been redecorating the hospital these past two months and still haven’t finished.”

Thirteen-year-old Katya, Nike’s elder daughter, was standing beside Medea waiting her turn to be kissed. Wherever Nike was, she had some inalienable right always to be first, and few there were who could dispute it. Masha too was waiting her turn, with her boyish haircut and her adolescent figure, as if she wasn’t a grown woman but a scrawny runt on wobbly legs. But her face was pretty, with a beauty not yet fully revealed, like an unused transfer. Georgii caught her and kissed the top of her head.

“Shame on you, I’m not talking to you,” Masha said, pushing him away. “You were in Moscow and didn’t even call.”

Masha’s son, five-year-old Alik, and Nike’s younger daughter Liza also embraced, acting out a passionate reunion although they hadn’t been parted since yesterday, as they had all stayed overnight at Nike’s apartment on Zubovskoy Street. The children were almost the same age and it was no exaggeration to say they had loved each other from birth. They amused everyone by constantly replicating adult relationships: feminine flirtatiousness, jealousy, and dashing acts of courtship.

“Cousinage, dangereux voisinage,” Medea said for the umpteenth time, looking at the cousins.

“I’ll kiss you as if you were already here,” Alik said, drawing Liza toward himself, but she decided to play hard-to-get, only she couldn’t think of a condition for agreeing to be kissed and so prevaricated,

“No, first, um, you’ve got to, you’ve got to, um, show me the little doggie!”

Two of those present exchanged curt nods: Artyom and Katya. There had been a time when they, like Liza and Alik now, had also loved each other passionately, but a couple of years ago everything had fallen apart. Katya had grown up markedly, sprouting hair in various places, which she promptly shaved off, and acquiring a pair of small but indisputably real breasts, and between the cousins there had opened up the abyss of puberty.

Artyom, his heart deeply wounded by last year’s dismissive-ness, which he had done nothing to deserve, although he had been desperately looking forward to seeing Katya again, now turned defensively away and meditatively dug the toe of his shoe into the pale brown earth.

Katya had been thrown out of the Bolshoi Ballet School last year for being totally without prospects but retained all the mannerisms of a professional ballerina, for which Nike, although secretly admiring of her wonderful deportment, was constantly ribbing her: “Chin up, shoulders down, chest forward, stomach back, and toes pointing outward.” In just this placement Katya now stood immobile, giving all present the opportunity of delighting in the beauty of ballet, of which she firmly remained the representative.

“Medea, take a look at our little ones!” Masha said, touching Medea’s shoulder.

Alik had been to the kennel of Medea’s immensely long, but short-legged, bitch Nyukta and brought back an equally long puppy. Liza was holding it in her arms, and Alik, moving the puppy to one side, was proceeding toward Liza’s promised cheek.

Everybody laughed. Georgii took two suitcases; Artyom, turning away from Katya, lifted a cardboard box with provisions; and Katya, tripping lightly like a prima ballerina taking her curtain call, ran down to take up her position in the sunlit patch of land between the house and the kitchen and posed there, exquisite and unattainable, like a princess, and Artyom perceived all this with an anguish in his heart the like of which he had never known before, the first victim of this early spring.

Nora, meanwhile, had again found herself in the role of snooper. Little Tanya was asleep after lunch. Neither potatoes nor dill had that handsome man brought her who looked, she now realized, not in the least like a Roman legionary, but like Odysseus. And then, while she was washing the dishes in Aunt Ada’s kitchen yard, she had seen a taxi drive up and a tall, redheaded woman in a vulgar red dress embrace an old woman while a whole horde of children jumped around; and her breath was taken away by a sudden access of jealousy for people who could be so pleased to see each other and who could make such an occasion out of their meeting up again.

Another taxi drove into the Village a couple of hours later, but this one stopped at the Kravchuks’ house. Nora, pulling back a corner of the embroidered curtain, saw how, in response to a voice calling for the owners, first Ada and shortly afterward her husband, wiping his greasy mouth with his oily driver’s hand, leapt out of the summer kitchen.

In the wide-open gate stood a strapping young man with long hair held like a girl’s ponytail by a rubber band, wearing tightfitting white jeans and a pink T-shirt. Ada was quite flabbergasted by the sheer brazenness of his appearance. The new arrival smiled, however, waved a white envelope, and asked, without moving from the garden gate, “The Kravchuks? A letter from your son with new greetings. Saw him yesterday.”

Ada snatched the envelope, and, without saying a word, the Kravchuks disappeared into the kitchen to read the letter from their only son, Vitka, who since graduating from army college had been living in Moscow province for three years now, and as it seemed from the perspective of the Village was making a great career for himself. The new arrival, showing not the least concern for the taxi-driver who was still waiting by the outside gate, sat himself down on a bench. The Kravchuks had meanwhile read that their son was sending them a very useful contact whom they should under no circumstances charge for accommodation, whose every whim they should indulge, and that the commandant of the entire military district himself queued up for massage at the hands of this same Valerii Butonov.

Before they had finished reading the letter, the Kravchuks rushed out to the new arrival. “But please come in, do. Where is your luggage?”

The new arrival brought in his luggage, a leather suitcase with a thick layered handle, covered in foreign stickers. Nora wearied of holding up in the air the old-fashioned smoothing iron with which she was ironing Tanya’s skirt and put it back on its holder. Her landlord and landlady were running in circles around the new arrival: the suitcase had impressed them too.

He was probably an actor, or a jazz musician, or something of that kind, Nora supposed. The iron had cooled, but she did not want to leave her little cottage to heat it up again in the kitchen. She put the half-ironed skirt aside.