The earth was shrouded in darkness and a single window shone with a pure yellow light from a valley in the hills; he even seemed to hear the sound of a woman’s singing coming from there. Valerii listened. Occasionally a dog barked.
The night truly was a sleepless one, but Medea had been used to sleeping little since she was young and, now that she was old, one sleepless night did not unsettle her. She lay in her narrow maidenly bed in her nightgown with its worn embroidery on the front, and her loosely braided nighttime plait rested alongside her, grown sparser with the years but still extending down to her hip.
The house was soon filled with little recognizable sounds: Nike shuffling past barefoot, Masha clinking the lid of the chamber pot, whispering “Piss-piss” to a sleeping child, and the little stream flowing audibly and musically. A light switch clicked, followed by muffled giggling.
Neither her hearing nor her eyesight were yet letting Medea down, and being naturally observant, she picked out many things in her young relatives’ lives which they themselves were quite unaware of. The young mothers with babies or toddlers usually arrived at the beginning of the season; their working husbands didn’t stay long, a couple of weeks, rarely a month. Friends of some sort would come, rent a bed in the Lower Village, and at night they would come secretly to the house, moaning and crying out on the other side of Medea’s wall. Then those mothers separated from one husband and married another. The new husbands brought up the old children and fathered new ones; the stepbrothers and stepsisters visited each other, and then the ex-husbands came back with their new wives and new children to spend the holidays together with the older ones.
When Nike married Katya’s father, a promising young film producer who never did fulfill his promise, for years she brought with her Misha, the producer’s ungainly and uncouth son from his first marriage. Katya did all she could to make his life a misery, but Nike was kind to him and looked after him, and when she swapped the producer for a physicist, she continued dragging the boy around with her for many years. Medea was witness to a change of partners between two married couples, an ardent romance between a brother- and sister-in-law with an age difference of thirty years, and several youthful flings between cousins which fully validated the French proverb.
The life of the postwar generation, especially of those who were now around twenty, seemed to her to be not quite serious. She could not detect in either their marriages or their parenting the sense of responsibility which from an early age had defined her own life. She was never judgmental but had immense respect for those who, like her mother, her grandmother, and her friend Elena, performed the least significant and the most important acts in the only way that was possible for Medea herself: seriously and definitively.
Medea had lived her life as the wife of one husband and continued to live as his widow. Her life as a widow was good, not a whit worse than her marriage. Over the long years, almost thirty of them, since he died, the past itself had changed radically, and the only bitter hurt her husband had caused her, strangely enough when he was already dead, had dissolved away and in her memory he had become a man of monumental importance, something of which there had been not the slightest evidence while he was alive.
She had been a widow considerably longer than she had been a wife, and her relationship with her departed husband was as good as ever and was even improving with the years.
Although experiencing her semiwakefulness as insomnia, Medea was actually in a subtle drowsy sleep which did not inhibit her usual thinking processes: half-prayer, half-conversation, half-reminiscence, it sometimes even casually strayed beyond the limits of what she personally knew or had seen.
Recalling almost word for word all her husband had told her about his childhood, she could remember him now as a boy, even though she hadn’t met him until he was approaching forty. Samuel Yakovlevich was the son of a widow who prized the affronts and misfortunes she suffered above any property. With inexplicable pride she would point out her weakling son’s defects to her sisters: “Just look how skinny he is, he looks like a chicken, in the whole of our street there is not another child so puny. And look at his scabs! He’s completely scrofulous. And he’s got red blotches on his hands.”
Little Sam grew bigger nevertheless, together with his spots and pimples and boils, and was in truth both skinny and pale but in that differed little from other children of his age. At thirteen he began to experience a certain special perturbation associated with a tenting of his trousers, raised from within by a rapidly sprouting shoot which inconvenienced him extremely.
The boy regarded his new condition as one of his numerous illnesses which his mother took such pride in talking about, and he adapted a drawstring from her underskirt to constrain the wayward organ and stop it troubling him. Meanwhile two more visible parts of his body, his ears and nose, entered a phase of irrepressible growth. Out of the good-looking boy there hatched a ridiculous creature with rounded, overhanging eyebrows and a long and motile nose. His skinniness acquired a new quality at this time: no matter where he sat down he felt he was sitting on two sharp stones. His late father’s striped grey trousers hung on him as if he were a scarecrow in the kitchen garden, and it was now he received the hurtful nickname of “Sammy Empty-Pants.”
At the age of fourteen, soon after the celebration of his bar mitzvah, which for Sam was remarkable only for his having made five times as many mistakes in the reading of the prescribed texts as the five other boys from poor families who had completed their synagogal studies at public expense, and after an exasperatingly evasive correspondence between his mother and an elder brother of his late father, he was finally sent to Odessa, where he began his career in the style and dignity of office boy with a round of interminable and ill-defined duties.
The post of office boy left him almost no free time, but he nevertheless managed to fit in an acquaintance with the Jewish Enlightenment, which even then was outdated, at the hands of Ephraim, the eldest of his father’s brothers. Ephraim was a self-taught Jewish intellectual who hoped, despite all evidence to the contrary, that well-founded education would resolve all the world’s thorny problems, including such misunderstandings as anti-Semitism.
Sam did not stand for long beneath the noble but seriously faded banners of the Jewish Enlightenment and defected, to his uncle’s great distress, to the contiguous camp of Zionism, which turned its face away from the Jew trying to raise his educational level to that of other civilized peoples and instead backed the Natural Jew, who had taken the straightforward but two-edged decision to plant his orchard once more in Canaan.
Sam’s cousin had already managed to emigrate to Palestine, was now living in a place no one had ever heard of called Ein Gedi, working as a farm laborer, and was sending infrequent but enthusiastic letters urging Sam to follow. To the displeasure of his office uncle, Sam enrolled in the Jewish agricultural courses for settlers. His studies took up an inordinate amount of working time; his uncle was displeased and halved Sam’s wages, which he had in any case never once got around to paying; his wife, however, Aunt Genichka, was a real Jewish woman with designs to marry Sam to her no-longer-young niece who had, moreover, a slight congenital dislocation of the hip joint.