“What a charming young woman,” Alexei Kirillovich thought to himself in an abstract, contemplative sort of way. He had married long ago; his wife was a professor, a hydrobiologist with a reputation no less solid than his own. Many years before, she had left her first husband for Alexei Kirillovich, then still a student, and they had married in the Registry Office.
There had been a time when she, born and brought up a Lutheran, had even thought of converting to Orthodoxy in order to legitimize her marriage officially, but in the postrevolutionary years the idea was dropped and even seemed risible. The profound disagreements between the denominations dissipated without a trace in the air of a new world which had no interest whatsoever in any Articles of Schmalkalden.
The couple lived in civil marriage in peace and harmony, exchanging professional information over the dinner table and not inclining in the least toward adultery. That merest flicker of a flame catching light in his bosom under its thick coat of furlike hair might well have remained unnoticed even by Alexei Kirillovich had not Alexandra herself felt attracted to this droll, old-fashioned professor, and had she not assiduously fanned the flame of unfocused, barely smoldering interest.
At first she gave him three days, but he made no approach beyond positioning himself opposite her in the volleyball circle and only passing the ball to her. Then she gave him another two days. Every evening they went swimming together with a noisy group of friends, then played ball, and still he made no approach, only casting quick, frightened glances in her direction and intriguing her more and more. They did not see each other during the working day: he went off to his plots to watch the ants, and she helped the botanists with their work in the herbarium.
For people of strong moral principles and decent physical habits, such as Alexei Kirillovich undoubtedly was, life lays the simplest traps, but also the most effective. The final twist came when he had all but emerged as victor in a contest which had never begun. Actually, the twist came in Alexandra’s ankle in a moment of abandon on the volleyball court. It was impossible for her to stand on it.
The male research workers took turns carrying Alexandra from the shore to the house. First, two postgraduates bore her on hands linked to make a seat; then Botazhinsky, an ichthyologist, carried her piggyback; finally, for the last third of the way, it was Alexei Kirillovich’s turn. That evening she was his, elbows, knees, sprained ankle and all.
He could remember perfectly well carrying her to the corner room and then going over to Junge’s dacha to get a bandage from the dispensary, a prerevolutionary German bandage from the supplies of the late Vyazemsky, no less, and returning to Alexandra to wrap her swollen and inflamed foot. The half-hour which passed between the act of bandaging and the moment when, without even closing the door, he plunged into the muscular grip of the novice volleyball player, disappeared without trace from his memory.
Possibly, Alexandra conceived that very evening, and two months later, departing before the end of his period of research leave, Alexei Kirillovich went back to Moscow leaving her unambiguously pregnant and quite certain that he would be returning for her in the very near future. However, the rearrangement of his former life which this romantic history entailed needed more time than he had supposed.
His wife took Alexei Kirillovich’s announcement of the new circumstances with Lutheran calm and even perhaps rather coldly. The only condition she stipulated was, however, unexpected and not easily met: she asked him to resign from the university where they both worked. Before September he had no means of looking for teaching work since the higher education institutions were all on vacation. In September a vacancy came up at the Timiryazev Academy, but now there were problems with accommodation. The apartment on Polyanka Street went to his wife. The Timiryazev had staff accommodation, but time was needed to complete the necessary applications and obtain the essential signatures and resolutions.
Time passed. Alexandra was not conspicuously pregnant and did not have to let out her clothes until the seventh month. She received weekly letters from Alexei Kirillovich and, thanks to her carefree nature, gave not a thought to what would happen if he were to disappear as unexpectedly as he had appeared. Or perhaps her equanimity was based on confidence that if need be Medea would take on this child too, as she had once taken on Alexandra and her brothers.
In the meantime neither sister said anything, although Medea did go through the old linen and set aside a few bits and pieces for diapers. Only when she saw an old-fashioned baby’s bonnet in Medea’s hands, on the border of which she was finely embroidering a crisscross pattern, did Alexandra tell her about Alexei Kirillovich, tossing her hair and perhaps protesting a little too much: “I do like him very much . . . he really is a very interesting man . . . he is someone you already know very well . . .”
Medea did indeed remember him from the days of her childhood, when Alexei Kirillovich, who was a student at the time, had rented a room in their house before he went to England. The Crimea attracted a lot of naturalists then. Now both the Sinoply sisters were waiting for Alexei Kirillovich’s return.
He, meanwhile, had been allocated his accommodations, a winter dacha beside the Timiryazev park. The dacha was so run-down it had to be hastily redecorated, and additionally Alexei Kirillovich had a major new lecture course to prepare on general entomology, as well as a special course on “orchard pests.”
Alexandra’s son didn’t, however, wait for them to move to Moscow and was born under the supervision of his Aunt Medea at the same Theodosia city hospital in which Matilda had given birth to all of her children. Only Dr. Lesnichevskii was no longer in the land of the living.
Two weeks later, without advance warning, Alexei Kirillovich arrived at Medea’s door. He knew from Alexandra’s letters that shortly before the birth she had moved in with her sister. He found a young woman sitting by the window on a bentwood Vienna chair with cropped ginger hair half-concealing her face, and a round-headed baby sucking at her bluish-white breast. This was his family. It took his breath away.
Two days later, Alexei Kirillovich and his new family departed for Moscow. There was no need for Medea to travel with them, but by now she had become so attached to her nephew, whom she had already christened, becoming his godmother in the process, that she took time off work and went with them to help Alexandra settle into her new home. That month, the first month of little Sergei’s life, she vicariously experienced to the full the motherhood that would never be hers.
Sometimes it seemed to her that her own breasts were filling with milk. She returned to Theodosia with a sense of profound inner emptiness and loss. “My youth is over,” Medea guessed.
CHAPTER 7
Valerii Butonov came from the Rastorguevo district of Moscow. He lived with his mother, Valentina Fyodorovna, in a low private house which had long been threatening to fall apart. He had no recollection of his father and as a boy was convinced that his father had died in the war. His mother did not particularly insist on that, but neither did she undermine the legend. Valentina Fyodorovna’s short-stay husband had signed up for contract work somewhere in the Russian North even before the war. He had sent back one letter of little interest and then dissolved forever in the polar wastes.