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 welclass="underline" 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.