Here too various documents were kept safe, including some which were quite curious, for example a form concerning the requisitioning of a bicycle from Citizen Sinoply for the transport needs of the Volunteer Army. It was a true family archive, and like any worthwhile archive, it concealed secrets not to be made public before the time was ripe. These secrets were in trustworthy hands, and as far as it lay within Medea’s power, they were kept fairly scrupulously. At least the greatest and earliest of them was.
This secret was contained in a letter addressed to Matilda Tsyruli and dated February 1892. The letter had come from Batumi, was written in extremely bad Russian, and was signed with the Georgian name Medea. The present Medea knew, of course, of the existence of her Batumi namesake, Matilda’s sister-in-law, the wife of her elder brother, Sidor. According to family legend, the Georgian Medea had died of grief at the funeral of her husband, who had been killed in an accident. It was in her honor that Medea had received her own name, which was unusual among Greeks. The letter, with its spelling and grammar corrected, ran as follows:
Matilda, my dear friend, we heard it said a week ago that they had drowned, your Teresii and the Karmak brothers. The day before yesterday his body was washed ashore at Kobulety. The witnesses who identified him were Vartanyan and Kursua the Cap. He was buried and may the Kingdom of Heaven be his, I can say no more. When you ran away, his temper became even more foul, he beat up Uncle Plato, and was always fighting with Nikos. God granted you a lucky escape. My legs are very bad. Last winter I could hardly walk on them. Sidor helps me, great will be his reward. Get married straightaway now. I send you my love, and God be with you. Medea.
Medea found this letter a few years after the death of her parents and had kept it from her brothers and sisters. When the young Alexandra started on her first escapades, Medea had told her the story with some vague didactic intention, as if trying to conjure Alexandra’s destiny, to forestall the misfortunes and the difficult search for the meaning of her life which, this letter seemed to testify, had been the lot of their mother Matilda. Medea was deeply convinced that frivolity led to unhappiness, and had no inkling that levity can equally well lead to happiness or, for that matter, lead nowhere at all. From childhood, however, Alexandra behaved exactly as her wayward heart dictated, and Medea could never understand waywardness, whims, urgent desire, caprice, or passion. The second family secret was linked precisely to this peculiarity of Alexandra’s and, until its time came, had been hidden from Medea herself on the lower shelf of a single wardrobe, in the officer’s map case of Samuel Yakovlevich.
Medea had made herself a little corner of her own in the small room where Samuel had spent the last, agonizing year of his life. She placed her husband’s chair with its back to the window, put the small trunk at its side, and laid out on it the few books which she read constantly. She continually changed the white curtains in the room for even whiter ones, and dusted the whitish Crimean dust off the bookshelf and the cupboard where Samuel’s things were kept. She did not touch his belongings.
For the whole of that year she read the Psalter, one kathisma each evening, and when she got to the end, she started again at the beginning. Her Psalter was an old one, in Church Slavonic, left from her school days. Another, Greek, which had belonged to Harlampy, was difficult for her because it was written not in the language of the Pontic Greeks but in modern Greek. She also had in the house a Russian-Hebrew parallel-text Psalter published in Vilnius at the end of the nineteenth century, and this, together with two other books in Hebrew, now lay on the lid of the small trunk. Medea tried sometimes to read the Psalter in Russian, but although this made the meaning clearer in some places, the mysterious veiled beauty of the Church Slavonic was lost.
Medea well remembered the brown face of the young man with the thick, crudely split upper lip, his pointed nose, and the big flat lapels of his brown jacket, who came firmly up to Samuel sitting on a bench near the Theodosia bus station waiting for the bus to Simferopol. The young man was pressing three books to his side with his elbow. He stopped next to Samuel and asked him very directly, “Excuse me, are you a Jew?”
Samuel, tormented with pain, nodded silently, choosing not to come out with one of his customary dazzling jokes.
“Please take these. Our grandfather has died and nobody knows the language.” The young man began pushing the dog-eared volumes into Samuel’s hands, and it became clear that he was terribly confused. “Perhaps you will read them some time. My grandfather’s name was Chaim.”
Samuel silently opened the top one.
“The Siddur. I studied so badly in the heder, young man,” Samuel said thoughtfully, and the youth, seeing his indecision, hurried to say,
“Do please take them. I can’t just throw them out, can I? What use are they to us? We aren’t religious.”
And the brown youth ran off, leaving the three volumes on the bench beside Samuel. Samuel looked at Medea with large eyes: “There, do you see that, Medea,” he halted, because he guessed that she could see everything he could see and a few more things besides, and deftly wriggled out of his predicament. “Now we’ll have to drag all this weight to Simferopol and back.”
The last leaf of hope had fallen from the tree. Believing not in chance but in God’s providence, she understood this clear sign without any room for doubt: prepare yourself! From that moment she had no need of any biopsy, which was why they were going to the provincial hospital. They looked at each other, and even Samuel, who habitually blurted out everything that came into his head, said nothing.
They didn’t bother with a biopsy in Simferopol but operated on him two days later, removing a major part of his large intestine, made an outlet in his side, a colostomy, and three weeks later Medea brought him home to die.
After the operation, however, he gradually felt better and better. Strangely enough he grew stronger, although he was extremely emaciated. Medea fed him only porridges and gave him herbal drinks, picking the herbs herself. A few days after his return from the hospital, he began reading those ancient books, and in the last year of his life the most useless pupil of the Olshansk heder, blessing unknown Chaim, returned to his people; and Orthodox Medea rejoiced. She had never studied theology and perhaps just because of that felt that the bosom of Abraham was situated not all that far distant from the regions inhabited by the souls of Christians.
This last year of his life was wonderful. The autumn outside was so still and mild, and unusually generous. The old Tatar vineyards, not pruned or tended for many years, bestowed their last harvest on the earth. In the following years the vines degenerated finally, and centuries of hard work went to waste.
Pears and peaches broke their boughs and tomatoes their stems. There were queues for bread, and not the remotest prospect of sugar. Housewives boiled and marinated tomatoes, dried fruit on their roofs, and the knowledgeable ones like Medea made Tatar pastilla without sugar. The Ukrainian pigs fattened on all the sweet windfalls, and the honeyed aroma of moldering fruit hung over the Village.