Medea was managing the hospital then. Only in 1955 was a doctor sent, and until then she was the only nurse in the Village. In early morning she would come into her husband’s room with a bowl of warm water, take off the clumsy, crudely made apparatus from his sick side, and cleanse and wash the wound with a decoction of chamomile and sage.
He grimaced not with pain but with embarrassment and muttered, “What justice is there in the world? I get a bag of gold and you get a bag of shit.”
She fed him watery porridge, gave him a herbal infusion to drink from a half-liter mug, and waited, placing a trough beneath his side until the porridge, having completed its short passage, poured out of the open wound. She knew what she was doing: the herbs sluiced the poison of his illness out of him, but the food was hardly assimilated. His death, for which both of them were readying themselves, was to come from starvation, not from poisoning.
Samuel at first turned away squeamishly, embarrassed at the exposing of this unpleasant physiology, but then he detected that Medea was not having to make the slightest effort to conceal revulsion, and that she was much more concerned about the inflamed edge of the wound or a delay in the outpouring of porridge which had only slightly changed its appearance than about the unpleasant smell emanating from the wound.
The pain was very great, but inconsistent. Sometimes several days would pass peacefully before some internal obstruction would form; then Medea would rinse the stoma with boiled sunflower oil, and everything would settle down again. After all, this too was life, and Medea was prepared to bear the burden indefinitely.
In the mornings she would spend three hours or so by her husband’s side, going off to work at half-past eight and running home at lunchtime. Sometimes, when Tamara Stepanovna, an old registered nurse, was on duty with her, she could leave at lunchtime and she didn’t have to go back to work in the afternoon.
Then Samuel could go out to the yard. She would arrange him in the chair and sit herself beside him on a low bench, cutting the skin off pears with a little knife whose blade had been almost completely worn away, or peeling blanched tomatoes.
Toward the end of his life Samuel became taciturn, and they sat quietly, enjoying each other’s presence, the stillness, and their love in which there was now no fault. Medea, ever mindful of his rare natural lack of malice and the event which he considered his ineradicable disgrace, but which she saw as a true manifestation of his meek soul, rejoiced now in the quiet courage with which he bore his pain, fearlessly approaching death and literally pouring gratitude out of his heart to all God’s world, and in particular to her, Medea.
He usually had his chair so that he could see the table mountains and the rounded hills in their pink and grey haze. “The hills here are like the hills of Galilee,” he repeated after Alexander Stepanyan, whom he had never seen, any more than he had seen the hills of Galilee. He knew of him only from what Medea had told him.
The book from which he had read excerpts worse than anyone else at the celebration of his Jewish coming of age half a century before, he now read slowly. Forgotten words rose like air bubbles from the bottom of his memory, and if they didn’t and the square letters chose not to reveal their hallowed meaning to him, he looked for an approximate paraphrase in the parallel Russian text.
He quickly realized that the book did not lend itself to exact translation. On the bourne of life things began to reveal themselves of which he had had no idea: that thoughts are not fully conveyed by words, but only with a large amount of approximation; that there is a certain gap, a breach, between the thought and the word, and it is filled in by hard work on the part of consciousness, which makes up for the deficiencies of language. In order to break through to the thought itself, which Samuel now imagined as resembling a crystal, you had to leave the text behind. In itself language clogged the precious crystal with inaccurate words whose boundaries fluctuated over time, with the physical appearance of words and letters, and with the different sound of the spoken word. He noticed that a certain shift of meaning occurred: the two languages he knew, Russian and Hebrew, had slightly different ways of expressing thought.
“National in form,” Samuel smiled, paraphrasing Stalin, “and divine in content.” Even now he couldn’t stop joking.
He had little strength left. Everything he did he did very slowly, and Medea noticed how his movements had changed, how meaningfully and even solemnly he raised the cup to his mouth, and wiped with his withered fingers the mustache he had grown over the last few months and the short beard streaked with grey. But, as if in compensation for this physical decline, or perhaps it was the effect Medea’s herbs had, his mind was clear and his thoughts, although slow, were very precise. He understood that he had little of his lifetime left, but surprisingly enough the sense of always being in a rush and the fussiness which had always been a part of him completely left him. He slept little now, his days and nights were very long, but this did not burden him: his consciousness had become attuned to a different timescale. Looking into the past, he was amazed at the instantaneousness of the life he had lived, and at the length of each minute he was spending in the wicker chair, sitting with his back to the sunset, his face to the east, to the darkening, lilac-blue sky, to the hills which in the course of half an hour could turn from pink to a brooding blue.
Looking in that direction, he made another discovery: it transpired that all his life he had lived not only in a rush, but also in a state of profound fear, which he had hidden even from himself. More exactly, many fears, of which the most acute was the fear of killing. Remembering now that appalling event in Vasilishchevo, the shootings which he was to have conducted and which he had not in the end seen, having ignominiously collapsed in a nervous fit, he now thanked God for that weakness so unbecoming in a man, for his behaving like a high-strung lady, which had saved his soul from damnation.
“I’m a coward, a coward,” he admitted to himself, but even here could not miss an opportunity for ironic creativity: “She loved him so because he was a coward, he loved her for forgiving that in him.” “And I always hid my cowardice,” as Samuel now judged himself, “by running after women.”
A psychoanalyst might have extrapolated from Samuel’s case some complex with a mythological name, and would at the very least have explained the dentist’s heightened sexual aggression as a subconscious driving out of fear of the bloodiness of life by means of simple thrusting movements in the yielding soft tissue of generously endowed ladies. Marrying Medea, he hid from his eternal fear behind her courage. His pranks and jokes and the constant desire to get those around him to smile were associated with an intuitive realization that laughter kills fear. He found out now that a mortal illness too could free you of the fear of living.
The last fierce dog waiting to bite every Jew’s heel was cosmopolitanism. Even before the term became generally accepted, sprouting its rigid expanded definition of “a reactionary bourgeois ideology,” from Zhdanov’s first publication Samuel anxiously followed the newspapers in which this bubble sometimes expanded and sometimes shrank. From his socially insignificant but materially more than tolerable position as district dental prosthetist, ever since his disgraceful flight from the ranks of the directly involved perpetrators of history into the herd of passive observers under experiment, Samuel foresaw the next of Stalin’s migrations of the peoples. The Crimean Tatars, the Germans, in part the Pontic Greeks, and the Karaims had already been deported from the Crimea by this time, and he had the inventive idea of preempting the blow and taking contract work in the north of Russia for five years or so, by which time, with any luck, it would all have blown over.