Even before his illness he often walked with his friend Pavel Nikolaevich Shimes, a consulting physiotherapist at the Sudak sanatorium, through the manicured park which had formerly adjoined the Stepanyans’ dacha, and they had whispered discussions about the sweeping course of history in the practical terms of those who currently found themselves at its sharp end. Early one Sunday morning at the end of October 1951, Dr. Shimes came from Sudak to see him, bearing a half-liter bottle of dilute surgical spirit, an extremely strange gift for a teetotaler to bring, and to Samuel’s great surprise he asked Medea to leave them on their own.
Thereupon, rattling with false teeth which had not been very well fitted—not by Samuel, be it said—and drumming his fingers on the table’s edge, he announced that the end had come. There had been a Party meeting at the sanatorium the previous day at which, with provincial intellectual obtuseness, he had been accused of cosmopolitanism because of the wretched Charcot shower which the doctor had been promoting for many years alongside other physiotherapeutic methods, all of which had been devised by foreign physiologists at the end of the nineteenth century.
“That moron who runs the sanatorium thought ‘Sharko’ was a Ukrainian. Somebody enlightened him about that. I tell you though, Samuel, what I thought I might do. How would it be if I were to show him the certificate? We’ve got it safe at home,” Shimes whispered.
“What certificate? That Charcot was a Ukrainian?” Samuel asked in surprise.
“That I’ve been christened. They think I’m a Jew, that’s what it’s all about, but my father was baptized and had the whole family christened back in 1904, just before the pogrom. What do you think I should do, eh? What should I do?” He dropped his bald head onto his hands.
He had nevertheless remained a real Jew, because at such a moment no Russian would ever have allowed himself to forget the bottle of spirits he had brought. Samuel scratched his little beard before answering in his usual manner: “Keep that certificate of yours for your funeral, so your priests can chant that Christian Kaddish of theirs over you. That’s no solution. For Russians you are still a Jew, and for Jews you are worse than a goy. But as regards Charcot, you announce to those donkeys that Dr. Charcot stole his invention. From Botkin, say, or from Spasokukotsky. Or better still from Academician Pavlov. What are you looking at me like that for? Write up in your treatment room, ‘Academician Pavlov Shower,’ and they will all go back to sleep. And Pavlov won’t mind: he died before the war.” Samuel smiled waspishly and added, “And if you are as Orthodox as all that, you can even light a candle in church for him. My Medea will show you how, she knows all about that sort of thing.”
Poor Shimes took offense and left, but after further thought he did hang up a notice in large red letters reading, “Academician Pavlov Shower.” Alas, it was too late: he was fired from his job, although the notice hung on the door for more than two years. But at that time, after Shimes had gone off, Samuel felt his fear gradually being replaced by regret that there should be such rank stupidity all around. Or perhaps his illness was already beginning its secret work in Samuel’s apparently still-healthy body.
It stayed warm for much longer than was usual in these parts, right through to the end of November. But then, from the first days of December, the cold rains began, quickly turning into snow and storms. Although the sea was quite far away and considerably lower, bad weather at sea affected the Village, especially at night. The wind bore masses of visible and invisible water, and the thick cushion of water vapor over the earth was so dense that it was impossible to imagine that a mere five kilometers or so above this cold porridge there shone the inexhaustible, infinite sun.
Samuel ceased going outside. Medea took his wicker chair back to the summer kitchen and put on the winter padlock. She was cooking now on a cooker in the house and in addition lit a small wood stove which had been installed by a Theodosia stove setter the year they moved here. Tatars did not put stoves in their houses, and left the floors earthen. Samuel and Medea had them covered over a year after they moved in.
Samuel asked her to hang heavy curtains in his room. He did not like the transition of twilight and would pull down the heavy blue blinds and light the table lamp. When they had a power cut, which was fairly often, he would light an older miner’s lamp which gave a bright whitish light.
They kept the windows closed now, and Medea was forever burning oil infused with herbs in little homemade lamps, and the house was filled with a sweet oriental fragrance.
Samuel no longer read the newspapers; even the periodical fishing out of cosmopolitans in all areas of science and culture ceased to interest him.
By now he had read his way to the Book of Leviticus. This relatively less engrossing book, by comparison with the first two books of the Pentateuch, was addressed primarily to priests and contained almost half the 613 commandments which supported the Jewish way of life.
Samuel immersed himself in this strange book for a long time but still couldn’t see why “of every winged crawling thing that goeth upon all four” you could eat only those which “have legs above their feet with which to leap upon the earth.” But even of those the only ones pronounced fit for eating were the locust, and the hargol and harab which nobody had ever heard of, while all the rest were considered an abomination.
There was absolutely no logical explanation given for this. It was rough and inflexible, this law, and a lot of space was devoted to all manner of rituals connected with service in the Temple, which was complete nonsense given that there had long been no Temple and there was no prospect of its ever being restored. Then he noticed that the overall design of this ungainly law, sketched already in Exodus and fully developed in the Talmud, examined every imaginable and unimaginable situation in which a human being might find himself, and gave precise instructions on how to behave in these circumstances, and that all these chaotically imposed prohibitions were in pursuance of a single aim: the holiness of the life of the people of Israel and an associated total rejection of the laws of the Land of Canaan.
This path had been offered to him in the days of his youth, and he had rejected it. More than that, he had rejected even the laws of the Land of Canaan, which promised, if not holiness, then at least a certain relative orderliness founded on justice, and as a young man he had managed to work for the destruction of both of them.
Researching now the ancient Jewish legislation, he came to a realization of the profound lawlessness in which the people of his country were living, and he among them. This was no less than the universal rule of lawlessness which, worse than the laws of Canaan, overruled the distinction between innocence and brazenness, intelligence and stupidity. The only person, he now recognized, who was truly living in accordance with a law of her own was his wife Medea. The quiet stubbornness with which she had brought up the children, toiled and prayed and kept her fasts, could be seen now not to be an extension of her strange personality, but an obligation freely assumed, the observance of a law long since repealed everywhere by everyone else.
He did actually know other people of a similar disposition— his Uncle Ephraim, randomly killed by a drunken soldier who disappeared around the end of the street without looking back; and possibly Rais, the feebleminded cleaner, was someone of the same kind, a young Tatar who had just two rules in his little head: to smile at everyone; and to meticulously—idiotically meticulously—sweep the paths of the sanatorium park.