Samuel, who had been used to blurting out everything that came into his head to Medea, kept his present thoughts to himself, not from fear of not being understood, but rather from a feeling that he could not express them with total accuracy. From what he did say, Medea understood how much his inner life had changed and was glad about that, but she was too concerned about his physical condition to delve more deeply. He had begun to have back pain, and now she was giving him injections to enable him to sleep.
December passed, the storms abated, but it was as dismal and cold as ever. By the middle of January they were looking forward to the coming of spring. Medea, who had previously replied promptly to letters from her relatives, now responded only with brief postcards. “Received your letter, thank you, everything with us is as it was, Medea, Samuel.”
She had no time for letter-writing. In all that winter she wrote only two real letters—to Elena and Alexandra.
February seemed to go on forever, and as luck would have it, this had to be a leap year. But then, in the third week of March the sun appeared, and from then on never missed an hour, and immediately everything started turning green. On the way home from work Medea climbed up a sun-warmed hill, picked a few violets and asphodels, and arranged them in a dish beside Samuel. He was hardly getting out of bed now and didn’t even sit up because sitting seemed to make the pain worse. He was eating only once a day because the business of eating was too exhausting. His expression was continuing to change, and Medea found him full of spirituality and marvelous.
The last Sunday of March was a warm day with no wind, and Samuel asked her to take him outside. She washed the chair, dried it in the sun, and covered it with an old blanket. Then she dressed Samuel, and it seemed to her that his coat weighed more than he did himself. He walked the twenty steps from his bed out to the chair with immense difficulty.
On a nearby slope the tamarisks were doing their best, their branches laden with lilac color which they were still holding back within themselves. He looked toward the table mountains and they looked back at him in a friendly way, as equals regarding an equal.
“God, how wonderful, how beautiful,” he said again and again, and tears flowed from the inner and outer corners of his eyes at the same time and were lost in the pointed beard he had grown.
Medea was sitting next to him on the bench and did not notice the moment when he ceased to breathe, because tears continued to flow for a few minutes more from his eyes.
He was buried on the fifth day. His withered body waited patiently for the relatives to come, showing no signs of decay. Alexandra came with Sergei, Fyodor with Georgii and Natasha, brother Dimitry with his son Gvidas from Lithuania, and all the men of the family from Tbilisi. The men bore him to the local graveyard and sat down afterward to a modest meal in his memory.
Medea did not allow any baking of pies or a big funeral party. There was traditional kutiya with rice, raisins and honey, there was bread, cheese, a bowl of Central Asian greens, and hard-boiled eggs. When Natasha asked Medea why she had arranged it this way, she replied: “He was a Jew, Natasha, and Jews don’t have funeral parties at all. They come back from the graveyard, sit on the floor, pray and fast for a set number of days. I have to say that seems to me a good custom. I don’t like our parties where people always eat and drink too much. Let it be this way.”
After the death of her husband, Medea put on widow’s weeds and surprised everyone with her beauty and an expression of unusual gentleness which people had not noticed in her before. With this new expression she embarked upon her long widowhood.
All that year, as we have said, Medea read the Psalter and waited for news from beyond the grave from her husband as diligently as one might wait for the postman to bring an overdue letter. But nothing came. Several times it seemed to her that the long-awaited dream was beginning, that everything was full of her husband’s presence, but her anticipation was dispelled by the unexpected arrival, in her dream, of some hostile stranger, or in reality by a strong gust of wind slamming the window and driving sleep away.
He first appeared to her in early March, shortly before the first anniversary of his death, but the dream was strange and brought her no comfort. Several days passed before its meaning became clear.
She dreamed of Samuel in a white doctor’s coat. That was good. His hands were covered in plaster or chalk, and his face was very pale. He was sitting at his work table tapping with a little hammer at some unpleasant jagged metal object, but it was not a set of dentures. Then he turned to her and stood up, and he was holding a portrait of Stalin which for some reason was upside down. He took the hammer, tapped it on the edge of the glass, and removed him neatly; but while he was fiddling with the glass, Stalin disappeared, to be replaced by a large photograph of the young Alexandra.
That very day it was announced that Stalin was ill, and a few days later that he had died. Medea observed the spontaneous grief and sincere tears, and also the unutterable curses of those who could not share that grief, but she herself was completely unmoved by the event. She was much more concerned about the second half of the dream: why was Alexandra in it and what did her being there presage? Medea had a vague sense of alarm and even wondered about going to the post office to ring through to Moscow.
A further two weeks passed and the anniversary of Samuel’s death came around. That day the weather was rainy, and Medea was completely soaked by the time she got back home from the graveyard. The following day she decided to go through her husband’s belongings, give some of the things away, but mainly she wanted to find some instruments and a small German electric motor which she had promised to the son of a friend in Theodosia.
She made a pile of his folded shirts and set aside his good suit for Fyodor, who might have a use for it. There were also two sweaters which retained the living smell of her husband, and she held them for a while in her hands before deciding not to give them away to anyone but keep them for herself. In the very bottom of the cupboard she found a map case with various documents: one certifying completion of the course in dental prosthetics of the Commissariat of Health; one about graduating from the workers’ faculty course; several deeds and official congratulatory letters.
“I’ll put them away in the trunk,” Medea thought, and opened an inconspicuous side section of the map case. A thin envelope lay in there, written in Alexandra’s handwriting. The letter was addressed to S. Ya. Mendez, Sudak Post Office. That was odd.
She opened the envelope mechanically and was stopped short by the first line: “Dear Samsy,” Alexandra had written. Nobody called him that. Older people called him Sam, the younger ones Samuel Yakovlevich. “You have turned out to be much better at arithmetic than I thought,” Medea read.
You are absolutely right, but it doesn’t mean anything at all, and it would be best if you forgot about your discovery straightaway and forever. I and my sister are complete opposites. She is a saint and I am a swine three times over, but I would rather die than that she should discover who the father of this child is. For this reason I beg you to destroy this letter straightaway. The girl is completely mine, only mine, and please do not think that you have a child—this is simply another of Medea’s many relatives. She is a splendid little girl, redheaded and smiling, and looks as though she’s going to be a bundle of fun, and I just hope she doesn’t look like you—by which I mean so that this secret will remain between the two of us. Thank you for the money. It was not unwelcome but, to tell the truth, I do not know whether I want help from you. The main thing is that my sister shouldn’t suspect anything. I’m suffering pangs of conscience enough as it is, and really where would I be if she ever found out?