And where would she be? Look after yourself and enjoy your life, Samsy.
Sandra
Medea read the letter standing up, very slowly, and then she read it again. Yes, of course. They had often gone down to the coves together that summer, Alexandra and Samuel. And it was that summer that Alexandra had lost her maiden’s ring.
Medea sat down. A blackness the like of which she had never known engulfed her. Until late evening she sat there, not moving, then she got up and started packing her things. She didn’t go to bed that night.
In the morning she was standing at the bus stop with her black shawl neatly tied, with a large rucksack on her back and carrying a carryall she had made herself. At the bottom of the carryall, in an old-fashioned carpetbag, lay her application for leave which she had decided to send when already on her way, her identity documents, some money, and the ill-starred letter. She caught the first morning bus to Theodosia.
CHAPTER 12
Standing at the bus stop with the rucksack on her shoulders, Medea felt herself a second Odysseus. Probably, indeed, even more heroic, since Odysseus standing on the shores of Troy, while he might have been unaware of the many years that would have to pass before his return, did at least have a fairly good idea of the distance separating him from home.
Medea, however, was accustomed to measuring distance in terms of hours of her brisk walking, and could not begin to imagine the length of the journey she had embarked on. Odysseus, moreover, was an adventurer and a mariner, and did not pass up any opportunity to delay his return, mostly just pretending that his ultimate destination was the crude habitation in Ithaca called the king’s palace and the embraces of his aged and domesticated wife.
Up to that time Medea had spent her whole life in the Crimea, apart from that single journey to Moscow with Alexandra and her firstborn, Sergei, and this rooted life, which had itself been subject to violent and rapid change—revolutions, changes of government, the Reds, the Whites, the Germans, the Romanians; some neighbors being deported, new neighbors, outsiders with no ties, imported—had finally given Medea the stolidity of a tree which has put down its twining roots into the stony soil, living beneath the unchanging sun as it completes its daily and yearly rounds, and exposed to the same winds with their seasonal smells of seaweed drying on the shore, or fruit shriveling in the sun, or bitter wormwood.
For all that, she was a maritime person. From an early age the men of her family went to sea. Her father had died at sea, and Alexander Stepanyan had gone away forever over the sea, taking with him Anait and Arsik; a decrepit steamer had taken her aunt and two of her brothers from Batumi; and even her sister Anelya, who had married a Georgian from mountainous Tiflis, had left home long ago from the new dock at dear Theodosia.
Although there were no direct sea routes to the far-off city to which Medea had been intending to travel for decades, and for which she had now packed her bags and set out in a single night, she decided to go at least part of the way, the first part, by sea, from Kerch to Taganrog. The first two legs of the journey, from the Village to Theodosia, and from Theodosia to Kerch, were as familiar as crossing her own yard. Arriving that evening in Kerch, she found herself on the frontiers of her oikoumene, which had the ancient Pantikapeia as its easternmost point.
In the port Medea learned that passenger sailings began only in May, and that the few ships which were now sailing between Kerch and Taganrog carried only freight and no passengers. She was nonplussed, recognizing her first mistake: she should after all have gone directly via Dzhankoy, not allowing herself to be tempted by marine digressions.
Turning away with some aversion from the brackish, yellowy-grey maeotian waters, she went to see her old friend Tasha Lavinskaya, who had dedicated herself from the days of her youth to “bone-grubbing,” as it was jocularly described by her husband, old Dr. Lavinsky, an intellectual and bibliophile who was almost as much of a local sight as the Vault of Diana. They lived at the back of the museum, and their apartment looked like an annex of it: fragments of crumbling Kerch stone, ancient dust, and dry paper filled the house.
Tasha did not immediately recognize Medea. They had not seen each other for several years, since Samuel had fallen ill, when her small number of friends, some from a feeling of tact, some for selfish reasons, had almost ceased to visit them in the Village. Having recognized her, however, Tasha fell upon Medea’s neck, not giving her time even to take off her rucksack.
“Wait, wait, Tashenka, let me get these things off first,” Medea said, fending her off. “Let me get washed. Samuel used to say Kerch was the world’s pole for dust.” It was a damp springtime and there was no dust in evidence at all, but such was Medea’s confidence in what her late husband said that she felt covered in dust.
Sweeping piles of tattered books and sundry sheets of paper, covered with tiny drawings and infrequent illegible lines of writing, from the edge of the table with a practiced gesture, Tasha laid out the food on a newspaper, making no attempt to disguise its paucity and unprepossessing appearance. Sergei Illarionovich, the majestic old husband of a once-young beauty who magnanimously failed to notice how old and ugly she had become at an early age, the occasional coarse hairs sprouting from her chin, or her increasingly buck teeth, all his life viewed Tasha’s extreme aversion to housework as a delightful foible. He had not lost an archaic ability to play the host, and plied Medea with dried and tinned fish, which was a complete absurdity in this fishing town.
But the wine was good. Someone had given it to them. Although long retired, Sergei was still practicing a little, and the intimates he treated would bring gifts of food to the house in addition to the customary fee, as they had in the past years of famine which had already almost faded from people’s short memories. Hearing of the hitch in his guest’s traveling plans, he immediately phoned the director of the port, who promised to see Medea on her way in the morning on the first available vessel, although he warned that he could give the traveler no guarantees regarding comfort.
They sat up until late into the night, the three of them at the table, drinking the good wine, then drinking bad tea, and Tasha, who showed no interest in why Medea might need to be going to Taganrog, launched into a long narrative about some kind of grid she had discovered from the Azov Mesolithic period. For a long while Medea couldn’t grasp why she was so excited, until Tasha placed before her, on top of the remains of the fish, some very soiled little pictures drawn by an expert hand, depicting what looked like a grid for tic-tac-toe, and announced that this grid was one of the most persistent sacred symbols, found in the Paleolithic period and discovered in Egypt, on Crete, in pre-Columbian America, and now if you please here too, in the Azov region. Sergei Illarionovich, overcome by the drowsiness of old age and dozing in his armchair, was roused from time to time by his innate courtesy to nod a sleepy head in agreement and murmur some word of approbation before relapsing into slumber.
Not in the least interested in Tasha’s scholarly researches, Medea waited patiently for the lecture to end, surprised that she had said not a word either about her daughter or granddaughter who were living in Leningrad. At each turning point in Tasha’s speech Medea nodded in agreement and reflected on how stubborn human nature is, how persistent a passion can sometimes be, as unchanging as these grids of hers, these ovals and dots which, having once been imprinted, live on for millennia in every remotest corner of the world, in the cellars of museums, in rubbish dumps, scratched in the dry earth and on ramshackle fences by children at play.