Although she had lived through many unsettled times in the Crimea, and remembered the typhoid-infected huts, the famine, and the cold, Medea had never been directly caught up in the huge migrations which have accompanied Russia’s history, and knew only by hearsay about the goods vans, the cattle trucks full of people, and the queues for boiling water at the stations. Now, when she had passed fifty, she had for the first time torn herself away from her dear settled life of her own free will, and observed with astonishment what uncountable hordes were on the move over this vast, uncared-for land littered with rusting metal and broken stones. Down the railway embankments, just beneath the spare spring grass, lay the remains of a war which had ended eight years before, eroded shell craters full of stagnant water, ruins and bones embedded in the ground which filled the landscape from Rostov to Salsk and from Salsk to Stalingrad.
It seemed to Medea that the war was etched more deeply in the memory of the land than in that of all this multitude of people so loudly and uniformly lamenting the recent death of Stalin. Only a few weeks had passed since he died, and all her fellow travelers were constantly mentioning it as they talked among themselves.
She heard a lot of fantastic nonsense: an elderly railway worker, on the way back from his own mother’s funeral, told in a whisper of the great slaughter which had occurred in Moscow on the day the nation was bidding farewell to Stalin, and about the Jewish conspiracies which had been at the root of it; another gloomy individual, with a wooden leg and a chest bright with medal ribbons, told of an underground city full of top-secret American weapons which had supposedly been dug up by chance in the middle of Moscow; two schoolmarms on their way to a regional meeting of some description endlessly debated in strained professional tones between themselves who there now was to lead the country to the Communist dream. In contrast, a tipsy traveler who had not taken off his cap with its earflaps all the way from Ilovinskaya to Saratov, and who had been listening the whole journey to their loud chatter without saying a word, as he was getting off the train suddenly pulled the hat from his head to reveal a patchy baldness, spat on the floor and said in a powerful voice, “You’re two daft old biddies! It can’t get worse than this under anybody.”
Medea smiled out of the window. From her early years she had become used to treating political changes like changes in the weather—something you just had to put up with: in the winter you were cold, in the summer you sweated. She did, however, take care to prepare for each season in good time, getting in firewood for the winter; stockpiling sugar, if such a thing were anywhere to be found, for jam making in the summer. She never expected anything good from any authorities, kept her guard up, and stayed well away from people who were part of the power structure.
As for the Great Leader, the family had long had a bone to pick with him. Well before the Revolution, in Batumi, he had turned the head of her aunt’s husband Iraklii, and landed him in a thoroughly unsavory episode involving a bank robbery from which he had to be extricated by his family putting together a very large sum of money.
In the Village on the day the Leader died, flags of mourning were put out and a meeting called. A party boss came from Sudak—not the top boss, someone fairly new. He gave his speech; they turned on some solemn music; two local women, Sonya from the food shop and Valentina Ivanovna the teacher, burst into tears; and everyone decided to send a telegram expressing their grief to “The Kremlin, Moscow.” Medea, more appropriately dressed than any of them in her mourning clothes, stood at the meeting for as long as was necessary and then went to her vineyard and pruned it until evening.
For Medea all this was the distant echo of a life in which she had no part. Her present traveling companions, individuals who collectively constituted the Russian people, were now loud in their anxiety, fearful of their future as orphans, weeping; others, unspeaking, were quietly rejoicing at the tyrant’s death; but all of them had now to resolve things in a new way, and to learn to live in a world which had changed overnight.
What was strange was that Medea too, in quite a different connection, was experiencing something similar. The letter lying deep in her bag was forcing her to see herself, her sister, and her late husband in a new light, and first and foremost to reconcile herself to a fact which seemed to her completely impossible.
An affair between her husband, who all the years of their marriage had deified her, extolling her merits, which he had partly invented himself, to excess, and her sister Alexandra, someone she could read like a book, was an impossibility not only on practical grounds. Some higher interdict, Medea felt, had been flouted, but judging by Alexandra’s pert letter and its easy tone, she had not even noticed this incestuous and sacramental wrongdoing. All she was concerned about was ensuring that the secret did not inconveniently become public knowledge.
A special torment was that the present situation called for neither decisions nor action. All the previous misfortunes in her life—the death of her parents, her husband’s illness—had called for physical and moral exertion: what had happened now was just the echo of something long past. Sam was no longer alive, his daughter Nike was, and there was no possibility of having a posthumous showdown with him.
She had been degraded by her husband, betrayed by her sister, abused by fate itself, which had denied her children while the child fathered by her husband, the child that by rights was hers, had been placed in her sister’s relaxed and fun-loving body. The gloom in her soul was made deeper also by the fact that Medea, who had always been on the move herself, was being forced to sit for days at a time by this window where all the movement was outside, in the rolling by of the changing scenery through the window and, to some extent, in the restless movement of other people in the railway carriage.
Her journey lasted three and a half days, and as the route was quite whimsical, veering far up into the heart of the Continent, she appeared to overtake the spring in its northward progress: she left the Crimea where the leaves were coming out, and again saw snow lying in the ravines in the pre-Urals, the bare earth still gripped by frosts at night; and then, traveling to the east and the south, she came back to the spring with the hot steppes of Kazakhstan in full flower and dotted with vivid tulips.
The train arrived in Tashkent in early morning. She got out with her now-depleted rucksack and, knowing that her relatives lived not far from the station, asked which direction to take.
The street was called Twelve Poplars, but if poplars ever had grown here, they had meekly yielded to the flowering apricot trees planted along the irrigation ditch at the roadside. It was earliest, newborn morn, the time Medea loved best, and after her taxing days on the dirty train, she was particularly alive to this God-given purity and the smells of the morning, in which familiar mingled with unfamiliar: the smoke from a different fuel, and the spicy smell of an unknown meat dish. Everything, however, was overpowered by the heady perfume of the lilac hanging out its trusses of blossom as blue and heavy as bunches of grapes above the clay walls and plank fences. Even the birds seemed to be singing in a foreign language, not so much singing as chirping.
As Medea walked down the interminably long road, enjoying the exercise, slightly swinging her shoulders, which were pulled back by the rucksack straps beneath which she had tucked her light coat in soldierly fashion, she was taking in, in addition to the numbers of the houses, all sorts of little details and surprises. On a fence a brown and pink turtledove was sitting as cool as could be: it was a bird she had been familiar with since she was a girl, only in the Crimea it was very wild and timid and never flew into the town.