The heavy mood of her journey, which she had seemed to be carrying on her shoulders, was washed away by the gentle waves of the morning breeze which, as she knew, always sprang up at sunrise. She heard a sudden shouting in the distance, carried over from the east on the breeze. It too seemed to roll in like a wave, and these were the piping voices of children.
“Water! The water’s coming! Suvgia!”
Several little children immediately came dancing out of the gates, and other children’s heads peeped over fences. A fat old woman in felt boots and a Ukrainian shirt which had worn through on her bosom waddled out to the ditch.
Medea stopped. She knew what was about to happen and had been waiting for just this moment. The bottom of the shallow ditch was covered over with a smooth, pale brown film of what looked like the skin skimmed from boiled milk, and, blown by the dawn breeze, pink petals of apricot blossom which had just fallen from the trees slowly settled on it; now there came the grumbling sound of water, and in front of its brown tongue there rose a pink cloud of apricot-blossom debris.
The shout passed down the street, the water was gurgling in the ditch. Young children and old men opened the ditch inlets to their yards. The time for the morning irrigation had begun.
Immediately outside Elena’s house Medea collided with a little blond boy of about ten. He had just let the water into the yard and was washing his freckled face in the brown, rather suspicious-looking water.
“Hello, Shurik,” Medea said to him.
He took a step backward in surprise and disappeared into the bushes with a shout: “Mamunya! Someone’s here to see you.”
Medea stopped in the yard and looked around: three small houses, one with a verandah and a high porch, and two more straightforward, whitewashed ones, formed a square in the center of which stood a platform for tea drinking, and from the summer kitchen with its side awning there came walking slowly toward her, greying, fat, wearing a white apron pinned up high in front, dear Elena. She did not recognize Medea at once, but when she did, she threw her arms open wide and ran toward her with a silly, joyful cry: “My own dear heart has come back to me!”
Doors and windows banged. The old sheepdog in its kennel finally woke up and started energetically barking, aware of having neglected its duty. The yard filled up with what seemed to Medea to be a huge crowd, but these were her own people: Elena’s daughter Natasha with her seven-year-old son Pavlik; Georgii, Elena’s younger son, who had grown over the past winter into a handsome young man; and a thin little old woman with a crutch.
“Old Nanny Galya,” Medea guessed.
Up on the porch, inclining the arrogant face of an oriental beauty to one side, stood thirteen-year-old Shusha, Natasha’s older daughter, wearing a white nightgown which her shining Asian hair almost entirely covered. Little blond Shurik peeped out from behind the trunk of a peach tree.
“Oh, Lord, Fyodor is away on a business trip. He left only yesterday!” Elena said, crestfallen, still not releasing Medea from her hug. “But why didn’t you warn us? Georgii could have come to meet you.”
Elena’s family stood around, waiting their turn for a kiss from their aunt or great-aunt. Only Old Galya muttered something to herself and hobbled off to the forgotten stove where some domestic crisis had occurred: black smoke was rising from a frying pan.
“Oh, I’ll get you some tea, some tea! Oh, what am I saying, coffee, coffee! Oh, my own dear heart has come back to me!” Elena clucked, repeating every word and flapping at the air around her head with a gesture totally unique to herself.
Seeing this movement of Elena’s small hand, which had quite slipped her memory, Medea suddenly felt very happy.
Since 1920, when Medea saw her brother Fyodor off from the Theodosia station to his new job with his new wife, entrusted to him only the previous day after Medea’s firm hand had matched the two of them, the friends had seen each other only twice: in 1932 soon after Medea and Samuel moved to the Village; and in 1940 when the entire Tashkent branch of the Sinoply family had come to visit.
That last summer before the war Medea had had a great family congress: Alexandra with Sergei and Lidia; her brother Constantine, who was killed a year later in the very first days of the war; Tasha Lavinskaya . . . There had been no room to move in the house. Everything was alive with children’s voices, the July sun, and Crimean wine.
That year Fyodor won the State Prize and was expecting a new appointment, almost at ministerial level.
Medea had been unable to get off work and had had to go in every day and then come home and cook and cook and cook. Her sister and the young bride would have been glad to help, but Medea didn’t like other people getting involved in her housework, moving things from where they belonged and generally not doing things her way. Only with the passing years and the coming of old age had she resigned herself to letting young relatives busy themselves in her kitchen and never being able to find anything.
There had been so many people there and the kitchen had constantly been so busy that the friends hardly had a chance to talk. Medea remembered only their last conversation the night before they parted, when they were washing up in the kitchen after the farewell supper and Elena, drying a pile of plates with a long towel, had complained bitterly that Fyodor was putting his head straight in the lion’s mouth. She was prudent enough to be fearful of his successful career and transformation from a modest surveyor into virtually the top official in charge of the irrigation system of Uzbekistan.
“How can he not understand?” Elena asked despairingly. “My father was a member of the Crimean government. He’s never mentioned that in a single curriculum vitae. And the higher you rise, the more exposed you become.”
Immediately after Elena and Fyodor left, Anelya had arrived from Tiflis with her family, then the younger Nastya with her young husband, and in a short interval between visitors Medea had written Elena a letter which concluded with the words “What a shame that we hardly saw each other. We’re probably doomed to correspond for the rest of our lives.”
Now in Tashkent, Medea was the only, and a profoundly welcome, guest. In the mornings after the children had been sent to school, Elena and Medea went to the Chorsinsky Bazaar not far from the house, bought mutton, early greens, sometimes chickens: two weren’t quite enough for dinner, but three were too many.
Everyone in the family was used to eating a lot, to Medea’s amazement. The end of March was a lean time and there was none of the summer lushness of an Asian bazaar, but they stuffed their bags full and went home in the tram.
The table was usually set for dinner late, at around eight when Fyodor got back from work. Before that the children nibbled, helping themselves to a piece of bread or whatever. Dinner, however, lasted a couple of hours, and in addition to the usual local food, sapsa dumplings and noodle soup, there was always an Armenian delicacy of some kind on the table—Elena was still a dab hand at making baklava.
Late in the evenings, when the house was quiet, they would sit together for a long time by the cleared table, laying out an intricate game of patience, which came out for Elena not more than once a year, going over early memories, beginning with their school days; they hooted with laughter, they sighed, they wept for those they had loved and who had been lost in the chaos of the past.
A heavy rock slowly shifted at the bottom of Medea’s heart, but their conversation did not move in a direction which would have allowed her to mention the letter. Something stopped her, and the tragedy she had experienced so recently suddenly began to seem to her quite simply indecent.