In the heat of the day, added to by the heat from the summer stove, the hearth in the yard and the constantly boiling water for the laundry, whose blueness and crackly starchiness was Elena’s special pride, Medea observed how Elena’s life was structured and noted approvingly the customs of the old Stepanyan house, a mixture of generosity toward those around and a certain stinginess where cooking was concerned. Elena counted the eggplants and the walnuts, but money—never.
Fate had taken Elena’s close family from her when she was very young, and her nineteen-year-old elder son in the war years, but at least it had never let her experience poverty. It was as if she had been destined from birth always to wear gold and eat from silver. Amazingly enough, in her first year of living in Tashkent she had been sought out, not without help from Medea, by Old Ashkhen, the servant of her Tiflis aunt, who had died a rich, childless widow. Ashkhen walked all the way from Tiflis, carrying a dirty traveling bag containing the family treasures bequeathed to Elena by her aunt.
Elena, who by then had lost everything that she had left from the old life, promptly put two rings on her fingers, one with a pearl, the second with a blue diamond; she put black agate discs with a small pearl in the center on her ears, and put the rest in the bottom of a basket in which she was laying down the dowry for her firstborn, whose appearance in the world seemed imminent. Old Ashkhen lived six more years in her house, right up until her death.
Elena set about arranging her house in Tashkent, this same house which Fyodor had been allocated immediately upon his arrival, in the manner customary in her family, with such modifications as their very modest means dictated. She named the best room the study and gave it to her husband; she returned to the bedroom two beds which had been taken from the house and put in a shed by the Uzbeks who had occupied the house after its previous owner, the deputy governor, shot himself in a fit of senile depression at the beginning of 1917.
In the same shed Elena discovered the remaining furniture which had not been consigned to the stove. She created the semblance of bedside cabinets from two stools she covered with bright scarves, bought a quantity of copper pots and pans at the bazaar, and their residence began in some elusive way to resemble the old house in Tiflis, the dacha at Sudak, and their apartment in Geneva. The tastes of the late Armik Tigranovna were everywhere in evidence.
They later bought the second house in their yard for Natasha, and were currently negotiating with their remaining neighbors to buy the third one, which stood to the right of the central house. Elena had plans to settle Georgii in it.
Medea knew all this from Elena’s letters, in which she mentioned every remotely significant event, but in which for both of them the most important things were still the mode in which they communicated, girlish and confidential, and their writing style, their handwriting and, of course, the French language which they both easily slipped into. Each letter was a secret oath of loyalty, although three-quarters of them were devoted to dreams and presentiments, or descriptions of a wayside tree or of someone they had met.
Describing her daughter’s wedding, Elena wrote in immense detail about the unusually heavy rain which fell in only one district of the city at just the moment when the newlyweds were coming out of the Registry Office, and of how the material of Natasha’s white dress got wet and shrank, creeping up and exposing her plump knees, but for all that Elena did not mention that Natasha had married Victor Kim, a Korean communications engineer, who even then had gained a reputation throughout the city for his extraordinary linguistic abilities. Apart from the standard Russian, the Korean he spoke at home, and the German and optional Uzbek he had learned at school, he had somehow managed by the age of twenty-five to learn English as well and was studying Chinese, although he anticipated having to spend not less than five years on mastering it.
Only six months or so after the wedding, describing in one of the letters her trip to the suburb of Kuilyuk and the tiny paddy fields sprouting bright rows of narrow-leaved rice, Elena had mentioned the parents of Natasha’s husband in passing, a wrinkled Korean couple whose outward appearance was so similar and so sexless that it was difficult to tell which of the two was the husband and which the wife. At all events, when another six months later Medea received the first photograph of newborn Shusha, she was not surprised by the pretty little round face with narrow slit eyes from which you would never have anticipated today’s beauty.
Sometimes during the day Elena would put Medea on a tarpaulin folding bed under the awning, which was almost completely covered with young vine shoots, and thrust into her hands a French book from the library she had assembled here from the only antiquarian bookseller in town, and Medea, absentmindedly leafing through Les Liaisons dangereuses or La Chartreuse de Parme, for the first time in her life enjoyed being indolent, totally relaxed, as if the current which maintained tension in her muscles had suddenly been turned off and every fibril was smoothed out in bliss.
She read a little and dozed a little and watched the children a little. Shusha kept herself distant and aloof but had the appearance of someone immersed in her own thoughts. Her younger brother, Pavlik, played the violin for days at a time and, when he did appear in the yard, was just a bit too polite. Medea looked in vain for family traits in them: their Asian blood had totally overwhelmed the Greco-Armenian.
Oddly enough, it was the fair-skinned little blond Shurik, whom they had adopted, who gave every indication of being a Sinoply: although his light, downy hair had not the least tinge of the family’s russet, his narrow, pale face was covered in deep ginger freckles. Even more significant—Medea did not immediately notice this, but when she did, she was amazed—his little finger was short, barely reaching the end of the first knuckle of his fourth finger. She did not, however, pass on her observations.
“What a good boy he is,” Medea said quietly, glancing over toward Shurik, who was whittling a seasoned lilac branch in order to replace the charred handle of the coffeepot.
“He’s just like my own son to me,” Elena responded. “Although nobody can ever replace Alexander in my heart. But Shurik—yes, he’s a very good boy. His mother was a deported Volga German. She worked in Kokand at one of Fyodor’s projects. She died of tuberculosis immediately after the war. He was sent to an orphanage at first and had a hard time there. Fyodor visited him once, and then a second time, and then brought him home. He has fitted into the family very well. Very well.”
Medea listened, said nothing, and looked. When she had been there five days, she noticed Elena taking a bowl of soup after dinner into a side room by the entrance, where Galya lived.
Catching Medea’s glance, she explained, “We have Musya living in there, Galya’s younger sister.”
“Musya?” Medea asked in surprise, never having heard the name.
“Well yes, Musya. She’s paralyzed, poor thing. Her daughter rejected her and Galya took her in,” Elena answered. Medea immediately remembered Armik Tigranovna’s paralyzed wet nurse whom the Stepanyans took everywhere with them for ten years or so, whether to the Crimea or Switzerland, in a specially made German chair of tubular brass, and Armik Tigranovna fed the wordless, withered old woman herself because she would not accept food from anyone else.
How everything recurs.
“God will always send them riches,” Medea reflected, although the family’s current prosperity could hardly be called riches. “Nobody knows better than Elena how to put them to good use.”
When Elena had fed Musya, whom Medea never did get to see, she immediately went to tell Galya off for throwing out half a jar of vine leaves prepared the previous year for making dolma. New, fresh leaves were fluttering above Medea’s head and she smiled.