At last Fyodor, having completed his official trip to the lower reaches of the Amu-Daria and the Aral Sea, called from Nukus to tell Elena he would be back home soon.
“Splendid, I’ll just see him and then go back home. Yes, home again in time for Easter,” Medea decided.
But Fyodor arrived only on Lazarus Saturday, the eve of Palm Sunday, in the middle of the day. A car snorted and Shurik rushed headlong to open the gate, but Fyodor was already walking through the yard. A fresh crimson tan shone out from beneath his provincial white hat. Shurik flew up to his chest and hugged him around the neck. Fyodor kissed the white top of his head and detached him from himself. Putting his hand on Shurik’s head, he walked through the garden.
“Papa is back home!” Elena shouted from the window in a ringing voice, as if he had been away not two weeks but two years.
Medea quickly took her feet off the couch but hadn’t time to get up before he caught her under the arms, lifted her up, and pressed her to himself like a child. “My kid sister, my clever girl, you’ve come to see me!”
Medea breathed in the smell of his hair and his body, and recognized the half-forgotten smell of her father’s working sweaters, which few people would have found pleasant but which for Medea’s retentive memory was a precious gift.
Everything began to revolve around Fyodor exactly as it had around Medea the morning she had arrived. The chauffeur who had driven him opened the gate and started unloading the car. He pulled out an assortment of parcels and sacks. These were valuable presents, and Elena immediately got to work on an enormous salted sturgeon. Shurik stood beside her, cautiously touching the fish’s mean face with his finger. Although Elena had made the preparations for her husband’s return, the sturgeon threw her, and telling Natasha and Galya to set the table, she got to work on the fish. She armed herself with a knife and poked her shortsighted face into its ripped open belly.
The chauffeur, another Fyodor, was a handsome man of around forty but with cheeks pocked by gunpowder. He pulled a case of anonymous unlabeled bottles out of the bottomless expeditionary vehicle.
At the meal Fyodor ate little, drank much, and without removing his heavy arm from around Medea’s shoulder, told them all about his latest trip in the confident voice of a boss. And Fyodor’s deputy came, a couple of elderly friends, and a pretty young Greek girl, Maria, a postwar political refugee, the first real Corinthian Medea had met in her life.
Shurik and Pavlik sat quietly on the children’s side of the table, and Elena scurried into the summer kitchen or out to the brazier in the yard. The unlabeled bottles contained something strong and tangy along the lines of a cheap brandy, but Medea found it to her taste. Fyodor drank out of a large silver goblet, and his face, fiery with his fresh tan, gradually turned purple and heavy.
Then two of Georgii’s classmates came in, and they too sat down at the table. Elena, true to her principles, took the hot dishes away as soon as they got cold and brought in new ones held up high in the air.
Medea, who had only recently completed an immensely long journey throughout which she had eaten only small grey rusks, rejoiced from the bottom of her heart at the abundance of the feast but, like Fyodor, barely touched the food. It was Lent, and Medea, taught from early childhood to observe the fasts, not only accepted them freely and joyfully, but managed somehow to grow stronger during them. Elena, on the contrary, had always found obligatory fasting hard to take and since moving to Central Asia had stopped even going to church, let alone observing the fasts.
Medea knew all this very well, but she also knew what fits of apparently groundless wretchedness overwhelmed Elena from time to time, and explained them by her having lapsed from the Church. This was another of the topics of their correspondence. They were both sufficiently enlightened women to understand that a person’s spiritual life is not by any means confined to their relationship with the Church, but Medea saw life within the Church as the only way possible for her.
“For me, with my limited understanding and self-willed character,” she wrote to Elena long before the war when the little Greek church whose dean was Harlampy’s younger brother, Dionisy, was closed and she started going to the Russian one, “the discipline of the Church is as necessary as medicine for a chronically sick person. It has been a stroke of great good fortune in my life that my mother instructed me in the faith. She was a simple person of exceptional goodness who had no doubts, and in my life I have never had to rack my brains fruitlessly over philosophical questions which it is by no means essential for each individual to try to resolve. I am content with the traditional Christian resolution of the questions of life, death, good and evil. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill—and there are no circumstances which can turn evil into good. And the fact that the ways of error have become universally accepted has no significance for us whatsoever.”
Elena was fairly immune to the temptations of killing or stealing. She knew only domestic and housekeeping trials which might have been too much for a less doughty woman but which she not only took in her stride but thrived on.
Her family expanded and so did her house, and Elena started taking an interest in the girls in Georgii’s class, assessing which of them might make him a good wife. Future children were accordingly already peeping into her life, promising to add to her family, as it had been added to by the adoption of Shurik and by unseen Musya. Accepting these people into her home was her religion, as Medea fully understood.
By midnight the guests had departed, the table was bare, but Fyodor still hadn’t taken his arm from Medea’s shoulder. “Well, then, sister,” he said in Greek. “Do you like my house?”
“Very much, Fyodor, very much,” she said, lowering her head.
Elena was clearing the dishes away and had long ago sent Galya off to bed. Medea wanted to help, but Fyodor held her back.
“Sit here, she can manage by herself. What do you think about my youngest? Did you recognize our blood?”
He asked in Greek, and this shared blood of theirs, mingled in the boy with that of someone else, made Medea’s face flush, and she lowered her head even more. “I did. Even the little finger.”
“You recognized it all, but she is a holy fool like you and sees nothing,” he said in an unexpectedly mean and harsh tone.
Medea stood up and, in order to terminate the conversation, replied to him in Russian: “It’s late, brother. Sleep well. And you sleep well too, Elena.”
She couldn’t sleep for a long time between the hard starched sheets, her head resting on the plump pillows, and tried putting together words heard long ago, fleeting glances, words not said, and having put everything together realized that the secret of Alexandra’s last child was no secret from anyone apart from herself, and that to judge by everything, even Elena knew, but for all her garrulousness had spared Medea the knowledge. But was Elena really as trusting as herself? Or did she perhaps know full well that she had taken into her house a half brother of her own children?
“Wise Elena, greathearted Elena,” Medea thought. “She wants to know nothing about it.”
Her unexpected discovery, which might have made the friends even closer if they had spoken about it, kept Medea from sleeping.
It got light outside the window, the birds began singing, and Medea started quietly getting ready to go to church. She had loved Palm Sunday ever since she was a child.
She got to the church on Hospital Street too early, an hour before the service began, before the doors were even open. The market, however, was already humming and she walked past the stalls, looking absently to either side.