There were almost no women among the traders: they were all Uzbek men in thick coats. The customers, however, were all women, and mainly Russians. In fact, Tashkent seemed to Medea to be a completely Russian city. She had seen Uzbeks only at the station on the day she arrived and at the bazaar. Living in the Russian center, she had not got as far as the old city with the Asian layout she was so familiar with from the old Tatar Crimea, and especially from Bakhchisarai.
“They’ve beaten everyone down,” she thought. “It’s turned into a huge provincial Russian town.”
She made a circuit of the bazaar and approached the church again. It was open now. By the church box an old woman in a white head scarf who looked like a fat rabbit was scuffling about. On the box stood a tumbler in which there were several sprigs of sparrow-grey pussy willow.
“Ah, it grows here too,” Medea thought with pleasure.
She took two scraps of paper, and writing on one “May they rest in peace,” she wrote out the names in their customary order: Father Dionisy, Father Varfolomey, Harlampy, Antonida, Georgii, Magdalina . . . The other, still-living part of the family she listed on another piece of paper under the words “May they be well.”
Every time in this place, writing out the names of her dear ones in large copperplate letters, she had exactly the same feeling: as if she were sailing on a river and in front of her, like a spreading triangle, were her brothers and sisters, their young and infant children, and behind, fanning out in the same way but much longer, until they disappeared in a rippling of the water, were her dead parents, her grandparents, all the ancestors whose names she knew, and those whose names had been lost in time long past. She had no difficulty at all in containing all these many, many people within herself, the quick and the dead, and she wrote each name mindfully, recalling the face, the presence, even, if such a thing is possible, the taste of that person.
It was at this unhurried labor that Elena found her. She touched her shoulder. They kissed. Elena looked about her: the people in the church were pathetic looking, the old women so ugly.
Through the sweet smell of the incense came the unmistakable smell of dirty, worn-out clothing and old, unhealthy bodies. The old woman standing next to them smelled of cats.
“Can there really be this kind of poverty and squalor even in Tiflis, in the little Armenian church in Solulaki, which we went up to along that terraced street?” Elena wondered. How fine and solemn it had been when she was a child, when her grandmother in her lilac velvet hat with the silk ribbons tied under her soft chin, her mother elegant in a light-colored dress, and her sister Anait were standing at the front of the laypeople, opposite the sole icon of Hripsime and Gayane hanging on a whitewashed wall, and everything smelled of wax, incense, and flowers.
A voice rang out, “Blessed is the Kingdom . . .” The service began.
Elena looked at Medea, who was standing firmly with her eyes closed and her head bowed. She possessed the art of standing for a long time without changing her position, not shifting her weight from one foot to the other.
“She stands like a rock in the midst of the sea,” Elena thought tenderly, and suddenly shed tears for Medea’s fate, for the bitterness of her loneliness, for the curse of childlessness, for the wrongs of deception and betrayal. Medea, however, was thinking nothing of the sort. Three old women’s rattly voices were chanting the Beatitudes, and new tears suddenly flowed from Elena’s eyes, no longer for Medea but for all of life. It was an acute experience in which there merged a tenfold sense of the loss of her motherland, the living closeness of her dead parents and of her son killed in the war, and it was a happy moment of complete self-forgetfulness, a momentary filling of her heart not with her own, vain preoccupations, but with something from God, something light, and her heart ached so greatly from this overflowing that she said to herself, “Lord, take me like Sephora, here am I.”
But nothing of the sort happened. Not only did she not fall down dead; on the contrary, the moment of acute happiness passed and she found that the service was already halfway through. The priest was whispering inaudible words which she had known by heart from childhood.
Elena suddenly felt bored. Her legs ached and her heart was weary. She felt like going out but couldn’t leave Medea.
The priest came forward with the communion cup: “Come in the fear of God and in faith,” but nobody came and he went off into the altar.
Barely waiting for Medea to kiss the cross, Elena came out of the church. They wished each other well on this festival day, and kissed solemnly and chastely.
Not one word did Medea say to Elena about her bitter hurt, and right up until death parted them, they would write tender letters to each other, full of dreams, memories, impressions, announcements of the birth of new children, and new recipes for jam.
Medea left three days later. Fyodor tried to persuade his sister to stay but, seeing the inexorable look in her eyes, bought her an air ticket and on Spy Wednesday took her to the airport.
It was the first time in Medea’s life that she had flown in an airplane, but she proved completely unmoved by the event. She wanted to get back home as soon as possible. Elena, sensing her impatience, was even slightly hurt. Now the letter lying in the bottom of Medea’s rucksack had entirely ceased to trouble her. The plane landed in Moscow, and Medea spent eight hours at Vnukovo Airport waiting for the connecting flight to Simferopol. She didn’t telephone Alexandra. Then or ever.
CHAPTER 13
Medea had a partial changeover on the fifth of May. Nike, Katya, and Artyom left in the morning, and after dinner the Lithuanians arrived: Gvidas, the son of Medea’s brother Dimitry, who had died three years previously from neglected heart disease, his wife Aldona, and their disabled son Vitalis.
The little boy was paralyzed, permanently seized in a painful convulsion. He moved awkwardly and could hardly speak. Gvidas and Aldona, crushed by their son’s illness, were mesmerized by one agonizing and unanswerable question: why us?
They came here every year in early spring, lived with Medea for a couple of weeks until the beginning of the swimming season, and then Gvidas took them to Sudak, rented a convenient apartment in the former German colony beside the sea from Aunt Polly, a friend of Medea’s, and left. He reappeared in mid-July to take them from the heat back to the cool of the Baltic coast.
Vitalis passionately loved the sea and felt happy only in water. He also loved Liza and Alik, the only children he was friends with. It was difficult to say whether he remembered them during the winter months, but the first time he met them again the following spring was a special day for him.
The adults prepared the children for Vitalis’s arrival, and they were primed with good intentions. Liza selected the best animal to give him from her menagerie of dogs and bears. Alik built a palace in a heap of sand for Vitalis to demolish. They had a game which consisted of Alik building things and Vitalis knocking them down, and it made both of them happy.
Masha moved to Samuel’s room, freeing the larger Blue Room for the Lithuanians. She had been in a state of chaotic inspiration since morning: words and lines of poetry were overwhelming her, barely giving her time to commit them to memory. There gradually formed, “Accept too that beyond all measure, like heaven’s grace on heaven’s grace, like rain, like snow, like faith to treasure, like that with which we can’t keep pace . . .” That was all there was so far.
At the same time, and quite independently, Masha was comforting Liza, who was doing her best to be a big girl but soon after her mother’s departure did nevertheless burst into tears; then she fed the children, put them to bed, and, abandoning the dirty dishes, lay down in Samuel’s room with the blinds drawn, rolled herself up in a ball, and mentally reran the whole of yesterday evening from the barmaid’s gold jacket to the movement with which Butonov had rotated the dial of the telephone. She recalled too the way her body had responded to that first chance touch from him on their outing, when her arm had burned and she had become feverish.