And at ten years of age, when a child became seriously ill and lay in a fever, unconscious, with a rash, he was so heavy you could hardly lift him when he needed to be moved over into another bed.
Medea had made another small discovery while looking after other people’s children: up until the age of four all of them were engaging, bright, acute, and sensible, but between four and seven something elusive but important occurred, and in the last summer before school, when the parents invariably brought their future schoolchild to the Crimea, as if it had to be inspected by Medea, some proved to be indubitably clever now and for the rest of time, while others were simply not too bright.
Of Alexandra’s children Medea put Sergei and Nike down as clever, while Masha was under a question mark; and of Elena’s the clever one, who in addition had a captivating personality, was Alexander who was killed in the war. Neither Georgii nor Natasha, in Medea’s view, were clever, but she valued kindness and good character no less. Medea had a saying, which Nike was fond of quoting: “Cleverness covers any failing.”
In this season it was Vitalis who was particularly close to Medea’s heart. He was the youngest Sinoply—the son of adopted Shurik was due to appear in the world two weeks later in the form of Athanasii Sinoply, so for the time being he did not count.
In the evenings Medea would often hold Vitalis on her knee, pressing his back to her bosom and stroking his little head and sluggish neck. He liked being stroked. Touching probably partly compensated him for the lack of interaction through speech.
“I’ll let them go off to Yalta on Saturday and Sunday,” Medea decided to herself. “Aldona can go for walks in the Botanical Gardens, and they can stay overnight with Kastello.”
Medea had an old friend, Kastello, who for a good twenty years or so had been in charge of some interminable building program in the Nikitsky Botanical Gardens. Medea would also have liked Aldona to liberate herself from the eternal slavery of motherhood, and to sit late at night with her, drinking some of the rowanberry or apple vodka she had stored away, and sigh, “God knows, I’m completely worn out.” And she would complain and perhaps cry, and then Medea, silently taking a few sips from the heavy liqueur glass, would explain to her that suffering and calamities are given to us so that the question “Why us?” should be replaced by the question “What is this for?” And then sterile attempts to find a culprit can end, and attempts at selfjustification, gathering evidence of one’s own guiltlessness; and then the law devised by cruel and unmerciful people that punishment is proportionate to sin would be seen to be invalid, because God does not have punishments he visits upon innocent little children.
Perhaps too Medea would have told her in quiet and simple words about various events in life which occur not because of unfairness but just because of the nature of life. She would have remembered the most wonderful of Elena’s children, Alexander, killed at the front, and little Pavlik who had drowned, and the little newborn girl who had been taken together with her own mother, and possibly after a while everything inside Aldona would have shifted of its own accord, simply with the passing of time, in the right direction, and she would have been healed just by getting used to things, a cure which is as strong as a callus.
But Medea was never the first to start a conversation. She needed an invitation, a lead-in, and of course a ready willingness to listen.
A few days later, after the lunchtime nap which divided the children’s day into two unequal halves, a perambulating brigade of three mothers, Masha, Nora, and Aldona, and four children, after various hesitancies over the route, reached the hospital. Vitalis was usually taken out in a wheelchair, his back to the road and facing his mother. On this occasion his wheelchair was being pushed by Liza and Alik. Medea saw them through the window and came out onto the porch.
Liza, squatting down in front of Vitalis, was prizing his little fingers open, singing, “Thieving magpie was baking some bread, thieving magpie’s babies got fed . . .” And gently waggling his little finger, she squealed: “But she didn’t give any to this one!”
He shrieked piercingly, and there was no telling whether he was laughing or crying.
“He likes it,” Aldona explained, with her invariable awkward smile.
Medea looked over toward the children, adjusted the shawl wrapped around her head, looked at Liza again, and said to Aldona: “I’m so pleased, Aldona, that you bring Vitalis here. Our little Liza is a willful, spoiled child, but she plays with him so well. Let her spend lots of time with him. It will be good for everyone.” Medea sighed and said, perhaps reflecting an old sorrow, perhaps in pity: “It’s so sad: everybody wants to love the strong and the good-looking. Off you go home, girls, I’ll be back soon.”
They headed off back home. Masha picked a thick green blade of grass with a sweet stem and chewed it. What had Medea meant when she talked about the strong and good-looking? Was it a hint about her guest in the night? No, that wasn’t like Medea. She didn’t hint. She either said something straight out or kept her peace.
Butonov came to Masha every night, knocking on the window, squeezing each of his brawny shoulders through its narrow opening in turn, completely filling the space of the small room with himself, and all of Masha’s body and soul, and departed at dawn, leaving her each time immersed in a tingling sensation of the newness of her whole being and of renewal of her life. She fell into a brief, potent sleep in which he was still present, to wake a couple of hours later and get up in a ghostlike state of infinite strength and equally infinite weakness. She woke the children, cooked, washed, and everything happened easily and by itself, only the glass tumblers got broken more often than usual, and the silver-plated spoons fell soundlessly onto the kitchen’s earthen floor. Imperfect lines of poetry appeared in the bubble-like space, turned sideways and floated off, wagging their awkward tails behind them.
Butonov for his part used no words other than the most elementary: “Come here . . . move . . . wait . . . I need to smoke.” He didn’t even once say he would come the next day.
One evening he visited Medea in the kitchen. He drank tea and talked to Georgii, who had been putting off his departure from one day to the next but had finally packed his bags. Masha tried to catch Butonov’s eye from the dark corner of the kitchen, but the air hung motionless around his beloved face and his motionless shoulders, and no indications of intimacy were forthcoming. Masha was in despair: could this be the same man who came to her in the night? She speculated briefly on the possibility of an incubus.
Saying goodbye to Georgii and not saying the least word to her, he left, but came again that night, secretly, and everything was as it had been, only when they were resting on the shore after their passion had receded, he said, “My first real lover was like you. She was a horse-rider.”
Masha asked him to tell her about the horse-rider. He smiled. “What is there to tell? She was a good horsewoman, thin, bowlegged. Before I met her, I thought making babies was just so unbelievably boring. She disappeared, although my guess is that her husband killed her.”
“Was she beautiful?” Masha asked, almost reverently.
“Of course she was.” He put his hand on her face, touching the cheekbones and her chin, which narrowed lower down. “All my women are beautiful, Masha. Except my wife.”
For a long time after he left, she pictured first the horsewoman, then his wife, then herself—as a horsewoman.
Three vast nights passed, as long as three lives, and three ghostly days, and on the fourth day Butonov arrived unexpectedly, while Aldona was washing the dinner dishes in the kitchen and Masha was hanging up the children’s laundry by the well. He came down and sat silently on a flat rock.