“What’s wrong?” Masha asked, frightened, and threw some pajamas she had just wrung out back into the bowl.
“I’m leaving, Masha. I’ve come to say goodbye,” he said levelly.
She was horrified.
“Forever?”
He laughed.
“Will you never come to me again?”
“Well, perhaps you’ll come to see me some time in Rastorguevo, eh?” He slowly got up, brushed off his white trousers, and kissed her tight-lipped mouth. “What is it? Are you upset?”
She was silent. He glanced at his watch and said, “Okay, let’s go. I’ve got fifteen minutes to fill.”
For the first time they went into Samuel’s room by the light of day, successfully avoiding Aldona, who was intently scrubbing plates, and fifteen minutes later he left for real.
“The way gods depart. As if he had never existed,” Masha thought, hugging the striped floor covering which had skidded right across the room with her. “I just hope Alik comes soon.”
Now, when everything had ended just as suddenly as it had begun, and all she had left was a thin pile of coarse grey half-sheets of paper written all over with a blotchy ballpoint pen, she wanted to read Alik her new poems as soon as possible and tell him, just him, about how the roof had fallen in on her.
At this moment Alik was approaching Sudak, and Butonov, heading toward him, was being driven to Simferopol in Mikhail Stepanovich’s old Moskvich in order to catch the same plane Alik had arrived on and return to Moscow that evening. Medea was on her way back from work and was the first to see Alik walking up from the Lower Village—wearing a navy-blue peaked cap and sunglasses on his town dweller’s untanned face. Shortly afterward Alik was spotted also by Masha, who was walking with the children in the high grass of the Hub.
With shrieks of “Alik! Alik! Daddy’s come!” they rushed down the road. He stopped, cast the small tightly packed rucksack from his shoulders, and threw his arms wide open for a communal hug. Masha got there first and threw her arms around his neck with the sincerest joy. Liza and Little Alik were jumping up and down with shrieks of delight.
By the time Medea came up to them, half the rucksack had been turned out. Masha had opened one of the letters he had brought her. Liza was pressing to her person a bag of toffees and a pale-looking doll the size of a mouse, a present from Nike, and little Alik was pulling open a box with a new game. Big Alik was trying to stuff everything that had been pulled out of the rucksack back into it.
He kissed Medea three times and immediately pressed a cardboard box into her hands, his usual professional contribution: “An aid package from our Red Cross to your Red Cross.”
There were various medicines which were in short supply, a couple of packs of plasters, and some standard rubber gloves which it had been impossible to obtain in Sudak last year.
“Thank you, Alik. I’m glad you’ve come.”
“Oh, Medea Georgievna, I’ve brought you such a wonderful book!” he interrupted her. “It’s a surprise! You’re looking really well.” He put his hand on top of his son’s head: “Alik, you’ve grown a whole head higher.” He opened his fingers a thimble’s breadth: “A mosquito’s head.”
Masha was shifting impatiently from one foot to the other and jumping up and down: “Let’s go now, Alik. At last!”
Medea went on ahead. “How strange. Masha really is glad her husband has come. She’s not embarrassed, she doesn’t look guilty. Does marital fidelity mean nothing at all to them? As if this athlete didn’t come to her every night. And I, old poker that I am,” Medea smiled to herself. “Well, what business is it of mine? It’s just I like Alik. He’s like Sam: not his facial features, but the quickness of his dark eyes, his liveliness, and the same unhurtful quick wit. I must be susceptible to Jews, the way other people are susceptible to colds or constipation. Especially to the grasshopper kind, thin and agile. It is interesting, though: how is Masha going to get out of her romance now?”
Medea did not know that Butonov had already left, and supposed ruefully that she would again have to watch other people’s comings and goings in the night, their love trysts and their lying.
“How lucky I am that I was completely blind to all this side of things when it involved me. And now thirty years have passed, thank God, since that summer. There now, they forgot to say it in the Beatitudes: Blessed are the idiots.”
Medea looked around: Alik was carrying Liza on his back and the rucksack in his hand, his white teeth gleaming in a broad smile. He didn’t look at all like an idiot.
CHAPTER 14
Alik the Husband was called Big Alik to distinguish him from Alik the Son. Big, however, he wasn’t. He and Masha, husband and wife, were the same height, and given that Masha was the smallest in her family, size was not one of Alik’s strong points. He bought his clothes in the Children’s World department store and in thirty years had never had a decent pair of shoes, because only very basic blunt-nosed boys’ shoes came in his size.
For all his diminutiveness, however, he was well proportioned and good-looking. He was one of those Jewish boys who take off intellectually at an early age, magically becoming literate and amazing their parents with the fluency of their reading just as the latter are wondering whether to introduce their child to the alphabet.
At seven he was plowing his way through the weighty tomes of the World History series; at ten he was fascinated by astronomy, then mathematics. He was already setting his sights on big science. He went to the Mathematics Club at Moscow University’s Faculty of Mechanics and Mathematics, and his brain revved at such high rates that the leader of the club could only groan at the thought of how difficult it would be for this young genius to break through the percentage quota for Jews at the university.
The unexpected death of his much loved father, which resulted from an absurd succession of medical mishaps in the course of a few days, deflected Alik to a different course. His father had been through the war and been wounded three times, but died from an incompetently performed appendectomy. While his father was dying of peritonitis, Alik gained insights into suffering and compassion which rarely figure in the curriculum of a child prodigy.
After his father’s hurried funeral, with a military band and the wailing of his grief-crazed mother beneath the pestilential December drizzle, his father’s former regimental friends and present-day colleagues returned from the slushy quagmire of the Vostryakovsky Cemetery to the large room on Myasnitsky Street, drank their way through a crate of vodka, and departed. That same evening the impressionable Alik underwent a conversion, turning his back on his ambitious plans and the biography he had planned for himself—a hybrid of the lives of his favorite heroes, Evariste Galois and René Descartes—in favor of medicine.
From that day on, his vigilant mind began to assimilate the disciplines in which he would have to pass examinations: physics, which after his mathematical vaccination struck him as an eclectic science lacking in rigor; and biology, which disconcerted him because of the weakness of its overall theoretical foundations, the multilayered nature of its processes, and its lack of a consistent terminology. In the secondhand bookshop next to his apartment block, he bought by good fortune a practical course on genetics by Thomas Morgan which had been published in the 1930s, and privately noted that genetics, currently being excoriated and crucified along with its practitioners, was the only area of biology in which it was possible to pose a clearly formulated question and receive an unambiguous answer.
Since he received not a gold but merely a silver medal on graduating from secondary school, getting into university meant going into battle against a five-headed dragon. The only top grade he gained without a fight was for an essay in which Alexander Pushkin gave him a helping hand: the topic of “Pushkin’s early lyric” was a gift from heaven.