She was running a temperature, Medea guessed, and closed her eyes to shut off the stream of flowers. Happily, Nina had come from Tbilisi only the day before.
It seemed to be the same illness from which she had suffered just before her marriage, when Samuel had looked after her so zealously and with such tremulous love and tenderness that he had every reason to quip later, “Other people have a feverish honeymoon, but Medea and I had a honeymonth of fever.” In the intervals between attacks of furious shivering and fuddled semiconsciousness, Medea lapsed into a state of serene tranquility in which it seemed to her that Samuel was in the next room and would come in to see her in a minute, awkwardly bearing a tumbler in both hands and with his eyes slightly bulging because the tumbler was hotter than he had expected.
Instead of Samuel, however, it was Nina who emerged from the semidarkness, enveloped in the fragrance of St.-John’s-wort and dissolving honey, with a thick glass tumbler in her thin, flat hands and her matte-black eyes deep-set like Samuel’s, and Medea realized something she seemed to have been waiting for for a very long time, and now it finally had come to her like a revelation: Nina was their daughter, Samuel’s and hers, their little girl; she had always known that but for some reason had forgotten it for a long time, but now it had come back to her and it was such a joy. Nina helped her up from the pillow, gave her the fragrant drink, and said something, but the meaning didn’t quite get through to Medea, as if she were speaking a foreign language: “Yes, yes, Georgian,” Medea remembered.
But the intonation was so rich and clear that she could understand everything just from the expressions on Nina’s face, the movements of her hand, and also from the taste of the drink. It was surprising too that Nina could anticipate her wishes, and even opened and closed the curtains a moment before Medea was going to ask her to do it.
Medea’s relatives in Tbilisi were the descendants of her two sisters: Anelya, who was the elder, and Anastasia, whom Anelya had brought up after the death of their parents. Anastasia had left a son, Robert, who was unmarried and seemed to be slightly touched in the head. Medea had no contact with him.
Anelya had not had any children of her own. Nina and Timur were adopted, so the Tbilisi relatives were a grafted branch of the family. These children were blood relatives of Anelya’s husband Lado, his nephew and niece. Lado’s brother Grigol and his wife Susanna were an absurd and unhappy couple: he was a fervent champion of a fair deal for traditional craftsmen; she was the city’s madwoman, with a penchant for Communist Party work.
Lado Alexandrovich was a musician and professor at the Tbilisi Conservatory. He taught cello and had nothing in common with his brother, whom he had hardly seen since the mid-1920s.
Lado and Anelya first saw their nephew and niece early one morning in May 1937. They were brought to their house by a distant relative after the arrest of both parents in the night.
The law of pairs is only a particular instance of a more general law of recurrence of the same event, whose purpose seems sometimes to be character formation, sometimes the accomplishing of destiny. In Anelya’s life it operated very precisely. Exactly ten years had passed since Anastasia married and left home, and now fate had again brought orphans into their house, but two this time.
Anelya was already past forty, and Lado was ten years or so older. Their bloom had faded, their skin withered, and they were preparing themselves for a peaceful old age, not the lifestyle of young parents. The old age they had anticipated never came to pass. It took time to bring the neglected children around, and then the war began. Lado did not survive the rigors of the times and died of pneumonia in 1943.
Anelya set the children on their feet by realizing the assets of a once-prosperous household. She died in 1957, shortly after the return from exile of Susanna, who was by now completely demented. Nina was a young woman by then, and had a much loved stepmother replaced by her natural mother, a one-eyed harpy full of spite and paranoid devotion to the Leader. Nina had been looking after her for twenty years now.
The three or four days Nina had been planning to spend with Medea stretched to eight, and as soon as she had Medea back on her feet, she returned to Tbilisi.
Medea’s illness had not completely passed. It spread to her joints, and she had now to treat herself with her home remedies. She bound her knees with thick bandages of old wool over cabbage leaves, or beeswax, or large boiled onions, and having completely lost her usual agility, hobbled around the house, but sat most of the time repairing quilts. As she did so, she was thinking about Nina and her crazy mother, and about Nike, who had spent the whole of September in Tbilisi because the theater was on tour there and, to judge even by Nina’s toned-down stories, had staged quite a few performances of her own.
“Idle thoughts,” Medea decided, stopped herself there, and reverted to doing what old Dionisy had taught her in her youth: “If worldly thoughts are troubling you and you can’t let go of them, don’t struggle but think prayerfully, addressing them to God.”
“Poor Susanna. Forgive her, Lord, for the dreadful and stupid things she has done. Soften her heart and let her see how Nina is suffering because of her. And help Nina. She is meek and patient. Give her strength, Lord. And protect Nike from all manner of evil. The girl is following a dangerous path. She’s so kind, so lively. Show her the way, Lord.”
She again recalled Nina’s account of how Nike had turned the life of a famous actor’s family upside down. She had embarked on a wild romance in full view of the citizens of Tbilisi, sparkling, dazzling, chortling, and the actor’s poor wife, dressed in black and consumed by jealousy, had rushed around to her husband’s friends at night, trying to force her way through closed doors in the hope of catching her faithless spouse in flagrante delicto. Which, in the end, she did. There was a smashing of crockery, and people leaping out of windows; there was screaming and passion and a total breakdown of all propriety.
Perhaps most surprising was that back in October Medea had received a short note from Nike describing her visit to Tbilisi, the great success the theater had enjoyed, and even congratulating herself that her costumes for the production had been written about separately. “It’s ages since I enjoyed myself so much and had such fun,” the letter concluded. “But in Moscow the weather is dreadful, the divorce is dragging on forever, and I would give anything just to live somewhere a bit sunnier.”
As regards the weather, Nike was absolutely right. The summer had ended in August and late autumn set in immediately. The trees had no time to turn properly yellow, and the leaves fell to the ground quite green, bludgeoned from the trees by strong, cold rain. Her merry September in Tbilisi was followed by an unendurable October in Moscow. The weather got no better in November, but at least Nike’s mood improved as a lot of work came her way.
She had another production to complete in her theater. She was forever looking into the workshops where, without her beady eye, the seamstresses were far too slapdash; and on top of that she was earning money on the side from work she was doing for the Romany Theater.
She was seduced by the Gypsy ambience, but found working for the theater very difficult indeed. Those same free and easy Gypsy ways which looked so enchanting in city squares and trams and on the stage, were a complete nightmare at the workplace: meetings arranged by the producer had to be rescheduled half a dozen times, and all the actresses threw terrible tantrums to back their impossible demands. Then, on the very day when one of the most strident of them, a lady already past her prime, threw in Nike’s face the burgundy-red costume she had been given instead of the lacy white one she had wanted, and Nike equally adroitly shot it straight back at her, lining it with solid theater swear words the way small weights used to be sewn into the hems of light dresses, something very unpleasant happened which Nike had been doing her best to avoid.