But the horror behind the door kept growing. She forced herself to look around. The false door moved slightly.
Masha ran into the living room and pushed the door to the balcony. It flew open without creaking. The cold which blew in from outside was fresh and joyful, and the air behind her was icy and stifling.
Masha stepped out onto the balcony. The snow was falling gently and it was a choir with a thousand voices, as if every snowflake carried its own musical note, and this moment too was something she recognized. This had happened before. She turned; something dreadful was standing behind the living-room door and it was coming nearer.
“Oh, I know, I know.” Masha climbed onto the box the television had come in, from there onto the long window box fixed to the side of the balcony, and made the inner movement which raises you into the air.
His legs drawn up to his stomach, her husband Alik slept on; in the next room, in exactly the same position, her son was sleeping. It was the start of the spring equinox, a glorious festival of the heavens.
CHAPTER 16
Medea received the telegram twenty-four hours later. Klava the postmistress delivered it in the morning. Telegrams were sent in three eventualities: Medea’s birthday, the imminent arrival of relatives, and a death.
With the telegram in her hand she went through to her room and sat down in the armchair which now stood where she herself used to stand, facing the icons. She sat there for a considerable time, moving her lips, then got up, washed out her cup, and got ready for the journey. From her illness in the autumn she still had a disagreeable stiffness in her left knee, but she was used to it by now and just moved a little more slowly than usual. Then she locked the house up and took the key to the Kravchuks.
The bus stop was nearby. It was the same route her guests usually took, from the Village to Sudak, from Sudak to the bus station at Simferopol, and from there to the airport.
She was in time for the last flight and late that evening rang the doorbell of Alexandra’s house in Uspensky Lane, which she had never visited before. Her sister opened the door to her. They had not seen each other since 1952, twenty-five years. They embraced and shed floods of tears. Lidia and Vera had just left. Her face swollen with tears, Nike came out into the lobby and clung to Medea.
Ivan Isaevich went to put on the kettle. He guessed this was his wife’s elder sister come from the Crimea. He vaguely recollected some kind of long-standing feud between them. Medea took off the downy head scarf which made her look as if she had just come up from the country. Beneath it the black scarf was wound around her head and Ivan Isaevich was amazed by her iconic face. He saw a great resemblance between the sisters.
Medea sat down at the table, looked around the unfamiliar house, and gave it her approval. This was a good place.
Masha’s death was a great sorrow, but it had also brought Alexandra Georgievna a great joy, and now she was puzzling over how one person could contain such different emotions at the same time.
Medea for her part, sitting to her left, simply couldn’t imagine how it had come about that she had not seen the person dearest to her for a quarter of a century, and was horrified. There really seemed to be no good reason or explanation for it.
“It was an illness, Medea, a serious illness, and nobody understood it at all. Alik’s friend, a psychiatrist, apparently examined her a week ago and said she needed to be taken into the hospital straightaway: she had an acute manic-depressive psychosis. He prescribed some drugs. They were waiting for permission to emigrate any day, you see. That was the problem. But I could see there was something wrong with her. I didn’t hold her hand the way I did before. I’ll never forgive myself,” Alexandra blamed herself.
“Do stop, for God’s sake, Mama! Don’t blame yourself for this at all. It really is my . . . Medea, Medea, how am I to live with this? I can’t believe it,” Nike sobbed, while her lips, designed by nature herself for laughter, seemed still to be smiling.
The funeral took place not on the third day, as would have been usual, but on the fifth. There was a postmortem. Alik came with two friends and Georgii to the forensic-medicine mortuary somewhere near the Frunze Metro station.
Nike was already there. She had wound a piece of white crepe de Chine around Masha’s shaven head and neck, on which the prosector’s coarse stitches had been visible, and tied it with a firm knot at the temple in the way Medea did. Masha’s face was untouched, pale and waxen, its beauty undefiled.
The priest from the Preobrazhenka church, which Masha had attended occasionally over the last few years, was deeply saddened but refused to conduct a funeral service for a suicide, so Medea asked to be taken to a Greek church. The most Greek of the Moscow churches was one affiliated to the Antioch congregation. There, in the church of Theodore Stratilatos, she asked to see the dean, but the serving woman subjected her to an interrogation. While she was explaining, with her lips pursed and her eyes lowered, that she was a Pontic Greek and had not been in a Greek church for many years, an old hieromonk came up and said in Greek, “I can recognize a Greek woman from a long way off. What is your name?”
“Medea Sinoply.”
“Sinoply . . . Is your brother a monk?” he asked quickly.
“One of my brothers went to a monastery in the 1920s, in Bulgaria. I have had no news of him since.”
“Agathon?”
“Athanasii.”
“Praise be to the Lord,” the hieromonk exclaimed. “He is a hermit on Mount Athos.”
“Glory be to the Lord.” Medea bowed.
They had some difficulty understanding each other. The old man proved to be not Greek but Syrian. His Greek and Medea’s were very different. They talked for over an hour sitting on a bench beside the candle box. He told her to bring the girl and promised to conduct the service himself.
When the bus with the coffin arrived at the church, a crowd had already assembled. The Sinoply family had representatives of all its branches: Tashkent, Tbilisi, Vilnius, and Siberia. The various golds of the church’s icon frames, candlesticks, and vestments were complemented by the different shades of copper on Sinoply heads.
Ivan Isaevich stood between Medea and Alexandra, a broad man with a floury pink face and an asymmetrical wrinkle running obliquely across his forehead. The elderly sisters standing before the coffin adorned with white and lilac-colored hyacinths both had the same thought: “It would be more fitting for me to be lying there among these flowers which Nike has arranged so beautifully, and not poor Masha.”
In the course of a long life they had learned to live with death, to be at ease with it: they had learned to meet it at home, veiling the mirrors, living two strict, quiet days in the presence of the body to the murmuring of psalms and the flickering of candles. They had known peaceful departings, painless and dignified; they had known of death at the hands of roughnecks, and the lawless invasion of death when the young perished in the lifetime of their parents.
But suicide was more than anyone could bear. What reconciliation could there be to that fleeting moment when a young lively girl had leapt of her own volition out into the slow rumbling whirlpool of snowflakes and out of life.
The hieromonk came out to the coffin, and the choir began singing the most expressive words of all those composed in times of earthly leave-taking and separation. The service was in Greek and even Medea understood only certain words, but all those present could clearly feel that in this bitter, inaccessible singing there was more meaning than even the wisest sage can contain within himself.
Those who wept, wept silently. Aldona wiped away her tears with a man’s checkered handkerchief. Gvidas the Hun nervously wiped a leather glove under his eye. Debora Lvovna, Masha’s mother-in-law, was all for wailing in loud lamentation, but Alik gave his doctor friends the nod and they led her from the church.