Masha was buried in the Foreigners’ Cemetery, in the same grave as her parents, and then everyone went back to Uspensky Lane: Alexandra Georgievna had insisted on having the funeral party there. There were a lot of people, and there was space at the table only for the older ones and relatives who had come a long way. The young people were all on their feet, with glasses and bottles.
Little Alik found a moment to ask his father in a whisper, “Daddy, do you think she has died for always?”
“Soon everything will change and then everything will be fine,” his father answered diplomatically.
Little Alik gave him a long, cold look. “Well, I don’t believe in God.”
On the morning of that day, their permission to emigrate had arrived. They were given twenty days to pack their things, which was fairly generous. In the memory of their friends the farewell merged with the funeral party, although Alik arranged it in Cheryomushki.
Debora Lvovna duly stayed with her sister, and Alik left with his son and a checkered medium-sized Bulgarian suitcase. The customs officials took one sheet of paper from him—Masha’s last poem, written shortly before her suicide. Needless to say, he knew it by heart.
Researching lures the intellectual sleuth
to hurl himself into his sweet researches.
He plots the ways of pigeons, or he lurches
through dusty tavern vaults in search of truth;
But even as he struggles to attain
experience appearances belying—
he will himself become the pigeon’s wing,
the demon drink of all his mental prying;
And beavering to secure our daily bread,
removed from fears and cares and snares infernal,
we stand in awe and meekly bow our head
before a soul dissolved in fame eternal.
EPILOGUE
The last time my husband and I were in the Village was in the summer of 1995. Medea had passed on long before. A Tatar family was living in her house, and we didn’t feel right about going in to trouble them. We went to see Georgii. He built his house even higher up than Medea’s and drilled his artesian well. His wife Nora still looks like a child, although close up you can see that the skin under her eyes is dissected by fine wrinkles, which is how the most delicate blondes age.
She has given Georgii two daughters.
The house was very full. I had difficulty recognizing these young people as the grown-up children of the 1970s. A fiveyear-old girl with ginger curls who looked very like Liza was throwing a tantrum over some kind of little-girl nonsense.
Georgii was glad to see my husband, whom he hadn’t seen for a long time. My husband is a Sinoply too, not from Harlampy’s branch, but from that of his younger sister Polixena. They calculated the degree of their relatedness at great length before deciding they were third cousins.
Georgii took us to the graveyard. Medea’s cross stands next to Samuel’s obelisk, and modestly yields to it in height. Georgii told us on the way back how unpleasantly surprised Medea’s relatives had been when a will was discovered after her death leaving the house to a Ravil Yusupov nobody knew anything about.
They made no attempt to trace this Yusupov, and Georgii moved into Medea’s house with Nora, Tanya, and their little daughters. He got a job at the research station.
Ravil appeared a few years later, in just the same way as when he had come to see Medea, late on an early spring evening. Georgii produced the will out of the trunk and showed it to him. Several more years were to pass, however, before Ravil could take possession of his house. For two years there was an absurd lawsuit to change the registration of ownership of the house, and this was ultimately achieved purely through Georgii’s doggedness in taking the case all the way to the republican level in order to have Medea’s will proved. After that, everyone in the Village considered him completely mad.
He is past sixty now, but as strong and sturdy as ever. He was given a lot of help in building his own house by Ravil and his brother. When the house was completed, the people in the Village changed their minds and now say Georgii was fiendishly cunning: instead of getting Medea’s ramshackle old house, he has a new one twice as big.
This was the house in which we spent the evening. The summer kitchen is very much like Medea’s. There are the same copper jugs, the same crockery. Nora has learned to gather the local herbs, and bunches of drying herbs hang from the walls just as they used to.
There have been many changes over this period. The family has spread over the world even more widely. Nike has long been living in Italy, married to a fat rich man who is witty and charming. She looks matronly and simply loves it when relatives from Russia come to visit her in her luxurious house in Ravenna.
Liza lives in Italy too, but Katya didn’t take to the country. As sometimes happens in children with dual nationality, she has become a raging Russophile. She came back to Moscow and lives in Usachevka, and the red-haired little girl who was making such a scene in the courtyard was her daughter.
Big Alik has become a member of the American Academy of Sciences, and before you know it may become a benefactor of humanity by discovering a drug against old age; but Little Alik after graduating from Harvard University reverted to Orthodox Judaism, learned Hebrew, put on a kipa, grew earlocks, and is currently studying all over again in a yeshiva in Bnei Brak, in Israel.
Little Alik published a collection of Masha’s poetry a few years after the move to America. Georgii showed us this slim volume. It has a portrait of her on the first page taken from a snapshot of the last summer she spent in the Crimea. She has turned and is looking into the lens with delighted surprise. I won’t attempt to assess her poems: they are a part of my life, because I too spent that last summer in the Village staying with my children at Medea’s house.
Butonov really took to his house in Rastorguevo, and moved his wife and daughter there after a great deal of persuading. He has had a son of whom he is inordinately proud. He has not been working in sports medicine for a long time now: he changed direction and works with spinal patients, of whom he has had a regular supply first from the war in Afghanistan and then from the war in Chechnya.
All the older generation have passed on except for Alexandra Georgievna. She is a tough old lady, already nearing ninety. After Masha’s death she came here every summer. She and Ivan Isaevich were here for Medea’s last year, and Alexandra saw her sister to the grave.
The last two years she hasn’t come to the Crimea. It has become too much for her.
Ivan Isaevich considers both sisters to be saints, but Alexandra smiles a smile which old age hasn’t dimmed and corrects her husband: “Only one of us was a saint.”
I am so glad that through my husband I became a member of this family, and that my children have a little Greek blood, Medea’s blood, in them. To this day her children come to the Village: Russian, Lithuanian, Georgian, and Korean. My husband hopes that next year, if the money can be found, we will bring our little granddaughter here, the child of our older daughter-in-law, a black American born in Haiti.
It is a wonderful feeling, belonging to Medea’s family, a family so large that you can’t know all its members by sight, and they merge into a vista of things that happened, things that didn’t, and things that are yet to come.