Having murmured this last, she meticulously braided her hair with movements practiced over many years, tied it in a knot, and wrapped the black silk shawl around her head. She freed the long tail of hair from beneath the bun down onto her neck, and suddenly, in the oval mirror encrusted with seashells, saw her own face. Of course, she tied her shawl in front of the mirror every morning but saw only a fold of cloth, a cheek, the collar of her dress. Today, however—and this was somehow connected with Georgii’s arrival—she suddenly saw her own face and was surprised by it. With the years, it had come to look even longer, probably as a result of the hollowed cheeks with two deep wrinkles etched into them. Her nose was the Sinoply nose, and the years had not detracted from it. It was fairly long but not in the least protruding, quite flat at the end and with rounded nostrils.
She had a face like a rather handsome horse. This had been especially true in the years immediately after her marriage, when she unexpectedly cut her fringe and for a short time had her hair styled instead of wearing it in the invariable bun which hung heavily and irksomely on her neck.
Medea examined her face with some surprise, not glancing at it sideways but viewing it attentively and severely, and suddenly realized that she liked it. As a young girl, she had been distressed by her appearance: she had red hair, she was too tall, her mouth was too big. She was embarrassed by her large hands and the man-sized shoes she wore.
“I’ve turned into a fine-looking old woman.” She smiled and shook her head. To the left of the mirror, among the clutch of photographs, a young couple looked out at her from a black rectangular frame, a woman with a low fringe and a man with a grand head of hair; a thin, patrician, Levantine face; and a mustache that was too large for it.
Medea shook her head once more: what had she been so upset about in her youth? She had been given a good face, a good height, she was strong and had a beautiful body, as Samuel, her dear husband Samuel, had assured her. She shifted her gaze to the portrait, enlarged from the last photograph of him, with the black mourning ribbon in the corner. In it he still had his splendid hair but with two bald spots encroaching on it and raising his low forehead; his mustache had faded and become less dashing, and there was a gentleness in his eyes and an overall kindliness in his face.
“All’s well. It’s all in the past,” Medea told herself, driving away the shadow of old pain. She came out of the room and closed the door behind her. For all visitors her room was an inner sanctum which nobody entered without special invitation.
Georgii had already made the coffee. He did it in exactly the same way that Medea and his mother Elena did, the Turkish way. The little copper coffeepot was standing in the middle of the table on an unpolished tray. For all her pedantic tidiness, Medea did not enjoy polishing copper. Perhaps she preferred it with a patina. Medea poured the coffee into a crude china cup she had been drinking out of for the past fifteen years. It was a heavy, clumsy cup, a present from her niece Nike, one of her first ventures into ceramics, the fruit of a short-lived enthusiasm for modeling in clay. It was painted dark blue and red and had runs of dried glaze; its surface was rough and it was too ornate for everyday use, but for some reason Medea had taken to it and to this day Nike was proud to have pleased her aunt so much.
As she started drinking the coffee, Medea thought about Nike, and that she would be coming today with her children and Masha. Masha was an early grandniece and Nike a belated daughter of her sister Alexandra, and there was little difference in their ages.
“I expect they’ll come on the morning flight, so they’ll be here in time for lunch,” Medea said, addressing herself to nobody in particular.
Georgii made no reply, although he himself was thinking of going down to the market for some wine and some little seasonal treat like spring greens or medlars.
“Not, it’s too early for medlars,” he calculated, and shortly afterward asked his aunt whether she would be coming back home for lunch.
She nodded and finished drinking her coffee in silence.
When she had left, Artyom launched a further halfhearted attack on his father, but Georgii told him to get ready to go to the bazaar.
“It’s always the same, first the graveyard, then the bazaar,” Artyom grumbled.
“You can stay here if you’d rather,” his father proposed mollifyingly, but Artyom had already decided that actually going to the bazaar wasn’t that bad either.
Half an hour later they were walking down the road. Both were carrying rucksacks, and Artyom was wearing a canvas panama, while Georgii had a tarpaulin soldier’s cap which gave him a jaunty, military air. At almost the exact same spot as yesterday, they saw the mother and daughter, and they were again dressed identically, except that this time the woman was sitting on a small folding stool and drawing at a child’s easel.
Spotting them from the road, Georgii called to ask whether he could get them anything from the bazaar, but the light breeze carried his words away and the woman signaled with her hand that she could not hear him.
“Run up and ask whether they need anything,” he told his son, and Artyom ran up the hillside in a flurry of small stones.
Georgii looked up with pleasure. The grass was still young and fresh, and on the brow of the hill a tamarisk with never a leaf to be seen was dusted with lilac-pink flowers.
The woman said something to Artyom, but then gave up and came running downhill herself. “Could you buy us some potatoes? Two kilos, please. I haven’t got anyone to leave Tanya with, and it’s too far for her to walk, she’d be worn-out. Oh, and a bunch of dill. Only I haven’t got any money on me.” She spoke rapidly, with a slight lisp, and blushing more deeply by the minute.
She climbed back up to her daughter who was standing next to the easel. Her heart was racing and affecting her throat. “What’s happened? What’s happened?” she blurted. “Nothing’s happened. Two kilos of potatoes and a bunch of dill.”
She saw how much everything had changed in the few minutes she had run down to the road: The sun had finally burned through the shining mist, and the tamarisks which she was trying to draw were no longer rising like a pink cloud but lay solidly, like cranberry mousse, on the skyline. All the delicate indefiniteness of the scene had gone, and the spot where she was standing suddenly seemed to her to be that fixed center around which everything revolves: worlds, the stars, the clouds, and flocks of sheep.
This fancy did not, however, calm her pounding heart. It was still galloping somewhere, unable to keep up with itself, and, independently of her mind, her eye was taking in the surroundings, eager to miss nothing, to forget not one feature of this world. Oh, if she could only have picked and pressed this moment with all its different aspects, like a flower she had taken a fancy to, as she had when she was a child with a passion for botany: her daughter standing beside the easel set crookedly in the center of God’s creation; the flowering tamarisk; the road along which two travelers were proceeding with never a backward glance; the distant patch of sea; the folded valley with the furrow of a long-departed river; everything that was behind her back and everything that did not fit into her field of vision: the table mountains neat behind the hump-backed hills which had aged in this place, the table mountains with their lopped-off summits, stretched out in line one behind the other like obedient animals.