The bus from Simferopol to Medea’s house took about five hours, and until the beginning of the holiday season the service was only once a day; but in any case Nike and Masha usually came by taxi despite the expense. (The two-hour journey by taxi was almost more than the price of a plane ticket from Moscow to Simferopol.)
As soon as Artyom got back from the bazaar, he went up to the roof armed with an old pair of binoculars and did not take his seeing eye from the gap between the hills where every car coming to the Village was briefly to be glimpsed. Georgii was sorting out his purchases in the kitchen. It had turned out not to be a market day, and there had been few traders and little going on. He had bought a pack of homemade plum pastilla scrolls which had been left to dry in the sun for rather too long, a favorite treat of the children; some spring greens; and a large packet of cheburek meat pastries.
It was the hardware shop where Georgii had scored his greatest success. Tourists were always surprised how well stocked it was. This time Georgii had bought a newly fashionable whistling kettle, two dozen glass tumblers, and half a kilo of akhnali, horseshoe nails which his friend Tarasov, the chairman of a collective farm near Novosibirsk, was desperate for. He also bought some Czech glue, which was in short supply in those days, and a fairly hideous oilcloth for the table. He laid all his purchases out and gloated over them. He enjoyed shopping. He liked the sport of choosing, haggling, and bringing home the booty. His wife Zoyka got angry each time he came back from a trip bringing a whole pile of completely unnecessary acquisitions which only cluttered up their house and dacha. She was an economist working in the municipal trading inspectorate and took the view that purchases should be judicious, thought through, and that you shouldn’t just scoop up all sorts of junk.
He uncorked a bottle of Tauride fortified wine and regretted not having bought more, although it was readily available and he could always get some later in the little store in the Village. Having sorted everything out, he sat down in the doorway with a glass of wine and a cheburek in his hand, only to see the artist and her daughter coming down from the hill.
“Damn, I forgot the potatoes,” he remembered. “Well, there can’t have been any. If I’d seen them, it would have reminded me.”
He had, however, bought plenty of dill and so, as a conscientious person, he called to Artyom to come down from the roof and take the vacationer some dill. The inhabitants of Medea’s house never considered themselves to be vacationers, and the local people also treated them as belonging.
Artyom refused point-blank to take her the dill. The moment when the car would appear was too important and he was afraid of missing it. Indeed, before they had finished arguing over the dill, a yellow Volga did appear in the gap where it was expected.
“They’re coming!” Artyom yelled in a voice breaking with happiness, and rushed down from the roof and out to the gate.
Only a few minutes later a taxi drove up to the house, stopped, its four doors burst open simultaneously and six people bundled out, two of them quite small. While the taxi-driver was retrieving suitcases and cardboard boxes from the boot, a scrum of relatives began kissing and hugging. The taxi had not left by the time Medea returned unnoticed with a bulging bag, smiling with her mouth firmly closed and her eyes narrowed.
“Auntie! My sunshine! How I’ve missed you! How pretty you look! And you smell of sage!” Tall, redheaded Nike kissed her, but she pushed her away slightly and muttered,
“What nonsense! I’m reeking of gloss paint. They’ve been redecorating the hospital these past two months and still haven’t finished.”
Thirteen-year-old Katya, Nike’s elder daughter, was standing beside Medea waiting her turn to be kissed. Wherever Nike was, she had some inalienable right always to be first, and few there were who could dispute it. Masha too was waiting her turn, with her boyish haircut and her adolescent figure, as if she wasn’t a grown woman but a scrawny runt on wobbly legs. But her face was pretty, with a beauty not yet fully revealed, like an unused transfer. Georgii caught her and kissed the top of her head.
“Shame on you, I’m not talking to you,” Masha said, pushing him away. “You were in Moscow and didn’t even call.”
Masha’s son, five-year-old Alik, and Nike’s younger daughter Liza also embraced, acting out a passionate reunion although they hadn’t been parted since yesterday, as they had all stayed overnight at Nike’s apartment on Zubovskoy Street. The children were almost the same age and it was no exaggeration to say they had loved each other from birth. They amused everyone by constantly replicating adult relationships: feminine flirtatiousness, jealousy, and dashing acts of courtship.
“Cousinage, dangereux voisinage,” Medea said for the umpteenth time, looking at the cousins.
“I’ll kiss you as if you were already here,” Alik said, drawing Liza toward himself, but she decided to play hard-to-get, only she couldn’t think of a condition for agreeing to be kissed and so prevaricated,
“No, first, um, you’ve got to, you’ve got to, um, show me the little doggie!”
Two of those present exchanged curt nods: Artyom and Katya. There had been a time when they, like Liza and Alik now, had also loved each other passionately, but a couple of years ago everything had fallen apart. Katya had grown up markedly, sprouting hair in various places, which she promptly shaved off, and acquiring a pair of small but indisputably real breasts, and between the cousins there had opened up the abyss of puberty.
Artyom, his heart deeply wounded by last year’s dismissive-ness, which he had done nothing to deserve, although he had been desperately looking forward to seeing Katya again, now turned defensively away and meditatively dug the toe of his shoe into the pale brown earth.
Katya had been thrown out of the Bolshoi Ballet School last year for being totally without prospects but retained all the mannerisms of a professional ballerina, for which Nike, although secretly admiring of her wonderful deportment, was constantly ribbing her: “Chin up, shoulders down, chest forward, stomach back, and toes pointing outward.” In just this placement Katya now stood immobile, giving all present the opportunity of delighting in the beauty of ballet, of which she firmly remained the representative.
“Medea, take a look at our little ones!” Masha said, touching Medea’s shoulder.
Alik had been to the kennel of Medea’s immensely long, but short-legged, bitch Nyukta and brought back an equally long puppy. Liza was holding it in her arms, and Alik, moving the puppy to one side, was proceeding toward Liza’s promised cheek.
Everybody laughed. Georgii took two suitcases; Artyom, turning away from Katya, lifted a cardboard box with provisions; and Katya, tripping lightly like a prima ballerina taking her curtain call, ran down to take up her position in the sunlit patch of land between the house and the kitchen and posed there, exquisite and unattainable, like a princess, and Artyom perceived all this with an anguish in his heart the like of which he had never known before, the first victim of this early spring.
Nora, meanwhile, had again found herself in the role of snooper. Little Tanya was asleep after lunch. Neither potatoes nor dill had that handsome man brought her who looked, she now realized, not in the least like a Roman legionary, but like Odysseus. And then, while she was washing the dishes in Aunt Ada’s kitchen yard, she had seen a taxi drive up and a tall, redheaded woman in a vulgar red dress embrace an old woman while a whole horde of children jumped around; and her breath was taken away by a sudden access of jealousy for people who could be so pleased to see each other and who could make such an occasion out of their meeting up again.