Sam attended the courses diligently for two months, delving into the arts of vaccination and inoculation, but his fickle heart couldn’t wait for the laid eggs of intention to hatch into accomplished actions, and even as the other students were being drawn ever more deeply into the world of horticulture and viticulture, he transferred to another class: a clandestine Marxist study circle organized for workers in the engineering workshops and port services. The enticements of small-scale Jewish socialism in provincial Palestine stood no chance against the world-girdling perspectives of the proletariat.
His office uncle, whose interests did not extend beyond the market price of wheat, had reacted with considerable disinterest to all his nephew’s previous hobbyhorses, but Marxism was too much and he told him to find another place to stay. To be fair, he did seem to have grasped from Sam’s account what surplus value was, but displayed an unexpected hostility to the young economic genius and shouted in a rage, “You think he knows better than I do what to do with surplus value? Let him first try getting it!”
Sam suspected that his uncle was confusing surplus value with pure profit, but wasn’t given an opportunity to explain this to him properly. His uncle assured him that he would land himself in jail in the very near future, words which proved to be prophetic, although almost two years were to pass before they were fulfilled. During this time Sam learned the metalworker’s trade, acquired a great deal of varied book-learning, and himself conducted a study circle to bring light into the benighted consciousness of the People.
At the end of 1912 he was subjected to administrative exile in Vologda province, where he spent two years, afterward traveling from town to town, carrying raw propaganda literature of his own devising in a doctor’s bag, meeting in conspiratorial apartments with unknown but clearly very important personages, and engaging in agitation and more agitation. For the rest of his life he styled himself a professional revolutionary and was in Moscow for the Revolution, where he became a middle-ranking leader since he was good at working with the proletarian masses; and then he was outfitted in ChON Special Detachment leather and sent to Tambov province, at which point his glorious biography mysteriously breaks off. Part of the story is glaringly missing, and then he reappears as someone entirely run-of-the-mill, devoid of any higher interests in life, a dental prosthetist enthused only by the sight of ample ladies.
The meeting between Medea, already withering after having inconspicuously spent the golden years of maidenhood in the daily caring for her younger brothers Constantine and Dimitry and her sister Alexandra (whom she had accompanied with her firstborn baby, Sergei, to her new husband in Moscow not long before), and the jolly dentist, whose smile revealed large short teeth along with a strip of pale raspberry-colored gum, took place in a sanatorium. The therapeutic Crimean mud was believed to stimulate fertility, and Nurse Medea Georgievna facilitated the process by applying mud compresses to barren loins.
There hadn’t been a dentist in the sanatorium before, but the chief consultant had managed to get the post established by the Commissariat of Health. The dentist duly appeared and created in this tranquil and slightly mysterious place a quite unholy hullabaloo. He was loud, he joked, he waved his nickel-plated instruments around, he flirted with all his patients at the same time, he offered unscheduled services for the promotion of childbirth, and Medea Georgievna, the best nurse in the sanatorium, was allocated to him as his assistant in these stomatological tours de force. She mixed the amalgam for fillings with a spatula on a specimen glass slide, passed him the instruments, and was quietly amazed at the dentist’s unparalleled impudence, and even more by the mind-boggling wantonness of most of the women suffering from infertility, who would consent to a rendezvous with him before they were even out of the dentist’s chair.
With a curiosity which grew by the day, she observed this thin Jew whose baggy trousers were inelegantly gathered around his thin waist by a Caucasian belt and who wore an old blue shirt. After donning his white coat he assumed a marginally more prepossessing appearance.
“He is a doctor, I suppose,” Medea reflected in explanation of his manifest success with the ladies. “And witty in his way.”
While Medea was filling in the patient’s record card, even before the patient had trustingly opened her mouth, his keen eye would have completed a benevolent and professional masculine examination from the crown of her head down to her ankle. Nothing escaped the connoisseur’s gaze, and the first compliment, Medea deduced, related exclusively to the upper story: hair, complexion, eyes. Receiving a favorable reaction, and in this respect the dentist showed great delicacy, he would throw himself into a purposeful outpouring of eloquence.
Medea observed the doctor surreptitiously, and was amazed how he came to life at the sight of each woman entering and how his face fell when he was alone with himself, that is, with stern Medea. He had subjected her to his critical analysis on the first day of their acquaintance, had praised her wonderful copper hair but, receiving no encouragement, had not returned to the subject of her physical merits.
After a time Medea recognized, to her surprise, that he really did have a keen eye and could pick out a woman’s most elusive merits in an instant; indeed, he was the more sincerely pleased to discover these the less obvious they were.
To one improbably fat woman manifestly suffering from obesity, he said admiringly as she was squeezing her soft backside into the seat of his dentist’s chair, “If we lived in Istanbul, you would be considered the most beautiful woman in the city!”
The bloated woman blushed, her eyes filled with tears, and she squeaked in a hurt voice, “What do you mean by that?”
“My God,” Samuel said in great concern. “Of course, I mean it as a great compliment. Everybody wants lots of something good.”
It even seemed to Medea that by the end of his reception hours he was tired less by the work itself than by his superhuman efforts to find a compliment for each woman based on their actual, if sometimes well hidden, virtues.
With the few members of the male sex who chanced to come his way (the basic specialization of the sanatorium was after all the treatment of infertility, although it also had a small orthopedics department), he was stiff, even, perhaps, timid. Medea smiled at her observation. It occurred to her that the merry dentist was afraid of men. She was later to discover how painful the reality behind that casual observation was.
Medea was nearing thirty at this time. Dimitry was preparing to enter the military academy at Taganrog. Constantine was fifteen and hoping to become a geologist.
Her sister Anelya, who had taken Anastasia, the youngest of the children, to Tbilisi, had long been urging Medea to come and visit her. Anelya had her eye on a certain charming and still-young widower who was one of her husband’s relatives, and had it in mind to introduce them. Medea, who had no inkling of these plans, was also intending to visit her sisters, only not in the spring but in the autumn after she had laid in her supplies for the winter. If Anelya’s plans had come to fruition, this house, possibly the last Greek house in the Crimea, would not have survived, and the next generation of the Sinoply family, Greeks in Tashkent, Tbilisi, and Vilnius, would have forgotten its seafaring heritage. But things turned out differently.
In the middle of March 1929 all the sanatorium staff were called to an urgent meeting; absolutely all, including even feebleminded Rais with the asymmetrical smile on half his face. If Rais had been told to come, it was an indication that the meeting was on a matter of national importance.
The municipal Party boss, enormous Vyalov, was ranting at a table covered with glossy red material. He had already read out the Party directive and was now improvising on the subject of everyone’s wonderful tomorrow and the grandeur of the idea of collective farms. The mainly female staff of the sanatorium were listening obediently. These were mostly women who lived in the suburbs, owned half a house, a kitchen garden extending to a few hundredths of a hectare, a couple of small trees, half a dozen hens, and received a wage from working for the state. They were disinclined to heckle. Firkovich, the sanatorium’s chief consultant, was a native Crimean from a scholarly Karaim family and had been kicked about quite a bit in his time. He had been drafted into the Red Army in 1918 and worked in hospitals but had never joined the Communist Party. He still feared for his family so was always willing to keep his head down and make available the time and place for anyone else who wanted to speechify.