A wind blew up toward morning, and Medea developed a severe headache. She wrapped an old scarf around her head and lay down in her cold bed. The following day her temperature rose and her joints ached. The influenza was severe and lasted a long time. Samuel Yakovlevich nursed her zealously. By the time she recovered, he was head over heels in love with her, and she felt immeasurably and undeservedly happy: she could never remember anybody bringing her tea in bed before, boiling broth for her, and tucking her blankets in at the sides. After the illness they got married, and their marriage was happy from its first day to its last.
Medea knew his main weakness: after a few vodkas he would start furiously boasting about his revolutionary past and looking victoriously at the women present. Then she would quietly get up from the table and say, “Home, Sam!” and he would hurry guiltily after her. It was a small thing, and she forgave him for it.
On the other side of the wall a child started crying—Alik or Liza, Medea couldn’t tell which. A new day was beginning and Medea was unsure whether she had slept that night or not. She had been having ill-defined nights of this sort ever more frequently of late.
The child, and now it was clearly Liza, was demanding to be taken to the seaside right away.
Nike scolded her: “I’m sure I don’t know what all this crying is about! Get up, get washed, have breakfast, and then we’ll decide where we’re going.”
CHAPTER 5
There were two ways to the sea. There was the main road, which had been laid before the war. It wound in a great semicircle past the creek and from there rushed headlong downhill, turning into a difficult path. The main branch of the road climbed uphill to disappear through a barrier, beyond which military installations led an underground life of their own. Another branch of the road went to Theodosia, from where it was often possible to hitch a lift.
The second, old road was a much shorter route, but steeper and more difficult. The roads came together twice: at the creek and at a round meadow between the Upper and Lower Villages. Here a view opened out which was almost more than the eye could bear. The hill on which the Tatars had once built a little village was not all that high, but, as if subordinating itself to some kind of Chinese brainteaser, the scenery here refused necessarily to follow the laws of optics and spread over a broad convex surface, clinging perilously to the point of transition where a plane surface becomes three dimensional, and miraculously uniting one-point with reverse perspective. In one smooth sweep everything was fitted in: the terraced hills once covered with vineyards but retaining them now only at their very tops; the faded table mountains beyond them dotted with the lichen patches of grazing flocks; and higher and farther still, a tremendously ancient mountain massif with leafy forests at its foot, the bald spots of old landslips, and bare, fantastical cliff figures and capricious natural features which seemed like the dwellings of dead boulders at its very summits; and there was no telling whether the stony crust of the mountains was floating in the blue chalice of a sea which encompassed half the horizon, or whether an enormous ring of mountains too large for the eye to see was the vast container of the elongated drop of the Black Sea.
Medea and Samuel found themselves here in the autumn of 1931. Sitting in this meadow covered in capers and grey wormwood, they both had a sense of being at the exact center of the world; that the smooth sweep of the mountains, the rhythmical sighing of the sea, the passing overhead of the clouds, scudding, half-transparent, and the slower ones, more substantial, the vast palpable flow of warm air from the hills, circulating, all in concert engendered a perfect tranquility.
“It’s the hub of the universe,” was all the astounded Samuel could say at the time, although Medea knew several such hubs in the region.
There and then, they decided to move here, exchanging Medea’s Theodosia residence, the two rooms in Harlampy’s house which she had been allotted, for an old Tatar homestead on the very edge of the Village, out on its own. This was the place from which the family’s expeditions to the sea usually set out, often joined by friends living in the Village who had children, and local children too. Preparations were made in advance for these expeditions to the coves, with food, tent poles, and all the other paraphernalia of tourism. Occasionally they spent only one day at the sea, but more often two or three, and would strike camp before sundown in order to negotiate the difficult precipitous path in daylight. They would get home late, carrying the youngest children, already sleepy, on their shoulders. Sometimes they managed to hitch a lift from the creek, but that was only if they were in luck.
Like most of the local people, Medea went to the sea rarely; but unlike the new, recently imported residents, the postwar settlers from the Ukraine, the North Caucasus, and as far away as Siberia, who couldn’t even swim, Medea was born on the seacoast and knew the sea here the way a country dweller knows his own woodlands: all the ways of the water, its fickleness and its constancies, the changing of its colors from morning to evening, from autumn to spring, all the winds and currents together with their calendar periods. When Medea was planning to visit the sea, she preferred to go alone. This time, however, Georgii persuaded her to come along with the rest of them.
It was the holiday period, the hospital was closed, and she couldn’t get out of it. She wrapped a scarf which had once been black but now was bleached almost white around her head and slung an old Tatar bag over her shoulder with her supplies for the trip and her swimming costume.
They locked the house and put the key in a place agreed on many years ago, since unexpected guests were always expected. Nora and Tanya were already sitting at the Hub, both dressed in white from top to toe, and from under Nora’s spectacles a narrow little poplar leaf protruded, just the right size for her nose. Georgii inspected their footwear.
“Right, we’re off!”
The caravan moved off. Artyom walked in front, behind him the beaming Alik with Liza, and behind them the girls in a riot of color, while Georgii and Medea brought up the rear.
On this stretch the road went smoothly downhill and after the first steep descent led them out to Fox Canyon. There had been a stream here once, but like most of the local streams it was long since gone. No one could even remember what it had been called, and it reappeared only for a few days in the year, when the snows were melting, as a trickle of murky meltwater. They walked in semidarkness along the stony bed of the shallow canyon. In its walls, which were clay lower down and rocky farther up, there were numerous fox lairs, a whole ancient city. These lairs were empty now, or had been reoccupied by rather unprepossessing little corsac foxes with pale fur and morose little snouts. Georgii kept looking higher up: his hunter’s eye had never yet failed to spot some kind of small game here.
They came out through Fox Canyon to an old defunct waterfall and turned onto a path which eventually crossed the main road and brought them out to the creek. By now the longer, and easier, part of the journey was behind them, and they called a halt here at a small grassy clearing overgrown with dwarf juniper before beginning the dangerous descent along the precipitous path on the coastal cliffs. This enclosed space, bounded by the cliffs and on one side by the slope of a steep little hill, always had its own pungent and individual smell, a mingling of the scent of juniper with the smells of seaweed, salt, and fish.
They always kept the break here short, in order not to let the heat of the day get to them and make them too relaxed, but just long enough for them to gather their strength before the last leg of the journey. Georgii, without the least pedagogical intention, year after year gave all the family’s children incomparable lessons in the art of survival. He versed the boys and girls in a pagan’s exact and subtle knowledge of how to treat water, fire, and wood. Thus even now Artyom, not the best of his pupils, had squatted down without taking his rucksack off, while Katya was giving the little ones a drink of the boiled water they had brought from home, a small tumblerful to each.