“Are you going to swim?” Nike asked in surprise.
“We’ll see,” Medea replied noncommittally.
Nora felt a pang when she thought of her own mother, prematurely aged, her swollen white legs lined with blue veins, hysterically and frantically embattled with the evils of old age, her constant tearful demands and ultimatums, her insistent advice and recommendations.
“Lord, what incredibly normal human relationships. There’s nobody demanding anything from anyone else, not even the children,” she sighed.
At just this moment the wailing Liza rushed to her mother demanding that Tanya should without delay surrender a pipefish which they had just found, because she saw it first but Tanya had grabbed it. Nike was sitting cross-legged. She didn’t turn a hair, only rummaged behind her and, without looking around, pulled a flat stone from behind her back, adroitly picked out of a pile of pebbles a little reddish one, and started rubbing the red one over the grey one. She did not try to calm her daughter, made no attempt to resolve the dispute fairly, and accordingly Nora, who was all ready to try to persuade her daughter to show magnanimity and hand over the shell, also stayed seated.
“I’m just going to draw something, but you’ll never in your life guess what,” Nike said into space, and Liza, still shedding tears, was already following the deft movements of Nike’s hand.
Her mother shielded the drawing with her hand, and Liza moved around to the side of her to get a peep. Nike turned away.
“Mum, show me,” Liza begged.
Nora was overcome by admiration of Nike’s pedagogical abilities.
A little later the same day she was again filled with admiration for her abilities, this time culinary. On a campfire, in an ancient battered pot, Nike made a soup out of dried packet soups into which she threw heaven knows what: crumbs and bits of bread swept off the table after breakfast and wrapped in a linen cloth, chopped leftover pieces of yesterday’s sorrel, and even hard little leaves of thyme picked on the way down to the cove.
This was the Medea or, more accurately, the Matilda school of culinary art, ideally suited to the larger family of slender means. To this day Medea never threw anything out, even making a crunchy bisque out of potato peelings with herbs and salt: the ideal accompaniment for beer, according to Georgii.
Nora knew nothing of this. She helped herself to soup out of the communal pot with a wooden spoon, placing a piece of bread under it as Medea did; she drank the thick, fragrant broth with a long-forgotten childish hunger and looked over constantly to where the little ones were sitting at a separate rock table. This was another family tradition: feeding the children at a separate table.
“Some more for Medea, please, Nora,” Georgii said, proffering Medea’s empty bowl.
Nora leaned over the pot in confusion.
“Use the mug, the mug, we haven’t got a ladle,” he said.
“They’re a couple,” Nike thought. “A perfect couple. He ought to have an affair with her. He’s been so low these last few years.”
Nike had a hunter’s flair for knowing where the lovebirds were waiting to be flushed out, even other people’s. Yesterday evening she had allocated Butonov to herself. Actually, of course, there was no one else to choose, and he was good-looking, had a fantastic body and an easygoing manner. Admittedly he didn’t have that spark which Nike looked for; and the fact of the matter was that he hadn’t been transmitting any call signals.
“We’ll just have to wait and see,” Nike decided.
Butonov was sipping his soup, speaking to no one, looking at no one. Masha was sitting next to him, looking sad and somehow hunched up. Her arm was still burning, as if it had been slapped, and she wanted to try out his touch again. She had sat next to him quite deliberately, and in passing a spoon and the bread she had touched him twice, but there had been no recurrence of the burn, only a kind of dullness inside her. He was sitting next to her with his body as still as a Buddha’s and radiating a rocklike strength. Masha was fidgeting. She just couldn’t get comfortable, and eventually realized to her disgust that all this fussing was a subconscious attempt to interest him. She put her spoon down, stood up, and went to the sea, and as she went, she threw off the man’s white shirt she had been wearing to shield herself from the sun. She plunged headlong into the water and immediately started swimming, without breathing and thrashing up a cloud of spray with her arms and legs.
“The girl’s quite frantic,” Medea thought.
Butonov looked in her direction. “That water is quite cold.”
“Katya says it’s eleven degrees, and she’s our thermometer,” Nike said, turning to him.
“Ah, you’re up for it,” Butonov noted to himself, directing a sober, steady gaze at her and, without hurrying, went down to the water. Masha was already coming out, shaking her head and getting her breath back.
“It’s like swimming in a hole in the ice,” she said with her teeth chattering.
“Yes, it’s a strong sensation,” Butonov agreed.
Masha lay down on the hot rocks, covering herself with the white shirt. Cold and heat flooded her body simultaneously.
Butonov sat down beside Medea.
“I hear, Medea Georgievna, that you swim all through the winter.”
“No, my dear young man, it must be twenty years since I last did that.”
They finished the soup, and Nike told Katya to wash out the pot.
“Why is it always me?” Katya asked indignantly.
“Just because,” Nike smiled, and Nora was overcome for the umpteenth time: no remonstration, no explanation, no arguing.
Katya took the pot grumpily and went toward the water.
“Hey, Katya! You’ve forgotten something!” Nike called after her.
“What now?” Katya asked, turning round.
“Your smile!” Nike replied, demonstrating an ear-to-ear smile.
Katya made a deep theatrical curtsy, clasping the pot to her bosom.
“Ten out of ten,” Nike appraised it.
She doesn’t think twice about screwing up her beautiful face, pulling it out of shape with her fingers, and contorting her body to show the children a monkey which has been given a laxative, or a hedgehog which wants to kiss its mother but can’t because of its prickles. She’s not in the least afraid of making herself look ugly! Nora found this both amazing and beyond comprehension.
Medea didn’t see this. She had turned her back to the sea and raised her eyes to the hills, the near at hand and the far away. Two thoughts were simultaneously in her mind: that when she was young she had loved the sea more than anything else in the world, but now looking at the mountains was much more important to her; and also, that behind her back, among these young relatives of hers, the languor of love was developing and the air was full of their mutual attractions and the subtle stirring of hearts and bodies.
CHAPTER 6
The ring which Medea had found in the coves truly had once belonged to Alexandra. In Medea’s memory the summer of 1946 was the time they had been closest as sisters, meeting then for the first time after the war. Throughout the war Medea had gone nowhere, not only not leaving the Crimea, but not even going out of the Village. Alexandra too had stayed the whole time in Moscow, flatly refusing to be evacuated to Kuibyshev, to which families of the military were moved at the beginning of the war. That year, in 1946, it was as if the age difference between them had been evened out and Medea could finally stop worrying all the time about what her younger sister might get up to next.