Other family traits were passed on: the stunted little finger of their grandfather was occasionally inherited but, for some reason, only by the boys; their grandmother’s earlobe had been attached to her cheek, and she had had exceptional night vision. These features Medea inherited. All these family peculiarities and a few less obvious ones were at play among Harlampy’s descendants.
Even the family’s fertility split clearly along two lines. Some, like Harlampy, struggled for years to bring forth even the tiniest child. Others, in contrast, scattered copper small change about the world without giving the matter a second thought. From 1910, Harlampy lay in the Greek cemetery of Theodosia, at its highest point, with a view of the bay where right up until the Second World War the last two of his steamers plied the waves, registered as in earlier times to the port of Theodosia.
Many years later the childless Medea would gather her numerous nephews and nieces, grandnephews and grandnieces together in her Crimean home and subject them to quiet, unscientific observation. It was assumed that she loved them all dearly, although what kind of love a childless woman has for other people’s children is uncertain. At all events, she took a lively interest in them, and this even grew stronger when she was old.
The seasonal influxes of her extended family were not burdensome to Medea, but neither was her solitude in autumn and winter. The first relatives usually arrived in late April when, after the rains of February and the gales of March, the Crimean spring sprouted from the earth with the lilac blooming of wisteria, the pink of tamarisks, and the Chinese yellow of the broom.
The first group visit was usually brief: a few days around the First of May holiday, with one or two people staying on until the ninth. Then there would be a short break, and in the last ten days of May the girls would congregate: the young mothers with preschool-age children. There were around thirty younger members of the family, so a roster would be drawn up the preceding winter: there was no way the four-room house could accommodate more than twenty people at one time.
The taxi-drivers of Theodosia and Simferopol who transported vacationers for a living were very familiar with Medea’s house. Sometimes they gave her family members a modest discount, but specified that they would not take them up the hill if it was raining but set them down in the Lower Village.
Medea did not believe in chance, and her life had been full of portentous meetings, strange coincidences, and surprises which came together in a quite incredible manner. Someone she had once met would return many years later and change the whole direction of her life; threads would be drawn tighter, joined together, would form stitches and make a pattern which became ever clearer as the years passed.
In mid-April the weather seemed to have settled when there was suddenly an extremely dull day. It turned colder and a dreary rain set in which looked as though it might turn to snow.
Medea drew the curtains and turned the light on rather early. She threw a handful of firewood and two logs into her small, clever stove, which used little fuel and gave out a lot of heat, spread out a worn sheet on the table and was in the process of deciding whether to cut it up for kitchen towels or discard the torn middle part and make it into a cot sheet.
At just this moment there came a loud knock at the door. She opened it. Outside stood a young man in a wet coat and a fur hat. Medea took him for one of her less frequently visiting relatives and let him in.
“Are you Medea Georgievna Sinoply?” the young man asked, and Medea realized he was not a relative.
“Yes, I am, although I’ve borne a different surname these last forty years,” Medea smiled.
The young man was pleasant looking, with light-colored eyes and a thin, drooping black mustache.
“Do take your coat off.”
“Forgive me, I’ve landed in on you quite without warning.” He shook a dusting of snow from his wet hat. “I am Ravil Yusupov, from Karaganda.”
Everything that transpired that evening and night Medea described in a letter to her sister Elena probably written the following day but never sent. Many years later it was to come into the hands of her nephew Georgii and explain to him the riddle of a completely unexpected will which he had found in the same bundle of papers and which was dated April 11, 1976. The letter read:
Dear Elena,
Although I wrote to you only a week ago, something really quite extraordinary has happened, and that is what I would like to tell you about. It is one of those stories which begin a long, long time ago. Of course you will remember Yusim, the carter who drove you and Armik Tigranovna to Theodosia in December 1918. Imagine, his grandson has managed to find me through friends in Theodosia. Isn’t it amazing to think that to this day you can find a person in a big city entirely without address books! It is a fairly common story for these parts. They were deported from Alushta after the war, when Yusim had already passed away. Ravil’s mother was sent to Karaganda, despite the fact that the father of her little children had died fighting at the front. My young man had known since he was a child what happened (I mean your evacuation), and even remembers the sapphire ring you gave Yusim then in gratitude. Ravil’s mother wore it for many years and exchanged it for a sack of flour when the famine was at its worst. But this was only the introduction to a conversation which, I will say frankly, touched me deeply. It brought back memories of things we aren’t that keen to remember, the ordeals of those years. Then Ravil revealed that he is a member of a movement for the Tatars to return to the Crimea, and that they long ago began to take official and unofficial measures.
He eagerly asked me in great detail about the old Tatar Crimea. He even produced a tape recorder and recorded me so that his Uzbek and Kazakh Tatars could hear what I had to relate. I told him what I could remember about my old neighbors in the Village, Galya and Mustapha, and Grandfather Akhmet the ditcher who cleaned the irrigation aryks here from dawn to dusk, pulling out every speck of rubbish like a mote from someone’s eye. I told him of how the Tatars were deported from here at two in the morning, without being given time to gather their belongings, and how Shura Gorodovikova the Party boss came herself when they were being sent away, and helped them pack their things, and cried buckets, and the very next day had a stroke and had to stop being a boss and hobbled around her land for another ten years with her face twisted and couldn’t speak so anyone would understand her. In our region there was nothing like it even under the Germans, although it wasn’t Germans but Romanians we had here. I know, of course, they took the Jews, but not in our region.
I told him too about how in 1947, in the middle of August, the order came to cut down the nut groves here which the Tatars had planted. No matter how we begged them, the dimwits came and cut down those wonderful trees, not even waiting for us to gather the harvest. So there the murdered trees lay all along the road, their branches laden with unripened nuts, and then the order came to burn them. Tasha Lavinskaya from Kerch was staying with me at the time, and we sat and cried as we watched that barbaric bonfire.
Thank God, my memory is still good. It retains everything, and we talked beyond midnight and even drank some wine. The old Tatars, you’ll remember, wouldn’t touch wine. We agreed that the next day I would take him around and show him all there is to see. And then he asked me a secret favor: to buy him a house in the Crimea, but in my name, because apparently houses can’t be sold to Tatars. There is a special government decree on the matter which dates back to Stalin’s time.