Alexandra was a war widow with three children, worn down by the years of hardship and already past her prime. There was nothing to suggest that this would be the moment she would pull off another of her stunts.
The loss of the ring had been unimportant in every respect. Alexandra was always losing things. Possessions did not stay with her for long, and she did not become attached to them. Nevertheless, Medea could not get the finding of this ring which had been lost thirty years before out of her head, perhaps because she knew that, apart from the usual links of cause and effect, there are other links between events, sometimes evident, sometimes hidden, and sometimes completely unfathomable.
“Never mind, if it’s something I need to know it will be explained,” she decided, with total confidence in the One to whom all things are known, and stopped worrying.
Alexandra had a whole collection of rings. Almost since childhood she had been tricking herself out in all sorts of frippery, and this despite the fact that she was young at just the time when this harmless feminine weakness was most heavily frowned on by public opinion. In the 1920s, when Medea was shielded from trouble by being an orphan with many children to look after, by her unsmiling seriousness and her unremitting concern for the younger ones, Alexandra, frivolous by nature but nobody’s fool, inflated her forgivable weakness like a balloon until it seemed she might at any moment fly off wherever she fancied in pursuit of who knows what.
Over time, her innocent failing developed to such an extent that all manner of ideological missionaries from the Russian League of Communist Youth and elsewhere called off all attempts to lay claim to her soul. Her civic deficiencies were manifest, and her incurable frivolity became a diagnosis freeing her from participation in the great cause of building—well, exactly what, Alexandra didn’t bother to find out.
Medea, the only member of the family to have received a full grammar-school education, had not really been properly taught during the times of war and revolution, and she longed to give her younger siblings a good start in life. With Alexandra she clearly failed. Alexandra was a poor student, although not without ability. In the municipal school she attended, there were still teachers left from the old grammar school, and it was not a bad school. Medea would sometimes come to collect her sister, and the old geography teacher, Nikolai Leopoldovich Velde, a great expert on the Crimea, would sit Medea down in the teachers’ common room, volubly curse today’s pupils for their lack of interest in studying, and lapse with heartfelt nostalgia into reminiscing about the days when he used to take well-bred young ladies on excursions to the wildest and most remote corners and crevices of Karadag. In this there could be detected a secret hope that everything might yet return to normal—that is, to life as it was before the war and before the Revolution.
But although life did not return to normal, things gradually settled down and became more tolerable. The boys grew out of infancy. Like all the Sinoply men, they were drawn to the sea. Fishing, since time immemorial a favorite pastime of boys, was a means of putting food on the table for them from an early age, and old Uncle Grisha Porchelli, a descendant of Genoese settlers who had worked for Harlampy since he was a lad, took them with him when he went out night fishing for mullet, which was not the easiest of pastimes.
In 1924, Alexandra finished her secondary schooling in the seventh grade. Medea racked her brains wondering where she could find her a job. Although the famine had passed, unemployment was still terrible.
Medea spent two days mulling, even in her dreams, over how best to fix her up, and on the third day as she was going to work early in the morning—she was working at the time in the obstetrics unit of the Theodosia city hospital—she ran into Nikolai Leopoldovich Velde, who was out taking his morning constitutional in the direction of the Quarantine district. She had barely opened her mouth to tell him about her problem before he told her, as if he had already thought everything through and decided the matter for her, to come and see him after work.
When Medea went to see him, he had the whole business practically sewn up. He had prepared her a letter addressed to the director of the Karadag research station, who was an old friend of his.
“I don’t know what sort of staff numbers he has there, but the station is under the auspices of the State Science Committee now, so perhaps they have got a bit of extra funding; the more so in the summer because they receive visiting scientists and have more work.” He held out the envelope for her.
As Medea accepted the envelope, which was made of grey poor-quality paper, she immediately had a sense that things were going to work out. Every time she encountered these old ties or had dealings with old, prerevolutionary people, everything fell into place.
She knew the station very well. She knew its present director, and she even remembered Terentii Ivanovich Vyazemsky, who had founded it. That first summer she had stayed at the Stepanyans’ dacha in Sudak. He used to come and visit them on matters concerning the station, a neglected old man in a frock coat which had acquired a reddish tinge with age, with a woman’s scarf tied in the manner of an old fashioned cravat; and he was accompanied by a second, no less remarkable personage, but of a completely different kind, with a round face, a paunch, thick salt-and-pepper eyebrows, and with an equally strong Jewish accent in Russian and French: Solomon Solomonovich Krym, a member of the prerevolutionary Russian Duma and a local celebrity.
Stepanyan, a great philanthropist and patron of the arts, declined for some reason to support his petitioners on that occasion, and in the evening, after supper, related what an original and unusual person this Dr. Vyazemsky was—a physiologist, a crusader for temperance, and a proponent of the strangest ideas. He was particularly keen for many years on the most unusual of these: he was concerned that, by locking its intellectuals up in prison, the state was losing their wonderful mental energy, which it could be putting to good use for the benefit of the state itself, and that by establishing penal scientific laboratories that energy could be conserved in the interests of society. Terentii Ivanovich enthusiastically propounded this idea to the then minister of education, Count Delyanov, who thought the whole notion bizarre and even dangerous, although it was successfully taken up by the state a few decades later.
“C’est un grand original,” Armik Tigranovna murmured, and sent the children upstairs to bed.
At that time everybody fortunately forgot the harebrained idea of the magnanimous madman. A few years later he sank all his fortune in a better-conceived project: creating a research station on his estate at Karadag which would be at the disposal of any serious scientist, even if he lacked formal academic qualifications and even, and indeed so much the better, if he were not in good health, because he could then restore his health right here in the course of productive scientific work, even if he were in straitened circumstances, because Dr. Vyazemsky would also open a sanatorium here and use the income from it to underwrite the expenses of research work.
The very next day Medea and her sister went to the station. The director kissed Medea on both cheeks. His older daughter, Xenia Ludskaya, had been in Medea’s class at the grammar school, had worked with her at the hospital, and had died in 1919 of typhoid.
Old Ludsky went off to arrange for the station’s external hygiene worker, or, in prerevolutionary parlance, the yard-sweeper, to vacate a small corner room in the station’s residences for Alexandra. Then they drank tea at length, recalling mutual acquaintances, of whom there were more than a few, and parted on the warmest of terms.
Three days later Alexandra moved to the station and started learning everything she would need to know to facilitate the fieldwork of the students coming that year from Moscow, Leningrad, Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod. She was a great success that first season and had lots of fun. First she had an affair with a category-two research worker from Kharkov, and when he left after collecting the requisite number of earthworms, the nicest geologist turned up who was compiling a large-scale geological map of Karadag, and she was allocated to him since his surveying could only be done with a partner. They proved excellent partners, both tall with a hint of rust in their hair, and hazel eyes, both cheerful and fun loving, and the geologist, whose name was Alexander, which both of them also found amusing, marked a faint cross on his new map in all the good, private locations they found, and from July until the last days of October, Alexandra never spared herself in underpinning the upward progress of science, beginning with the Beregovoy Ridge, and charting all its five massifs, from Lobovoy to Kok-Kai. After that the weather broke and the geologist departed, postponing the culmination of his efforts to the following year.