The winter didn’t drag. Alexandra worked hard in the library and the station museum and proved to have the requisite degree of common sense, literacy, and numeracy to cope with the demands made of her. In late March all manner of scientists began arriving and things livened up again. In addition the gliding center, which had been in decline for a few years, revived and broad-shouldered sportsmen and romantic inventors were soon to be found not far away on St. Clement’s Hill in quiet Koktebel. As a result, by the time last year’s geologist returned, Alexandra was already in love with a glider pilot whom she swapped a month later for his twin brother, who resembled him so closely that Alexandra barely noticed the moment of transition.
Medea made no attempt to pry into her sister’s personal life, and was only glad that she had a good job where she was not ill treated and, indeed, on the contrary, spoiled. She was much more worried about the younger ones. Dimitry showed great promise in mathematics and dreamed of going to the artillery college. Medea did her best to tactfully steer him away from the military profession, but he was profoundly sensitive to her maneuvering, clammed up, distanced himself from her, and, although he never said a word, left her in no doubt that he considered Medea a bourgeois relic and ballast left behind by the ancien régime. Constantine, although only two years older, had no leanings in that direction and continued to go out fishing with Uncle Grisha Porchelli, and seemed to dream of nothing more complex than standing nets and dragnets.
A certain coolness which developed between Medea and her younger brothers upset her deeply, the more so since she now saw Alexandra quite infrequently as well. Alexandra would come to Theodosia a couple of times a month, run around to see her friends, and in passing, over supper, tell Medea about life at the station, mainly about her trips out and things she had found, leaving her tempestuous private life strictly private. Medea had little trouble, however, in guessing that her kid sister was not missing out on anything, diving for pearls in any sea, and sipping honey from any flower. This led her to reflect sadly that her own life was not fulfilled, and probably never would be.
She was not in demand. Her iconic face, her small head, even then bound with a scarf, her flat-chestedness—in the estimation of the men of Theodosia, her general thinness did not attract admirers.
“Evidently my intended was killed in the war,” Medea decided, and quickly reconciled herself to the idea. She thought, however, that she needed to get Alexandra married off as soon as possible.
Alexandra had been working at the station for three years. It would have been closer to the facts to say three seasons. Meanwhile her future husband was already packing his bags in Moscow, on Polyanka Street, in preparation for a research visit to Karadag.
Alexei Kirillovich Miller belonged to a rather prominent St. Petersburg family which had what at one time was a slightly dangerous aura of “progressiveness” and long-established humanitarian traditions. His most prominent ancestor was one of Peter the Great’s Germans; both grandfathers, paternal and maternal, were professors. His father had shown promise of going far in the natural sciences and had been educated in England but died young, before reaching thirty, on an expedition to the North. Alexei Kirillovich, brought up by a rich aunt, an educated woman very active in the publishing business of her husband, also studied in England for a time but, because of the outbreak of war with Germany, returned to Russia before receiving his doctorate.
Congenital shortsightedness, which was actually quite minor, exempted him from military service, and after defending his doctoral dissertation at Moscow University, he remained there, first as an assistant professor and subsequently as a full professor. He was an entomologist and studied insects with complex social behavior. In effect, he was one of the first specialists in socio-zoology. His favorite research subjects were earth wasps and ants. These wordless creatures were able to tell the observant researcher about the interesting and highly enigmatic events occurring in their city-states of many thousands of inhabitants, with all their complex administrative, economic, and military structures.
Many years later, finding himself in southern Germany with the indefinite status of displaced person and the position of research worker in a secret scientific institution which brought together the intellectual potential of occupied Europe, organized in accordance with the principle once proclaimed by the late Terentii Ivanovich Vyazemsky, he even wrote a short work full of deeply pessimistic elegance, in which he tried to separate out common behavioral patterns in colonies of social insects and in the prisoner-of-war camps where he had spent almost a year as a translator before being transferred to the laboratory.
This work, in which he provided a sad theoretical basis for racism as a biological phenomenon, perished in early 1945 during the bombing. Unfortunately together with its author.
But in that summer of 1925 in the Crimea he first succeeded in observing from start to finish the drama of the conquest of one race of ants by another, beginning with the first invasion of the newcomers, relatively smaller, but with more massive jaws. Sitting over an anthill by the hour and peering into the deceptively purposeful life of beings incapable of existing as individuals, he felt himself almost like the Lord God and well able to understand but unable to express in his customary scientific language the notion that in the innocent to-and-fro of the ants there was both a mystery and a destiny and a lesson for humanity. Not only biology was at work here, there was much else besides: he had the presentiment of an imminent discovery, he was in an excellent mood, and he felt a surge of energy.
Alexei Kirillovich was not yet forty. He belonged to that breed of people who are respectable from birth, fixed at a predetermined age once and for all. Possibly he had been feeling so good these last few years precisely because this personal age of his, which was independent of the passing of years, currently coincided with his age by the calendar.
He had gone bald early, but even before the hair fell naturally from his round head with its gleaming, symmetrical bumps, he had begun to shave it and to grow a small beard and mustache. To complete his image, spectacles in a gold frame were required, and a prerevolutionary-style linen or silk suit of a size even more expansive than was demanded by his early but entirely muscular stoutness. He was light on his feet, an excellent swimmer, and, something you would hardly have suspected of him, an excellent player of all ball games, from tennis to soccer. His English schooling, no doubt.
That year volleyball was all the rage at the Karadag station. In the hour before sundown a very varied, socially mixed group of local and visiting researchers and students on field trips would pick their way back to shore over slippery rocks after their evening dip and play a relaxed game of ring volleyball. The prim and proper Alexei Kirillovich took the ball lightly on his sensitive phalanxes, passed it with precision, and, rising to the most difficult passes, rolled under the ball like an ocean wave. Alexandra leapt in a flurry of elbows and long shins with their sural muscles attached high up to the tendons, lost the ball, shrieked and chortled, opening her mouth so wide in the process that her pink gullet showed.