They watched the flowing of the leisurely river of sheep and were not the only people observing the road. Some fifty meters away two girls were sitting on a knoll, a teenager and one who was only little.
“Let’s walk around the side of the flock,” Artyom suggested.
Georgii nodded agreement. As they passed close to the girls, they saw that it was not the sheep they were staring at but something they had found on the ground. Artyom craned his neck: between two dry runners of a caper bush a snake skin was standing straight up. It was the color of an old man’s nail, half transparent, twisted in places, here and there it had split, and the little girl, afraid to touch it, was prodding it apprehensively with a twig. The teenager proved to be a grown woman. It was Nora. Both of them were fair-haired, both were wearing light head scarves, long colorful skirts, and identical blouses with pockets.
Artyom squatted down beside the snake skin too. “Dad, was it poisonous?”
“A racer,” Georgii said, taking a close look at it. “Constrictor. Lots of them around here.”
“We’ve never seen anything like it,” Nora said with a smile. She recognized him as the man from this morning, the figure in the white shirt.
“I once found a snake pit here when I was a child,” Georgii said, picking the rustling skin up and spreading it out. “This one is still fresh.”
“It’s thoroughly nasty,” Nora said, shuddering.
“I’m scared of it,” the girl said in a whisper, and Georgii noticed that, with their round eyes and little pointed chins, mother and daughter bore a comical resemblance to a pair of kittens.
“What sweethearts,” Georgii thought, and put their scary skin down on the ground. Then he asked, “Who are you staying with?”
“Aunt Ada,” the woman answered without taking her eyes off the snake skin.
“Ah,” he nodded, “we’ll be seeing you then. Come and visit us. We live over there.” He gestured in the direction of Medea’s farm and, without looking around, ran on down. Artyom bounded after him.
The flock of sheep had meanwhile passed by, and only an arrière-garde sheepdog, totally uninterested in the passersby, trotted along the road covered in sheep droppings.
“He’s got big legs, like an elephant,” the girl said damningly.
“He’s nothing like an elephant,” Nora protested.
“I didn’t say he is, just his legs are,” the girl insisted.
“If you really want to know, he’s like a Roman legionary.” Nora trod resolutely on the snake skin.
“Like what?”
Nora laughed at her silly habit of talking to her five-year-old daughter as if she were a grown-up, and corrected herself. “He doesn’t really look like a Roman legionary either, because they shaved and he has a beard.”
“And legs like an elephant.”
Late in the evening of that day, when Nora and Tanya were sound asleep in the little cottage they had been allotted and Artyom was curled up like a cat in Mendez’s room, Medea was sitting with Georgii in the summer kitchen. She usually started using it from the beginning of May, but spring had come early this year. The weather had become really quite warm in late April, and she had opened up the kitchen and cleaned it thoroughly even before her first visitors arrived. It got colder toward evening, however, and Medea put on a worn sleeveless velvet jacket with a fur lining. Georgii donned a Tatar robe which had been serving all Medea’s family members for many years now.
The kitchen was constructed of natural stone after the manner of a clay saklya. One wall was built into the hill where the slope had been dug out, and low, irregularly shaped windows had been made in the side walls. A hanging oil lamp cast a dim light over the table, and in its circle stood one last bottle of homemade wine which Medea had been keeping for just this occasion and an already opened bottle of her favorite apple vodka.
A slightly odd routine had long ago been established in the house: they usually had supper with the children between seven and eight, put them to bed early, and then came together again in the night for a late meal which was as bad for the digestion as it was good for the soul. Now, at a late hour, having finished numerous chores around the house, Medea and Georgii were sitting in the light of the oil lamp and enjoying each other’s company. They had a lot in common: both were agile, quick on their feet, appreciated small pleasures, and brooked no interference in their private lives.
Medea set a plate of the fried flounder on the table. Her generous nature was amusingly combined with parsimony: her helpings were invariably slightly smaller than one might wish, and she was fully capable of refusing a child a second helping with a dismissive “That’s quite sufficient. If you aren’t full, take another piece of bread.”
The children soon got used to this strange leveling down of all who ate at her table, and relatives who didn’t like the way she ran her house didn’t come back.
Propping her head up with her hand, she observed Georgii adding a small log to the open hearth, a primitive approximation to a fireplace.
A car drove along the upper road, stopped, and gave two hoarse honks. It was the night post. A telegram then. Georgii went up. He knew the postwoman, but the driver was new. They exchanged greetings and she gave him the telegram.
“Your family coming?”
“Yes, it’s that time already. How is your Kostya?”
“Well, how would he be? Half the time he’s drunk and the rest he’s ill. He really knows how to live.”
Georgii read the telegram by the light of the headlamps: “ARRIVING THIRTIETH NIKE MASHA CHILDREN.”
He placed the telegram before Medea. She read it and nodded.
“Well, Auntie, how about that drink?” He unscrewed the vodka bottle and poured them both a glass.
“What a pity,” he thought, “that they’re coming quite so soon. It would have been good to have Medea to myself for a bit longer.”
All her relatives liked having Medea to themselves.
“Tomorrow morning I’ll run an overhead cable through,” Georgii said.
“Come again?” Medea asked, puzzled.
“I’ll run the main electricity through to the kitchen,” Georgii elaborated.
“Yes, yes, you’ve been meaning to do that for a while,” Medea recalled.
“Mother asked me to have a word with you,” Georgii began, but Medea wanted nothing of this long-familiar topic.
“Here’s to your stay, Georgiou,” she said, taking up her glass.
“This is the only place I really feel at home,” he said, as if complaining.
“And that’s why every year you bother me with this foolish talk,” Medea grunted.
“Mother asked—”
“Yes, I got her letter. It’s all nonsense, of course. The winter is over, there’s the summer to look forward to. I’ve no intention of living in Tashkent either in the winter or in the summer. I don’t invite Elena to come and stay here. At our age you don’t go to live in a new place.”
“I was there in February. Mother’s grown older. It’s impossible to speak to her on the telephone now. She can’t hear. She’s reading a lot, even the newspapers, watching television.”
“Your great-grandfather read all the newspapers too. Mind you, there weren’t so many of them in those days.” They were silent for a long time.
Georgii threw a few more sticks on the fire, and they crackled and lit up the kitchen.
What a good life he could have here in the Crimea, if he could just make up his mind to write off these ten lost years, the discovery he had never made, the dissertation he had never finished and which sucked him into itself like an evil quagmire if he went anywhere near it. And yet, no sooner were Akademgorodok and that moldering pile of papers out of sight than his dissertation contracted into a dark little lump which he tended to forget. He should build a house here. He knew the top officials in Theodosia—they were all the children of friends of Medea’s. He could build it at Atuzy or on the road to Novy Svet. He’d seen someone’s gaunt, half-ruined dacha there. He should find out whose it was.