Людмила Улицкая - Medea and Her Children

He was standing in the doorway, her usual angel, clad in somber dark red raiment. She couldn’t see his face clearly, but his eyes were deep blue, as if he were looking through the slits of a theatrical mask. Masha noticed that the doorway was a false one: the real door was farther to the right. He stretched out his hands to her, placed them over her ears, and even squeezed a little.

“Now he’s going to teach me clairvoyance.” She understood that she had to take off her dressing gown. She stood there now in her long nightgown.

He was behind her and pressing her ears and eyes closed, and with his middle fingers began to massage across her forehead and right down to the bridge of her nose. Delicate waves of color floated toward and away from her, rainbows extending to a great range of hues. He was waiting for her to stop him, and she said, “Enough.”

The fingers stopped immediately. In a beam of pale yellow light with an unpleasant green tinge, she saw two people, a man and a woman. They were very young and slender. They came nearer as if she were watching through binoculars until she could recognize them. They were her parents. They were holding hands and aware only of each other. Her mother was wearing a familiar light blue dress with dark blue stripes, and she was younger than Masha herself. What a pity they could not see her.

“This can’t go on,” Masha understood. He began stroking across her forehead once more and pressing on some particular point.

“Butonov’s art, pressure points,” Masha thought. She stopped the beam of yellow light and saw the house in Rastorguevo, the closed side gate and herself beside it. The car was inside the main gate, and the small light was burning in Grandmother’s half. She passed through the side gate without opening it and approached the lighted window, or rather the window approached her, and rising easily into the air, she flew up and dived smoothly inside.

They did not see her, although she was right beside them. Nike had thrown back her long neck, and she could have touched it. Nike was smiling, even perhaps laughing, but the sound was turned off. Masha ran her finger down Butonov’s gleaming chest, but he did not notice. His lips trembled and parted, and revealed his front teeth, one of which was set slightly off true.

“Turn around, please, and go back,” Nike said quietly to Butonov, looking out through the window at Ryazan highway.

“Is that what you want?” Butonov asked in some surprise, but did not argue, engaged reverse gear and turned the car.

He stopped in Usachevka. They parted warmly, with a good, live kiss, and Butonov was not in the least put out. He could take no for an answer. In these matters nobody owes anyone anything. It was still early evening, light snow was falling, and Katya and Liza were waiting up for their mother.

“So much for Rastorguevo,” Nike thought, and lightly ran up the stairs to the third floor.

Masha was standing in the corridor between the kitchen and the living room in an icy draught and had a sudden revelation, as if she had been struck by lightning, that she had once before stood in her nightgown in this exact same freezing current of air. The door behind her would open in a minute and something dreadful would be behind it. She ran her fingers across her forehead to the bridge of her nose, rubbed the middle of her forehead: wait, stop . . .

But the horror behind the door kept growing. She forced herself to look around. The false door moved slightly.

Masha ran into the living room and pushed the door to the balcony. It flew open without creaking. The cold which blew in from outside was fresh and joyful, and the air behind her was icy and stifling.

Masha stepped out onto the balcony. The snow was falling gently and it was a choir with a thousand voices, as if every snowflake carried its own musical note, and this moment too was something she recognized. This had happened before. She turned; something dreadful was standing behind the living-room door and it was coming nearer.

“Oh, I know, I know.” Masha climbed onto the box the television had come in, from there onto the long window box fixed to the side of the balcony, and made the inner movement which raises you into the air.

His legs drawn up to his stomach, her husband Alik slept on; in the next room, in exactly the same position, her son was sleeping. It was the start of the spring equinox, a glorious festival of the heavens.

CHAPTER 16

Medea received the telegram twenty-four hours later. Klava the postmistress delivered it in the morning. Telegrams were sent in three eventualities: Medea’s birthday, the imminent arrival of relatives, and a death.

With the telegram in her hand she went through to her room and sat down in the armchair which now stood where she herself used to stand, facing the icons. She sat there for a considerable time, moving her lips, then got up, washed out her cup, and got ready for the journey. From her illness in the autumn she still had a disagreeable stiffness in her left knee, but she was used to it by now and just moved a little more slowly than usual. Then she locked the house up and took the key to the Kravchuks.

The bus stop was nearby. It was the same route her guests usually took, from the Village to Sudak, from Sudak to the bus station at Simferopol, and from there to the airport.

She was in time for the last flight and late that evening rang the doorbell of Alexandra’s house in Uspensky Lane, which she had never visited before. Her sister opened the door to her. They had not seen each other since 1952, twenty-five years. They embraced and shed floods of tears. Lidia and Vera had just left. Her face swollen with tears, Nike came out into the lobby and clung to Medea.

Ivan Isaevich went to put on the kettle. He guessed this was his wife’s elder sister come from the Crimea. He vaguely recollected some kind of long-standing feud between them. Medea took off the downy head scarf which made her look as if she had just come up from the country. Beneath it the black scarf was wound around her head and Ivan Isaevich was amazed by her iconic face. He saw a great resemblance between the sisters.

Medea sat down at the table, looked around the unfamiliar house, and gave it her approval. This was a good place.

Masha’s death was a great sorrow, but it had also brought Alexandra Georgievna a great joy, and now she was puzzling over how one person could contain such different emotions at the same time.

Medea for her part, sitting to her left, simply couldn’t imagine how it had come about that she had not seen the person dearest to her for a quarter of a century, and was horrified. There really seemed to be no good reason or explanation for it.

“It was an illness, Medea, a serious illness, and nobody understood it at all. Alik’s friend, a psychiatrist, apparently examined her a week ago and said she needed to be taken into the hospital straightaway: she had an acute manic-depressive psychosis. He prescribed some drugs. They were waiting for permission to emigrate any day, you see. That was the problem. But I could see there was something wrong with her. I didn’t hold her hand the way I did before. I’ll never forgive myself,” Alexandra blamed herself.

“Do stop, for God’s sake, Mama! Don’t blame yourself for this at all. It really is my . . . Medea, Medea, how am I to live with this? I can’t believe it,” Nike sobbed, while her lips, designed by nature herself for laughter, seemed still to be smiling.

The funeral took place not on the third day, as would have been usual, but on the fifth. There was a postmortem. Alik came with two friends and Georgii to the forensic-medicine mortuary somewhere near the Frunze Metro station.

Nike was already there. She had wound a piece of white crepe de Chine around Masha’s shaven head and neck, on which the prosector’s coarse stitches had been visible, and tied it with a firm knot at the temple in the way Medea did. Masha’s face was untouched, pale and waxen, its beauty undefiled.