Людмила Улицкая: Medea and Her Children

That October, Matilda was about to give birth to her fourteenth child, who had decided to be born not in August like all her other children but in mid-October. Ten days after the loss of Georgii both of them, Matilda and her little pink-headed girl, followed him in death.

Medea was the first to learn of her mother’s death. She went to the hospital in the morning to be met by Fatima the nurse, who stopped her on the stairs and said in the Crimean Tatar language which many inhabitants of the Crimea knew in those days, “Don’t go in there, my dear, go and see the doctor. He is expecting you.”

Dr. Lesnichevskii came out to see her, his face wet with tears. He was a plump little old man; Medea was taller than him by a head. He said, “My dear, dear child!” and reached up to pat her head. He and Matilda had begun their complementary labors in the same year, she giving birth to babies and he running the obstetrics department, and he had delivered all her babies himself.

That left thirteen of them, thirteen children who had just lost their father and not yet come to terms with the reality of that death. The symbolic funeral for sailors who died at sea, with an orchestra and volleys of gunfire, had seemed to the younger children to be some kind of military entertainment, like a parade. In 1916 death had not yet become as cheapened as in 1918 when the dead were buried in pits, barely clothed and without coffins. Although the war had been going on for a long time, it was far away, while here, in the Crimea, death was still an individual matter.

Matilda was dressed in her finest, her strident hair covered in black lace and her unbaptized little girl laid beside her. Her older sons bore the coffin first to the Greek church and then on to the old graveyard, to rest beside Harlampy.

Even the youngest child, two-year-old Dimitry, remembered his mother’s funeral. Four years later he told Medea about two things which had made an impression on him that day. The funeral was held on a Sunday, and a wedding had been scheduled in the church for an earlier hour. On the narrow road leading from the church, the wedding party encountered the funeral procession. There was an awkward moment before those carrying the coffin had to step aside onto the shoulder in order to let the car through, on the back seat of which there sat in glory, like a fly in sour cream, a frightened dark-haired bride in a white cloud of wedding dress with a bald bridegroom beside her. This was almost the first car in the town and belonged to the wealthy Muruzi family, and it was green. Dimitry described the car to Medea. “It really was green,” she recalled. The second incident was puzzling. The boy asked her what those white birds were called which were sitting beside mother’s head.

“Seagulls?” Medea asked in surprise.

“No, one was big and one was little, and they had different faces, not like seagulls have,” Dimitry explained.

Beyond that he could remember nothing. That year Medea was sixteen. There were five children older than her and seven younger. Two were missing that day, Philip and Nikifor. They were both away at the war. Both were later killed, one by the Reds, the other by the Whites, and throughout her life Medea wrote their names on the same line on the requiem slip.

Sophia, Matilda’s younger widowed sister, came from Batumi for the funeral and thought it would make sense for her to take the two older boys back with her. Since her husband’s death she had had a large farm to cope with, and she and her three daughters were barely managing. In the not-too-distant future, fourteen-year-old Athanasii and twelve-year-old Plato would be growing into the men she so much needed in her household.

They were not, however, destined to revive the fortunes of their aunt’s farm, because two years later Sophia wisely sold what remained of her property and took all the children first to Bulgaria and later to Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, Athanasii, still a callow young man, became a novice in an Orthodox monastery and moved from there to Greece where all trace of him was lost. The last anyone heard was that he was living in the mountains of Meteora, which nobody knew anything about. Sophia, her daughters, and Plato finally put down roots in Marseilles, and the summit of her achievement was a little Greek restaurant built up from retail sales of oriental sweetmeats, in particular baklava, the dough for which her busy, ugly daughters were adept at drawing out. Plato, the only man in the house, really was its main support. He saw his sisters married, saw his aunt buried just before the Second World War, and only after the war, when already by no means a young man, married a Frenchwoman and fathered two Frenchmen with the jolly surname of Sinoply.

Ten-year-old Miron was taken by a relative from the Sinoply side, the very charming Alexander Grigorievich, who owned the Diamonds café in Koktebel. He had come to Matilda’s funeral with no intention of taking new children into his home, but his heart softened and he did. The boy died a few years later after a short, incomprehensible illness.

A month later Anelya, Matilda’s older sister, whom people considered the most fortunate of them all, took Nastya to her home in Tbilisi where she lived with her husband, a musician of some renown at that time. She had intended to take the youngest boys as well, but they howled the house down, and it was decided to leave them with Medea for the time being. Eight-year-old Alexandra also stayed with Medea. Alexandra had always been very attached to her, and of late hadn’t strayed from her side.

Anelya was perplexed: how could she leave three small children in the hands of a sixteen-year-old girl? At this point old Pelagea, their one-eyed nurse, intervened. All her life she had worked in their house, and she had been a distant relative of Harlampy.

“For as long as I am alive, let the littlest ones grow up in this house.”

And that was how everything was decided.

Some time later Medea received three letters simultaneously from St. Petersburg: from Elena, Armik Tigranovna, and Alexander Ashotovich. His letter was the shortest: “Our whole family deeply condoles with you in the great sorrow that has befallen and asks you to accept the little help we can offer in this hour of need.”

The “little help” proved to be a very considerable sum of money for those times, half of which Medea spent on a cross of brittle black marble into which were incised the names of her mother and of her father, whose body had dissolved in the pure and potent waters of the Pontus Euxinus, which had received so many of the Sinoply family’s seafaring men.

It was there, in the shadow of the wild olive tree planted on Harlampy’s grave, during the revolutionary holidays of early November 1926, that Medea nodded off on a bench and saw all three of them: Matilda in a halo of red hair, not gathered in a bun as when she was alive but magnificently standing up full length on her head; with a little, naked girl with a pink head in her arms, not newborn but for some reason three years old; and her father, grey haired, with a completely grey beard and looking much older than Medea remembered him, to say nothing of the fact that he had never had a beard while alive.

They radiated love toward her but said nothing, and when they disappeared, Medea knew that she had not been dozing. At all events, she was not conscious of any transition from sleeping to wakefulness, and she sensed a wonderful resinous aroma in the air, dark and ancient. Inhaling the fragrance, she guessed that their appearance, so ethereal yet so solemn, was to thank her for having kept the little ones from harm, and as it were to release her from the authority she had voluntarily assumed so long ago.

Some time passed before she could describe this extraordinary occurrence in a letter to Elena. “Several weeks have passed already, Elena, during which I have been quite unable to sit down to write you a letter describing a very unusual mystical experience.”