Людмила Улицкая - Medea and Her Children

This was the house in which we spent the evening. The summer kitchen is very much like Medea’s. There are the same copper jugs, the same crockery. Nora has learned to gather the local herbs, and bunches of drying herbs hang from the walls just as they used to.

There have been many changes over this period. The family has spread over the world even more widely. Nike has long been living in Italy, married to a fat rich man who is witty and charming. She looks matronly and simply loves it when relatives from Russia come to visit her in her luxurious house in Ravenna.

Liza lives in Italy too, but Katya didn’t take to the country. As sometimes happens in children with dual nationality, she has become a raging Russophile. She came back to Moscow and lives in Usachevka, and the red-haired little girl who was making such a scene in the courtyard was her daughter.

Big Alik has become a member of the American Academy of Sciences, and before you know it may become a benefactor of humanity by discovering a drug against old age; but Little Alik after graduating from Harvard University reverted to Orthodox Judaism, learned Hebrew, put on a kipa , grew earlocks, and is currently studying all over again in a yeshiva in Bnei Brak, in Israel.

Little Alik published a collection of Masha’s poetry a few years after the move to America. Georgii showed us this slim volume. It has a portrait of her on the first page taken from a snapshot of the last summer she spent in the Crimea. She has turned and is looking into the lens with delighted surprise. I won’t attempt to assess her poems: they are a part of my life, because I too spent that last summer in the Village staying with my children at Medea’s house.

Butonov really took to his house in Rastorguevo, and moved his wife and daughter there after a great deal of persuading. He has had a son of whom he is inordinately proud. He has not been working in sports medicine for a long time now: he changed direction and works with spinal patients, of whom he has had a regular supply first from the war in Afghanistan and then from the war in Chechnya.

All the older generation have passed on except for Alexandra Georgievna. She is a tough old lady, already nearing ninety. After Masha’s death she came here every summer. She and Ivan Isaevich were here for Medea’s last year, and Alexandra saw her sister to the grave.

The last two years she hasn’t come to the Crimea. It has become too much for her.

Ivan Isaevich considers both sisters to be saints, but Alexandra smiles a smile which old age hasn’t dimmed and corrects her husband: “Only one of us was a saint.”

I am so glad that through my husband I became a member of this family, and that my children have a little Greek blood, Medea’s blood, in them. To this day her children come to the Village: Russian, Lithuanian, Georgian, and Korean. My husband hopes that next year, if the money can be found, we will bring our little granddaughter here, the child of our older daughter-in-law, a black American born in Haiti.

It is a wonderful feeling, belonging to Medea’s family, a family so large that you can’t know all its members by sight, and they merge into a vista of things that happened, things that didn’t, and things that are yet to come.

1996

Translation copyright © 2002 by Schocken Books

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Originally published in Russia as Medea I Ee Deti by Vagrius Publishing House, Moscow, in 1998.

Copyright © 1998 by Vagrius Publishing House.

Copyright © 1996 by L. Ulitskaya.

Schocken and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

A Cataloging-in-Publication record has been established for Medea and Her Children by the Library of Congress.

eISBN : 978-0-307-42683-3

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