Medea and Her Children

by Ludmila Ulitskaya

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Sagas

Synopsis

Medea Georgievna Sinoply Mendez is an iconic figure in her Crimean village, the last remaining pure-blooded Greek in a family that has lived on that coast for centuries. Childless Medea is the touchstone of a large family, which gathers each spring and summer at her home. There are her nieces (sexy Nike and shy Masha), her nephew Georgii (who shares Medea’s devotion to the Crimea), and their friends. In this single summer, the languor of love will permeate the Crimean air, hearts will be broken, and old memories will float to consciousness, allowing us to experience not only the shifting currents of erotic attraction and competition, but also the dramatic saga of this family amid the forces of dislocation, war, and upheaval of twentieth-century Russian life.

Release date: December 18, 2007

Publisher: Schocken

Print pages: 320

Sample

CHAPTER 1

Medea Mendez had the maiden name of Sinoply and was, if we disqualify her younger sister Alexandra who moved to Moscow in the late 1920s, the last remaining pure-blooded Greek of a family settled since time immemorial on the Tauride coast, a land still mindful of its ties with Ancient Greece. She was also the last member of the family who could speak passably the medieval Pontic Greek which survived only in the Tauride colonies and lagged one thousand years behind modern Greek, the same length of time it was separated from the language of antiquity.

There had long been no one for her to talk to in this worn-out, resonant language from which the majority of philosophical and religious terms had sprung and which retained to this day a pristine literalness in words like metaphorisis, which meant "transportation." The other Tauride Greeks of Medea's generation had either died or been deported, but she had lived on in the Crimea by the grace of God, as she supposed, but partly no doubt also because of the Spanish surname bequeathed by her late husband, a jolly Jewish dentist with vices which were minor but not insignificant, and virtues which were great but meticulously concealed.

She was a widow for many years but didn't remarry, ever the stereotypical figure in black, and the color suited her very well. For the first ten years she wore only black, then relented and allowed a scattering of white spots or small polka dots, but still on black. She wound a black shawl around her head in a way that was neither Russian nor rustic and fastened it with two knots, one of which hung to the right of her forehead. The long end of the shawl fell away in small classical folds to her shoulders and covered her wrinkled neck. Her eyes were brown, clear, and dry, and the dark skin of her face also fell in small dry folds. When she sat framed in the painted registration window of the Village's little hospital wearing her back-fastening medical white coat, she looked like a portrait Goya had omitted to paint.

She entered notes in the hospital records in large, sweeping handwriting, and she stalked the land in these parts no less sweepingly. She thought nothing of rising before daybreak on a Sunday, putting the twenty kilometers to Theodosia behind her, standing through the liturgy, and walking back home toward evening.

For local people Medea Mendez had long been a part of the landscape. When she was not sitting on her stool in the white frame of the registration window, her dark figure was to be seen out on the eastern hills or on the rocky slopes to the west of the Village. She was not strolling idly but gathering sage, thyme, mountain mint, barberry, mushrooms, and rose hips, and she did not neglect the carnelian, the layered and structured rock crystal, or the dark antique coins with which the dull soil of this minor arena of world history was brimming.

She knew the region near and far like the inside of her own buffet, and not only remembered when and where a useful plant could be picked, but also noted to herself how the green mantle was gradually changing over the decades: the runners of mountain mint advancing down the spring flood channels on the eastern slope of Mount Kiyan; the barberry being killed by a canker which ate away its lower branches; the chicory attacking underground, its rhizomes stifling the delicate spring flowers.

The Crimea had always been generous in yielding up its treasures to Medea, and in return she appreciatively remembered every detail about every one of her finds: the time, the place, and all the nuances of feeling she had experienced, beginning with July 1, 1906, when as a little girl she had discovered, in the middle of the abandoned road to Ak-Mechet, a magic circle of nineteen identical-sized little mushrooms with pale green caps, the local variant of the white boletus. The most wonderful of all her nonedible finds was a flat gold ring with a lackluster aquamarine, cast at her feet by the sea as it was subsiding after a storm, on a little beach near Koktebel on August 20, 1916, her sixteenth birthday. She was still wearing that ring, which had become deeply embedded in her finger and hadn't been taken off for some thirty years now.

She could feel the goodness of this land through the soles of her feet. It was in a poor state now, but she wouldn't have changed it for anywhere else and had been outside the Crimea only twice in her life, for a total of six weeks.

Medea was born in Theodosia, or more precisely in a great rambling house, once well proportioned, in the Greek colony which had long ago been swallowed up by the outskirts of Theodosia. By the time of her birth the house had lost its original elegance, sprouting annexes, terraces, and verandahs to accommodate the rapid expansion of the family in the first decade of a century which had such a cheerful beginning.

The fast growth of the family was accompanied by the slow bankruptcy of her grandfather, Harlampy Sinoply, a wealthy merchant who owned four cargo ships registered to what was then the new port of Theodosia. In old age Harlampy lost his earlier driving and insatiable avarice, and looked on in wonder as fate, which had sorely tried him with many years of waiting for an heir, and visited on him six stillborn babies and innumerable miscarriages from both his wives, prodigally endowed his only son, Georgii (whom he had managed to produce only after thirty years of tribulation), with progeny. Georgii's fruitfulness might, however, have been the merit of Harlampy's second wife, Antonida, who walked in pilgrimage to Kiev in fulfilment of a vow and, having given birth to and weaned her son, fasted in thanksgiving for the rest of her life. Or perhaps his son's fecundity came from the scrawny redheaded bride, Matilda, whom he had brought from Batumi and who entered the house already scandalously with child and thereafter gave birth to a round-headed baby once every two years, in late summer, with unfathomable but cosmic regularity.

As the number of his grandchildren increased, old Harlampy declined, growing kindlier until by the end of his life he had lost along with his wealth even the appearance of a hard, authoritarian, and shrewd merchant. His blood proved strong, however, not yielding to other lines, and those of his posterity who were not winnowed by the bloodthirsty times inherited robustness of spirit and talent from him, while his renowned avarice manifested itself in his male issue in great energy and a passion for building. In the women, as in Medea, it turned into thrift, a heightened interest in material things, and a practical resourcefulness.

Harlampy's family was blessed with so many members it might have provided an admirable subject for a research project into the distribution of hereditary characteristics. No suitably motivated geneticist appeared, but Medea with her characteristic urge to bring system and order to everything, from the teacups on the table to the clouds in the sky, did more than once in her life, for fun, rank her brothers and sisters in order of the gingerishness of their hair--in her mind's eye, necessarily, since she could not remember the entire family gathered together in one place at any one time. One or another of the elder brothers was invariably absent. Their mother's coppery hair was passed on to some extent to all of them, but only Medea herself and the youngest of her brothers, Dimitry, were radically redheaded. Alexandra's hair was a complex mahogany hue, and even had the highlights of mahogany.

Other family traits were passed on: the stunted little finger of their grandfather was occasionally inherited but, for some reason, only by the boys; their grandmother's earlobe had been attached to her cheek, and she had had exceptional night vision. These features Medea inherited. All these family peculiarities and a few less obvious ones were at play among Harlampy's descendants.

Even the family's fertility split clearly along two lines. Some, like Harlampy, struggled for years to bring forth even the tiniest child. Others, in contrast, scattered copper small change about the world without giving the matter a second thought. From 1910, Harlampy lay in the Greek cemetery of Theodosia, at its highest point, with a view of the bay where right up until the Second World War the last two of his steamers plied the waves, registered as in earlier times to the port of Theodosia.

Many years later the childless Medea would gather her numerous nephews and nieces, grandnephews and grandnieces together in her Crimean home and subject them to quiet, unscientific observation. It was assumed that she loved them all dearly, although what kind of love a childless woman has for other people's children is uncertain. At all events, she took a lively interest in them, and this even grew stronger when she was old.

The seasonal influxes of her extended family were not burdensome to Medea, but neither was her solitude in autumn and winter. The first relatives usually arrived in late April when, after the rains of February and the gales of March, the Crimean spring sprouted from the earth with the lilac blooming of wisteria, the pink of tamarisks, and the Chinese yellow of the broom.

The first group visit was usually brief: a few days around the First of May holiday, with one or two people staying on until the ninth. Then there would be a short break, and in the last ten days of May the girls would congregate: the young mothers with preschool-age children. There were around thirty younger members of the family, so a roster would be drawn up the preceding winter: there was no way the four-room house could accommodate more than twenty people at one time.

The taxi-drivers of Theodosia and Simferopol who transported vacationers for a living were very familiar with Medea's house. Sometimes they gave her family members a modest discount, but specified that they would not take them up the hill if it was raining but set them down in the Lower Village.

Medea did not believe in chance, and her life had been full of portentous meetings, strange coincidences, and surprises which came together in a quite incredible manner. Someone she had once met would return many years later and change the whole direction of her life; threads would be drawn tighter, joined together, would form stitches and make a pattern which became ever clearer as the years passed.

In mid-April the weather seemed to have settled when there was suddenly an extremely dull day. It turned colder and a dreary rain set in which looked as though it might turn to snow.

Medea drew the curtains and turned the light on rather early. She threw a handful of firewood and two logs into her small, clever stove, which used little fuel and gave out a lot of heat, spread out a worn sheet on the table and was in the process of deciding whether to cut it up for kitchen towels or discard the torn middle part and make it into a cot sheet.

At just this moment there came a loud knock at the door. She opened it. Outside stood a young man in a wet coat and a fur hat. Medea took him for one of her less frequently visiting relatives and let him in.

"Are you Medea Georgievna Sinoply?" the young man asked, and Medea realized he was not a relative.

"Yes, I am, although I've borne a different surname these last forty years," Medea smiled.

The young man was pleasant looking, with light-colored eyes and a thin, drooping black mustache.

"Do take your coat off."

"Forgive me, I've landed in on you quite without warning." He shook a dusting of snow from his wet hat. "I am Ravil Yusupov, from Karaganda."

Everything that transpired that evening and night Medea described in a letter to her sister Elena probably written the following day but never sent. Many years later it was to come into the hands of her nephew Georgii and explain to him the riddle of a completely unexpected will which he had found in the same bundle of papers and which was dated April 11, 1976. The letter read:

Dear Elena,

Although I wrote to you only a week ago, something really quite extraordinary has happened, and that is what I would like to tell you about. It is one of those stories which begin a long, long time ago. Of course you will remember Yusim, the carter who drove you and Armik Tigranovna to Theodosia in December 1918. Imagine, his grandson has managed to find me through friends in Theodosia. Isn't it amazing to think that to this day you can find a person in a big city entirely without address books! It is a fairly common story for these parts. They were deported from Alushta after the war, when Yusim had already passed away. Ravil's mother was sent to Karaganda, despite the fact that the father of her little children had died fighting at the front. My young man had known since he was a child what happened (I mean your evacuation), and even remembers the sapphire ring you gave Yusim then in gratitude. Ravil's mother wore it for many years and exchanged it for a sack of flour when the famine was at its worst. But this was only the introduction to a conversation which, I will say frankly, touched me deeply. It brought back memories of things we aren't that keen to remember, the ordeals of those years. Then Ravil revealed that he is a member of a movement for the Tatars to return to the Crimea, and that they long ago began to take official and unofficial measures.

He eagerly asked me in great detail about the old Tatar Crimea. He even produced a tape recorder and recorded me so that his Uzbek and Kazakh Tatars could hear what I had to relate. I told him what I could remember about my old neighbors in the Village, Galya and Mustapha, and Grandfather Akhmet the ditcher who cleaned the irrigation aryks here from dawn to dusk, pulling out every speck of rubbish like a mote from someone's eye. I told him of how the Tatars were deported from here at two in the morning, without being given time to gather their belongings, and how Shura Gorodovikova the Party boss came herself when they were being sent away, and helped them pack their things, and cried buckets, and the very next day had a stroke and had to stop being a boss and hobbled around her land for another ten years with her face twisted and couldn't speak so anyone would understand her. In our region there was nothing like it even under the Germans, although it wasn't Germans but Romanians we had here. I know, of course, they took the Jews, but not in our region.