Medea and Her Children

Medea and Her Children

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. “One of today’s best Russian writers . . . Alternately witty and affecting, with an impeccable style.” – The Star-Ledger “Ulitskaya’s epic narrative of life well lived under the radar of Soviet totalitarianism becomes a testament to the power of that other formidable regime we so innocently refer to as ‘family.’ ” – Elle “ Medea and Her Children is everything one would expect from a modern Russian novel.” – Los Angeles Times Book Review Ludmila Ulitskaya ’s fiction has been published in many countries, including Russia, France, and Germany; Medea and Her Children is her second novel to be published in America. She lives in Moscow. 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