Medea and Her Children by Ludmila Ulitskaya

Author:Ludmila Ulitskaya
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307426833
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

Toward evening, clouds built up over the mountains in the place known as Rotting Dell, and in the house an atmosphere built up of silent expectation. Nike was expecting Butonov to look in. As she saw it, after their nocturnal romp it was for him to make the next move. The more so since she could not remember whether she had told him she was preparing to leave.

Masha was waiting too, her expectation all the more tense since she could not decide who she wanted to see more: her husband Alik who was taking some of his holiday entitlement to come down for a few days, or Butonov. She could still see him running down the hill, leaping over the thorn bushes and jumping up and down on the scree. Perhaps her infatuation might indeed have been dispelled if she had sat in the kitchen and talked to him.

“He’s completely thick,” she recalled Nike’s words, resorting to a saving but meaningless logic which proposed that someone who was completely thick couldn’t be the object of an infatuation.

The person most acutely tormented by expectation was little Liza. That morning, after all her petty squabbling and displeasure with Tanya the day before, she had discovered that really she couldn’t live without her. She had been waiting all day for her to come, pestering everyone, and now in the evening, tired of waiting, was wringing her hands and throwing a tantrum. Nike never took Liza’s excessive demands on life too seriously, but this time she smiled: she too was having an affair of the heart. “She’s just like me. If I want something, I want it now.”

And right now the wishes of mother and daughter partly coincided. Both were eager to continue their romance.

“Oh, do stop it. Get dressed and let’s go to see your Tanya,” Nike mollified her daughter, who ran to put on her best dress.

With the buttons on the back of her dress undone and with a whole armful of toys, Liza returned to Nike in the kitchen to ask which toy she could give to Tanya.

“Whichever one you don’t mind parting with,” Nike smiled.

Medea looked at her tear-stained granddaughter and thought to herself, “So hot-blooded. How enchanting she is.”

“Liza, come here. I’ll do up your buttons,” Medea commanded, and the little girl obediently came over and turned her back.

It was difficult to get the small buttons into the even smaller buttonholes. Her fair hair still had that familiar sweet baby smell.

Fifteen minutes later they were at Nora’s, sitting in her little house decked with arrangements of wisteria and tamarisk. The tiny summer house had a Ukrainian coziness about it, was cleanly whitewashed, and the earthen floor was covered with mats.

Liza had hidden the hare she had brought under her skirt and was trying to intrigue Tanya, but Tanya had her eyes down and was eating her porridge. Nora, as ever, was complaining mildly that they had got very tired yesterday, that the sun had been too hot, that the walk had really turned out to be very long.

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