A Train to Moscow(18)
“Well, do not swear,” she orders her acting partner, Vova, to the auditorium’s dead silence. She doesn’t see the rows of chairs, or the windows pasted with garlands of frost, or the eyes aimed at her. She only sees the boy she loves standing beneath the balcony; she only tries to grapple with the passion that is pushing her toward him, overwhelming and conflicting. “It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden. Too like the lightning,” she confides to the audience frozen in rapt silence.
Approaching the end of the scene, she has yet to understand what has thrust the room full of her impatient schoolmates into this quiet focus. But she can sense this force, even though she doesn’t know how to attach words to what is swirling inside her. She knows one thing: she has connected with the audience and made them watch her, made them listen. She has convinced her schoolmates to follow her despite their boredom, despite the sun slanting its last rays into the dirty windowpanes. She doesn’t yet comprehend the nature of this new power, but it feels like magic.
11
The three of them are in the forest that starts behind the end of the streetcar route, and both Marik and Andrei are wearing ushanka hats with flaps hanging down to the shoulders of their cotton-padded coats. It is the dawn of March, when the winter still insists that it is in charge despite the signs of receding snow wherever the sun can reach down through the canopy of firs. They are sitting around a campfire Andrei has built with branches and twigs they found sticking out of the snow, patches of dead grass and brown leaves radiating from their burning pile of sticks.
As they were searching for wood, Andrei had stumbled onto an unexploded shell, small and darkened by the years that had passed since the front turned west. From the tense curve of his back, as he was digging in the loam, Sasha knew that he had come upon something prized, something she and Marik would never find no matter how painstakingly they trained their eyes to search the porous snow. Why was it always Andrei who found forbidden things, who explored any place he wanted without curfews or rules, who was always the first one riding on the back of the streetcar? She stares at his open palm, red and blotchy, where the shell now sits covered in old dirt, pretending to be no more dangerous than an ordinary stone. Andrei carefully lifts and examines it before he offers it to Marik in an apparent show of sudden generosity.
She knows Marik shouldn’t lift the shell from Andrei’s palm, but he does, and now it’s his. Now he owns it. His fingers, swollen from the cold, embrace and welcome it, accepting Andrei’s risky find, now putting Marik in charge.
“Come on—throw it into the fire!” Andrei yells, whirling his arms as if he were a windmill. “Let’s see the fireworks.” The flames from the fire reflect in his eyes, like little dancing darts of orange on green.
She knows, of course, that throwing an unexploded shell into a fire is a dangerous thing to do. Her mother has told her about local boys with missing fingers and feet, stupid children who didn’t use their brains to think about the consequences of their actions, and she wishes her mother were here now to tell Marik what to do.
Sasha sees Marik standing on the edge of the fire, his hand extended, every freckle on his face lit orange by the flames. He just stands there, scared to move, as if he were a statue. But in addition to fear, she sees a flicker of pride in his eyes, the pride of being able to hold a live shell, of being as tough as Andrei, of being a man.
“Don’t be a fool,” she screams as loudly as she can, hoping the force of her voice can influence Marik’s next move.
“You don’t have the guts!” Andrei shouts at the top of his lungs, and his words overpower hers. His ushanka hat is clutched in his hand, and she sees his eyes wild with excitement, a black curl of hair dancing on his forehead. “You’re a coward!” he yells. “You’re like a little girl. You can’t even throw a shell into the fire.” Andrei takes a breath and reaches for the sharpest argument of all. “Your father’s politichesky, and he is never coming back.”
“Leave him alone!” she yells at Andrei, whose mouth is a thin, straight line, as if carved in stone and who now almost looks like his father.
“Don’t!” she yells at Marik, who is clasping his fingers around the shell, his eyes white with rage, just as they were at the ice-skating pond last year. The piece of metal in his hand is dark and filled with death, but Marik doesn’t seem scared. He is cuddling it as if it were an egg, as if what he did with the shell might bring his father back.
She knows she shouldn’t be here. Whatever is going to happen belongs to the realm of danger her mother invokes so vividly when Grandpa pins her to the bench and flogs her. She’s not afraid of another flogging, even if it is with nettles. What she’s afraid of is being where she shouldn’t be, within the reach of danger. But she also knows something else, viscerally. She can smell it the same way she can smell Marik’s anger and Andrei’s contempt. She can feel in her bones that Andrei has dug his boots into the marshy ground and Marik is closing his fingers around the shell for the same reason, the reason she refuses to acknowledge, even to herself. She knows why they are fighting, but knowing the cause of this clash doesn’t help her know what to do.
“Stop!” she yells, but they don’t seem to hear her. They are frozen in their bitterness and in their battle. She knows she can’t make them stop because they have already abandoned the safe perimeter of common sense and crossed into a place from which they cannot turn back, so she starts running toward home, as fast as she can. Her felt valenki sink in the wet snow, and as she runs, snow gets into her boots and melts inside them. She tenses her feet to keep her valenki from falling off as her heels make slurping sounds inside the soaked felt, as fir branches whip her in the face. She runs and runs, with every second adding to the distance between rage and reason, between her and danger.