A Train to Moscow(24)
Sasha thinks of Grandpa, who believes all the news he hears on the radio, and of her mother, who believes that the war was all heroism and valor. Or maybe she doesn’t completely believe it. After all, she worked in a hospital one kilometer from the front, and she must have seen what Kolya saw. But she is no longer sure what Andrei believes in. He has become a mystery, and maybe this is precisely why she is here, lying in the grass next to him. He is like a tough equation she has to solve in math class. She knows she has to unravel the variables that will allow her to learn who he really is, to get down to the X he harbors at his core.
He looks down, shakes the cigarette ash into the grass. “The Young Communist League has saved my life. I was going nowhere, and they gave me a sense of purpose; they made me one of them.” He pauses and peers down into the grass teeming with grasshoppers and ants. “My whole life, people have been looking at me and smirking. I’m not stupid; I know what they whisper behind my back: There goes the loser, the son of a street cleaner. The one who is likely to end up in jail, just like his alcoholic father. But with them, for the first time in my life, I have a future.”
He looks away, toward the forest, considering the heft of what he has just said. When he turns back to her, his face has lightened. “And they also tell me I look a lot like Mayakovsky,” he says and chuckles.
He does look like Mayakovsky, whose poems they were all made to memorize in eighth grade, a high-cheekboned poet who glared down from the wall of every literature classroom, with his piercing eyes and a square chin, handsome in his seriousness about the Revolution. She cups her hands over Andrei’s ears and peers into his face. “You have his coal-like eyes,” she whispers, drawing so close that she has no choice but to kiss him. They stay immersed in this tobacco-scented kiss until he pulls away, takes her by the shoulders, and separates their bodies carefully and deliberately, as if his was a stick of dynamite and hers a lighted match.
“And there is one more thing about my job,” says Andrei, as if to certify that he has changed the subject. “We have a special store with decent food.”
She doesn’t know why the Komsomol town committee workers have access to decent food when the rest of them stand in lines for bread and milk, but this is when Andrei unwraps a newspaper parcel he brought and pulls out a sweet roll. She has never seen a sweet roll so gleaming with glaze and studded with poppy seeds and raisins, so plump in its freshly baked glory. He orders her to take a bite, and she obeys with pleasure. The only sweets she has at home are cubes of sugar they drop into their cups of tea and a little glass vase with sucking candy Grandma keeps on the bottom shelf of the buffet. The roll melts in her mouth, warm from the sun, decadent and sweet, magnificent in its special Komsomol deliciousness.
She is grateful to Andrei for the poppy seed roll, for wrapping it in newspaper and bringing it here. She kisses his salty eyelids to thank him. She runs her fingers through his black hair; she presses her cheek into his damp neck. This is all she is ready for; this is all she wants so far. She knows this is all he wants right now, too. He is happy to tolerate her touch because he says he loves her.
No one has ever said they loved her before, either outside her family or within it. In their house, they don’t talk about love. Days are filled with more pressing matters: sheets needing to be boiled, chickens needing to be fed, wood needing to be split for their furnace. Every day, they stand in lines for milk and bread and carry buckets of water to Grandpa’s beds of potatoes and dill. In July, they make jams from strawberries and currants; in September, they shred head after head of cabbage and layer them with salt and cranberries to fill a barrel for the winter. There is no time for talking about love. So she feels guilty lying with Andrei in this field swarming with grasshoppers and ants, talking about love, instead of digging up radishes for salad or lugging water from the well for Grandma’s nettle soup.
She feels guilty because she loves Andrei’s love. It feels good being loved by an older boy, being admired and touched reverentially, as if she were an ancient Greek vase on display in the Hermitage. It feels a lot like Turgenev’s orchard scene or Nina’s part in Chekhov’s Seagull she is rehearsing in the school drama club. But even though she loves Andrei, she also loves Theater. The one thing she knows for certain is that she must go to Moscow, and it is time to tell Andrei about this, even if it makes his coal-like Mayakovsky eyes turn white with anger. She takes a breath and tries to release what has been stuck inside her for too long, but the words still refuse to clothe themselves in sound. She sits with her mouth open, silent. She knows that what she is not able to utter yet will catch him as off guard as an expert solar plexus strike and will be just as devastating. She also knows that soon—despite the pain it is bound to inflict on both of them—she will have no choice but to tell him she is leaving.
Andrei peers into the wall of grass before him, as though the ants crawling up and down the thick blades hold the key to what he senses she cannot yet say, as though if he stares long enough into the yellowish thicket, their future would reveal itself in its entirety. Yet their future is still opaque; she is not ready to say what she has to say.
She turns away from him. From the angle of the sun above the forest, she knows that Grandma has already started to prepare for supper, so she has a perfect excuse to extract herself from the thicket of this uncomfortable silence. “It’s getting late,” she says. “I have to go home.”