A Train to Moscow(26)

Grandpa scrapes his chair back and stands up. “I’ve had enough. I’ll tell you what you will do,” he rumbles. “You will listen to me, that’s what you will do. You’ll go to school right here in Ivanovo. You’ll learn something useful. How to build a house or treat a disease, like your mother did when she was your age.” Sasha sees that Grandpa’s hands are shaking, as if he is about to hit her. “You will respect your family!” he shouts. “You will be like your uncle Sima, who died right here, in this house. He was a hero who made me proud. You make me sick. Your mother is right: you’re nothing but a clown. A disgrace.”

Then Grandma gets up and whispers something into his ear. She strokes his arm, hoping that his rage will dissipate. She is the only one who hasn’t condemned acting. From her abbreviated experience singing opera, she knows what it feels like to escape and have another life, even if only in her imagination. “Vsyo budet khorosho,” she says, her favorite saying. “All will be well.”

But all is not well.

“No one in this house is going to Moscow,” declares Grandpa and takes a step toward the door. He walks out into the yard, where the neighbors’ sheets fluttering on a line quickly hide him from their view. A few minutes later, he is back, a bunch of nettles clutched in his right fist. With his left hand, he grabs Sasha by the back of her neck, like he grabs blind kittens to be drowned in a ditch, and drags her onto the porch. There he locks her waist in the vise of his elbow and whips her bare calves until they become swollen and red, until blood begins to rise to the surface of her skin.

The nettles’ sting makes her clench her teeth, but she doesn’t wail, as she did when she was younger. Never again will she reveal her pain in front of him. She will remain silent, just as his dictum demands, deaf and mute.



She wonders if all will ever be well, as Grandma promises. She feels like Nina from Chekhov’s Seagull, bathing in Konstantin’s love yet yearning to leave her small town and go to Moscow to become an actress. And what then? Will she, like Nina, turn out to be naive and simpleminded, deceived by a famous man, one of the scores of heartbreakers who undoubtedly prowl the drama schools in Moscow? Will she, like Nina, end up performing in stuffy provincial theaters, riding crowded trains whose cars reek of beer and urine, from one dilapidated stage to the next?

The enormity of Moscow’s possibilities is as thrilling as it is terrifying. In the night, terrible dreams return again and again. She bends over the ledge of their drinking well and falls in. She is flailing in icy black water, the logs of the walls closing over her head, as a tiny figure etched against a square of light high above watches her scrape the slime off the walls. “Help!” she cries, but no sound comes out. She takes a breath and shouts again, but she can only hear splashing water. She has no voice. She is thrashing desperately, mute, the figure above a dark silhouette of someone she doesn’t know. In her dream, she always wakes up before she drowns so that she could fall into the well again, the next night and the next.

Yet she knows she must go to Moscow and study acting. Even if she ends up in provincial theater, even if she has to announce that dinner is served. The need to leave this place gnaws at her bones like a hungry dog, poisoning her dreams, making her wake up in a cold sweat.





15


Sasha does not see the fire. Only when she comes back from school, their last day of the last grade, a day of farewells, does she see what is left of Andrei’s house. It has always been more of a shed than a house, with a wood-burning stove in the front corner and two tiny rooms separated by a door with a missing upper hinge that always made it hang at an angle. But now there is no house; there is no shed. There is a heap of charred, broken ribs jutting out of the smoldering pile of crumbling boards.

No one saw how the fire started, her mother tells her, but once it did, it spread fiercely and fast, devouring the house.

“Andrei’s mother was inside when we heard a boom, like an explosion. I ran out into the courtyard and saw the house ablaze. His father was wobbling around, drunk, with a broken vodka bottle in his hand. So drunk he could barely stand. So when he lost his balance and fell, the jagged glass must have knifed straight into his stomach.” Her mother nods her head, whether to drive in the irony or to affirm the outcome, Sasha doesn’t know.

The courtyard is filled with the bitter smell of wet ash, and Andrei is slouched on the ground next to the fence, streaks of black across his face. Sasha kneels down next to him.

“Tell me what happened.”

He doesn’t move and doesn’t say anything, as if he didn’t hear her. And maybe he didn’t.



For about a week after the fire, Sasha cannot find Andrei. He is not in any of their usual haunts; he has completely disappeared. Asking her mother would only provoke another tirade on danger. Two years ago, Sasha would have asked Marik, but all that is left of her friend is a heavy stone of guilt in the pit of her stomach. And now there is more guilt staring her in the face: the approaching date for her Moscow drama school exam, the knowledge that she must leave her life in Ivanovo, the nauseating feeling that she must leave Andrei, in spite of what he has lost.

What would Andrei do if her house burned down, her mother, Grandma and Grandpa, and every one of Kolya’s paintings she knows by heart, gone? If she were alone and the only thing she had left was a charred carcass of what used to be her home spreading the reek of damp ash all over the courtyard? Would Andrei leave her for Moscow?