A Train to Moscow(30)
There is a suitcase by the feet of the father, a small man with curly black hair and a cigarette that hangs off his lip as if it had become a permanent feature of his face. He holds on his lap a whining girl of about three, who is trying to wiggle her way out of her father’s arms, wailing and rubbing her eyes with her clenched fists. Holding the baby with her left arm, the mother bends her right elbow, not a muscle twitching in her face, and slaps the girl on the back of her head. The girl stops wriggling and becomes quiet for a few seconds, then explodes into a new, louder wail. The mother whacks her again, and the girl swallows her sobs, curls into a ball on the man’s lap, and begins to whimper softly, like a beaten dog.
Sasha sees the girl’s brother, now by the station’s food kiosk, watching a stocky woman in a sleeveless dress eat a fried turnover, eyeing the grease the woman licks off her fingers when she finishes the last bite. The woman’s arms are as plump as loaves of white bread in the Ivanovo bakery where every morning, Grandma and Sasha stand in line for a brick of black bread and three rolls of white.
From now on, she will save every image she sees and set it onto the innermost shelf of her memory, next to everything else she has experienced and observed in her nearly seventeen years in Ivanovo. She is going to save it all—every glance, every head movement, every scene, and every face she sees—and she will store it all inside her until she needs to pull it out for the roles she will be playing when she becomes an actress.
“This is for you,” says Grandma and hands her a handkerchief tied at the corners. “Open it.”
Inside is a ring with a green stone, gold and delicate, a treasure worth more than everything she has ever owned.
Grandma lifts the ring and puts it on Sasha’s finger. “Fits you, just as I thought. This used to be my lucky ring. An actor’s stone.” They both stare at her hand, which now looks as if it belonged to someone else, someone talented and noble, someone who could easily fit into the life of hats and banned poetry, someone who could get accepted, even without connections, to the best Moscow drama school.
“Be careful when you get out of the station in Moscow,” her mother says. “Don’t stop and don’t talk to anyone; God knows what hoodlums hang out there in the middle of all that transit bedlam.” She has already warned Sasha several times, but she wants the message to remain fresh in Sasha’s mind, her proverbial message about dangers. “Cross the square in front of the station and wait for trolleybus number eighty-seven. The fourteenth stop is yours.” For the two weeks of auditions, she will be staying with Baba Yulia and Katya, whom they visited for the May Day parade when she was seven, and then, as her mother hopes, Sasha will come back to Ivanovo to start a normal, serious life.
She wishes she could convince her mother, the same way she has been trying to convince herself, that in two weeks, she will not be coming back. But what if her mother turns out to be right? What if Sasha’s readings from Lermontov and Chekhov make the judges yawn? What if she is too immature to understand what adults already seem to know—that everyday survival always beats art, that the material invariably trumps the intangible? What if, ever since she heard Three Sisters on the radio, she has been chasing after a phantom; what if life is indeed all utilitarian and tethered to the ground, like the spindly goat of one of their neighbors, circling the pole, day after day, over the dusty grass of the yard?
Her mother looks at her watch and gets up. They walk outside, onto the platform where passengers are already waiting, about forty people, the size of Sasha’s drama club. The family from the waiting room is already there, the mother rocking her infant on her left arm and holding her daughter with the same hand she slapped her with, the father clutching a suitcase and fumbling through his pocket in search of something to give to the boy, who leans forward in a stiff, pleading way.
The train will arrive from around a curve where the forest begins its dark expanse behind a meadow dotted with fresh haystacks on the left, and everyone stands swiveled in that direction, waiting for a whiff of smoke to appear above the trees.
Sasha throws her arms around Grandma’s neck. She smells of kitchen and soft cotton, and Sasha presses against her warmth. She knows that Grandma doesn’t believe Sasha will return in two weeks, and this knowledge fortifies her resolve and brings back her strength, at least for the last few minutes. She tells herself that she can’t fall apart in front of everyone on the platform. She can’t allow tears to overwhelm her; she can’t let her mother think that she has been right all along. She looks away, at what she is leaving: everything.
With a whistle, in a cloud of smoke, the train appears from around the curve, and her mother now hugs her as Sasha snuggles into her wet cheek. “Vsyo budet khorosho,” her mother whispers. “All will be well.” This is her usual refrain—although Sasha knows that her well is very different from Sasha’s—which drowns in the hot steam of the train sighing its way to a stop.
They have two minutes until it whistles again, until the platform begins to sail away, until Sasha gets, with every moment, farther from life in Ivanovo and closer to Moscow. As she looks over her mother’s shoulder, she sees Andrei standing at the end of the platform. He appears and then vanishes in the clouds of steam rolling from the engine, almost a vision, if she believed in visions. She blinks to see if he is real, but from the stern look on her mother’s face, from the way she resolutely swipes a finger under her eyes and frowns, she knows that he is.