A Train to Moscow(31)
ACT 2
MOSCOW
18
Sasha does not see her name on the admitted list at the Vakhtangov Drama School, and everything inside her begins to loosen and dissolve, her legs refusing to support her weight. She leans against the wall and breathes in and out, as her drama club leader has taught them, to keep upright, to keep thinking, to keep going on, but tears are already rising in her throat, choking her and drowning any protest to this hideous injustice. What does she do now? The question, like a hammer, strikes against her skull, reverberating with all the shameful and appalling answers. Will she now have to trudge back to Ivanovo, humiliated and defeated, just as her mother and grandfather hoped, the word talentless tattooed onto her forehead?
Sasha takes a deep breath and turns back to the two pages with twenty-five typed names clipped to the board. Her vision is blurry, but she stiffens her back and focuses on the middle part of the list, between the Ls and the Ns, where her name should be, willing with every fiber inside her to coax it out of nothingness and force it onto the page of the admitted. Then she closes her eyes and exhales. When she looks again, her name is on the list, between the Ls and the Ns. She screws her eyes shut again and presses her palms over her face in an effort to test the reality she seems to have warped, but every time she looks back, her name is still there, among the twenty-four others. Why didn’t she see it right away? A temporary blindness, most likely, the product of anxiety, a few nauseating minutes of stomach-churning dread.
She runs to the post office and sends a telegram to Ivanovo. At ten kopecks a word, she must be brief: “Accepted,” she writes. “Kisses. Sasha.” She imagines her mother’s face when she receives it. At first, her mother may feel angry to read the judgment that instantly shatters her plans for Sasha and legitimizes such an unworthy profession as acting. But at the same time, Sasha knows, her mother won’t be able to deny feeling something that resembles pride. For a minute, as her mother stares at the words of the telegram, Sasha imagines the anger and the pride bumping against each other, with pride, at least in her mind, unexpectedly taking the upper hand.
She knows that Grandma will smile and Grandpa will glare. She knows that Grandma will busy herself in the kitchen, smiling furtively as she rolls the dough for pirozhki, while Grandpa will storm out into the yard and furiously start pulling dandelions out of a bed full of blooming strawberries. Sasha sees her telegram spreading the word to their street, to their neighbors in the other half of the house, as they munch on the news that the girl who used to run barefoot around the yard chasing chickens is now in the country’s capital, just steps from Red Square, learning to become an actress.
She sees Andrei, or maybe she doesn’t see Andrei. He is elusive: what he says does not always match what is reflected in his eyes or what may be brewing in his heart. She knows how badly she has hurt him, but instead of brooding, she also knows she must focus on the enormity of the task before her. It is only by an act of sheer will that she can push aside, albeit temporarily, the guilt that presses on her heart.
She sits in her dorm room, a mirror propped up on the desk against a stack of textbooks. There is nothing interesting about her face that she can see: big gray eyes her acting teacher calls photogenic, a pudgy nose that her roommate Sveta says will always typecast her into character roles, bangs that fall down to her curved eyebrows Sasha has recently plucked with tweezers. This is what art demands, said Sveta, who has already starred in a movie, so Sasha believes her. She sits before a mirror, ruthlessly yanking little hairs out of her face, biting her lip with each tug.
During the month of September, like college students all over the country from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, they pay for their free education by working on a collective farm, where there is a perpetual shortage of hands to harvest the vegetables planted in May. Every morning, they climb into a creaky bus and for eight hours bend over rows of potatoes, onions, and turnips, raking through the dirt soaked from recent rains in search of produce that hasn’t yet rotted in the ground. Sasha doesn’t know where all the collective farmers are, the workers who have tended to these crops they are now told to harvest, but as she lifts her head, all she sees are drama students up to their ankles in mud. Every day, practical as ever, Sveta stuffs the best-looking vegetables into a bag to take back and store in the bottom of the armoire in their dorm room. At the end of the month, they have a pile of food that will last them until New Year’s.
Sveta is inventive in other ways, too. She is a year older than Sasha and, in her own words, she has already seen life. She sends Lara, their third roommate, to buy a few meters of cheap upholstery fabric and instructs Sasha to sew them skirts with big pockets. “For crib sheets,” Sveta says. “For history and philosophy, when we have our first final exams in January.” With a blonde braid down to her waist, Sveta has the slight build and pure blue-eyed stare of an ingenue. Sasha had to look up the word ingenue in a French-Russian dictionary—“an innocent, unworldly young woman”—and she thought it was ironic that the real Sveta was the complete opposite of the Sveta she would portray onstage.
The only classes they would never dream of approaching in their devious skirts with crib-sheet pockets are the classes they came here for, the reason they left their homes and endured three brutal rounds of auditions. These are the classes of stage movement, dance, voice, and, the most frightening, the most important class of all—acting. Acting is sacred, and they all know that the first two years are when some of them will be expelled for what their dean calls “professional inadequacy,” or simply a lack of the acting gift.