A Train to Moscow(32)
During the first year, no one is allowed to speak in acting class. For two semesters, they drink from imaginary glasses and eat with nonexistent forks and knives, diligently screw in light bulbs, feel the wind standing on the bow of a ship, thread needles and sew up holes. For her first final exam in acting, Sasha picks up imaginary clamps and scalpels and hands them to the surgeon played by Lara. She has learned to do this by observing a nurse during surgeries at Central Clinical Hospital, four operations a week, for two months. The rest in their class silently slice apples, bang make-believe keys of typewriters, sway in crowded buses, knit scarves, chew on lemon wedges, embrace illusory lovers, wait in lines, walk pretend dogs, uncork wine bottles, wash underwear in the sink, stand on the observation deck of the highest building in Moscow and look down at the sprawling city laid out below—all on the small stage of their freshman studio.
By the end of the first semester, three students are dismissed for professional inadequacy, and Sasha feels a rush of overpowering relief that she is not among them. Their dean calls it “the first wave of attrition,” and the word first sends a cold shiver down her spine.
There are twenty-two of them left, ten girls and twelve boys. “My girls and boys” is what their artistic director Vera Konstantinovna calls them, and a smile spreads wrinkles across her face as she surveys her students before their History of Theater class. Vera, as they call her when she is not within earshot, is short and small-boned, and Sasha wonders if she, too, was an ingenue when she was young. When she speaks, she waves her ringed fingers as if conducting an orchestra, and her sharp nose and a green shawl around her shoulders make her look like an exotic bird.
Vera tells them that they are now actors and will always live on this side of the curtain, the stage side. From the time they walked through these doors, she says, the world has split in two: one half is Theater, where everyone is one of them, svoi; the other half is the audience, chuzhoi. Among the audience is a world they are told to observe, full of situations they will use onstage and characters they will inhabit when they are finally allowed to speak. They are different, those people; they lead normal, ordinary lives; they are civilians, as Sasha’s teacher calls them. By the end of the first year, they must learn to become them.
But what about Sasha’s mother and grandma? Are they also on the audience side of the curtain, among the ordinary people, or are they with Sasha, on the stage side? Does Theater allow those close to you into the space where acting happens? And where is Andrei in this new scheme of things? Which side is he on?
She hasn’t written to him, not a single letter. She feels that acting, like distance, is building walls to separate them even further.
Moscow is full of things Sasha has never seen: hard salami and chocolate candies in bright wrappers, silk scarves and cakes adorned with pink cream roses, nylon see-through stockings and whimsical bottles of bitter-smelling perfume. There are also open exhibits of modern art labeled “cosmopolitan,” which were banned only a few years earlier. There are unofficial concerts by a young bard Volodya Vysotsky, who often comes to their dorm to sing about struggle, angst, and love while they sit on the kitchen floor, mesmerized and quiet, drinking teakettles of young sour wine Georgians sell at the nearby railroad station. There is a film called The Magnificent Seven playing in two central theaters, the first movie from America that ever made it across their borders.
Sveta, Lara, and Sasha sink into their seats as the galloping horses on the screen deliver American recklessness straight into their waiting hearts. After the movie ends, they walk out silently, filled with the joy of color and the thrill of danger, so different from the monochrome monotony of their own films. Although only three of the magnificent seven survive at the end, Sasha feels relieved that one of them, Chico, goes back to the village and the girl who loves him. The night air of the Moscow streets seems charged with energy, filling her chest with a lightness, transporting her back to the innocent times of her life in Ivanovo when she felt safe, loved, and protected by Andrei.
It is 1960, and to afford the benefits of what their teachers call “the political thaw,” Sveta, Lara, and Sasha participate in the mass scenes at the Vakhtangov Theatre, where they are paid seven rubles and fifty kopecks a performance. They can always count on Gorky’s Summerfolk and The Lower Depths, and Sasha’s singing voice gets her into a Gypsy choir in Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse, but they know that the mass scenes in movies pay considerably more. They also know that their school strictly prohibits first-year students from working in film, since their professors see motion pictures as a detrimental influence on the students’ stage training.
The three of them hold a discussion about the possible repercussions of challenging the ban, which ends with Sveta’s decree that The Magnificent Seven, which they have already seen three times, as well as the cosmopolitan art exhibits and Vysotsky unofficial concerts, are sufficient reasons to break the school rules. Sveta gives them permission to sign up for the crowd scenes at the Mosfilm studio and tells them to hide in the back so as not to be caught on-screen.
19
On those evenings when they do not participate in mass scenes at the theater, Sasha and her roommate Lara sit on her bed and talk. Lara is from Pskov, a town to the northeast of Ivanovo, a place as small as Sasha’s hometown, a place often paired with the adjective provincial. They are the same age, both children of the war, both fatherless. Lara’s father was killed in Poland in 1944, when the tide of the war had already turned and Russian troops were advancing west, when the word victory had already begun to form on people’s lips. “1944, when no one should have been killed,” Lara whispers, looking down as she straightens the corner of the duvet cover with her hand.