A Train to Moscow(35)
The night before the party, Lara says, Gennadii, her older brother who just graduated from high school, lugged in a case of vodka and a case of wine, stacking them up in the corner of the kitchen. A half a bottle of vodka per person, the standard calculation for any celebration.
After all the potatoes, beets, and carrots were boiled, chopped, and drowned in mayonnaise, after trays of pirozhki were pulled out of the oven, brushed with milk, and covered with towels to soften—just as they were in celebrations in Sasha’s house—Lara teased her hair and outlined her eyes with coal. She was still in ninth grade, but that night, she remembers she was feeling very grown-up. The sounds of the doorbell announcing guests buzzed joy into her heart. The two tables were pushed together, the eating surface extended with several boards propped on boxes. Every guest had to stand up and deliver a toast—to her mother’s health, to success in work and private life, to happiness, which seemed to everybody abstract and elusive—and Lara quickly drank two glasses of wine, or was it three? After two hours of toasts and chasers, of vodka and pirozhki, the tables were pushed against the wall, and someone put on a record of a popular song Lara liked.
“Remember the Rio Rita?” Lara asks. The popular song wailed from the record player, and Oleg, as one of the two men in the room, extended his hand to Lara’s mother and ceremoniously dragged her onto the dance floor. The rest of the women danced with one another, stumbling into the sultry rhythm, shuffling their tipsy feet on the linoleum, shouting over the music and laughing. Lara’s brother grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her into the gyrating flux of bodies, into the delirious heat. His arms locked around her waist, and his face, hot and damp, pressed to her cheek. It was an important birthday, after all, and everyone was getting drunk. The women from the cafeteria were now in a circle, telling lurid jokes in loud, uncontrolled voices, bursting into fits of intoxicated laughter. Oleg, having tried to dance with every woman, was now propped against the wall by his wife, who gave him fierce looks, holding in check his inclination to yell and fling glasses at the guests.
“My brother poured me another glass of wine and spilled half of it on the floor. I don’t remember how I got into my mother’s bedroom.” All she remembers is the walls spinning and the ceiling pulsing above her head. All she remembers is her brother’s weight pressing her into the cover of her mother’s bed, his vodka breath smearing her face, his unyielding grip that left black marks pressed into her shoulders. All she remembers is the shame.
“I never told my mother,” Lara whispers. “I never told anyone.” She stares at her clenched hands and begins to pull at the skin around her fingernails. “After that, home was poisoned. I stayed late at school; I found every pretext to sleep over at my friends’. I flunked my classes, almost every one of them, except music.” She smiles faintly, still staring down. “That’s why I am here, in Moscow. I couldn’t stay, despite my mother’s pleas. I had to leave, even though I knew that no college would accept me. I wasn’t good at anything. The only place where I stood a chance, I thought, was drama school.” She shifts on the blanket, straightening her back. “It’s still raw, like an abscess I’ve tried to squeeze out of my mind. I knew it was my fault. I was drunk. I am the one to blame.”
Sasha wraps her arms around Lara to hold her, but Lara stiffens, resisting her embrace. She has been trying to erase that from her memory, as if it had never happened. She thinks that if she empties her mind of that day, the event will disappear. She believes that pity will only cement it into her memory.
The last thing Sasha wants is for Lara to relive that day, so she releases her from the hug, and Lara slides away, relieved not to be held, not to be touched. To get her mind off that day, it is now Sasha’s turn to unleash her secret, so she tells Lara about Andrei and Marik, about that day in the forest everyone still calls an accident in the woods. She tells Lara about the guilt she feels for leaving Andrei. She tells her how he begged her to stay and how she refused, even after the fire, even after his parents both died and his whole life went up in flames. She feels she betrayed him, she tells Lara. She is grateful to her friend for listening, for not holding her hand, and for not saying she is sorry. Like Lara, Sasha doesn’t want to be held. Unlike Lara, she is guilty.
Yet in her bones, Sasha knows how fortunate they are to be here, in this city and this school. She knows that acting will endow them with power, the power Lara lacked when she was in ninth grade. When they master its secrets of becoming someone else, Sasha says, Lara will be as liberated from her past as she is when she inhabits the characters in classic plays, strong yet conflicted, but always in control of their lives.
20
Despite her school faculty’s disdain for movies, the Mosfilm studio regularly scouts their hallways for fresh talent. Studio agents, unshaved men in denim and loose-haired women dressed in clothes they don’t see in stores, catch students between classes to invite them to screen tests, enticing them with fees only the studio can pay. During the spring semester, Sveta is offered the lead part in a film set in contemporary Moscow, and Sasha is invited for a supporting role in Rimsky-Korsakov’s film opera The Tsar’s Bride.
The studio sends its emissary to their dean, who has starred in many Mosfilm studio films himself, to plead for both of them. Sasha hopes the emissary is a green-eyed beauty in a peasant dress and no makeup, a look the dean is rumored to favor. But all that Sveta and Sasha can do to influence a favorable outcome is to sit on her bed and curse each other with the foulest epithets they can fish out of memory, a superstition for good luck Grandma and her mother both believe in. It turns out Sveta knows many more despicable obscenities, so for Sasha, this cursing session has become a learning opportunity.