A Train to Moscow(36)
Sveta is lucky. The dean allows her to accept the role, since all the shooting will be completed in the summer, during their vacation. Fortunately for her, the filming of her movie will not interfere with her education. Sasha’s case is more complicated. The Tsar’s Bride will film all the outdoor scenes in the summer, just like Sveta’s movie, but the indoor shooting in Riga is scheduled during her first semester of the second year, throughout the fall.
She imagines the dean sitting behind his massive desk, weighing her future in his hands. His dark hair is chafing like a storm around his unsmiling face as he tears up the letter from Mosfilm in the same fit of splendid anger he recently exhibited in his own on-screen performance in The Idiot. This image makes hope leak out of her, drop by drop, like hot water from the broken radiator in their dorm room. Sasha knows he is not going to allow a second-year student to miss the whole fall semester, with classes in literature, political economy, and history of art, not to mention the new sophomore classes of ballet and fencing. With regret, she thinks of Riga, the capital of Latvia, where the indoor filming will be done, the Soviet Union’s most western city she will never see.
When their artistic director Vera relays the dean’s decision, Sasha is stunned.
“We’ve taken your good grades into consideration,” says Vera, blowing out a cloud of tobacco smoke. “You will study the required general subjects on your own and take exams in January. The film will be counted as a pass for all the other classes that have to do with acting.”
Sasha doesn’t know what has swayed the long odds in her favor. Was it the classic opera contained in The Tsar’s Bride or perhaps the white beard and serious gaze of the revered composer Rimsky-Korsakov? Was it the stunning emissary from the film studio who showed up in a flowery dress and no makeup? Or maybe it was something else entirely, a recollection that floated unexpectedly to the surface of the dean’s mind: his own first film role when he was still a student—unrecognizable now, with bony arms, short hair, and surprised eyes—the role that forty years ago silenced his venerable teachers into consternation and inducted his name into the esteemed columns of the national movie magazine, Screen.
Sasha is triumphant and relieved. She will spend the summer in the old town of Suzdal, which she imagines to be a lot like Ivanovo, only full of ancient churches. Then, in the fall, when her classmates move on to improvisations with words, she will be living in a real hotel in Riga, as foreign as any city abroad, getting paid a salary exponentially greater than any Moscow mass scene could offer.
Sometimes she wakes up at night and listens to Lara’s mumbling when she has a bad dream and Sveta’s even breathing on the bed across from hers. If she keeps her eyes open for a few minutes, the contours of things slowly step out of the darkness, like a developing photograph: the doors of the armoire materialize into a grainy image in the corner of the room, and the table covered with oilcloth gathers into a familiar outline next to what she knows is the doorframe. It is three or four in the morning because it is completely dark and silent: all the buses, trolleys, and streetcars are parked for the night in their depots, and the red neon sign for a Georgian restaurant they can’t afford has been switched off since midnight.
This is the time when guilt, a nocturnal predator, crawls out of its lair. She feels guilty for sauntering around Moscow as though she was born here, for singing on the oldest theater stage in the capital as though she were a professional actress. She feels guilty for living so close to Red Square and not wanting to admire the Kremlin wall or the Lenin Mausoleum. She feels guilty for not wanting to go back to Ivanovo.
She feels guilty about Marik. She sees him the way she last saw him, his eyes white with rage, his fingers clasped around the shell. This is the time she knows she could have stopped him. She could have averted his death, but instead, she ran away. This is the time of night when the tape of that day in the woods spins in her mind, the ruthless tape with no stop and no fast-forward button. Could she have asked Marik in a calm, mature voice to hand her the shell? “Give it to me right now,” she hears herself say four years too late, knowing that he would have done what she asked because he would have done anything for her. It seems so simple now, putting herself in control of a split second before everything changed, before everything slid off its base and collapsed.
She lies with her eyes open, wondering if Andrei is as racked with guilt as she is, hoping he is also awake in his house in Ivanovo, staring into the night. Hoping but far from certain, since this is the time of night her hope often turns to doubt. Did Andrei’s face ever darken over Marik’s death? She never heard him lament placing the shell into Marik’s hand. Shouldn’t Andrei have known that what he drove Marik to do was within the realm of danger? Shouldn’t he wake up at least as often as she does, the weight of Marik’s death constricting his chest? The thought takes her places that only emerge late at night, when everyone is asleep, when the layer of everyday life is stripped away and there is nothing, not a glimmer of light, to detract from the darkness. Terrifying places that she is not ready to acknowledge. To escape from them, she thinks of what happened after Marik died.
She saw Marik’s mother only once after the accident in the woods, as Marik’s death was referred to in their family, when her mother, Grandma, and Sasha went to his funeral at the same cemetery where Uncle Sima had been lying for fifteen years. The new section, with a freshly dug grave awaiting Marik’s coffin, was at least a kilometer from Uncle Sima’s; so many had died since then that the cemetery had swollen past its original fence and spilled onto the field leading toward the underbrush that marked the edge of the forest.