A Train to Moscow(37)
As they walked along the alleys of the dead, she thought it was ironic that Marik’s grave would overlook, for all eternity, as Grandma whispered in her under-the-breath prayer, the woods that killed him. Or was it the remnants of the war that killed him? Or was it Andrei, with his goading and mocking? Or maybe—a thought that still stings—what killed him was her abandoning them by the fire, two stubborn boys who wouldn’t budge, two friends who for a moment became blinded by rage and who had no one to shake them back into their own truth. Maybe what killed Marik was her betrayal.
Marik’s mother stood by the open grave, in a black coat and black fur hat, her hands clutching the edge of the coffin above Marik’s head, as if this were her only support, as if without holding on to it, she would lose her balance and fall.
She had been sick, they were told by their substitute teacher after Marik’s funeral, and no one knew when she was going to come back. “She can’t get out of bed,” Sasha heard her mother say to Grandma when she thought Sasha was out of earshot. She couldn’t imagine what kind of illness could shackle Marik’s mother to bed for so long, the same teacher who read the last chapter of Yevgeniy Onegin to them without interruption, forty students rapt and silent, impatient to hear if Tatyana would leave her old husband to be with the man she had loved her whole life.
Then, one day, a month later, Marik’s mother got out of bed and made her way to where the river settled into a small lake, a little dirt beach for sunbathing and swimming in the summer. It was the end of April, and no one understood how it could have happened that she found herself in the water. No one understood how the placid Uvod’ River, even at its April fullest, could have turned into a stormy sea and drawn someone to its pebbly bottom.
An accident at the lake was what their principal called her death at a school meeting. But Sasha was not sure it was an accident, the same way she knew Marik’s death was not an accident. What was it, then? Did she die because her son died? Did this mean that Andrei was complicit in her death as well? Was Sasha complicit, too?
Her mother, Grandma, and Sasha went to Marik’s mother’s funeral. Her grave was next to Marik’s, which meant, Sasha wanted to think, that March and April were relatively happy months for Ivanovo because no one else had died.
21
In August, she is in Suzdal, filming The Tsar’s Bride. It is an opera, with the Bolshoi stars singing on tape as they act the scenes, so the experience is not unlike what they have been doing during the first year in drama school: living and acting but remaining speechless. The film’s director, Sergey Vladimirovich, gives her thoughtful notes at the end of each day, and she is grateful he treats her just like all the other actors. Or maybe not quite. Maybe he is a little too involved in her scenes, a little too attentive in his instructions to her. She closes her mind to this. He is married and middle-aged and besides, back in Ivanovo, there is Andrei. Or at least she hopes there is still Andrei.
Her character, Lyubasha, smolders with anguish and anger. She begs the man she loves, the man who has already laid eyes on someone else, not to abandon her, not to crush her life. Night and day, she thinks of him. Night and day, only him, she sings. Lyubasha, short for Lyubov, love. She is despondent, feverish, losing hope, as the Bolshoi orchestra echoes from a tape recorder with music as restless as her mood. Lyubasha is so desperate to keep her lover that she decides to buy poison to exile her rival from life. Poison that will extinguish her rival’s eyes, drain color from her cheeks, make her hair fall out, strand by strand; poison that will bring her lover back. “I will give you everything I have, all my pearls and all my precious stones.” She sings Rimsky-Korsakov’s lines to the chemist who has promised the deadly potion. “And if that’s not enough, I’ll borrow or steal. I’m not afraid of servitude or debt.” The orchestra reverberates in heavy chords throbbing with a premonition of tragedy. But the chemist doesn’t want her necklaces or her rings. He wants only her honor. Her honor she has already given to the man who is about to leave her.
“Night and day,” she sings, “I think of him. I have forgotten my father and my mother for him,” she laments, holding the procured poison, shadowing the harmonies that pulse with dread. “I have abandoned all my family. I’ve given him everything I have. And now he wants to leave me for a girl whose eyes are brighter, whose braids are longer. A girl who doesn’t love him, who is innocent of his desire, who is betrothed to someone else.” A French horn enters with a throaty solo. “What have I come to?” cries Lyubasha, brokenhearted, bitter, inconsolable, the violins of the orchestra weeping from the Bolshoi Theatre tape.
They are almost done with the outdoor shots, and at the end of this week, after a banquet thrown by the local government office, the film crew will pack up and take the train to Riga.
This is Sasha’s first banquet, and she has been looking forward to it for weeks. Back in drama school, when they have extra money, Sveta and her other classmates mark the end of exams at Café Leningradskoe, where they pool their rubles together for a bottle of wine and a few cheap zakuski, but she has never been to a celebration that is designed to honor artists. The local Communist Party Committee has invited them all—the actors and the crew—to the biggest restaurant in Suzdal, Bely Lebed, or the White Swan.
She watches Raisa, who plays her on-screen rival, Marfa, the woman Ivan the Terrible chooses as his bride, the woman Lyubasha poisons, spend half an hour teasing her hair and pinning up a shirt that in two months of work has become too wide at the waist. Sasha watches her thread a needle as she stretches out her arm that underscores the length of bone expected for a heroine. She is shorter than Raisa, and her Ivanovo bones boast in breadth rather than length. In the movie, Marfa, innocent of Lyubasha’s rivalry, doesn’t want to marry the tsar because she loves another man, and only a few days ago, in one of the ancient monasteries Suzdal is famous for—white stone walls covered with dark icons lit by candles—Raisa filmed the final scene where, after five takes, she goes insane and dies. As Raisa is finishing pinning her shirt, Sasha ties her hair back into a ponytail, makes up her face using the tricks she has learned from Sveta and their makeup class, and puts on her only good dress, stitched together from black cotton dotted with tiny daisies.