A Train to Moscow(41)
In the beginning of November, the film director, Sergey Vladimirovich, calls her into a scene that isn’t hers, and as she sits in the corner knitting another sweater for the winter, she feels his gaze on her. If she is honest with herself, she doesn’t dislike this gaze. It is inviting and admiring, and it emanates from someone who—while not as good-looking as her acting partner who plays her lover—is still attractive, with his dark curly hair and thin-rimmed glasses pinched low on his nose. She doesn’t dislike his medium height and build, the solidity of him. Sergey Vladimirovich is also twenty years older than she is and, technically, he could be her father.
As she sits there, dipping her knitting needles, she fumbles inside herself for feelings toward Sergey Vladimirovich, itemizing in her mind all the pros and cons. He has been kind and generous to her, an acting student, although he is a film director with two major motion pictures to his credit. He is older and more established than anyone who has been interested in her before, but he is also married to an opera singer who is voicing over the main part of the film, which is a definite con. She should be grateful it isn’t her part, which would be utterly ironic. She thinks of having raced to the post office for three months, and she almost hopes that the director decides to keep his eyes on her a little longer. Besides, shouldn’t she be grateful to him for teaching her how to act on camera, a lesson her drama school has deliberately denied its students? Shouldn’t she thank him for showing her how to make the camera caress her face with radiance and light?
Sasha looks back at the director and smiles, letting him know that his attention hasn’t gone unnoticed, telling him with her eyes that she is almost ready.
24
Sasha returns to the Vakhtangov Drama School in January, with full credit for all the courses she missed during the fall semester. In a year and a half, she has learned to observe. She has learned to watch what people do, how they move, and how they speak, how they squint their eyes, tighten their jaws, and knead their hands. She remembers every character she sees and every emotion she feels and stores them in a little box inside her, like photos in an album, where they will wait until she will need to pull them out for a role. She has also learned about heartbreak, thanks to Andrei and Rimsky-Korsakov, the opera composer.
In acting classes, they have moved to scenes. Yet they rarely see themselves onstage the way their acting teachers see them, and their stage personalities don’t even hint at their real ones. Why does the most stunning woman in their class, Zhanna, with raven-wing eyebrows over dark-blue eyes, become average and boring onstage, while her roommate Lara, quiet and unnoticed in life, suddenly grows ten centimeters taller, her face illuminated from within? “Stage charm,” their teacher Vera says, the term she has just introduced in their new class, Manners.
“You don’t lose your stage charm when you’re angry,” Vera tells Sasha. “You have a rare quality: your charm is in your anger.”
Of course, Sasha doesn’t want to hear this. And who would? She wants her charm to be in her heroism and beauty, not her anger. She wants to play tragic lovers, not character sidekicks and irate bullies. They all do. But Vera stands in front of their class, her fingers firmly wrapped around a cigarette, letting them know the rules: “Next year, when you are allowed to choose your own scenes, you can play whatever characters you like, but right now, be so kind as to play the roles you are assigned and work within the emploi we see you in.” She flicks off the ash at the new word emploi, the role archetype. Their school has told them what their archetypes are from now on: Sveta is an ingenue, Zhanna is a Soviet heroine, and Sasha is a character role catchall: a funny klutz, a peasant bully, or a heroine’s sharp-elbowed friend.
She doesn’t go back to Ivanovo in the summer. She, Sveta, and Lara are free from classes for almost a month, and they have Moscow, sunny and breathless thanks to Khrushchev’s political thaw, to themselves. With the extra income from film, they live like they imagine artists should live, recklessly and freely. They feast on bowls of pelmeni dumplings and bottles of Georgian wine in a café two blocks away from their dorm and dive into the Moskva River with a bunch of schoolboys who are not afraid of swimming in the shadow of the Kremlin. They race one another on merry-go-round horses in Gorky Park, their faces whipped by the wind and their hearts brimming with happiness at their utterly un-Russian independence from their families and their pasts. Sasha begins to think there may be a slight possibility that Andrei no longer matters.
She asks herself whether she would go back home if she was not afraid to see him, if she was sure she could kiss him on the cheek without bursting into flames, if she could engage in insincere talk about her neighbors’ potato field and the Party’s progress. Would she have given up holding Grandma’s soft cotton shoulders in her embrace if Andrei wasn’t there? She only knows that forcing herself to say something meaningless to him would empty her body of breath and curdle the edges of her heart.
Instead, she accepts the director’s invitation to see his apartment. Why couldn’t Sasha shed her emploi, her funny-peasant archetype, and plunge into a magnificent love affair, the kind only a drama heroine can have?
“Please come in and feel at home,” says Sergey Vladimirovich, pointing to a couch.
It is the biggest apartment she has ever seen, cavernous and full of light, warm air hovering somewhere around the intricate ceiling molding four meters high, an apartment where the excessive space hypnotizes and intimidates.