A Train to Moscow(42)
“I want to show you a book on acting by Vakhtangov, a first edition,” he says, fumbling through the book spines on the shelf behind the couch. Vakhtangov was the founder of Sasha’s drama school, an indisputable object of her interest. The director’s wife is on tour with the Bolshoi Theatre, and Sasha knows what this book viewing invitation means. She has learned many things since her night with Andrei in Suzdal, and she tries to suppress the gnawing feeling in her gut that she will end up doing something she is not sure she wants to do.
But she also knows that Sergey Vladimirovich has been mindful of the difference in their ages, and his courtship since November has been considerate and kind. Just last week, in one of their late-night conversations, Lara told her that she is lucky her suitor is courteous and gentle, that she is not the object of interest of their school’s assistant dean, as Lara was when they started school. “He didn’t bother to invite me anywhere,” she says, trying to keep her voice from clotting. “He didn’t even bother to pour me a glass of water. He just pointed to my clothes when he was through and said I could leave. He treated me like I wasn’t even human. Like a dog.”
They all know that the assistant dean, a balding man with a paunch, who used to be a decent actor before he found teaching more rewarding, is known for summoning female students to read for him in his office. When his secretary sent for Sasha a few months ago with an audition call, she scribbled a note full of the medical jargon she’d heard at her mother’s hospital that certified she had promptly come down with a bad case of strep throat. To make it look official, she stamped the phony paper with a doctor’s stamp she had long ago stolen from her mother’s anatomy department. Had Sasha known the assistant dean had set his eyes on Lara first, she would have used that pilfered stamp to produce a fake note for her, too. The only thing she could do now was to sit and listen and try not to show how sorry she felt for her friend. She hoped Lara would find the strength to rip the memory out of her mind and fling it to the mental garbage pile where it belonged.
In the director’s apartment, Sasha finds herself sinking into the plush upholstery as he pours her a glass of golden wine from a bottle that she has never seen in the stores. She knows she is fortunate that the director is patient, but she can sense that his patience is wearing thin.
He sits next to her and hands her a filled glass. “To the end of our work together,” he says and clinks his glass against hers. “And the beginning of something brand-new.”
Sasha knows it is new, this post-filming territory where Sergey Vladimirovich can no longer give her orders to be more happy or less happy than she already is. The Tsar’s Bride is over, and so is their work together. Is she happy in this vast place where everything pleases the eyesight: big windows, half-opened, letting in the jingles of a streetcar; dark bookshelves filled with first editions of tomes by theater titans; a glass coffee table, a piece of furniture she has never seen before? Is she happy to feel the director’s hands on her shoulders? Is she, at least, not terribly unhappy?
Every time Sergey runs his hand across her back, she thinks of Andrei. She thinks of how much she misses him, of all the sadness she has hidden away in the darkest corner of her soul’s storage loft, where no one can find it unless they crouch and rake through years of discarded junk.
Everything is so much simpler with Sergey. He has the soft chest of an older man, and he enfolds her in his arms, grateful that she has agreed to come to his apartment, that she is almost twenty, that she listens with attention when he speaks about himself and the Theater. Every time they meet, he buys her a pastry filled with whipped cream from the best bakery in Moscow and watches reverentially as she bites into it and then licks the sweet cream off her lips. In addition to good cognac, he introduces her to the Hungarian Tokaji in round bottles with elongated necks you can’t find behind the counters of Soviet wine stores. He is always there, leaving messages with Aunt Sonya at the entrance to her dorm, and if he suddenly disappears for a week or two, she knows that his opera singer wife is back home from a Bolshoi tour.
But there are two quintessential Russian questions she asks herself: Who is to blame? and What is to be done? Raised in the nineteenth century by classical writers Herzen and Chernyshevsky, these questions were flung at all of them by her eighth-grade teacher, the one with the squirrel face and admiration for books with simple answers to questions fraught with infinitives.
Eighth grade, when everything was simple, when Marik was still alive, when Moscow was only a dream. Is it her fault that she is in the capital and Andrei is still in the provinces, that he has chosen to work for the Party, that he cannot marry an actress? Is she the cause of her own misery?
Having to consign Andrei to the emotional storage loft fills her with the same despair she felt when she found Kolya’s journal. Yet, in the absence of letters from Andrei, the war journal is the only tangible connection she has to him. She rereads the story of Kolya and Nadia they read together, the story of a happier love Sasha envies, as though her uncle’s words could rebuild the bond between the two of them, bring Andrei closer, make him open up to her and no one else. As though her uncle’s journal could shed a glimmer of light on Andrei’s baffling betrayal.
February 13, 1942
I saw Nadia only cry once, when she told me about her father’s arrest. There was a knock on the door of their apartment, a loud, demanding knock. A knock that always comes at three in the morning because this is the time when a person is in bed, undressed and most vulnerable.