A Train to Moscow(43)
After the arrest, I came to her apartment almost every day, and what I saw was a different house. It looked bigger and emptier, a place where every noise seemed to echo against the high ceilings as if there were nothing soft left in the apartment to absorb the sound, as if all that was left amounted to stone. Evgeniya Iosifovna’s face also seemed to have turned to stone, and so did Nadia’s. They sat in the kitchen in front of cups with tea that had turned cold, staring at the pattern of the oilcloth on the table, sunflowers smudged from wear. I think I was the only one who came to visit Nadia and her mother after Naum Semenovich’s arrest. Her house might as well have been stricken by the plague, and their friends and neighbors, those who were not informers, were afraid to catch the deadly infection.
It was April 1941, and to distract Nadia, I took her to look at the melting ice on the Neva, at the gray slabs being thinned and weakened by the zinc water whirling below. We stood on the Palace Bridge, the place where we met eighteen months earlier, staring at the funnels of whirlpools around the stone pillars of the bridge, pulling our wool hats over our ears to protect them from the icy gusts of Baltic wind.
“What would you do if something happened to me?” she asked, her voice so soft that I could barely make out the words, almost as though she didn’t want me to hear them.
But I did hear her, and I knew exactly what she was asking. I wanted to tell her that nothing bad was going to happen to her, that I would kill any bastard who would so much as attempt to touch her, that I would always be there to protect her. But we both knew that if the NKVD came for her and her mother, the same way they came for Naum Semenovich, there would be nothing I could do to stop them. We both knew what I would never tell her, what could not be acknowledged if we wanted to stay sane and go on with our lives.
“Nothing bad will happen to you,” I said. “I promise.”
She didn’t respond, still looking down into the water raging under the bridge.
I took her by the shoulders and made her look at me. “I promise. Do you hear me? I promise.” Her eyes seemed dark and set deeper in her head, eyes of an older person full of sad wisdom. “I will always be here to protect you.”
She nodded and looked left, where for a minute the sun blazed into the windows of the Hermitage from under the clouds torn by the wind.
“I know,” she said.
Sasha closes the notebook with a sigh, wishing that Andrei, too, were always there to protect her.
25
In the spring of her last year at the drama school, there is the most important exam of all, the scene that will determine whether they will spend their lives playing important roles on the Moscow stage or huddling in mass scenes in provincial theaters. “You’d better be ready to show everything you’ve learned,” their artistic director Vera tells them, “or you’ll get a failing dvoika in acting, and they’ll ship you straight to Pinsk to organize an acting club for janitors in their local House of Culture.”
For this exam, they are allowed to choose their own scenes, and what Sasha chooses makes Vera light up a cigarette and silently gaze into the distance.
“This is not your role,” she finally says and exhales a puff of smoke.
“But this is what I want to play,” Sasha insists. Like everyone else, she wants to play a heroine.
“Child,” says Vera, calling her what she calls all her fellow students. To her, they are all naive and silly children, and she is here to guide them through the maze of Theater, lighting their way with an acting master’s torch of wisdom. “Listen to what I tell you. We know you, as an actress, better than you know yourself.”
“You only know what you allow me to play!” This sounds brazen, but if Sasha doesn’t say this now, she will never get another chance. She has to prove—to Vera, to her school, and to herself—that she can be more than just a heroine’s funny friend, or a rude saleswoman, or a clumsy cousin from the provinces.
She breathes in and out, just as Vera taught them. “I want to play Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka.” The beautiful, conflicted, and infinitely flawed femme fatale Grushenka in Brothers Karamazov. The tall, curvaceous twenty-two-year-old, a local seductress with feline movements, who is in love with the tempestuous Dmitri. A role that wouldn’t be assigned to her by anyone but her.
“It’s outside your emploi,” says Vera. She doesn’t have to say this, because Sasha already knows it. She is a character actress, and Grushenka is a seductive heroine. She can’t make Andrei write her even one love letter, while Grushenka has so many men buzzing around her that she has to swat them off like flies. But under the sheath of paralyzing fear that Vera may be right, there is a hot nerve of obsession that links Sasha to this woman, a character who seems to have risen from the pages of the novel and beckoned Sasha with her plump hand to embody her. She wants to feel her, to become her, to get into her skin.
She is also, as her mother often says, stubborn as a goat. “I don’t care about my emploi,” she says quietly, dizzy with her own audacity and disrespect. “I know Grushenka, and I want to play her.”
For a minute, Vera considers her silently, exhaling rings of smoke. Her face is an impenetrable mask, and Sasha doesn’t know what she sees.
“As you wish, then,” she says finally. “But you will regret this. Maybe for the rest of your life.”