A Train to Moscow(46)

Lara has already presented her archetype-appropriate scene and received an A, so Sasha is not sure her friend can understand her turmoil. She is now a professional actor, just as is Slava, and they are both going to star on the Moscow stage because they both have talent. They deserve to be here. What she deserves is nothing. She is nothing. Why did she think she had a gift? Why did she think she had enough strength for this?





27


Ten days before the acting exam, the three of them first recite the lines of their scene. They do their best; they try to be persuasive and organic. They try to please their teacher who has invested months of time in their nineteenth-century immersion.

Polevitskaya is quiet throughout the scene. She is quiet after the scene ends. “Well,” she finally says and rises from her chair, ending the rehearsal.

On Sasha’s way back, she tries to decipher her well. The optimistic possibility that her mentor feels she could make something out of the scene swims to the surface of Sasha’s mind, sparkles like a small fish, and promptly goes under. She is hardly an optimist. She has to presume that her mentor’s well is the verdict of Sasha’s total hopelessness.

The next morning, Sasha wakes up determined to go into the rehearsals full throttle, ready to accept her legendary mentor’s criticisms and follow her direction. She knows this is her only chance to survive the ordeal.

But the day begins with a bombshell. Vera calls the three of them into a classroom to announce that Polevitskaya has fallen ill and will no longer be able to work with them. Sasha stands there dumbfounded, unable to digest what Vera has just said. Could their reading have been so disastrous that it made her mentor’s soul revolt against it? Could it have made her so sick that she cannot now get out of bed? She feels the walls of the room close in and collapse silently around her, but she sees Vera’s mouth moving. “If you are unable to finish the scene on your own,” she says, turning to Sasha, “we will still credit you for having tried. A credit, not a grade. It doesn’t guarantee your chances after graduation.” She pauses. “It’s up to you to decide what to do.”

Sasha is in such shock that she simply stands there, paralyzed, after the door shuts. Polevitskaya’s illness is undoubtedly a sign of fate, a clear harbinger of her looming failure. She feels she has already fallen into an abyss, and from the bottom of the canyon, she hears Lara’s faint voice.

“So . . . ?” Lara squeezes out after a gap of leaden silence.

“We can’t! We simply can’t!” Sasha shrieks, her voice on the verge of breaking. “I’ll mess up and they’ll kick me out and they will be right.”

“Calm down,” Slava orders in a new voice edged with steel, a man from the Caspian Sea taking charge of the Dostoyevsky territory. “We are going to stage this scene ourselves. It’s a piece of cake.”

“It may be a piece of cake to you!” Sasha yells, raising her voice to stage heights. “You only sit in the corner while the two of us do all the heavy lifting.”

“Then I will direct the scene,” Slava says in his new commander voice. “I’ve been watching the two of you for almost six months, and I know you can pull it off. The committee knows our mentor became ill and couldn’t work with us. So what do we have to lose?”

Sasha thinks that they have everything to lose. She has everything to lose. She will lose the respect of her acting teachers, of everyone in her school, and maybe even of the entire Moscow acting community. For the rest of her life, she will be known as a failure, as a talentless impostor, as professionally inept. She can almost hear hushed voices snickering behind her back, her acting career now undoubtedly somewhere in the depth of Siberia. The pathetic handout of a credit Vera has offered will get her nowhere but into mass scenes of theaters in the provinces from which she will never again emerge. And back in Ivanovo, her mother will shake her head, unsurprised, and her grandfather will glare with expected satisfaction.

Yet if she doesn’t finish this scene, her failure will be irrevocable and instant. If she doesn’t prove that she belongs in the world of Theater, she might as well pack up and take the first train to Ivanovo, where for the rest of her life she will be like everyone else, building their bright socialist future, one red brick at a time.

These ifs are hanging in the air, and she is in their midst, grateful that Slava has taken charge. He is their director now, and he tells them that they are going to reserve time for three rehearsals in the student theater.

“Today we’ll block the scene, and then we’ll run through it twice,” he decrees. Sasha is glad someone has made a decision, and she forces herself to concentrate on what Slava is saying. “Remember your objective,” he tells her. “You want to humiliate your rival. You promised Lara’s Katerina, who wants to marry Dmitri, to give him up, and she believed you. She invited you to her house to thank you. But you love Dmitri and have no intention of giving him up. You play with Lara, the way a cat plays with a mouse before devouring it. You let Lara praise you; you let her kiss your hand in gratitude and adoration, and then you strike. You tell her you’ll never give up Dmitri. What you want is to keep your lover and to humiliate your rival. This is your objective in the scene. Remember this and everything will work.”

The next three days slouch by like the heavy fog of this cold, late spring. Lara bounces around their dorm room, tense as a drum. Slava has become quiet and pensive, just like Dostoyevsky’s Alyosha, watching them from the corner of the stage as they go through the scene. Sasha wallows in a strange cloud of calm, as if nothing matters anymore.