A Train to Moscow(54)
Sasha sits over her cup of tea and listens: today seems to be a day for revelations. She can’t imagine Uncle Kolya maimed, with missing arms or legs or with his face burned away—disfigurements that would make him unrecognizable to her. She doesn’t want to think of him ending up in such an inglorious place as this invalid repository on some remote island.
“It was a day in August, unusually warm, and everyone who could get outdoors was outside, on the grounds of the monastery. The men without legs rode on boards with little wheels, and those without arms, who could walk on their own, sat on benches. The samovars with no legs and no arms were hanging in baskets suspended on tree branches, brought there by the nurses.” Her mother stares into her cup, as if trying to see once again what she saw on Valaam island back then. “They were hanging off the tree branches, talking to each other, arguing, laughing. With their war decorations displayed on their chests. I walked around and peered into their faces. They were young, most of them, but they all looked older than me. One man Kolya’s age, with four medals and the familiar softness of the chin, called to me as I was walking by. “Sestrichka,” he said, “can you help me?” He called me little sister and asked me to carry him inside and put him on top of a bucket so he could relieve himself. I did, even though he wasn’t Kolya. Even though not one of the invalids was Kolya.”
31
“They trained us on classics and then graduated us into the world of socialist realism and gray Soviet plays,” she says to Lara.
At the drama school, they played characters from Tolstoy and Chekhov, from Brecht and Pirandello. Slava and Sveta even did a scene from The Catcher in the Rye by an author from America, where Pravda tells them capitalism is in a state of deep, permanent rot.
Lara nods but says nothing. Maybe she thinks that the drama school’s lack of warning to its graduates about the paucity of their future repertory is not as serious a crime as allowing its assistant dean to routinely rape its students. Maybe she is waiting for their artistic director to decide to stage The Seagull so that she can finally declare onstage that she is in mourning for her own life.
A week after their talk, almost as though the director heard Sasha’s rant, he announces the next play to add to their repertory, Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. A classic at last. He casts Lara as Viola, a young shipwrecked woman who disguises herself as a man, and Sasha as the servant Maria, sharp-witted and daring, the engine that fuels all the tricks concocted by her own small kompaniya of friends.
Although Sasha feels happy, she is also anxious. What’s going to happen if she fails, if this classic finally reveals her professional inadequacy? She reads Twelfth Night the way her mentor taught her to read Brothers Karamazov, assiduously and with the utmost attention. She goes to all the rehearsals, even those where they work on scenes that aren’t hers, and writes down the director’s every word.
Before rehearsals, in their dressing room, Lara is her savior, insisting that they begin with an exercise from drama school: Sasha becomes a rusty engine in need of lubrication, and Lara presses her palm to her friend’s and makes believe that she pours oil into her creaky system. Sasha feels the revitalizing oil run through her veins, making the joints rotate smoothly, pumping energy through to her limbs. Maria’s every word filters through the nerve fibers of Sasha’s body, and when the rehearsal is over, she feels emptied of emotion. For a few hours afterward, she feels so hollow inside that she can’t think of anything, even Andrei.
She doesn’t see Andrei until the entire cast comes out for a curtain call. They were all at their best that evening—Vladimir Ivanovich, who plays her earthy partner Sir Toby Belch; Lara, the willful Viola in men’s clothes; Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian, played by Maksim, just out of drama school; and the rich and ravishing Olivia, played by the director’s wife. For two and a half hours, she was Maria, and they lived inside a mesh of golden light charged with the energy they have created, which has left them all breathless. As she smiles and curtsies in front of the curtain, adrenaline still pumping through her veins, something forces her to look down into the third row of the audience, as if the stage lights have instantly reversed direction and plucked Andrei’s face out of the crowd.
When she fits the key into her apartment door, glad that her mother is on a visit to Ivanovo, they don’t even bother to turn on the hallway light or hang their coats on the coatrack in front of the refrigerator. The coats drop onto the floor, followed by her sweater and his jacket, layer after layer of clothing, a trail of selfishness and frivolity leading to a finale to which no Party Committee would ever give its stamp of approval.
During her last two years in Moscow and her first year in Leningrad, she has yearned for Andrei every single minute she was not onstage, despite her promise after their night in Suzdal that she would not allow him to enter her life again. But the moment his face shone out of the crowd, the smoldering pain exploded into a fire, reminding her how much she still longs for him, tossing all her promises out the window. In the darkness, with their fingers on the buttons of each other’s coats, desire bumps against resentment, challenging it to a brief duel where desire promptly fires a fatal shot straight into resentment’s heart. It is fast and simple, and it is the only thing that matters. They are together again, fused by a force that seems bigger than anything they could control, a force that flows from Andrei’s eyes and enters her directly, without words, which penetrates her every nerve fiber, as if he’d never left her on the threshold of that Komsomol hotel room, as if he’d never promised to write and then failed to do so, as if she were still in the provinces, still innocent of life.