A Train to Moscow(58)
32
She is at the theater, at the shoemakers’ lair, a room full of broken and newly mended shoes, and she is weeping. She came here with a pair of pumps that needed repair, and when Uncle Tolya asked, “What happened?” her throat closed, and she burst into tears. She is holding a shoe in each hand, wiping her eyes and nose with her forearm, wailing so loudly that the senior shoemaker, Uncle Moishe, bent over a piece of leather when she entered, now clucks his tongue and shakes his head and peers at her from above his glasses. “Nu, nu,” he says and pats her head with his gnarled hand. “Sit, little girl, and let me bring you some tea.” Uncle Tolya, bony and long-jawed, stops hammering a nail into the bottom of a shoe and looks at Uncle Moishe, who waves his wrist to send him on a tea quest. Uncle Moishe’s hands smell of old leather and shoe polish, a comfortable smell that makes her calm down, go from weeping to sniffling. Then Uncle Tolya returns with a kettle and pours steamy, strong tea into a glass. The tea has the color of cognac, which makes her start weeping again, and her tears leave stains on the broken shoes she is still holding in her hands.
When she leaves the shoemakers’ workshop, she is empty inside, as hollowed by the crying as she usually is by a performance. She walks along the endless hallway to her dressing room, when she passes the open door and sees Vladimir Ivanovich, her partner Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, who waves her in. She likes Vladimir Ivanovich, although he is in his fifties, almost thirty years her elder, and is married. He has a deep, fatherly voice; he is dependable and strong. His face is too idiosyncratic for him to be cast as a hero, even when he was younger—a fleshy nose; dark eyes, set a little too close apart; an imperious chin with a cleft—so he is a character actor, like Sasha.
“When leaving the stage, don’t forget to leave your character’s skin behind,” says Vladimir Ivanovich, who thinks that she just came out of a rehearsal and hasn’t had a chance to disconnect from her role. He is an inexhaustible source of these little sayings, small scatterings of acting wisdom that make her laugh even when she doesn’t feel like laughing. Behind every peacock tail, there is a chicken’s ass, he told her when Olivia, the director’s wife, tried to upstage her in their scene in Twelfth Night. Sasha attempts a smile and shakes her head, letting him know that her distress has nothing to do with acting.
On the other side of the room is Yuri, the assistant director, with an opened bottle of vodka in his hand. “Do we have an extra glass?” asks Vladimir Ivanovich, which is a rhetorical question in the theater. “You are our third,” he says, laughing his humid laugh of a smoker, pouring vodka.
“The problem with this world,” he announces as Yuri pours, “is that you’re three glasses more sober than I am.” She smiles because it is true that she is still sober and because she thinks it is an insightful way of looking at the problems of the world. “To our Maria!” Vladimir Ivanovich proclaims, and they empty their glasses. The vodka flows down where the tears had erupted from, warming up her chest and making the image of Andrei smudge at the edges, as if she were looking at him through clouds of smoke from a departing train.
33
“Again! Drunk as a plumber!” her mother wails. “What did I do to deserve this?” Every night, she listens to the elevator door bang shut and to a key scratching around the keyhole of their apartment, Sasha’s key. She claims that she knows when Sasha is drunk even before she opens the front door, just from hearing the key jiggling tentatively in the lock, trying to figure out the right way to turn. Then she stands by the door, waiting for Sasha to slump into the hallway, ready to pull off her coat, lifting her arms as if she were a rag doll, ready to lead her to the divan and throw a blanket at her, like a stone.
The next morning, six months after Andrei’s visit, she is hungover and humble. Now it is her mother’s chance to say what she can’t say when Sasha is drunk. She drives her fists into her hips and delivers her lecture about the dangers of zelyoniy zmei, the green serpent—the color of the bottle—wringing its coils around Sasha’s neck. She rattles the silverware in the drawer and bangs the lid over a pot of soup to punctuate her statements because this is just what she predicted back in Ivanovo: Theater is too toxic, too unstable, and the love for zelyoniy zmei is what happens to everyone who comes under its corrosive influence.
“There are so many normal jobs,” she says, knowing that after last night, Sasha has no choice but to listen. “Look at Valya from the fourth floor—she’s just got a position at the district library around the corner. Look at Irina Petrovna’s daughter. Your age and already a chief engineer.” These are the jobs her mother understands, practical and safe, unlike the chaos and frivolity of Theater.
Last night, they celebrated the opening of a new play until four in the morning, so today her mother is more upset than usual, trotting out a longer list of toxic outcomes that await Sasha, leaping a full meter further than usual in her condemnation.
“When are you going to get married?” she demands as she cranks the handle of the meat grinder to make kotlety for dinner. “Look at yourself: no family, no children. Everyone your age is married, and some are even divorced by now. Not that I am promoting divorce,” she adds prudently, so that Sasha doesn’t get any wrong ideas in her head.
She has poked at the topic before by bringing up various young men she knows: heaping praise on a young anatomy professor at her medical institute, lionizing the engineer son of their neighbor on the third floor. Sasha doesn’t want to discuss with her mother the possibility of marriage, especially now. She doesn’t want to give her mother the advantage of being privy to what is swirling in her daughter’s heart, of sighing and pitying Sasha for not getting the man she wants. She keeps it all inside her, away from everyone’s eyes, because, as Grandma told her, what’s inside you, no one can touch.