A Train to Moscow(59)
“I’m married to the Theater,” she says, pushing back a headache.
“Don’t be so ironic with me,” her mother warns, letting her know that she is engaged in a serious conversation.
“I’m not being ironic. This is what my teachers told us at the drama school.” She thinks of her Dostoyevsky scene mentor, Polevitskaya, who warned them that Theater would take over their lives and bring them to ruin. As a spasm of nausea begins to creep up her throat, she is willing to admit that Polevitskaya may have been right. All of this—clouded in the bank of fog her mind has become—seems like a century ago.
“You need a normal life,” her mother says. “You need order. You need a family. Not a married man thirty years older than you.”
Her mother has expressed her critical disdain for Vladimir Ivanovich many times, in pursed lips, silences, and frowns, but this is the first time she has verbalized the accusation. Sasha has never told her anything about him so that her mother wouldn’t feel sorry for her, or worry about her, or give Sasha unwanted advice. She can’t explain to her mother, an optimistic patron of order, anything about such hopeless and messy things as men or love. She can’t explain to her, for instance, that Vladimir Ivanovich has become her safety net. Without him, she would have quit the theater last year, when the new director, after watching all of their repertory, gathered the actors and slammed them with a scathing condemnation for their flat performances, singling Sasha out with a torrent of special scorn for her role of a village divorcée from a new contemporary play. Had Sasha quit then, when her humiliation was at its peak, where would her mother be living now? She can’t explain to her how many of Sasha’s anti-Soviet outbursts he has kept from spilling into earshot of their regular informers and, by extension, of their theater’s administration. Her mother wouldn’t understand that he is the most important actor, after Polevitskaya in her drama school, who was able to drive through Sasha’s head how ruthless Theater really is. To survive in a big company like this one, he said when she had just arrived from Moscow, you need teeth, horns, and hooves, and I’ll teach you how to grow them. Her mother would not understand the sad humor of his favorite sayings that, for her, encapsulate the essence of their work. Keep in mind, he told her after her debut in Twelfth Night, success is never forgiven, a piece of wisdom she has never forgotten.
But the most important thing she can’t even begin to explain to her mother is how much he feels like a father to Sasha. He is someone who keeps her safe, who protects her from other men always on the prowl, who steers her along the perilous maze of life in the theater. On their recent tour in Baku, Azerbaijan, when one of the local bazaar vendors cupped his hands over her breasts, he locked the man’s head in the vise of his elbow and made him whimper for mercy, begging forgiveness for what the man thought was a gesture of admiration toward the Russian buyer’s daughter.
Sasha takes a breath before she strikes back as a headache pulses through her temples and coaxes angry words out of their deep lair. “Maybe if I’d had a father to protect me all these years,” she says, “I wouldn’t look for older men.”
Her mother gives out a little gasp, then tightens her mouth. She hasn’t expected opposition in such close proximity to the time Sasha’s key scratched around the lock and didn’t find the keyhole. She is usually the one doing the lecturing; she is the master of dispensing guilt-provoking tirades and unsought advice.
“Your father perished in the Great Patriotic War,” she says in a wounded voice. “You know that.”
Sasha knows. His sepia photograph is on the first page of their family album in Ivanovo. Until she was seven or eight, she had been hopelessly waiting for him to walk through their gate, despite his “perished in the war” status, but then something snapped her waiting vigil. Was it her mother’s reluctance to share any memory of him, or was it Grandma’s inevitable sigh at the rare mention of his name? Or maybe it was an old neighbor, one of those who had to line up to use the outhouse, a babka with sharp eyes and a bent spine that made her look like a question mark, who one day coughed up the real story of Sasha’s father to her neighbor on their courtyard bench, making sure Sasha was close enough to hear every word.
“He didn’t perish in the war,” Sasha says. “He died of TB, two years after the war ended, in the town of Atkarsk, where he lived with his common-law wife and a ten-year-old daughter.” She sees her mother swallow hard, her face tightening. She remembers that afternoon in their Ivanovo courtyard, the babka’s coarse voice marking the moment when her mother’s heroic war-perishing story turned out to be nothing but another lie. Lying, their way of life, the stubborn abscess oozing into the cells of their system, infecting everyone.
Strangely, Sasha feels removed from this whole scene, watching the action from the wings, like a director during a performance. Her mother, the tragic heroine of the second act, admonishing her prodigal daughter who, in turn, admonishes an untruthful mother.
“I wanted to protect you,” her mother says, sniffling. “I only wanted to keep you safe. That’s all I ever tried to do.”
She wishes her mother would stop protecting her from danger, from experience, from life itself. She wishes she would stop protecting her from Theater.
Her mother wipes her eyes before she cranks the handle of the meat grinder, and its iron face erupts in red twists of meat squeezing out into a bowl underneath.