A Train to Moscow(60)
“I only want you to have a normal life,” she says. “To have a family of your own, like everyone else. Not to be alone.” She takes two slices of bread soaking in milk and with her hands kneads them into the ground meat. “These older men will never marry you. They will never leave their wives,” she declares, as if she were drawing a verdict, as if this were something she has learned from personal experience. “Anyone is better than an older, married man.”
“You still don’t understand,” Sasha says. “I don’t want to marry Vladimir Ivanovich. He’s done good things for me, but I see him mostly for sex.” The word hisses out of her mouth, sibilant and harsh, a shocking word never used in public, as noxious as a curse. It has produced the planned effect, draining blood from her mother’s face, turning it white.
Her mother turns away and begins to shape the pile of meat into oblong kotlety between her palms, her tense back a reproach to Sasha for wrapping such a scandalous topic in words.
“There is only one man I’d even consider marrying,” Sasha says. “Someone you’ve never approved of. Someone who is married to another woman because he is not allowed to marry an actress.”
What she has just uttered slaps her like a whip across her face. She feels blood rush to the wound; she feels her cheeks burn. Her thoughts shoot back to this very kitchen months ago, to Andrei sitting on the other side of this table.
Her mother turns and gives her one of her long, drilling looks. She may have heard Sasha mumble Andrei’s name when she is drunk. What does she say when her tongue is so heavy that it refuses to wrap around the sounds and form coherent sentences? Does she curse him, threaten him, or does she pledge eternal love? She would like to know, but she can’t approach her mother with this question.
“And do you know what else?” Sasha says. “All my life, I could feel that you never believed in me. Not when I lived in Ivanovo, not when I was in Moscow, and not now. You always told me I’d never make it as an actress. But here I am, in the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theatre. I did make it. And it must kill you and Grandpa that I’ve succeeded, that you turned out to be wrong. But you were right about one thing: Theater is toxic and corrosive. It has cost me plenty. It has cost me the only man I’ve ever wanted.”
Her mother looks at Sasha, her eyes like broken glass. “You’re wrong. I am proud of you,” she says quietly. “I’ve always been proud.” She swipes under her eyes, stifling tears. “It’s just that theater is so chaotic, so unruly. I’ve always wanted you to have an easy life, not like mine or Grandma’s. A warless life, a life of peace we didn’t have. A life of order.”
She waits for Sasha’s response, for some indication that she is open to normalcy, her sunny, righteous mother, as down-to-earth as Grandpa, who still believes what he hears on the radio, who refuses to look out the window and see there is no bright dawn on the horizon.
“I don’t want order, and I don’t want a peaceful life,” Sasha snarls back. “Let Andrei and his wife live this life of regiment and calm and hope for a bright tomorrow. I don’t want any more lies, any more pretense.” She knows her voice is on a steady ascent to shouting heights, but she does nothing to restrain the anger rising in her throat.
“Then tell me, what do you want?” her mother asks.
“I want you to leave me alone!” she yells. “Stop lecturing me. I’m not your student. I want you to stop waving flags for a minute and look around. I want you to stop pretending that everything is fine, stop making excuses for the mess we’re in.” She sharpens her voice like a knife. “This isn’t Ivanovo. We live in a country full of hypocrites and bandits, and of people like Grandpa and you, true believers, who have survived Stalin only because he was too busy murdering the other twenty million.” She pauses to take a breath, to ready herself for the final blow. “If you can’t empty yourself of this crap, of this toxic provincial thinking, you may as well go back to Ivanovo and tend to the chickens.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees her mother hunched over the table.
“I have a rehearsal to go to,” she says and gets up, leaving her mother alone with the anguish and pain and the newly made kotlety.
34
The new play is called The Dawns Here Are Quiet, five women commandeered by a young male sergeant, a tiny regiment operating near the front line during the Great Patriotic War. Although it’s a Soviet play, Sasha can relate to the material better than any other contemporary play so far. Lara is the tall, acerbic Zhenya who comes from Moscow, and she is Liza, the daughter of a peasant from a small village.
In Quiet Dawns, she is on a reconnaissance mission, making her way through the swamp, carefully stepping from one mound of earth to the next, feeling the ground before her with a pole made from a thick birch branch. The swamp is vast, several kilometers in any direction, but from the sun that is beating into her right cheek, she knows she is going north. When her sergeant gave her this assignment, she felt terrified of walking alone across the swamp that is rumored to have claimed many lives, but the war has taught her a shifting sense of danger: what seems frightening at first is often recalled later as safe as your Ivanovo home.
She is in cold water up to her ankles, but she knows she is safe as long as she is standing on firm ground. The birch pole is her guide. When it sinks, there is nothing in front of her except the bottomless sludge of death; when it meets resistance, she pokes around for a minute to make sure the ground is solid and takes the next step. There are trees and spindly bushes rising from the mud, and between them are the cold cauldrons of the bog, with bubbles floating up from their black depths. She tries to imagine those who drowned here, sucked into this abyss. She thinks about all who were killed in the war, all who died in the camps, millions of snapped, diminished lives. She thinks of the totality of death. She thinks about Uncle Kolya, who is not listed among the dead or alive, and Uncle Sima, who died in their Ivanovo house three weeks before she was born. She thinks, reluctantly, about her father.