A Train to Moscow(64)
Thinking of that moment, she flies past the tall pine where they left the birch pole, not realizing it until it’s too late to go back. There are scores of big, dead branches scattered in the puddles on the brink of the swamp, and she quickly chooses one. Then she takes off her skirt, ties it to the top of the pole, and steps into the swamp.
At first, the swamp is not very deep, and Sasha even calms down a bit as she waddles along the sloshy path. She thinks of her mother breaking the military order when she operated on a civilian at the front, a nine-year-old boy, before she was born. It took her mother a second to evaluate the alternative between the military rule and a child’s life before she chose life. She didn’t hesitate to disobey the commissar and do what she knew was right. So why does she apologize for the heartlessness of their motherland, for the long shadow of that commissar today?
Onstage, she walks, connecting the firm hillocks with her feet, until there is only the last few hundred meters of dirty ooze left before her, the most difficult stretch. The quivering depths of all her insecurity and fears, of all her losses and guilt. How does she locate firm ground to support her and lend her some understanding? How can she fight back the feeling that she is standing on nothing at all?
Suddenly a huge brown bubble burps out of the swamp’s gut right in front of her, so loudly and unexpectedly that without thinking, instinctively, she swerves off her path. Just one step sideways, but her feet instantly lose support, as if someone yanked the road from under her boots. With all her weight, she leans onto the pole, but the dead wood cracks and splinters and—face forward—she falls into the cold liquid mud. The path is close, a step away from her, maybe a half a step. But it is a step she can no longer make.
Russian women die from the heart, Grandma used to say. This is what Liza-Sasha has always thought would happen to her: like all Russian women, she would die from the heart. Not from the cold burp of a bottomless muck that is pulling her under and beginning to leak into her lungs, extinguishing hope for any understanding.
She hears herself scream, an awful, lonely scream that rings over the rusty swamp, over the stage, and into the audience, then soars to the tops of the pines, gets tangled in the leaves of young aspens, and falls again. The sun sails from above the trees, and for the last time she sees its white light, as brilliant and warm as the promise of tomorrow.
Vladimir Ivanovich is waiting for her in the wings. Sasha doesn’t know why he is here: he is not in the Quiet Dawns cast and should probably be home with his wife watching the nine o’clock news. She sees him, but she doesn’t see him. She still holds Liza inside her, her short-lived love, her crushing fear, her unfaltering if rueful hope, her staunch surprise at her cruel, and utterly un-Russian, death. Or maybe every death, no matter how senseless, is fundamentally, at heart, a Russian death. She has been emptied by two onstage hours of Liza’s life, and she takes a breath before she can fill the void.
She knows there is time to decompress. Since her character has just died, she won’t be in the second act, but she has to wait another hour for curtain call.
“No curtain call tonight,” Vladimir Ivanovich says, his eyebrows mashed together into one bristling line above his eyes. “We got a call from the hospital.” He pauses, giving time for all the blood to drain from her body, and she knows what he’s going to say next. She closes her eyes and shakes her head, but he says it anyway. “It’s your mother.”
“When?” she asks as though it might make a difference.
“Seven o’clock, half an hour before curtain.”
She opens her mouth to say something, but he quickly adds, “They ordered me not to tell you until the end of the performance. That’s the protocol, the chief administrator said. I had to fight with him to even let you leave before curtain call.”
Her legs feel like cotton, and she sits down on a rolled-up rug, the green field of the last act, the field that Liza didn’t have a chance to see.
“I’ll take you to the hospital if you want to go,” says Vladimir Ivanovich.
“If I want to go?” she asks.
“They called just before you finished the scene,” he says. “The doctor at the hospital.”
“I thought they called before I went onstage.”
“They did,” says Vladimir Ivanovich. “Then they called again just now.”
He doesn’t need to explain why they called the second time. There can only be one reason. He pulls her into his arms and holds her, as if otherwise she would fall apart into a thousand pieces at his feet, and she knows what he is going to say, and he knows that she knows, so he doesn’t say it. Instead, he strokes her hair and kisses her forehead and holds her tight to keep her together, like a father would, to prevent her from breaking apart.
The funeral is a blur; the days before and after are a blur. There are cars, and heaps of flowers with a sickly sweet smell, and people with somber faces Sasha should know but cannot remember. There is Grandma and Grandpa standing in the door of her apartment, wearing black. A Volga bumps along Leningrad’s center, crosses the bridge into the city outskirts, and takes them to the cemetery where two men with unshaven, veiny faces loom near a freshly dug grave. They are always the same men, in Leningrad or Ivanovo, two drunks earning a few rubles for another bottle. Grandma bends down; scoops a handful of wet, heavy dirt; and tosses it into the grave—it hits the lid of the coffin with a thump. Grandpa circles his arms around her shoulders and leads her back, since she can’t see where she is going, tears clouding her glasses. She leans on Grandpa’s arm, blindly following his lead, wondering why there are any tears left in her at all.