A Train to Moscow(66)
Only now, her director is doing something very different from what they were taught in eighth grade. The merchant’s wife and daughter, in their production, are practically the same age, both abused, both locked up in the courtyard of the merchant’s house, behind three rows of fences, away from life and any chance of personal happiness. Her character Matryona, always played by middle-aged actresses as a petty tyrant, in their production is as much of a victim as her stepdaughter, who, in turn, is as far from being “a ray of light in the dark kingdom” as any of the play’s despotic merchants.
They rehearse every day, and this routine—getting up, making coffee in a small copper pot she brought from Georgia where her theater went on tour last summer, when her mother was still alive, getting dressed and waiting for a bus under her windows—makes life purposeful and gives shape to the quiet, empty mornings. She wakes up to the silence in the kitchen and the silence in the room where her mother slept. Silence, despite the streetcars screeching on the turn under her windows and the neighbor behind the wall adjusting the volume of their radio to listen to the morning news. Silence in her apartment, silence in her soul, silence hand in hand with guilt. She gets up, pulls on a sweater and pants she wore the day before, and walks downstairs to the bus stop, almost sleepwalking, as if she’d been enmeshed in cobwebs, so every step requires effort to push through the sticky binding. Even the smallest task—taking her coat off the hook, for instance, or lifting a scarf out of a drawer—seems like a colossal endeavor that requires might and concentration almost beyond her power.
Vladimir Ivanovich, who is her merchant husband in the play, watches her during rehearsals, senses the cobwebs, and tries to pick them off with remarks that would normally make her laugh. Sasha doesn’t know what he sees when he looks at her. What she saw this morning when she glanced at the mirror was distressing: a pyramid of bones upholstered in sallow skin, exhausted eyes, the face of a stranger. “The problem with young people is that I am no longer among them,” he says, trying to make her smile, and her mouth smiles, but he can see that her eyes don’t. In spite of having a wife and two grown children, he cares about her, Sasha knows; once in a while, he even says he loves her. She calls him by his name and patronymic, the way you would address someone else’s father.
After the rehearsals are over, she works with the director, who also senses that something is off in her, that she is not all there. They go over her words and add a subtext of what Matryona would think as she lashes out at her permanently drunken husband and her self-righteous stepdaughter conniving to take the reins of the house away from her. The subtext mostly comes out as mut, the lowest of the sordid jargon of obscenity, the mother tongue of construction sites and lines to beer kiosks. Sasha is grateful to the director for helping her with the Matryona role and for keeping her in the rehearsal room, away from the silent emptiness of her apartment, from the guilt, from a bottle of vodka always stashed in someone’s dressing room.
They are already six weeks into rehearsals, but Matryona doesn’t come to her. She hovers close but refuses to invade her. She is still a specter, a fleshless apparition, devoid of blood and bones, of meat and skin. Sasha senses her presence, but she does not feel her heft and cannot smell her breath. They are already at the stage in the production where the set designer has completed the layout of the scenery and brought it to one of their rehearsals. The stage set is the courtyard of her husband’s house, surrounded by three rows of tall fences, with a stump in the middle. Matryona and her stepdaughter live locked inside this courtyard, but the stepdaughter, at least, has a chance of getting married and breaking out of here. For Matryona, this courtyard will be her life until she dies, and she is only twenty-three. Her husband, more than twice her age, drinks all night and sleeps all day while she goes to the market, and when he wakes up late in the afternoon, he lumbers down the porch and lifts his eyes to the sky, certain that it has cracked in half and is about to fall. That’s when he screams for her to hold him upright and assure him that he is only hallucinating, that the sky is still whole, at least for tonight. That’s when he takes his first swig of vodka, crunches down the steps of the porch in his boots, and yanks her to the ground behind the stump. Then, with his filthy, callused hands, he tears at her dress, rips open her skirt, and rapes her.
Sasha has decided not to take a bus to the opening night. What point is there in clinging to a routine when she knows it’s all going to end in a colossal shipwreck? She is going to falter and fail and take the whole production down with her. In two hours, she is to play Matryona, who is still remote and intangible, a bunch of lines Ostrovsky wrote, which they have backed with some crude layers of mut, all in vain. Tomorrow, after reading the abysmal reviews in every paper, their administrative director will call her to his office and inform her that she has been fired for professional inadequacy, her apartment taken away from her. At least her mother is not here to witness her failure.
It is the middle of November, and she is leaning into the wind on Dekabristov Street, walking toward Theatre Square, where the green and white building of the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre looks pearly in the distance through the blustery air pregnant with rain. As she looks up, she sees low gray clouds rushing across the sky, across the narrow space between the roofs. They race overhead with decisiveness and deliberation, scurrying from one side of the roofs framing the street to the other, chased by more clouds blown in by the wind. There is always wind, blowing from somewhere far away, trapped between the fences, swirling dirt around the stump, then flying away. This is all she can see: the bustle of rain clouds above her head, the three rows of fences, and the low sky clamped over her head like a lid. This is her life, every single day until she dies—the towering fences, the courtyard with its racing clouds above, and the stump behind which her drunken husband rapes her. Suddenly something clicks, and it all comes together: two months of rehearsals, the text and the subtext, her dead-end youth and her own old age she can already see peering from the face of her perpetually inebriated husband. Twenty more years of this revolting dead-end life is what she has to look forward to, if she survives that long.