A Train to Moscow(67)
This is the moment Matryona enters her and Sasha shapes her body around her soul. The moment every line she utters is carved into Sasha’s heart. The moment Matryona’s pulse begins to beat in sync with Sasha’s, the moment her blood begins to course through Sasha’s veins.
37
“They are going to close the play,” Andrei says.
They are walking along Nevsky Prospekt, away from Sasha’s theater, away from the three hours of intense magic at their seventh performance of An Ardent Heart. Nearly three years have passed since he told Sasha he was married and she hoped that if she ever saw him again, her heart would remain as frigid as this November night with snowflakes floating through the air. He was waiting outside the theater, away from the stage door, on the periphery of her vision, as she was signing programs for a small crowd of fans. Her heart lurched and then plunged when she registered his silhouette as she handed the last program back and said something she doesn’t remember to a handsome man with ears red from the cold.
They are walking toward the Neva, through the darkness diffused by the few neon signs still lit at this hour, breathing in the icy dampness that numbs the throat and metes frost into the lungs. Sasha opens her mouth to ask him how he knows the play will be closed, but she catches herself. Of course he knows. He works at the department that decides things like that—which plays to close and what books to ban—the Ministry of Culture of the Municipal Committee of the Communist Party. It is located in the Smolny, a former institute that prior to the Revolution housed a school for young maidens of noble birth. They no longer have nobles, and there are far too few maidens left among them.
“Why must they close the play?” she asks instead. It is an unnecessary question, but she wants to hear his explanation, feeling anger constricting her chest. She is angry at his official look, at his surprise late-night visit to tell her that the role she has just created will soon be relegated to the archives of the Bolshoi Theatre museum. She asks why they are closing her play, because she wants to hear him confirm his complicity.
“The public wants optimism, a positive hero,” he says, his voice flat. “They need something to believe in.”
Of course she knows this—one of many Party slogans—but the need to challenge him is itching in her throat. “How do you know what they want?” she says, refusing to continue this argument along Party lines they’ve both known from birth. She wants to hear what he really thinks, what is hidden behind the facade of his official face, although she doubts he will ever reveal it. “They buy tickets, those who are lucky enough to get tickets. They give us a standing ovation every night. They love the absence of light. They identify with the darkness. They applaud all our characters, and none of them are positive heroes the public can believe in. Why can’t your bosses ever allow the people to see life as it really is?”
She glances at his profile, waiting for him to answer. His hair is completely black in the dappled red neon from the Kavkazsky restaurant sign, still open.
“This only tells me that we still have a lot of work to do,” he says, and she can’t tell if he is being sarcastic. He doesn’t smile, so she must allow for the possibility that he believes what he has just said, even though it sounds too suspiciously close to what he would say to someone at work. How is it possible that she detests him as much as she does at this moment, and at the same time is searching for a pretext to stroke his hair?
“We all live surrounded by three rows of fences, in a courtyard with a stump behind which you get fucked,” she says. “Just like the characters in this play you’re closing.”
They both know that the scene from Ostrovsky is a metaphor not only for life in their motherland but also for the dead end of their own nonlife together. Maybe she should tell him she no longer believes in the sentimental nonsense about connected souls and unbreakable bonds. Several years of working in repertory theater have successfully wiped out all vestiges of that hope.
He stops to peer into her face, and they stand there for a few moments, bathed in red, searching for a trace of something in each other that may still be there. Then he lowers his eyes and reaches for a pack of cigarettes in his coat pocket. They are Marlboros, the American brand they hear about only from jammed broadcasts of the BBC, and it occurs to Sasha that he must be climbing the Party ladder. He offers her one, and for a few minutes, they walk silently, inhaling capitalist tobacco so scandalously better than their own.
“Maybe you were right to leave Ivanovo when you did after all,” he says, stopping in front of a courtyard that seems to shimmer under an ordinary-looking archway, so painfully beautiful that for an instant, Sasha wonders if she has been blessed with a mirage. A wrought-iron bench glistens under a tree, and a marble statue, white and seemingly glowing, stretches its arm in their direction, in a puzzling gesture of either invitation or forbiddance. “Are you happy?” he asks. “Now that you’ve become an actress?”
She doesn’t know if he wants her to answer the first, existential, question or to attach the second, qualifying, half to it, but she knows that it is safer to remain within the confines of acting. The answers to these two questions, if she is honest, are diametric opposites: no, she’s not happy without him and yes, she is happy when she is onstage. She is happy to be breathing in the damp smell of wool from his coat. She is unhappy that they can’t go to her apartment, tear off their clothes, as they did three years ago, and ravage each other until they both melt and start coursing through each other’s veins like lifeblood.