A Train to Moscow(68)

“Acting is freedom. It’s searching for what’s real,” she says. “Every performance is different. Together with the other actors onstage and with the audience, I search for the truth—we all do—and sometimes we almost find it. That’s the essence of acting: looking for the truth. There is nothing fake about it. There is no pretending.”

They walk inside the courtyard and sit on the bench, which is freezing cold and damp from wet snow.

“So it is the opposite of our life here.”

“It’s the opposite of your job,” she says. “The opposite of banning plays that fail to lead the audience into the shining future. It is allowing people to think, to examine their failings and their faults, to peek into the dark corners of the soul. To see human beings as they are, not as we think they should be. Maybe that’s the reason Theater is so dangerous.”

He smirks, or maybe she only thinks she sees him smirk.

“Last time I saw you,” he says, and she hears an intake of breath, “I came to tell you what I’d done. I wanted to confess to you. I hated myself and wanted to tell you the truth. My truth.”

They are both silent for a minute.

“My wife is a good woman,” he says, fumbling inside his pockets, as if he were looking for something and not finding it. “I only wish she’d found someone better than me, someone more deserving. I don’t love her, and I never did.” He plays with a pack of matches he has fished out of his pocket. “She fell in love with me the first time we met, the daughter of my boss, someone to whom I owed everything. He took a big chance on me when I had nothing, not even a pair of shoes to wear to the office. Anyway, she begged him to do whatever he could to get me to marry her, even if it meant twisting my arm. She sensed that I was in love with someone else, but that didn’t stop her. She just refused to feel humiliated. She wanted me, and nothing else mattered.” Andrei lights a cigarette he finally finds in his pocket, inhales, and lets the smoke extinguish a whirl of snowflakes. “A pathetic story, isn’t it?”

He pauses, and from the corner of her eye, Sasha sees him bite his lower lip, as if getting ready to tell her something. For a few seconds, he seems on the verge of letting the words out, but then he looks away. She sees his hand with the cigarette tremble, or maybe he is simply shaking off the ashes. “My father-in-law has been diagnosed with cancer,” he finally says. “He needs surgery and then radiation. My wife is devastated. If she didn’t have me, she would fall apart.”

Sasha tries to imagine a woman who had to beg her father to make someone marry her against the man’s will. Or was it really against the man’s will, after all, if the man agreed to the marriage?

“But you allowed your arm to be twisted. You did what they wanted you to do.”

“It wasn’t that simple.” She hears him shift on the bench, as if with his weight he could substantiate this claim. “There were things done that couldn’t be undone. There were things said and choices made. It’s always about choices, dead ends and mistakes.” She hears him inhale as if he were preparing to say more. “Do you want to hear a little story about my father-in-law’s choices? The story he told me a couple of weeks ago when I visited him at his dacha. Maybe it was his cancer diagnosis that helped loosen his tongue about his past, but once he set the vodka down and started talking, my only job was to sit back and listen.”

She is too tense to sit back, but she is willing to listen.

Andrei leans forward, staring at his shoes. “Toward the end of the war, they chose Vadim to work at the NKVD. The Party trusted him to do important work, he said, as important as killing Germans at the front. He hated Germans. They were the enemy who had to be killed. And when he killed them, they screamed in German, in their foul language of bandits and invaders. But his prisoners, the ones he interrogated in the NKVD cellars, screamed and begged in Russian. Not in that alien language he couldn’t understand. The language he was speaking to me, our mother tongue.” Andrei speaks evenly, almost monotonously, not allowing any opening for an interjection.

“Every day by noon, he was covered in blood. He reeked of blood, despite a bucket of cologne they brought in at the end of the day. Even his dog refused to come near him at home. He had to wipe his hands on his hair to keep the gun from slipping out of his grip. But that was his work. That was his duty, he said, and he was a soldier. They told him to serve, and he served. They told him to execute, and he executed.

“Every day, by the end of the shift, he had pulled the trigger so many times that his index finger became numb. It hung limp as a whip, completely useless. But they had a monthly plan, like any factory, a plan that had to be fulfilled. So they brought medical experts to advise them what to do. Physicians in white coats armed with notepads sauntered along the hallways, furrowing their brows and watching them interrogate the prisoners. The result? Twice a week, each of them was to get a massage of the right hand. A massage of his trigger finger, as my father-in-law called it. So after that, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, during lunch hour, a terrified-looking woman slinked into his office. A new one every time. I’ll spare you the details. But at the end of the month, the quotas were met. The NKVD even gave him a plaque for ‘living up to the special task of the Party.’ He has a cabinet full of those plaques.”

Andrei stops, and she sees he isn’t going to say more.