A Train to Moscow(69)
They both remain silent for a minute or so. What is Sasha going to do with this story? What is she going to do with the fact that Andrei did not walk away from that conversation, from his father-in-law and his dacha, from that life? What kept him there, drinking and listening?
“Congratulations on being related to someone who can brag about such a glorious Soviet past,” Sasha says. But what she really wants is something much more selfish than this grand moral condemnation. “So you allowed yourself to be bought for a cushy job and a pair of nice shoes,” she says.
He turns to her, his face contorted with sudden anger. “You weren’t around, remember? I was alone, with nobody there. You left. My parents were dead, my house burned to the ground, and all you could think of was yourself and the theater.” He gets up and strides out of the courtyard. She follows, trying to catch his words. “I told my father-in-law things he could use against me. Things he could put me in the camps for. Stuff I did.”
Sasha grabs his elbow to prevent him from walking away. “What did you do?”
He struggles out of her grasp but stops. For a minute or so, they stand under the arch, silently, and she can hear him breathe hard. “What I did is too late to fix. Years too late. There is nothing anyone can do now.” He starts walking back to Nevsky Prospekt.
Without saying a word, they walk toward the blustery Neva that lets them know it is close as they tense against the heavy gusts of wind. They walk past rows of darkened windows, on the sidewalk that is already a gruel of dirty snow until the spire of the Admiralty becomes visible against the sky, until the Hermitage steps out of the dark like a photographic image floating in developing solution. They make their way to the river through the grip of an early winter, contemplating what has just transpired between them, thinking of their ruined lives.
“Did you arrange for my mother’s funeral?” she finally asks.
“Your theater arranged most of it. I only helped.” She thinks of Andrei at the cemetery standing at a distance, just as he did in Ivanovo, in the cloud of train smoke.
“So you’ve been watching me from your Party perch at the Smolny,” she says, “like the NKVD watched Kolya’s Nadia and her family. Like they watched everyone.” The words come out metallic and harsh, as if she wanted to hammer them into his temples, and maybe she does. Maybe she wants to grab him by the hair and dunk his face into what he does for a living, to force him to suck in the toxic sludge and choke. Maybe she was as wrong to tell him about Kolya’s journal as she was to love him in Ivanovo and Suzdal and Moscow, as wrong as she is still to love him now.
“Why don’t you ban me from existence, along with the play?” she asks. “I have no doubt you can make me disappear. I’ve said lots of subversive things. Enough to get me ten years under Stalin, according to my mother.”
He stops and shakes his head, as though he were a patient teacher and Sasha, a brazen student bent on challenging authority. “I would never do anything to hurt you, Sashenka,” he says, peering into her face. “Remember that.” She stares back, and as he looks away, he adds, under his breath, almost as if he wasn’t the one uttering the words, “Although I could.”
He didn’t have to say this. She knows he could, and she is as grateful for his assurance of her safety as she is revolted by the sheer stretch of his power. They have reached the Palace Bridge, and the wind makes her stop and grasp the wrought-iron railing, forcing her to pull her hat down over her ears and hold it from being blown away.
“This is where they met, Kolya and Nadia, isn’t it?” says Andrei.
Sasha looks down at the black water hissing around the pillars of the bridge, seeing in her mind Nadia’s yellow hat bobbing on the waves. This is where they met. Right here, where they are now standing, probably on the same spot. This is the railing Nadia grasped a quarter century ago, looking down on the same angry waves charging at the granite below. Sasha wishes she could feel as unequivocally about Andrei as Nadia felt about Kolya. What if her mother was right about him after all? What if he is indeed of a different group of blood?
“I’m sorry about the play closing.” Andrei runs his fingers across her cheek and steps back. “I just wanted to let you know, before you heard about it from the theater administration.”
“Thank you. That was very helpful. Now, with An Ardent Heart closed, I won’t have to yank my guts out to play Matryona and scatter the bloody mess across the stage for the audience to applaud. At least there’s comfort in that.”
He doesn’t answer. A streetcar clangs across the bridge, probably the last one for the night, a small firework of sparks sizzling around its wire above. Andrei knows nothing about acting, so she is not sure he understands what she meant about scattering her blood and guts onstage.
“Do you still read Mayakovsky?” she asks.
He leans on his forearms and looks down into the water, then quietly, just so she can barely hear him, recites a few lines of the poem they memorized in Marik’s mother’s class in Ivanovo. Most of them learned it by heart simply because this poem was about love, hopelessness, and disappointment, unrevolutionary things that excluded it from the required reading list.
“My love is
an arduous weight,
hanging on you
wherever you flee.”
He stops and waves his hand, as if waving away bad memories. She knows the line that precedes it, “Let’s part tonight and end this madness,” and he knows that Sasha knows, but they both remain quiet; they don’t say a word. She knows Mayakovsky has always been his hero, but she also knows—a stinging thought—that now, working at the Ministry of Culture and banning plays, Andrei has crossed into a place that doesn’t care about literary heroes. A place beyond truth, a place beyond art.