A Train to Moscow(77)
As the motorboat speeds under a bridge and disappears behind a bend in the canal, her memory springs twenty years back, to Mama on a park bench, smiling at the pilot in uniform Sasha had hoped would become her father. For months, when she was seven, she rode on his shoulders around the courtyard, triumphant of her accomplishment, past the neighbors’ envious glances, so certain that she had finally found a father, so sure that the thrill boiling inside her would never end. It did end, despite her stubborn, childish confidence in the future, despite the fact that she didn’t doubt him at all, not even for a second.
Is this the reason she now lacks certainty in Andrei and Kolya, the two most important people left in her world?
Soon, the Smolny Cathedral sails into view, its pearly cupolas glinting softly against the sky. Next to it in the yellow buildings of Smolny resides the Leningrad Communist Party. The car bounces through the main gate and pulls along the driveway to the entrance. Borya waves for her to get out, and they face two soldiers standing guard at both sides of the door, both holding guns as big as the ones from the classic painting of The Hunters at Rest by Perov she saw at the Russian Museum. The soldiers’ eyes stare into the distance, but when they see Borya, they silently step aside to let them in. She and Borya walk along a corridor that smells of fresh paint, toward a door with a black sign on the front, where Andrei’s full name is etched into a metal plate. Borya knocks on the door, politely shakes her hand, and disappears.
In the few seconds before the door opens, Sasha tries to conjure up the person on the other side, the person she hasn’t seen in almost two years, ever since he warned her that his ministry was closing her production of An Ardent Heart. The person whose dark secret is now lodged in her chest like a malignant lump. Although she cannot track his bureaucratic trajectory, she is almost certain he has been tracking her artistic one. Behind this door, she is certain that he watches over the entire city of Leningrad—shielded by a wall of bureaucracy everyone in the Theater can feel—controlling its exposure to culture, letting only those plays that won’t harm fragile psyches pass through the gates of his censorship. Or is it her anger surfacing, gearing up to distract her from listening to what he is reluctant to say? Would she have learned the truth about his father’s death from him rather than from her grandfather had she been ready to listen? Is she about to sabotage, again, the truth she can portray so well onstage?
As she hears the steps on the other side, Sasha takes a breath, trying to silence the pounding in her chest. Andrei opens the door and draws her inside, his arms carefully making their way around her shoulders, his breath a hot puff against her cheek. If anyone were watching them, they wouldn’t detect even a glimmer of impropriety in this embrace, the warm greeting of two old friends. He kisses her on the cheek, holds her at arm’s length, and peers at her, his hands still on her shoulders. They stand like this for at least a minute, studying each other for changes time may have carved into their faces, for signs that Ivanovo—with its field leading into the forest where their grass bed used to be, and its lilac bushes behind the fence where he stood waiting for her, and its unpaved roads covered with silky dust—is still there, gouged into their hearts.
His eyes have darkened since Sasha last saw him. They seem brown now instead of green; they swallow and trap the light instead of reflecting it; they are wary, guarded eyes. There are parentheses of wrinkles around his mouth, and the hair around his temples has turned gray, as though he has lived through a battle. The air between them is still cold, and neither of them wants to be the first to yield any emotional ground, to expose even a centimeter of vulnerability.
“It’s genetic,” Andrei says, catching her eye. “My father turned gray when he was only thirty-three, my mother told me.” All Sasha remembers of his father’s hair was wisps of white bristling from under a cap he never removed when he was outside.
The mention of his mother thaws the air, and he leads her toward the two armchairs that sit around a coffee table by a safe, an intimidating-looking cabinet of steel. This is a perfect place for top official secrets, Sasha thinks, imagining the inside of the safe stuffed with dissident files, plans for nuclear attacks on the West, and lists of books and plays that are to be banned. This is, she imagines, where Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and the works of Solzhenitsyn are stacked in neat, forbidden piles, next to the names of film and theater directors whose productions have been pulled from screens and stages because of their insufficient patriotism or the lack of optimism in the lead characters’ objectives.
“Do you want some cognac?” Andrei asks before he sits down. It is around four in the afternoon, and she rarely turns down cognac, especially official Party cognac that they never see in stores.
Out of the top drawer of his desk, he produces a small key, turns it in the lock, and the safe door opens noiselessly. Inside, where Sasha imagined dissident files and plans to obliterate the West, presides a round bottle of cognac surrounded by a coterie of small glasses. He fills two of them and raises his glass in a toast, the same honey-colored alcohol they drank in her apartment what seems like a century ago, when she felt happy and light-headed, when she thought their life together was finally about to begin.
“To another reunion,” he says—another reunion is what their life seems to have come to—and he empties his glass in one gulp with the effortlessness of a regular drinker. Sasha sips the contents of her glass, as though she could fool anyone into thinking that she wasn’t one. He pours again, and they drink, and from his quick pace, she knows he is waiting for her to explain why she is here, in this vast office, helping reduce the liquid contents of his Smolny safe.