A Train to Moscow(8)
At night, lying on the divan next to her mother, Sasha thinks about the three sisters and the actresses who played them. She thinks about how they believed the words Chekhov had written, pretending to be Olga, Masha, and Irina. But it isn’t the same as pretending to want to be a teacher or an engineer so that no one suspects that she really wants to be an actress. This is the true pretending. It is Theater, the real make-believe, exciting and magical, not at all like the everyday make-believe they all have to live by.
In the morning, Katya takes them to see Moscow by trolleybus, and they get off in front of the central food store. Inside, behind the heavy doors of glass and oak, it feels like the rooms of Ivanovo’s only art gallery. But it doesn’t have the odor of a museum. It smells of the flour that hangs in the air of the bakery department, where bricks of black bread and loaves of white bulka are stacked on shelves like firewood, of milk that an aproned saleswoman ladles into aluminum vats that people pass to her over the counter, of cookies with patterns of the Moscow spires embossed on the front. The glass displays show three different kinds of cheese: a dense brick called Soviet, an anemic-looking wheel of Russian, and a cube of punctured Swiss—all real, all for sale. In front of the glass, as if guarding all this treasure, are chocolate bars called Soviet Builder in paper sleeves with a picture of a muscular man brandishing a hammer.
Even Sasha’s mother, who was a surgeon during the war and doesn’t surprise easily, stops in front of a meat counter to gawk at the signs for beef and pork, at the bones piled in rows, at livers and kidneys, dark and glistening, perfect for the sour pickle soup they haven’t had since Sasha was four.
But the most unbelievable thing of all is not how much they have in Moscow. It is how little they buy. In Ivanovo, when Grandma and Sasha have stood in line from noon until her mother returns from work, they always buy kilograms of whatever it is they are standing in line for. They buy as many kilograms as the store is willing to dispense, as many as they can carry home. That’s why when Grandma goes to the store, she always takes Sasha and sometimes even Grandpa. Here a woman in a felt hat is frivolously asking for a hundred grams of ham, sliced, please. A hundred grams? If ham magically turned up on the counter of their Ivanovo store, Grandma would never think of buying only a hundred grams, and their saleswoman, Aunt Dusya, certainly wouldn’t waste time slicing it.
“You have a good life here,” concedes her mother, who doesn’t usually have an opportunity to talk about good things. “All this food and no lines.”
“No lines?” says Katya, laughter dimpling her cheeks. “I’ll show you a line.”
They meander along a narrow cobblestone street that deposits them next to a wall made of shining granite panels. A half a block away, where the granite turns a corner, a thick line of people hugs the wall and disappears into the next street. They join the line, which moves in slow thrusts, like a purple rainworm across their compost pile, and wait with everyone else.
“It’s Lenin’s mausoleum,” says her mother. “You must behave.”
She must have forgotten that Sasha has been behaving since December.
Two hours later, they reach the doors guarded by two soldiers with guns. The line heaves forward and around the platform on which lies Lenin, eternally alive. Only he doesn’t look alive. He looks dried up, with the head and face of a bird. He looks eternally dead.
“His body was preserved with formaldehyde,” her mother whispers into her ear, “the same way they preserve bodies in our anatomy department.”
She thinks of the dissection room at her mother’s medical institute, with its tall tables on which lie brown bodies—not at all frightening, full of revelations about what was previously hidden—with every nerve and capillary and membrane exposed by her mother’s skillful hands.
When they pass the table where Lenin lies under glass, her mother pushes her through the crowd to the first row. At this close range, Lenin is as uninteresting as she saw from a distance, yellowish skin stretched over his bony head, dead and undissected. But she must display proper solemnity, like the rest of the people who wrinkle their brows and pleat their mouths into mourning lines, as if he died only yesterday and not in 1924, when her mother was only seven.
It is early morning on May 1, and they are walking toward the Moskva River, behind Red Square, where Katya’s group from the telephone center is assembling before the demonstration. It is sunny and warm, perfect weather for International Workers’ Day, and the streets have been washed by blue trucks that Sasha saw earlier spraying water in heavy, blazing arches. She is between her mother and Katya, holding their hands, jumping over the puddles left by trucks. They are wearing their best dresses—a sunflower cotton shirtwaist for her mother and red polka dots for Katya. Today they don’t mind her jumping, and they hold hands and swing her over the wet pavement as long as she wants.
The people from Katya’s telephone center look as confident and bold as the workers with thick muscles from the poster of a Five-Year Plan they passed on the way here. They unfurl red banners on long wooden sticks and hoist up huge portraits of stern, unsmiling men.
Then everyone starts walking: people with banners and portraits and red carnations made from construction paper swaying on long wire stems. Her mother hoists her up onto her shoulders, so now Sasha is above the people’s heads, in the midst of a forest of swaying sticks with flags, banners, and portraits, of balloons and red carnations. She squints and peers to her left, where everyone else is peering. There, five columns of people away, a group of men stands on a granite platform against the Kremlin wall. In the center is a separate dark figure in what looks like a military uniform. She knows it is Stalin, their conscience and their revolutionary glory, as the radio reminds them every morning. He is the father to all of them marching in this square and gathered around radios from here to Kamchatka, across all their eleven time zones. Only he is so far away, she can barely see him. He looks tiny and ant-like, and there is nothing glorious about him.