A Train to Moscow: A Novel, by Elena Gorokhova.

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A Train to Moscow:

A Novel, by

Elena Gorokhova

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In initial parts, one isn't quite able to know how much of the portrayal is from imagination of someone living in US and researching a little about Russia, so very un-Russian the writing, not merely attitude, obviously is; but then, especially more after the death of Marik, and much more after the protagonist joins theatre, it becomes very real, far more so than the journal of the uncle.

In a way very real, it's the death of the mother that hits a gut-wrenching blow, and is far more real than the other various losses, including that of Marik.

Post that, it's a tad anticlimactic, seemingly an effort by author to justify the thinking and attitude by the author and protagonist towards the then Soviet regime. But it recovers.

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"Where did he return from? The war ended ten years ago, and Sasha is old enough to know he didn’t return from the war. Their neighbors who live in the other half of their house sometimes whisper the word ugolovnik, a convicted criminal, when they pass him on the way to the store.

"She waits for Andrei to say something about his father, to tell her where he has been all this time, to let her know if his father’s return has made her friend happy. ... "

" ... Maybe Andrei was expecting a different father, someone taller and shaved, someone less scary and more heroic. Maybe he thought that his father would immediately go to work and break all records, like those workers in street posters: coal miners with faces dusted in soot or steelmakers peering into a furnace, a red glow of liquid metal reflected in their goggles. ... "

Next, a comment that obviously stems from right-wing and church policies in US

" ... Her mother, like my own, was simply a mother, defined only by her family rather than an outside job she never held. ... "

Glorification of women in serving only in unpaid housework doesn’t fit any poor land, much less the postwar Russian situation where every pair of hands was important for nation building, and wasting whole humans in work that didn’t require more than a dmall fraction thereof, wasn't glorified, to say the least.

On the contrary the value system that glorifies a Ekman bring thrashed foen into unpaid servitude is exemplified in the arrest and physical manhandling of a high kevel diplomatic corps persona, a consul, who happened to be a female - while no male, whether diplomat or otherwise, is ever considered guilty of using free labour for housekeeping and childcare, cooking and much more, as long as the worker is titled 'wife', however abominably treated.

Wives of diplomatic corps in post-war Russia on the other hand advised younger members of their colleagues to get on and finish their family plan while they were posted in Russia - because of how good childcare, provided officially by the government, was; unlike US where young mothers have no help, Moscow was a heaven for them.

And those children have grown up healthy, some even preferring to return for higher education to the city where they attended communal childcare centres.

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" ... There was something invincible and mighty about the Germans’ movements, in their bizarre, alien appearance, in the way they sliced through the damp air over the fields. There was an arrogance and a luxury in the way the machine guns occupied the sidecars as though they were passengers, as though those iron contraptions were human beings deserving to spread their weight across the black leather seats, hitching a ride along a dusty road of an alien country."

Those words smack of an admiration bordering on a hero-worship, an adoration, and they belong to a neo-nazi young and safe in US, not a Russian whose homeland is being devastated by deliberately wrought havoc, burnt whole villages alive with millions of Russian civilians killedby German army this way,, and much more. The said Russian would be filled with a determination and an implacable hatred of a victim of injustice, not an admiration suitable to a racist.

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Writing by author gets much more unrealistic here.

" ... The paralyzing fear of the first German bombing, ... I stood in shock amid craters and burned grass, as planes were speeding toward us, filling the sky over the field with a deafening roar—alien iron machines armed with death—and Seryoga had to slap me and pull me down and shove me into the trench ... I’ve become angry since then, and my heart has hardened around the edges. ... "

All fine if this were supposed to be written by a US observer, but it's supposedly what the young Russian boy is writing - maintaining a fairy in midst of a WWII struggle of life and death, in a trench during German bombings, in bleak Russian countryside!

Did they even have trenches?

There's much more of very unrealistic description, over and beyond a young Russian soldier in WWII maintaining a diary to write what would count as realistic description of the experience - in US. He also draws figures of his comrades!

"“Hey, Da Vinci,” calls the sergeant, looking over my shoulder. “Make sure you finish that masterpiece before the next attack. The Hermitage can’t wait.”

"The sergeant knows nothing about the Hermitage. He is from a small town on the other side of the Urals where he probably failed drawing in middle school because of his contempt for anything that isn’t real, and I know he has never been to Leningrad."

A Texan wouldn't write or draw like this in midst of bombings, and escape alive from his buddies, soldiers of the bible belt, in trench with him.

That a Russian would not only dare to fo this but actually afford a diary and a pen, and be allowed to carry them around in midst of the war, is imagination of the author who probably didn't graduate high school in US, or shouldn't, much less allowed this garbage by editors and publishers.

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"“Hey, kike,” yells a boy from a stoop as Marik and Sasha are walking home from school. “If you weren’t ugly enough before, you’re certainly ugly now.”

"The boy is a year younger than they are, and Sasha has seen him in the hallways of their school ... "

That's something Jews in US suffer even now, and it's easy enough for someone from US to accuse Russian society of, but it's dishonest to insinuate that it's only true of Russia.

"Sasha is not proud of beating up a seventh grader, but Marik is grateful. He looks at her with admiring eyes, as if she’d just single-handedly defeated a battalion of Germans. “You’re a real friend,” he whispers, blinking and squeezing her hand, not daring to trust his changing voice. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

"She is not sure Marik is right that she is his real friend. More and more often, she finds herself being a buffer between Marik and Andrei, whose resentment of one another seems to be growing together with their muscles and bones. What happened to their games of Cossacks and Outlaws, when the three of them outwitted the other team of local kids and found the most unexpected places to hide, or to the game of War, where Marik and Sasha were heroic partisans, ready to withstand the most hideous threats from Andrei, the Nazi commandant? ... "

Reminds one rather of 'We, The Living', an early work by Ayn Rand, and its triangle, although her love object there wasn't nazi.

" ... And then, a few seconds into this ferocious race, she hears a thump: a body padded with the wool and cotton of a winter coat hits the ice.

"She grates to a stop and so does Andrei. They both stare at Marik curled by the edge of the field, stroking the ice around him and squinting, feeling for his glasses with his fingers.

"“You pushed me,” he spits out as she hands him the glasses. “I was winning, and you pushed me.”

"“No, I didn’t,” says Andrei. “You stumbled and fell. You always stumble and fall.”

"“I didn’t stumble!” Marik shouts, but his voice betrays him, and the words come out in a thin falsetto, a mockery of his intended message. “He pushed me,” he whispers as he looks at her, a whisper that comes out as a hiss.

"She wants to believe Marik, who is sitting on the ice, wiping his bloodied lip with the sleeve of his coat. She saw him winning, and then she saw him fall. She also wants to believe Andrei, who is standing and whistling, his hat in his hands, his black hair blown across his forehead. They are her friends, and she wants to believe them both, but Marik acts as if he wants her to make a choice. He keeps peering at her, tight springs of red hair framing his face, his eyes as liquid as they were when she beat up a stupid sixth grader. His eyes want to know if she believes him, if she is still as noble as that girl who avenged his dignity with a schoolbag full of homework.

"“Be a man and face your defeat,” says Andrei, a phrase he undoubtedly lifted straight from The Three Musketeers Sasha gave him last summer so that the three of them could play the story out together. “And don’t whimper on devchonka’s shoulder.” He adds a sliver of his own wisdom. “Maybe you can catch a fish, but you skate like a girl.”"

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"“So what are you saying?” Sasha hears irritation in her voice but does nothing to rein it in. “That he saw everything through a dark lens while in reality everything was rosy and light?”

"“No,” says her mother and shakes her head, getting defensive. “What I’m saying is that maybe this personal trauma blurred his vision, so he wasn’t able to see reality the way it was.”"

Reality is that around the globe, people will recall what ordinary people including soldiers faced snd suffered, and know that victory of Russia was due to Russian people, while leaders were useful as symbols, much as flags are - and, of course, for willing to fight on rather than surrender against the will of people, as French politicians had done at nazi onslaught.

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"She is in a new play, a work by Alexander Ostrovsky, a classical playwright whose bearded portrait hangs in the literature classroom of every secondary school. This is the reason she gets out of bed, instead of huddling under a blanket and wallowing in the soupy dusk of an October morning. She is Matryona, a wealthy merchant’s wife. Her stepdaughter Parasha is the main character in An Ardent Heart, “a ray of light in the dark kingdom” of merchants, a world of hidden grief, gnawing pain, and deadly silence, as their eighth-grade literature textbook taught them. The famous literary critic Dobrolyubov called Ostrovsky’s works “the plays of life,” a phrase they all memorized to quote on an eighth-grade test. To Sasha, Ostrovsky always seemed preachy, so she used to doodle on her desk, pretending to listen to her teacher lecturing them about An Ardent Heart and its moral conflict between duty and personal happiness, which seemed to be the moral conflict of every work in their textbook, with duty, by the last few pages, always taking the upper hand."

Fittingly, Koenraad Elst labels leftist creed 'Abrahamic-IV.

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"She is back in Ivanovo, the town she has stayed away from for all these years, the memories she has hidden in the most remote corner of her soul. Everything is so much smaller than she remembers: the houses seem to squat under black tar roofs, the streets that she holds in her mind as avenues are alleys, and the trees whose branches blocked the entire sky now barely reach to the lines of the electric wires. The only thing that is still the same in Ivanovo is the dust. The silky dust of the summer covering the roads—its ubiquity, its warmth."

Very familiar to anyone who has revisited a childhood home, and been surprised at how much smaller it all seemed.

"In the telegram, her grandfather wrote that Grandma had been taken to the hospital. It was her heart. What else would it be? She got another telegram five days later with the date for the funeral. She didn’t go to the funeral. She had two performances of Twelve Months, Saturday and Sunday, and the understudy was on maternity leave, so the administrative director didn’t allow her to go to Ivanovo, either to say goodbye to Grandma or to bury her. She played Twelve Months and then Quiet Dawns, and then there was a week off, a rare break when no performance of hers was on the schedule. Every night before the break, she drank in Vladimir Ivanovich’s dressing room, to fill the emptiness left where Grandma’s image—her tender way of speaking, her cotton dress permeated with the smell of their armoire, her soft fingers on the piano keys—had rested next to Sasha’s heart. Every night, they emptied a bottle of vodka, and then she had a crying fit in front of his makeup mirror. A little less drunk than she was, he tried to hold her, but this only made her wail louder ... "

"Grandpa met her at the train station. Sasha saw him even before the train pulled to a stop, from her compartment, through the haze of the locomotive smoke and window grime. She saw him standing in the middle of the platform, trying to gauge where her car would pull to a stop, his white hair long and wispy, tangled by the breeze, his shoulders stooped. It suddenly became clear to her that Grandma was the one who cultivated his image of a commander. The power he projected, his weight, his authority Sasha was so intimidated by, his permanent seat at the head of the table—all existed because of Grandma. Like a sculptor, she molded him into a stern father and grandfather, a protector, the hard-edged face of the family everyone feared and respected, maybe so that she herself could remain gentle and kind and still survive in the heartland of their heartless motherland. And now, with her no longer there, he simply disintegrated down to his essence: an old man, lost to the point of being extinct, squinting at the numbers on the train cars, hobbling up the platform as the train chugged and clattered forward and sighed its last breath."

A false validation of a man who need mot have flogged a six year old child with his belt if he weren't a sadist, or a grown up granddaughter with nettles for that matter.

"It only took seconds, as the front door gave a familiar creak and Sasha stepped over the threshold of the house, for memories to spill over and flood the senses. She had to prop herself up against the cupboard made from dark wood that only turned darker over the years. It was where Grandma kept the everyday plates on the lower shelf and the tea service with red roses they used for holidays—her family’s gift for their wedding—on top. The plates were all there, neatly stacked up, the holiday service probably not touched since May 9, Victory Day, when she always pulled out the cups and saucers with roses, two extra sets on the table for Sima and Kolya.

"Sasha thinks of a day when she was six or seven, when Grandma took her to get their bread rations and look for lines. If there was a line, she said, you must always join it because there is food at the other end.

"Grandma stopped by the barbed-wire fence where several men were driving shovels into a pile of dirt spiked with jagged pieces of cement. Their movements were mechanical, as if under their coats, they all had hidden creaky motors that lifted their arms and bent their legs. The German closest to the fence looked up and met her eye. ... "

"“Why did you give him your ration?” she asked as the German hastily stuffed the bread into his mouth.

"Grandma rewrapped what remained in the handkerchief and put it back into her bag. The words came out gently, as soft as her wrinkles, as sad as her eyes. “He is someone’s son, too,” she said and motioned for Sasha to move on, probably thinking of her own son Kolya, the one still missing in action, hoping that he was alive somewhere in a foreign land, hoping that someone would offer him a piece of bread."

Very reminiscent of the episode in Gone With The Wind when Melanie Wilkes declared that she's hoping to not only continue pulling weeds from Yankee soldiers' Graves, but place flowers, too - and carried both factions of Atlanta ladies, uniting them.

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"“I need to go outside.” She gets up. “To clear my head.”

"“I’ll go with you,” Andrei says. “I’ll just walk by your side. We don’t have to say anything.”

"What is going on behind the facade of his face? she wonders. Does his job require him to consider Kolya a traitor for making the decision not to return home, for questioning the sacred mercy of their motherland, for doubting the heroism and sacrifice of the war no one is allowed to doubt?"

Abrahamic-IV, indeed.

"The little park in front of the Party building is filled with diffused light, and, as always in June, it is difficult to tell afternoon from night. Sasha doesn’t know how long they spent in Andrei’s office, how long she sat there staring at the phone after the call. It could be six in the evening, or it could be ten at night. They walk along the street toward the Neva, their silence matched by the unusual stillness of the city, interrupted only by gusts of wind from the river. It must be late, Sasha thinks, with most people home, windows lit by the pale light of white nights.

"An occasional bus clangs by on the embankment as they cross the nearly empty street and lean on the brown granite banister. The light above the river is so white and thick that you feel you could hold it in your hand. With the baroque center of the city behind them, the view from here is rugged and industrial, necks of construction cranes hanging over the water, drawing long shadows onto its leaden surface with the sun sinking toward the Okhtinsky Bridge. This is the unbound time, the disconnected time, time that has lost its meaning, time where no time exists. Down below is the river—its surface rippling and sparkling in the sun, the image that Sasha knows is still burned into Kolya’s brain—its enormity and depth an extension of life itself."

"Andrei turns to her, and his eyes are dark green again, the eyes of their Ivanovo childhood. They are so close that she can no longer make out his whole face: his features have disintegrated and shifted, like she imagines in the Picasso portrait that she has never seen, the one Kolya described in his journal. They stay like this for what feels like several minutes—his chest rising when Sasha takes a breath, the two of them melded into one—their faces only centimeters away from each other, deconstructed and warped. What is she hoping for? That he will announce he is going to divorce his wife and quit his job so that he can be with an actress?"

"“I can do something for you that no one else can do,” says Andrei, and from the deep place his voice emerges, she knows this is serious. “After all I’ve done to you, I hope you will accept this as a gift with no conditions.” For a minute, he stares at the ripples of water below. “I know I hurt you, and we both know I can’t undo what I did.” His voice is hoarse, and she can see only one side of his face, a blue vein pulsing under his temple fringed with white hair. “But I can get you on a plane to see your uncle in America.”"

" ... Even her mother, with her spotless record, wasn’t allowed to go to Bulgaria to visit the medical students she had taught, despite receiving an official invitation to meet their parents in Sofia. After a stack of letters vouching for her character, after months of meetings and committees, her request was turned down because the visit was deemed unnecessary. And that was Bulgaria, their southern communist neighbor who believes in their shared shining future. No one Sasha knows has ever crossed over to the other half of the earth. ... "

"Andrei must see the confusion in her face, because he doesn’t press her for an answer. “Let’s go somewhere we can sit down and talk,” he says. “I know a place that’s open late.

"“And if you like it there, in America,” he adds casually, as if in passing, as if what he is about to say amounts to nothing but a trifle, “you can do me a favor and never come back.”"

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"“What I do remember is that on one of those nights, I confessed to him what really happened. I told him I’d killed my father.” Andrei props his forehead with his hand and looks down. “And he told me that I was a hero. That I did what I had to do, what he would have done, what any man would have done. That was when he gave me a promotion. He said the Party needed strong, determined men like me.”

"Andrei stops, presses his palms over his eyes, as if he wants to black out what he saw.

"“With the promotion, they gave me an apartment, but I still went to dinner at Vadim’s at least once a week, an invitation extended by his wife, without fail. And every time, without fail, I felt Natasha’s liquid gaze on me, the heat emanating from her body when she stood close in the hallway to say goodbye. Why am I telling you all this? It doesn’t change anything. It can’t. Then one day she came to her father in tears and begged him to do anything to get me to marry her.” He pauses. “That was when Vadim gave me a choice”—the word echoes in Sasha’s head, in sync with her pulse—“a choice between a life of hard labor for murder and a life of privilege with his daughter.”"

" ... “This was the beginning of the end—not my first downfall and not my last.”"

"“When my father got back from the camps, he told me stories of what it was like, stories I refused to believe back then. ... But what struck me most about his stories was that the victims’ denouncers were not some foreign agents. The denouncers were their own neighbors and friends. Sometimes even their cousins, their own brothers and sisters.”"

"“That’s why you have to go to America. You have to get out of here before it’s too late, before the poison has seeped into your veins and you become just like the rest of us.” He peers into her face for a few moments as Sasha shakes her head. “I know you think this could never happen to you, but with time, it does happen. It happens without you even knowing it. It happens to all of us.” He props himself on his elbow and leans so close, she can feel his breath. “You were born in the wrong country, Sashenka. You’re naive and uncompromising. You don’t bend, and sooner or later, our motherland will break you. It breaks everyone.”"

It isn't the land, it's the Abrahamic-IV creed.

Not different from The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

"Like a flash of lightning, an idea makes her heart lurch with hope. “Then let’s go to America together,” she says. “We will leave the past here. All the past, yours and mine. We will start over.”"

" ... “I can’t start over. I wish I could.” ... “My back has been broken. I can no longer move forward. I’m now deep in this muck, up to my ears, drowning.”"

" ... Sasha has to try one last time. She needs to exhume her guilt of leaving Ivanovo for Moscow, surrender it to him.

"“I know I’m naive, but this is our only chance. I left you at a terrible time. It is my fault that you’ve been drawn into this swamp, and I want to pull you out. Please. Let’s leave together and start over.”"

" ... His silence is his answer. ... "

"“I will arrange for you to go to America to see Kolya,” Andrei says. He is back to being practical, back to arranging things, something he does so well. Does he think that his arrangement of this impossible trip, which Sasha knows involves breaking Party rules, is the deed that will redeem him? Does he think that sending her across the ocean will give him hope for atonement? ... "

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"In the summer of 1959, her first summer in Moscow when she was admitted to study at the drama school, a miniature America sprouted up in Sokolniki Park outside the city, the American National Exhibition that Sveta and Sasha waited three hours to enter. They had already read what Khrushchev said to the US president three weeks earlier, when the Expo opened. In another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we pass you along the way, we’ll wave to you. With the rest of the curious crowd, they gawked at the world they were promised in only seven years: cars laden with chrome, cameras that dispensed instant pictures, films that were not banned, stainless steel refrigerators, robot vacuums, and a machine that washed your dirty dishes in less than thirty minutes. They stared at a blonde woman modeling a dress, which Sveta considered for a minute and said she could sew one just like it, if only she could get her hands on three square meters of decent fabric. Sasha didn’t know then that seven years later, just when they should have caught up with America, Sveta would lock herself in a hotel room in Kiev, where her theater was on tour, and pour down her throat a vial of drugs that were not supposed to exist in the healthy Soviet world."

"When we pass you along the way, we’ll wave to you. Well, two years have passed since we were supposed to overtake America, and she hasn’t seen one dishwasher or a single brownie. Is this what America looks like, that Expo? A model house for every model family, shelves filled with books that no one tries to censor, plays that no one decrees to ban?

"Or is it a country where people sleep in cardboard boxes under bridges, as Pravda constantly reminds them? A place plagued by hurricanes and guns, where round-bellied capitalists in top hats, who glare from posters glued to newsstands, multiply their fortunes by exploiting men in chains? A place where human beings are disconnected and alone, stooped under the weight of questions that have no answers?"

"He gets up from his desk and paces to the wall and back, his hand hugging his sharp chin. “Alexandra Alexandrovna,” he says, using a formal way to address her, something he has never done before. “You are our leading character actress,” he says in a solemn voice, trying to maintain authority. “You are engaged in five performances. How do you expect us to function without you?” He turns to her from the wall. “Please enlighten me.”

"She has nothing to say to offer enlightenment. Instead, she says what she has wanted to say to him for months.

"“You refused to allow me to go to the hospital when my mother was dying because I had a performance to deliver. Do you remember? You didn’t let me travel to Ivanovo to my grandmother’s funeral. It was more important that the shows kept running. The performance was more important than a human being. Theater was more important than life.”

"He stops before his desk and leans forward, his palms on the glass.

"“This job has cost me dearly,” she says, “and now I need to leave.”"

"He lowers himself into the chair and stares at the massive ink blotter no one has ever used. “You do realize that if you leave, we may not be able to offer you a position when you come to your senses and decide to return,” he says."

"Abandoning all of them at once, she thinks, is the only way she will ever leave.

"At the door, she turns, but not to bid him farewell. “By the way,” she says, “you don’t need an entire meeting to figure out why Party members rarely get leading roles. It’s simple. They rarely have any talent.”"

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"He stands there behind the pillar, watching her walk toward the plane that will take her out of Russia, watching her leave, the same way he stood at the Ivanovo railway station when she was leaving for Moscow to study acting, the same way he stood at the cemetery at her mother’s funeral—always an observer, almost a stalker, always watching her from the sidelines, perched on the periphery of her life."

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"As the plane descends, it banks to the right and then the left, as if to show her from every perspective a new, other life waiting below. She looks down on the gray expanse of water held back by a barrier of stone rising higher than she has ever seen, spires etched against the sky, lit by the sun like a set for a play."

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"Who is this wagon waiting for? Not for her friend Marik, for sure. Marik is seven, like Sasha, and no driver would waste time plowing through snow all the way to the edge of Ivanovo to stand by while a first grader pulls on his itchy uniform and tosses his books into a schoolbag. Despite the dusk of early mornings, Sasha has always savored this hour before school, from the moment she plunges out of the clouds of frost and into the warmth of Marik’s house to see his father leaf through Pravda over a glass of tea ... "

" ... But all those safe mornings, she can sense, are now in the past. Today, everything is different."

" ... She sees another man shaking out every book from the shelves, cutting out the binding, and squinting down its spine, which must be taking a long time because Marik’s mother is a literature teacher and has a lot of books. ... another man, short and stumpy as a fireplug, snatches the briefcase of Marik’s father off a chair and rips it open. He scans the sheets of paper with mathematical formulas scrawled in a hurried handwriting, as if he could understand any of them. Then he lifts his eyes and stares at the wall.

"“Citizen Garkovsky, you are under arrest,” he announces.

"This is when Sasha sees her friend. Marik is crouching in the corner behind an armchair where he and Sasha usually read together after school. His head is between his knees, his red hair sticking out in all directions like taut little springs, so Sasha cannot see his face."

"“Please don’t worry,” says Marik’s father to his wife and son, but also to Sasha. He stands by the door, scrambling to get his arms through the sleeves of the coat Marik’s mother holds out for him. “Go to school and make me proud,” he says to the children, who are clutching on to each other on the floor, braving the bruises that are just beginning to throb. “They will straighten this out soon,” he promises. “I will be back in a few days.” He is trying to stay composed, but his voice is quivering. “All will be well,” he says, even though his words sound hollow, lacking the weight required to ground them in Sasha’s mind, maybe even in his own."

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"At dinner, her mother talks about dangers. The dangers she saw at the front, where she was a surgeon until Sasha was born, and the dangers they all read about in Pravda ... "

"“Next time, it’s nettles,” says Grandpa and gives her a hard look from across the table. His eyes are blue, the color of the forget-me-nots he grows around the gate, with grooves of deep wrinkles radiating into his white hair. He was a peasant before the Revolution, but after 1917, when the people rose up with hammers and scythes to liberate themselves from the yoke of tsarist oppression, he became an engineer. Grandpa’s peasant ancestry is the reason they have three rooms and a kitchen all to themselves. Before the Revolution, the entire house belonged to Grandma’s father. He was a factory supervisor and because he hadn’t been exploited like workers or peasants, he didn’t deserve to keep the place where he lived. Now one half of the house is theirs, with three families of neighbors sharing the other half, one family in each room. Grandpa must have been a pretty important peasant because they have an indoor toilet on their side of the house, while the three other families all troop to the outhouse in the back. Sasha doesn’t understand why Grandma’s father deserved to be thrown out of his own house and then shot for supervising factory work, but she has a sense no one wants to talk about this, so she doesn’t ask.

"With her mother trying to feed her, Sasha can see she is at a disadvantage, just like when she was pinned to the bench, so she relaxes her lips and lets the spoon spill its contents into her mouth. She holds it there, warm, salty water with potato chunks and grains of barley, as her mother repeats the motion three times and then goes back to her seat. Maybe she realizes Sasha is not going to swallow it, or maybe she is simply tired and hungry after work and wants to finish her own food. When all the plates are emptied but Sasha’s and she is finally released from the table, she goes outside and, her body still aching from the policeman’s shove and her grandfather’s belt, spits out the soup into Grandpa’s gooseberry bush."

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"Marik is intelligentny, a word Sasha’s mother uses to characterize people. It is a salad mix of education, culture, intelligence, and manners, and all their neighbors and acquaintances have been divided into intelligentny and not intelligentny. ... Intelligentny: Irina Vasilievna, who gives piano lessons in her house two blocks away; Marik and his mother, pale and freckled and, as rumor has it, a Jew.

"Sasha doesn’t know what Jews are and how they are different from the rest of them, but from the way people lower their voices when they say yevrey, a word that is spat out like a wormy chunk of apple, she guesses Jews are worse than they themselves are in some dark and hidden way they cannot discuss in public. She knows only one other Jew—Moisey Davidovich Zlotnikov, the head of the anatomy department of her mother’s medical institute and the adviser of her dissertation. Sasha has seen Dr. Zlotnikov only once, when her mother took her to work because Grandma’s heart was hurting, and he didn’t look different from any other person in Ivanovo. He had glasses and a goatee, and he rose from his desk and bent down to shake Sasha’s hand as if she were an anatomy professor and not a first grader with two skinny braids."

"Andrei’s father is not here, either, but according to Grandpa, he has a better chance of coming home than Marik’s father because he is not a politichesky. Maybe Andrei’s mother, as she sweeps the yard, also turns her head at the creak of the gate, just like Grandma has done since the end of the war, still waiting for her son Kolya to come back from the Leningrad Front."

" ... They just finished reading a book of Andersen’s fairy tales, and the story they are playing is about a one-legged tin soldier. ... "

"Marik is the soldier, and Sasha is the paper ballerina. The soldier is terrified of the darkness inside the belly of the fish, but he is too proud to cry for help because he wears a uniform. Through the scraps of ripped linoleum, the river roars until it becomes a waterfall, the boat made from newspaper disintegrates, and the water finally closes over the soldier’s head."

"Sasha likes it that something remained of the soldier and the ballerina after they burned in the fire, but she is not sure about the little tin heart. Is it too sappy a finale for such a proud warrior? She doesn’t know, yet she decides to accept it without an argument. Despite its lack of what her mother values most, grit, Marik’s ending seems to be a good fit for the story of courage and love they have just played out on this make-believe stage of the linoleum-river setting. It makes her happy and lighthearted, and she feels her mouth stretch into a smile, all on its own."

................................................................................................

"She doesn’t know about Chekhov yet because she just finished the first grade, but this radio play doesn’t sound like anything they ever get to hear: the anthem of the Soviet Union that wakes them up in the morning or news from the fields with rumbling tractors her mother turns on when she returns from work. Sasha always wonders about the destination of these tractors filled with wheat. Maybe they are all sent to Moscow or Leningrad, which she knows are much more important to their country than Ivanovo, but she is afraid to ask because Grandpa is always within earshot, and he wouldn’t appreciate her questioning the news."

"She doesn’t want Irina to kill herself. She wants her to go on acting.

"Then there is a gunshot, sharp and dry as snapped kindling, and Sasha starts sniffling. It wasn’t Irina, but the baron Irina was going to marry who just got killed in a duel, and that means she will never be able to leave this provincial town that is driving her toward insanity and desperation. She will never be able to move to Moscow and live that other life she’s been dreaming about, a life full of poetry and happiness."

" ... The possibility of becoming Irina and living a noble life so different from theirs, a life of guests and servants and longing for Moscow. She can relate to longing to live in Moscow better than she can relate to guests and servants. She has always wanted to go to the May Day parade in Red Square, and her mother said that she may even take her there one day, on an overnight train that whistles before it pulls into their platform, immersing the station in clouds of smoke and soot. It feels gratifying to find similarities between Chekhov’s Irina and herself; it makes Sasha feel sophisticated and almost grown-up. Maybe she can be like Irina, dreaming and hopeful and giving orders about what she wants for dinner. Maybe she can become an actress."

"She will stow this secret inside her like a treasure, away from the neighbors’ inquisitive glances, away from her mother’s teacher’s voice and Grandpa’s blue stare. She will hold this secret on the back shelf of her heart, and no one will suspect anything, not even Grandma, who must have felt the hot touch of Theater when her retrograde father prohibited her from singing opera in Moscow. Sasha will pretend she wants to be an engineer, like Grandpa, or a doctor, like her mother, so no one will suspect anything until she finishes tenth grade and then leaves for Moscow to study acting."

................................................................................................

"Outside the station, Moscow explodes around her with stone facades that rise into the sky and block the sun; with rivers of asphalt that radiate in five different directions; with the whistle of a militiaman who wields a zebra baton to freeze the four lanes of traffic and then, like a magician, make them move again; with buses and trolleys circling around a statue of Lenin, as if performing a ritual dance, and then, on cue from the militiaman’s baton, vanishing into the tunnels of streets. It stuns her with its energy and bustle; it invades her senses; it pumps into her ears a loud, brazen invitation to a different life."

"“Where is Magadan?” Sasha asks, but her mother frowns. Maybe she thinks that it is impolite to ask questions about a place that makes people rot.

"“In Siberia, on the other side of the Urals,” says Katya. She cuts off a slice of cheese and puts it on Sasha’s plate. She likes Katya. ... "

"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 ... "

"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 ... 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."

"She is thinking about another life, a life in Theater. She is thinking about the true make-believe, the only pretending that makes sense. She wants to be part of it more than she has ever wanted anything, desperately, and she will dream about it every night. She will be stoic and patient, enduring their long days and long lines and gray streets with empty horse-drawn carts inching along through the dust. She will wait until she finishes school; she will live with Theater smoldering in the corner of her soul."

................................................................................................

"She is hiding from Grandpa, from the thick leather belt he flogs her with when she breaks his strict house rules. She is hiding from the radio reports announcing the biggest-ever harvests that never reach their stores and from her mother’s warnings about danger when she speaks about the war, when the word front rumbles out of her mouth, sputters on her lips, and detonates in Sasha’s ears, ending with a dead t.

"Her mother saw the front when she was a war surgeon. The front killed Sasha’s father, who, she says to their neighbors, perished in the Great Patriotic War. There is a photo of him in the family album, a blond man in a uniform cinched with a belt. But from Grandma’s sighs and the neighbors’ smirks, Sasha senses that the noble war death is simply another story, another lie. She knows she is too young to be told the truth, but she is patient.

"The front also killed both her mother’s brothers. Sima was wounded in battle and died in the back room of their house. Kolya, an artist, who studied in Leningrad and whose paintings hang on their every wall, is still missing in action. They haven’t heard anything from Kolya since the war began—not a letter, not a note, not a word from any of those who have already returned—but Grandma is still waiting for him, running outside at every creak of the garden gate, certain that Kolya has finally made his way home all the way from Berlin.

"The war ended eight years ago, and even if Berlin were on the other side of the earth, Sasha doubts it would take Kolya this long to make his way back home. But she knows she can’t say this to Grandma, who still sets a cup and saucer from her prerevolutionary tea service for Kolya every year on May 9, Victory Day."

" ... The words maid and cook, she knows, are bourgeois and retrograde, atavisms of the tsarist past that the Revolution extracted from their society, like a cancer. She couldn’t hear her grandfather use these words without irony, but Grandma somehow seems to fit in with those parasols, hats, and long, flowing skirts, and Sasha often imagines her free of glasses and wrinkles, giving instructions to cooks and maids in her low, patient voice.

"There are also poems in these magazines by writers whose names, although she is almost eleven, she has never heard before, names absent from their literature textbooks and even from the catalog of the entire Ivanovo library. It is, she knows, because those poets wrote about unsocialist things, devoting every line to feelings rather than the workers’ accomplishments, which was clearly selfish and individualistic from the point of view of their new progressive communist collective.

"Since they both learned how to read at five, Sasha has shared all these books and magazines with Marik in the loft, where the two of them have crouched for hours in the dusty murk. ... "

" ... On the front page, in an angular, masculine hand, are the words that almost stop her heart, Kolya Kuzmin, her uncle missing in action.

"She opens the notebook and begins to read.

"January 9, 1942

"The first time I saw a German up close was three months ago, in October. ... "

" ... “This is what’s required here,” Seryoga’s eyes seemed to be saying. “Our main objective is to kill people. Or those people will kill us.”"

................................................................................................

"“You just don’t understand how dangerous it would be if anyone read it. You have no idea what they could do to our family,” her mother would shout."

"“What’s the NKVD?” Sasha asks, the ominous letters from the journal clanging on her tongue like sounds of a latching padlock.

"“Where did you hear about the NKVD?” her mother asks suspiciously.

"“From someone at school,” Sasha lies.

"“The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs,” her mother says, tossing the potato peels into a waste bucket. For a minute, she is silent. “Grandma’s brother Volya used to live with us before the war,” she says, having decided to bring the NKVD to life with her uncle’s story. ... “But he should’ve been more careful around strangers. He shouldn’t have babbled. Babbling is dangerous; it’s only one step from treason.” Sasha knows what her mother is referring to: they’ve all seen the poster of a woman in a red head kerchief with a finger across her lips and the caption NE BOLTAI in big red letters.

"“But how could they arrest him for a joke?” Sasha asks, glad that she didn’t tell her mother about the journal she found. “Even if he babbled.” She thinks about the early morning when they took away Marik’s father, almost four years ago. Did he also tell a joke? Did he babble? “I babble; my friends babble at school. We babble all the time. Babbling is just speaking. Does this mean that we can’t speak? Should we all be deaf and mute, as Grandpa demands when we sit at the table to eat?”"

"Her mother lifts the pot with potatoes and lowers it onto the surface of the stove. Then she turns back to Sasha, pointing her finger at her daughter’s chest. “You should be careful what you say to others.”

"“Uncle Volya never returned from the camps,” she says. “He was shot attempting to escape. At least that’s what they told Aunt Lilya.”

"It is difficult to imagine that Uncle Volya, soft-jowled and asthmatic, tried to crawl under three rows of barbed wire. His daughter, Nina, nineteen when the war started, volunteered for the front to avenge her father and was killed during her first week of service. When the mailwoman brought a gray letter announcing her death to their door, Aunt Lilya collapsed and never recovered. She died from the heart, Sasha’s mother says. All Russian women, according to her mother, die from the heart."

................................................................................................

Writing by author gets much more unrealistic here.

Did they even have trenches?

"“Hey, Da Vinci,” calls the sergeant, looking over my shoulder. “Make sure you finish that masterpiece before the next attack. The Hermitage can’t wait.”

A Texan wouldn't write or draw like this in midst of bombings, and escape alive from his buddies, soldiers of the bible belt, in trench with him.

And then it smacks even more definitively, not only of someone writing an assignment sitting at a desk in US, but someone unfamiliar with, say, George Patton.

" ... “This is what’s real.” He is a man of utter concreteness, and this time he is right. No Michelangelo or El Greco can shield you from machine guns. No Pushkin, or Turgenev, or even Tolstoy, who knew all about war, can protect you from a shell fragment piercing your back or a tank crawling over your trench. When the sergeant yells, “Attack!” we attack, even if we are ordered to run up a hill where a German machine gun sits buried in a cemented bunker, spewing fire we can’t extinguish. We attack, and after the first waves of us are mowed down, there are always more bodies to throw into the maw, more amateur soldiers to be fed to the meat grinder of battle by the decisions of our military commanders. They yell, “Attack,” and we attack. And those who don’t, those who are afraid to die, those who retreat toward the rear, are mowed down by machine guns of our own domestic making. Our own troops stationed in the rear, shooting all of those with weak nerves, those whose minds are clouded by seeing too many human guts wound around tank turrets, too many bodies with heads blown off, a bloody mess instead of legs, too much death. For fleeing death, they get death. Traitors is the word now attached to their corpses. What’s real is the only thing that matters at the front."

Does the author imagine that soldiers of any army, fighting in any other war or battle, were welcomed back with bouquets - for running away?

Author seeks to invoke contempt at Russian people reacting to death of a leader, one who'd led them through dire circumstances of WWII to victory over an enemy supposed invincible, victory not limited to borders of Russia but allowing Russian army to exact revenge in Germany, even through Berlin.

" ... The steel-like Natalia Petrovna was now weeping openly, as if all her teachers and pupils had been lined up and executed by the Nazis right in front of her, a scene from a war film they’d recently watched in their history class."

If this reaction was seen by anyone in US as ridiculous, it can only be because they forget US people reacting to assassination of JFK, or unexpected demise of an FDR.

Author Texan?

................................................................................................

"She waits for Andrei to say something about his father, to tell her where he has been all this time, to let her know if his father’s return has made her friend happy. ... "

Next, a comment that obviously stems from right-wing and church policies in US

" ... Her mother, like my own, was simply a mother, defined only by her family rather than an outside job she never held. ... "

And those children have grown up healthy, some even preferring to return for higher education to the city where they attended communal childcare centres.

"Does one need love, Sasha wonders—the forbidden kind of love no one talks about, the fiery love, hot and ruthless as the tongues of flame in their stove—to see life as Kolya saw it, full of wonder and promise?"

No.

................................................................................................

10.

"“Hey, kike,” yells a boy from a stoop as Marik and Sasha are walking home from school. “If you weren’t ugly enough before, you’re certainly ugly now.”

"The boy is a year younger than they are, and Sasha has seen him in the hallways of their school ... "

That's something Jews in US suffer even now, and it's easy enough for someone from US to accuse Russian society of, but it's dishonest to insinuate that it's only true of Russia.

Reminds one rather of 'We, The Living', an early work by Ayn Rand, and its triangle, although her love object there wasn't nazi.

"She searches for answers in Kolya’s journal.

"February 21, 1942

" ... It wasn’t Mama who darkened my mind when I thought of introducing Nadia as the woman I loved, my future wife. I thought of my father, who would only need one look at Nadia’s curly hair and skinny arms to know she was Jewish, to know that his son could do much better than entwine his life with an offshoot of the rickety intelligentsia that the Revolution of 1917 had succeeded in deposing. ... "

"It is December, and the three of them are at an ice field in the park behind the end of the streetcar route, tying skates to their valenki boots with ropes. “Tighter,” she says to Marik, whose right skate wobbles when he steps on the ice. She doesn’t have to say anything to Andrei: his knots are exacting, and he is the first to race to the other side of the field, his skates cutting through the ice with resolute lines. Marik and Sasha step onto the field with caution. It is their first outing of the season, and it feels as though they are trying to make sure that their grown arms and legs still remember the moves.

" ... And then, a few seconds into this ferocious race, she hears a thump: a body padded with the wool and cotton of a winter coat hits the ice.

"She grates to a stop and so does Andrei. They both stare at Marik curled by the edge of the field, stroking the ice around him and squinting, feeling for his glasses with his fingers.

"“You pushed me,” he spits out as she hands him the glasses. “I was winning, and you pushed me.”

"“No, I didn’t,” says Andrei. “You stumbled and fell. You always stumble and fall.”

" ... None of them has a shred of interest in her acting, and except for first graders, all have seen the proverbial scene from Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet performed by the previous crop of the school’s drama club, the scene staged every year without fail. The only person who wants to see her act, she knows, is Marik."

" ... She has convinced her schoolmates to follow her despite their boredom, despite the sun slanting its last rays into the dirty windowpanes. She doesn’t yet comprehend the nature of this new power, but it feels like magic."

................................................................................................

11.

"She knows why they are fighting, but knowing the cause of this clash doesn’t help her know what to do.

"“Stop!” she yells, but they don’t seem to hear her. They are frozen in their bitterness and in their battle. She knows she can’t make them stop because they have already abandoned the safe perimeter of common sense and crossed into a place from which they cannot turn back, so she starts running toward home, as fast as she can. ... "

"Then from the forest behind her, there is an explosion. The sound bounces off the trees and then hollows out. The explosion freezes her heart and she knows, even without her mother having to tell her, that she did the right thing by running away from danger. But all she feels is the opposite of right. Would Uncle Kolya have left his fellow soldiers to be killed or captured by the Germans because they were in danger? Would he have abandoned his friends when they needed him?"

"They pull Marik out of the woods on this makeshift sled, trudging silently through the snow, like the tired dogs tugging at their load in a grainy film about the Arctic they all saw at school. When the forest ends, they walk across the field and onto a road that leads to the hospital where her mother works. It is harder to pull Marik over the rough surface of iced pebbles and frozen dirt, ... they drag Marik past wooden houses squatting on the outskirts of town under roofs that have been ravaged by the winter; and finally, as her arms begin to quiver and she is afraid she won’t be able to take one more step, the hospital arranges itself in front of her, as if magically lowered from the pewter sky."

" ... Would Marik still be alive if she hadn’t left the two of them by the bonfire? Would he be alive if her heart hadn’t raced each time Andrei’s sleeve inadvertently brushed against hers?"

" ... Marik is the first person who stopped existing right in front of her eyes. The person who told her she was good at acting, who made her smile. For fourteen years, they played the same games; for ten years, they read the same books; for eight years, they went to the same school and practiced the same piano pieces. And only a day before that Sunday, behind their shed, did he take Sasha’s hand in his, in a different way than they’d held hands before. She tensed the moment his fingers met hers. His touch was clammy and shaky, and there were drops of sweat on his forehead despite the cold outside. For a few seconds, he held her hand as if trying to decide what to do with it; then he took a breath and asked if he could kiss her.

"And now Sasha wishes she’d said yes."

................................................................................................

12.

"How do people fall in love, one of Turgenev’s characters asks in A Nest of Nobles, which they are reading at school. The moral conflict of Turgenev’s novel is between personal happiness and duty, says her teacher. A year has passed since Marik’s death, a long year full of struggle between personal happiness and duty inside her. ... Must Sasha make a choice between her own personal happiness and duty, between Andrei and Marik’s memory?"

" ... She is under the spell of literary trysts in moonlit orchards ... "

"She tries to imagine Leningrad, where Kolya studied painting, with the Neva flowing through its center, the river shackled in its granite embankments. She tries to imagine the Winter Palace, the home of the tsars ... "

................................................................................................

13.

"Sasha thinks of Grandpa, who believes all the news he hears on the radio, and of her mother, who believes that the war was all heroism and valor. Or maybe she doesn’t completely believe it. After all, she worked in a hospital one kilometer from the front, and she must have seen what Kolya saw. But she is no longer sure what Andrei believes in. He has become a mystery, and maybe this is precisely why she is here, lying in the grass next to him. He is like a tough equation she has to solve in math class. She knows she has to unravel the variables that will allow her to learn who he really is, to get down to the X he harbors at his core."

" ... Every day, they stand in lines for milk and bread and carry buckets of water to Grandpa’s beds of potatoes and dill. In July, they make jams from strawberries and currants; in September, they shred head after head of cabbage and layer them with salt and cranberries to fill a barrel for the winter. There is no time for talking about love. ... "

"As she gets up to leave, she looks down and sees Andrei grab a lime-green grasshopper pulsing on its spindly legs by the stem of a bluebell flower and crush it between his fingers."

................................................................................................

14.

"“Don’t you dare yell at us!” her mother shouts. “What makes you believe they will even look at you in Moscow? You think those plays you put on in your drama club were so great? They weren’t. They were pathetic. Pathetic plays in a pathetic theater in a pathetic little town. You’re nothing but a fool, like all the other young fools from all over the country who race to Moscow like flies to sugar, all wanting to be stars, all thinking they’re the next Sarah Bernhardt.”

"Sasha cringes because she fears her mother may turn out to be right. The best drama school in Moscow, the one where she wants to go, admits only twenty-five applicants a year from all over the country, and there must be thousands of people like her who have been infected with the germ of Theater and who will do anything to have a life of real make-believe. The thought that she may fail makes her anger blaze even hotter."

" ... Grandpa’s hands are shaking, as if he is about to hit her. “You will respect your family!” he shouts. “You will be like your uncle Sima, who died right here, in this house. He was a hero who made me proud. You make me sick. Your mother is right: you’re nothing but a clown. A disgrace.”"

"The nettles’ sting makes her clench her teeth, but she doesn’t wail, as she did when she was younger. Never again will she reveal her pain in front of him. She will remain silent, just as his dictum demands, deaf and mute."

"Yet she knows she must go to Moscow and study acting. Even if she ends up in provincial theater, even if she has to announce that dinner is served. The need to leave this place gnaws at her bones like a hungry dog, poisoning her dreams, making her wake up in a cold sweat."

................................................................................................

15.

"She remembers she was at the river with Grandma, rinsing a load of laundry, when a thunderstorm came out of nowhere, and they hid in a shack where someone, long dead, had kept his rowboat, now all crumbly and rotten through, a dark skeleton from old times. They stood inside the shack and waited for the storm to end as a ball of lightning heaved through an empty window cut out of the wall but never enclosed with glass. Afraid to move, she looked at Grandma, her frozen profile, her stiff vertebrae, the corner of her petrified eye. The ball of lightning sailed across the room and lingered over the boat, sighing and glowing, like an enormous egg yolk suspended in the air. They flattened themselves into the splintery wood of the wall, afraid to stir, watching it crackle with electricity. Then the ball of fire dipped, almost touching the bottom of the boat; heaved its glowing mass to the windowsill, as if it had seen enough of what it came to see; and rolled out."

" ... They are now standing at the bank of the Uvod’ River, over the little beach carved by the water from the thicket of reeds and tall grass."

"“My father came back from the camps with no teeth and no forgiveness. He boiled with hate, and he unleashed that hate on us, but mostly on my mother. It was as if it were her fault that a quarter of his life had been stolen from him, as if she didn’t try hard enough to glue together the pieces of the wreck he had become. He said he told me those stories to teach me a life lesson. There is no friendship in the camps, he said. It’s always you against them. As if I needed a lesson from a thug. As if I was going to end up behind barbed wire, like him.”"

"“How could I believe him? This was the stuff of Auschwitz, not our own Vorkuta or Magadan. This is what the Nazis did in their camps. My father had become everything we were fighting against, his cruelty toward my mother, his drunkenness. That’s why I went to work for the Komsomol Committee, because of him. To get away from him, to take revenge on anyone like him. To build a world in which he wouldn’t exist.”

"Andrei’s mouth tenses, and he looks away. “I hated my father, and I still hate him. Not a single tear for him from me.” He turns to Sasha and cups her hand between his palms. “Except for you, Sashenka, from now on, not a single tear for anyone.”"

................................................................................................

16.

"She says the words she has prepared, but all she hears in response is silence, and all she sees is Andrei’s wounded face. She never knew she could possess the power to hurt someone so deeply, to inject such anguish into someone’s eyes. The power she will learn to wield in Moscow, the power that ten years earlier made her believe that the actors in the radio play were really desperate to leave their provincial town, the power that will make her audiences laugh or cry. Was her mother right when she called her an egoistka? An egomaniac basking in her freshly discovered power while plunging a knife into the heart of someone she purports to love."

"Her mother knows what to say to make Sasha feel even more frightened than she already feels. You know she is right, a little voice inside her whispers; you’re nothing but a provincial girl with no connections. She feels a gnawing sensation in her gut, as if a determined hand were trying to unravel her intestines.

"“I’m not saying you don’t have talent,” her mother adds in a conciliatory gesture, sensing Sasha’s dread. “But with all those hordes of youth with connections, whose names are already on the list of the admission board—honestly”—she pauses and gives Sasha a sorrowful smile—“you don’t stand a chance.”"

................................................................................................

17.

"Her hands feel unsteady, and her stomach churns, but she cannot show anyone, even Grandma, that she is terrified. She cannot admit, even to herself, that this is the end of everything she knows, that, just like Andrei’s house, her Ivanovo life is about to go up in flames."

"“This is for you,” says Grandma and hands her a handkerchief tied at the corners. “Open it.”

"Inside is a ring with a green stone, gold and delicate, a treasure worth more than everything she has ever owned."

"Sasha throws her arms around Grandma’s neck. She smells of kitchen and soft cotton, and Sasha presses against her warmth. She knows that Grandma doesn’t believe Sasha will return in two weeks, and this knowledge fortifies her resolve and brings back her strength, at least for the last few minutes. She tells herself that she can’t fall apart in front of everyone on the platform. She can’t allow tears to overwhelm her; she can’t let her mother think that she has been right all along. She looks away, at what she is leaving: everything.

"With a whistle, in a cloud of smoke, the train appears from around the curve, and her mother now hugs her as Sasha snuggles into her wet cheek. “Vsyo budet khorosho,” her mother whispers. “All will be well.” This is her usual refrain—although Sasha knows that her well is very different from Sasha’s—which drowns in the hot steam of the train sighing its way to a stop.

"They have two minutes until it whistles again, until the platform begins to sail away, until Sasha gets, with every moment, farther from life in Ivanovo and closer to Moscow. As she looks over her mother’s shoulder, she sees Andrei standing at the end of the platform. He appears and then vanishes in the clouds of steam rolling from the engine, almost a vision, if she believed in visions. She blinks to see if he is real, but from the stern look on her mother’s face, from the way she resolutely swipes a finger under her eyes and frowns, she knows that he is."

................................................................................................

18.

"She runs to the post office and sends a telegram to Ivanovo. At ten kopecks a word, she must be brief: “Accepted,” she writes. “Kisses. Sasha.” ... For a minute, as her mother stares at the words of the telegram, Sasha imagines the anger and the pride bumping against each other, with pride, at least in her mind, unexpectedly taking the upper hand.

"She knows that Grandma will smile and Grandpa will glare. She knows that Grandma will busy herself in the kitchen, smiling furtively as she rolls the dough for pirozhki, while Grandpa will storm out into the yard and furiously start pulling dandelions out of a bed full of blooming strawberries. Sasha sees her telegram spreading the word to their street, ... "

"She sits in her dorm room, a mirror propped up on the desk against a stack of textbooks. There is nothing interesting about her face that she can see: big gray eyes her acting teacher calls photogenic, a pudgy nose that her roommate Sveta says will always typecast her into character roles, bangs that fall down to her curved eyebrows Sasha has recently plucked with tweezers. This is what art demands, said Sveta, who has already starred in a movie, so Sasha believes her. She sits before a mirror, ruthlessly yanking little hairs out of her face, biting her lip with each tug.

"During the month of September, like college students all over the country from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka, they pay for their free education by working on a collective farm, where there is a perpetual shortage of hands to harvest the vegetables planted in May. Every morning, they climb into a creaky bus and for eight hours bend over rows of potatoes, onions, and turnips, raking through the dirt soaked from recent rains in search of produce that hasn’t yet rotted in the ground. Sasha doesn’t know where all the collective farmers are, the workers who have tended to these crops they are now told to harvest, but as she lifts her head, all she sees are drama students up to their ankles in mud. Every day, practical as ever, Sveta stuffs the best-looking vegetables into a bag to take back and store in the bottom of the armoire in their dorm room. At the end of the month, they have a pile of food that will last them until New Year’s."

"During the first year, no one is allowed to speak in acting class. For two semesters, they drink from imaginary glasses and eat with nonexistent forks and knives, diligently screw in light bulbs, feel the wind standing on the bow of a ship, thread needles and sew up holes. For her first final exam in acting, Sasha picks up imaginary clamps and scalpels and hands them to the surgeon played by Lara. She has learned to do this by observing a nurse during surgeries at Central Clinical Hospital, four operations a week, for two months. The rest in their class silently slice apples, bang make-believe keys of typewriters, sway in crowded buses, knit scarves, chew on lemon wedges, embrace illusory lovers, wait in lines, walk pretend dogs, uncork wine bottles, wash underwear in the sink, stand on the observation deck of the highest building in Moscow and look down at the sprawling city laid out below—all on the small stage of their freshman studio."

"Moscow is full of things Sasha has never seen: hard salami and chocolate candies in bright wrappers, silk scarves and cakes adorned with pink cream roses, nylon see-through stockings and whimsical bottles of bitter-smelling perfume. There are also open exhibits of modern art labeled “cosmopolitan,” which were banned only a few years earlier. There are unofficial concerts by a young bard Volodya Vysotsky, who often comes to their dorm to sing about struggle, angst, and love while they sit on the kitchen floor, mesmerized and quiet, drinking teakettles of young sour wine Georgians sell at the nearby railroad station. There is a film called The Magnificent Seven playing in two central theaters, the first movie from America that ever made it across their borders."

"The three of them hold a discussion about the possible repercussions of challenging the ban, which ends with Sveta’s decree that The Magnificent Seven, which they have already seen three times, as well as the cosmopolitan art exhibits and Vysotsky unofficial concerts, are sufficient reasons to break the school rules. Sveta gives them permission to sign up for the crowd scenes at the Mosfilm studio and tells them to hide in the back so as not to be caught on-screen."

................................................................................................

19.

"On those evenings when they do not participate in mass scenes at the theater, Sasha and her roommate Lara sit on her bed and talk. Lara is from Pskov, a town to the northeast of Ivanovo, a place as small as Sasha’s hometown, a place often paired with the adjective provincial. They are the same age, both children of the war, both fatherless. Lara’s father was killed in Poland in 1944, when the tide of the war had already turned and Russian troops were advancing west, when the word victory had already begun to form on people’s lips. “1944, when no one should have been killed,” Lara whispers, looking down as she straightens the corner of the duvet cover with her hand."

" ... Is Sasha’s search for a different life in Moscow simply an extension of her looking for a father, someone noble and heroic, someone whose name wouldn’t make Grandma frown? Has Lara, all this time, been looking for a father, too? It is probably to fortify the growing bond between them that Sasha tells her the story from her childhood."

"She doesn’t remember when she realized it was useless to wait for her father to return, but at seven, Sasha knew one thing: if she wanted a father, she had to take matters into her own hands and find him."

" ... He stood by the kiosk with a glass of golden liquid in his hand, his resplendent uniform cinched by a belt with a shining buckle, his black boots reflecting the sun. ... "

"“Zdravstvuite,” she said politely, as if he were her teacher. The man swallowed what was left in the glass, and she saw the sharp bone in the front of his neck move up and down. He looked at her, and his eyes crinkled, golden and liquid, as if the juice he’d just swallowed, instead of going down his throat, went up and lit his eyes from within.

"“Do you want to be my father?” she asked, and from the way his smile spread across his face, she knew he did, even before he could open his mouth. “Come,” she said and grabbed him by the hand. “I’ll take you to Mama.”"

"She clasped her mother’s hand and set it down onto the man’s broad palm. Her mother’s face was open and unprotected, lit by surprise. “Here,” Sasha told her. “I want him to be my father.”

"The next few weeks were light and breathless, like the anticipation of a New Year’s Eve. The man’s name was Alexei, Lyosha for short, and he was a military pilot. On his first visit, he came to their door dressed in his uniform, which temporarily melted the icy blue stare of Grandpa, who didn’t trust strangers. His word for strangers was chuzhoi, as opposed to svoi, our own. The same words Vera in their drama school uses to separate actors from those on the other side of the curtain. You can only trust svoi, said Grandpa, a small bunch that included their immediate family here and Grandma’s sister who lived in Kineshma, ninety kilometers away. Sasha was not sure she liked Grandpa’s philosophy. If what he said was true, she couldn’t trust Marik, or Andrei, or Marik’s mother, who taught them about Pushkin. If they couldn’t trust anyone but their family, how could they even get on a streetcar without risking their lives? And what about those radio reports of tons of grain they never saw? When it came to the radio, did Grandpa not trust the news, either?

"The reason he wasn’t sure if he could trust Lyosha, she thought, was the melting gaze in her mother’s eyes when Lyosha looked in her direction. That was when she forgot about Grandpa, which instantly stripped him of his command status because, as they all knew, a commander could never be ignored."

" ... Even at seven, she knew that what drove the babushkas to flap their arms and fuse together into what looked like a murder of crows was envy. Lyosha was not an invalid and not a drunk, with arms and legs intact, and that made him a rare commodity in postwar Ivanovo. He could have been the only man with extremities and a smile to roam their streets in the last five years.

"But after four months of this privileged, man-infused existence, something happened. Her mother’s eyes were no longer liquid, because Lyosha only stopped by once a week and was not there long enough to lift Sasha onto his shoulders so she could parade around the yard. ... "

"Then one week, he was not there at all, and her mother announced at dinner that Lyosha had been sent with his air squadron to an overseas military mission. She said this staring into her borscht, and from Grandma’s deep and silent sigh, Sasha knew that she didn’t believe her."

"The war aftermath is what Sasha and Lara both remember, not the war itself. The time of women, children, and old men; the time of nettle soup in the summer and cabbage soup in the winter; the time of waiting for fathers, sons, and brothers to return. The time of the gradual realization of how many wouldn’t."

" ... It won’t be until April when the snow melts and reveals what is below these winter corpses—more dead. Layers of the dead: at the bottom are soldiers in summer uniforms; on top of them are sailors in black jackets and flared pants; then lie Siberians in sheepskin jackets and felt valenki boots who died in the December attacks of 1941. On top of them are fighters in cotton-filled jackets and cloth hats that had been distributed in the besieged Leningrad. Layer upon layer of corpses: a monstrous, bottomless layer cake of death."

" ... As I stumble into the woods on the other side, I think of Borodino, of Tolstoy’s Volume III of War and Peace we had to read in art school. Imagine this picture, the professor said: tens of thousands of bodies strewn across the battlefield, the ground soaked with blood, half the Russian Army killed in one day. And the most surreal thing of all is that we claimed victory. ... "

"Sasha wraps her arms around Lara to hold her, but Lara stiffens, resisting her embrace. She has been trying to erase that from her memory, as if it had never happened. She thinks that if she empties her mind of that day, the event will disappear. She believes that pity will only cement it into her memory."

"Yet in her bones, Sasha knows how fortunate they are to be here, in this city and this school. She knows that acting will endow them with power, the power Lara lacked when she was in ninth grade. When they master its secrets of becoming someone else, Sasha says, Lara will be as liberated from her past as she is when she inhabits the characters in classic plays, strong yet conflicted, but always in control of their lives."

................................................................................................

20.

"Despite her school faculty’s disdain for movies, the Mosfilm studio regularly scouts their hallways for fresh talent. Studio agents, unshaved men in denim and loose-haired women dressed in clothes they don’t see in stores, catch students between classes to invite them to screen tests, enticing them with fees only the studio can pay. During the spring semester, Sveta is offered the lead part in a film set in contemporary Moscow, and Sasha is invited for a supporting role in Rimsky-Korsakov’s film opera The Tsar’s Bride."

"Sveta is lucky. The dean allows her to accept the role, since all the shooting will be completed in the summer, during their vacation. Fortunately for her, the filming of her movie will not interfere with her education. Sasha’s case is more complicated. The Tsar’s Bride will film all the outdoor scenes in the summer, just like Sveta’s movie, but the indoor shooting in Riga is scheduled during her first semester of the second year, throughout the fall."

" ... Sasha knows he is not going to allow a second-year student to miss the whole fall semester, with classes in literature, political economy, and history of art, not to mention the new sophomore classes of ballet and fencing. With regret, she thinks of Riga, the capital of Latvia, where the indoor filming will be done, the Soviet Union’s most western city she will never see.

"When their artistic director Vera relays the dean’s decision, Sasha is stunned.

"“We’ve taken your good grades into consideration,” says Vera, blowing out a cloud of tobacco smoke. “You will study the required general subjects on your own and take exams in January. The film will be counted as a pass for all the other classes that have to do with acting.”"

"Sasha is triumphant and relieved. She will spend the summer in the old town of Suzdal, which she imagines to be a lot like Ivanovo, only full of ancient churches. Then, in the fall, when her classmates move on to improvisations with words, she will be living in a real hotel in Riga, as foreign as any city abroad, getting paid a salary exponentially greater than any Moscow mass scene could offer."

" ... Did Andrei’s face ever darken over Marik’s death? She never heard him lament placing the shell into Marik’s hand. Shouldn’t Andrei have known that what he drove Marik to do was within the realm of danger? Shouldn’t he wake up at least as often as she does, the weight of Marik’s death constricting his chest? ... "

"As they walked along the alleys of the dead, she thought it was ironic that Marik’s grave would overlook, for all eternity, as Grandma whispered in her under-the-breath prayer, the woods that killed him. Or was it the remnants of the war that killed him? Or was it Andrei, with his goading and mocking? Or maybe—a thought that still stings—what killed him was her abandoning them by the fire, two stubborn boys who wouldn’t budge, two friends who for a moment became blinded by rage and who had no one to shake them back into their own truth. Maybe what killed Marik was her betrayal."

" ... “She can’t get out of bed,” Sasha heard her mother say to Grandma when she thought Sasha was out of earshot. She couldn’t imagine what kind of illness could shackle Marik’s mother to bed for so long, the same teacher who read the last chapter of Yevgeniy Onegin to them without interruption, forty students rapt and silent, impatient to hear if Tatyana would leave her old husband to be with the man she had loved her whole life.

"Then, one day, a month later, Marik’s mother got out of bed and made her way to where the river settled into a small lake, a little dirt beach for sunbathing and swimming in the summer. It was the end of April, and no one understood how it could have happened that she found herself in the water. No one understood how the placid Uvod’ River, even at its April fullest, could have turned into a stormy sea and drawn someone to its pebbly bottom.

"An accident at the lake was what their principal called her death at a school meeting. But Sasha was not sure it was an accident, the same way she knew Marik’s death was not an accident. What was it, then? Did she die because her son died? Did this mean that Andrei was complicit in her death as well? Was Sasha complicit, too?

"Her mother, Grandma, and Sasha went to Marik’s mother’s funeral. Her grave was next to Marik’s, which meant, Sasha wanted to think, that March and April were relatively happy months for Ivanovo because no one else had died."

................................................................................................

21.

"In August, she is in Suzdal, filming The Tsar’s Bride. It is an opera, with the Bolshoi stars singing on tape as they act the scenes, so the experience is not unlike what they have been doing during the first year in drama school: living and acting but remaining speechless. The film’s director, Sergey Vladimirovich, gives her thoughtful notes at the end of each day, and she is grateful he treats her just like all the other actors. Or maybe not quite. Maybe he is a little too involved in her scenes, a little too attentive in his instructions to her. She closes her mind to this. He is married and middle-aged and besides, back in Ivanovo, there is Andrei. Or at least she hopes there is still Andrei.

"Her character, Lyubasha, smolders with anguish and anger. She begs the man she loves, the man who has already laid eyes on someone else, not to abandon her, not to crush her life. Night and day, she thinks of him. Night and day, only him, she sings. Lyubasha, short for Lyubov, love. She is despondent, feverish, losing hope, as the Bolshoi orchestra echoes from a tape recorder with music as restless as her mood. Lyubasha is so desperate to keep her lover that she decides to buy poison to exile her rival from life. Poison that will extinguish her rival’s eyes, drain color from her cheeks, make her hair fall out, strand by strand; poison that will bring her lover back. “I will give you everything I have, all my pearls and all my precious stones.” She sings Rimsky-Korsakov’s lines to the chemist who has promised the deadly potion. “And if that’s not enough, I’ll borrow or steal. I’m not afraid of servitude or debt.” The orchestra reverberates in heavy chords throbbing with a premonition of tragedy. But the chemist doesn’t want her necklaces or her rings. He wants only her honor. Her honor she has already given to the man who is about to leave her.

"“Night and day,” she sings, “I think of him. I have forgotten my father and my mother for him,” she laments, holding the procured poison, shadowing the harmonies that pulse with dread. “I have abandoned all my family. I’ve given him everything I have. And now he wants to leave me for a girl whose eyes are brighter, whose braids are longer. A girl who doesn’t love him, who is innocent of his desire, who is betrothed to someone else.” A French horn enters with a throaty solo. “What have I come to?” cries Lyubasha, brokenhearted, bitter, inconsolable, the violins of the orchestra weeping from the Bolshoi Theatre tape."

"They are almost done with the outdoor shots, and at the end of this week, after a banquet thrown by the local government office, the film crew will pack up and take the train to Riga.

"This is Sasha’s first banquet, and she has been looking forward to it for weeks. Back in drama school, when they have extra money, Sveta and her other classmates mark the end of exams at Café Leningradskoe, where they pool their rubles together for a bottle of wine and a few cheap zakuski, but she has never been to a celebration that is designed to honor artists. The local Communist Party Committee has invited them all—the actors and the crew—to the biggest restaurant in Suzdal, Bely Lebed, or the White Swan.

"She watches Raisa, who plays her on-screen rival, Marfa, the woman Ivan the Terrible chooses as his bride, the woman Lyubasha poisons, spend half an hour teasing her hair and pinning up a shirt that in two months of work has become too wide at the waist. Sasha watches her thread a needle as she stretches out her arm that underscores the length of bone expected for a heroine. She is shorter than Raisa, and her Ivanovo bones boast in breadth rather than length. In the movie, Marfa, innocent of Lyubasha’s rivalry, doesn’t want to marry the tsar because she loves another man, and only a few days ago, in one of the ancient monasteries Suzdal is famous for—white stone walls covered with dark icons lit by candles—Raisa filmed the final scene where, after five takes, she goes insane and dies. As Raisa is finishing pinning her shirt, Sasha ties her hair back into a ponytail, makes up her face using the tricks she has learned from Sveta and their makeup class, and puts on her only good dress, stitched together from black cotton dotted with tiny daisies."

"For no reason at all, she turns to the door and sees a handsome man in a suit and tie shaking everyone’s hand. She knows it has to be a mirage, but even after she shuts her eyes and opens them again, Andrei is still there. She looks away, but her head turns back, like a ball of iron attracted by a magnet, and the tugging pain of the year without him suddenly swells inside her and makes her walk in his direction, as if hypnotized.

"He takes her by the shoulders and kisses her on the cheeks, three times, an old-fashioned custom Grandma favors. There is a different air about him, the way he carries himself, the way he moves—an air of gravity and importance. Maybe he is no longer Andrei but Andrei Stepanovich, a man she knows yet does not know. In this byzantine room of so much excess, he seems completely at ease, introducing himself to the crew members and kissing Raisa’s hand as if she were a real tsarina. Sasha sees all this in snatches—discarded frames on the floor of a film editing room. When they are invited to sit at the table, Andrei is next to her on her right. Sasha’s first banquet is foggy, experienced through the delirium of his presence."

" ... First it’s vodka; then it’s either cognac or wine. She chooses wine. It is red and sweet, the wine from Georgia called Khvanchkara, the favorite wine of Stalin, the toastmaster proclaims. Sasha has her doubts about this claim, for whoever knew what Stalin favored has probably been dead for at least a decade, arrested and shot for knowing too much, but sitting next to Andrei makes her skepticism melt away. Despite a line of waitresses snaking through the room carrying trays of hot dishes ... she cannot but feel heat radiating from him. ... "

" ... She doesn’t know how Andrei found out about the filming in Suzdal, but she is glad he did. She is glad she can be alone with him in this town that has been turned into a huge movie set. She is glad she is nearly eighteen, an acting student doing real acting. Today is a perfect day to celebrate all this."

................................................................................................

22.

"After a minute of silence, he speaks reluctantly. “I have to go back to my life. And you must go back to yours.”

"There is a shadow now that dims everything in the room, as if the curtains were suddenly pulled closed. The street below is empty except for a blue Moskvitch parked at the curb below their window, probably an official Party Committee car waiting for Andrei. “Why did you come here,” she asks, “if you only intended to stay for a night and run out at the crack of dawn?” He straightens up but doesn’t turn to her and doesn’t answer. “Why did you go to all the trouble to find me? There are other women, I’m sure, women you could’ve had with much less effort.”"

" ... Sensing her anger, he turns and sits in an armchair by the bed. With morning light flooding into the room, he is no longer Andrei. He is Andrei Stepanovich, a Party functionary.

"“Is that car downstairs one of the Party perks?” she asks, sharpening her voice to counter his silence. “Am I just a perk, too?”

"“Leave the Party out of it,” he snaps. “There are things about the Party you’ll never understand. The Party isn’t a concept; it’s made up of people, flesh and blood. And these people trust me. You might even say they love me. They were my family when I no longer had a family.”"

"“I cannot marry an actress,” he says, looking at the floor. “It’s one of the Party’s strictest rules.”

"This is so sudden, she is rendered mute. His words feel like a gut punch that has left her trying to catch a breath and find her balance.

"“How do you know I would even consider marrying you?” she spits out when she is finally able to speak, a question that makes him wince. “How do you know I would consider marrying anyone?”

"There is a sharp intake of breath, his mouth tensing around what he decides not to say. Instead he steps toward her and pulls her into his arms again. ... "

................................................................................................

23.

"When her scenes are not on the schedule, she walks on Riga’s narrow streets, past its cathedrals, so gothic and un-Russian, the antipodes of Suzdal’s churches. In her mind, she rewinds their Suzdal night again and again, looking for clues. He cannot marry an actress: what an absurd, insulting declaration. It reeks of the medieval stupor of old times when actors could not be buried inside a Christian cemetery, when their bodies were laid to rest behind the cemetery walls, away from all the decent, sinless souls. And who said she is ready to talk about marriage? Who said that Theater does not have its own requirements, just as severe as the Party does?"

" ... His father was still safely in Siberia, so was she twelve? And what were they planning to do there in his tiny kitchen? When his mother caught them that afternoon, she poured them milk, placing her glass on a doily embroidered with elaborate roses she had cross-stitched. It seemed impossible that her gnarled hands, big and full of calluses, could have produced the tiny filigree stitches on the doily, but that was the heart of Andrei’s house—and maybe of Andrei himself—roughness stitched into beauty.

"She thinks of her character’s death at the end of The Tsar’s Bride. In the final scene, Lyubasha admits that she has poisoned her rival, who has just been chosen as the tsar’s bride. Her lover is furious, grief-stricken, desperate. He knows they are both doomed, and he plunges a knife into Lyubasha’s chest. A quick death, for which she is grateful. “Thank you.” She sings Rimsky-Korsakov’s words in a pale voice to the mournful wail of cellos. “Straight into my heart.” Lyubasha dies first—to a coda of tragic chords—just before her poisoned rival goes mad and expires, just before her lover is dragged away to be beheaded.

"Why is it, Sasha wonders, that she was able to intuit such tragic, crushing love? What made the director so satisfied with the way she acted in the scene? How was she able to get it right so that the camera believed her? She has so many questions she would like to ask, although she knows she would never dare pose those questions to the director or to anyone else. Why did she have to die? Is death Lyubasha’s punishment for her intense, unbending passion? Does death stalk under the murky vaults of medieval and contemporary mores, her punishment for sex?

"Sasha walks past the dark buildings, wallowing in sadness, as despondent as Irina from Three Sisters. She walks and walks, burnishing her sadness with every step into the ancient cobblestones of Riga’s streets, and Chekhov, she thinks, would be proud of her angst."

" ... Shouldn’t she thank him for showing her how to make the camera caress her face with radiance and light?

"Sasha looks back at the director and smiles, letting him know that his attention hasn’t gone unnoticed, telling him with her eyes that she is almost ready."

................................................................................................

24.

"Sasha returns to the Vakhtangov Drama School in January, with full credit for all the courses she missed during the fall semester. In a year and a half, she has learned to observe. She has learned to watch what people do, how they move, and how they speak, how they squint their eyes, tighten their jaws, and knead their hands. She remembers every character she sees and every emotion she feels and stores them in a little box inside her, like photos in an album, where they will wait until she will need to pull them out for a role. She has also learned about heartbreak, thanks to Andrei and Rimsky-Korsakov, the opera composer.

"In acting classes, they have moved to scenes. Yet they rarely see themselves onstage the way their acting teachers see them, and their stage personalities don’t even hint at their real ones. Why does the most stunning woman in their class, Zhanna, with raven-wing eyebrows over dark-blue eyes, become average and boring onstage, while her roommate Lara, quiet and unnoticed in life, suddenly grows ten centimeters taller, her face illuminated from within? “Stage charm,” their teacher Vera says, the term she has just introduced in their new class, Manners."

" ... “Next year, when you are allowed to choose your own scenes, you can play whatever characters you like, but right now, be so kind as to play the roles you are assigned and work within the emploi we see you in.” She flicks off the ash at the new word emploi, the role archetype. Their school has told them what their archetypes are from now on: Sveta is an ingenue, Zhanna is a Soviet heroine, and Sasha is a character role catchall: a funny klutz, a peasant bully, or a heroine’s sharp-elbowed friend."

" ... She, Sveta, and Lara are free from classes for almost a month, and they have Moscow, sunny and breathless thanks to Khrushchev’s political thaw, to themselves. With the extra income from film, they live like they imagine artists should live, recklessly and freely. They feast on bowls of pelmeni dumplings and bottles of Georgian wine in a café two blocks away from their dorm and dive into the Moskva River with a bunch of schoolboys who are not afraid of swimming in the shadow of the Kremlin. They race one another on merry-go-round horses in Gorky Park, their faces whipped by the wind and their hearts brimming with happiness ... "

"It is the biggest apartment she has ever seen, cavernous and full of light, warm air hovering somewhere around the intricate ceiling molding four meters high, an apartment where the excessive space hypnotizes and intimidates.

"“I want to show you a book on acting by Vakhtangov, a first edition,” he says, fumbling through the book spines on the shelf behind the couch. Vakhtangov was the founder of Sasha’s drama school, an indisputable object of her interest. The director’s wife is on tour with the Bolshoi Theatre, and Sasha knows what this book viewing invitation means. She has learned many things since her night with Andrei in Suzdal, and she tries to suppress the gnawing feeling in her gut that she will end up doing something she is not sure she wants to do."

" ... Sasha finds herself sinking into the plush upholstery as he pours her a glass of golden wine from a bottle that she has never seen in the stores. ... "

" ... The Tsar’s Bride is over, and so is their work together. Is she happy in this vast place where everything pleases the eyesight: big windows, half-opened, letting in the jingles of a streetcar; dark bookshelves filled with first editions of tomes by theater titans; a glass coffee table, a piece of furniture she has never seen before? Is she happy to feel the director’s hands on her shoulders? Is she, at least, not terribly unhappy?"

" ... In addition to good cognac, he introduces her to the Hungarian Tokaji in round bottles with elongated necks you can’t find behind the counters of Soviet wine stores. He is always there, leaving messages with Aunt Sonya at the entrance to her dorm, and if he suddenly disappears for a week or two, she knows that his opera singer wife is back home from a Bolshoi tour."

"February 13, 1942"

" ... I think I was the only one who came to visit Nadia and her mother after Naum Semenovich’s arrest. Her house might as well have been stricken by the plague, and their friends and neighbors, those who were not informers, were afraid to catch the deadly infection."

" ... I wanted to tell her that nothing bad was going to happen to her, that I would kill any bastard who would so much as attempt to touch her, that I would always be there to protect her. But we both knew that if the NKVD came for her and her mother, the same way they came for Naum Semenovich, there would be nothing I could do to stop them. We both knew what I would never tell her, what could not be acknowledged if we wanted to stay sane and go on with our lives."

................................................................................................

25.

"“You’d better be ready to show everything you’ve learned,” their artistic director Vera tells them, “or you’ll get a failing dvoika in acting, and they’ll ship you straight to Pinsk to organize an acting club for janitors in their local House of Culture.”

"For this exam, they are allowed to choose their own scenes, and what Sasha chooses makes Vera light up a cigarette and silently gaze into the distance."

" ... “I want to play Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka.” The beautiful, conflicted, and infinitely flawed femme fatale Grushenka in Brothers Karamazov. The tall, curvaceous twenty-two-year-old, a local seductress with feline movements, who is in love with the tempestuous Dmitri. A role that wouldn’t be assigned to her by anyone but her."

" ... “I know Grushenka, and I want to play her.”

"For a minute, Vera considers her silently, exhaling rings of smoke. Her face is an impenetrable mask, and Sasha doesn’t know what she sees.

"“As you wish, then,” she says finally. “But you will regret this. Maybe for the rest of your life.”"

" ... is it possible that all this brooding about provinces and Dostoyevsky is nothing more than a distraction? Is she in such desperate need of Andrei simply because he has placed himself out of her reach, having exited the stage?

"For her Dostoyevsky scene, the school provides a mentor whose name makes Sasha breathless, the legend of Russian theater Elena Aleksandrovna Polevitskaya. They all know about her from classes on the history of Theater, where their professor lauded her famous interpretations of classical roles on Russian and European stages. How someone could have performed both in Russia and Europe, Sasha cannot fathom. True, Polevitskaya began her acting career in tsarist Russia, leaving the country shortly after the Revolution, but then she chose to return to her motherland, which was by then Soviet, and to spend the rest of her life acting and later teaching at the Vakhtangov Theatre. They only hear about people leaving for the West; they never hear about anyone coming back.

"But there is no time to ponder such nonacting questions. Sasha can’t believe she is going to work with the actress who played Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka for Russian and European audiences, to critical acclaim. She can’t believe her own impudence and gall, her foolish insistence on a role that the renowned actress will immediately know isn’t Sasha’s. “You’re chopping off the branch you’re sitting on,” said Vera coldly after she informed her of the rehearsal arrangements, a phrase Sasha pretended not to hear so she didn’t have to fumble for a response."

"“Do you want to know what acting really is?” she says as she describes her work in prerevolutionary Moscow. “Imagine you are bathing in a tub, with all your favorite oils and scrubs, and suddenly a tour group walks in.”"

"“Theater will rob you of everything,” she says. “Everything.” She looks at Lara and Sasha as if their faces were open books with their life stories, where she could already read the future. “You, girls, will never have a family. It will be replaced by Theater, which will always control you, like a jealous husband. Nothing else will ever matter to you but Theater. And then, in the end, when you’re old and sick, it will chew you up and spit you out. You will end up all alone, and there will be no one to so much as bring you a glass of water on your deathbed.” She gets up and walks toward the window, where her small figure is outlined by the last streaks of pale spring light. What she has just said, despite her conviction, sounds so melodramatic that Sasha has a suspicion she has just recited lines from one of her many roles."

" ... What if Grandma, the only one who ever believed in her, turns out to be wrong?"

................................................................................................

26.

"During the next month, they each visit Elena Aleksandrovna separately. Sasha doesn’t know what happens with Lara and Slava, but they walk around with a tome of Brothers Karamazov, just as she does. When she asks them about their rehearsals, they both say that they simply talked. At her rehearsals, she does more than talk. She draws the plan of the house where Grushenka lived, complete with the view from her window, all based on the descriptions in the novel and on her memories of her grandparents’ house in Ivanovo. By the end of that month, she knows not only her role from the beginning of the novel to its end, but also the complete novel itself, almost by heart. And what she can’t find in the novel, she creates: every event and every character, no matter how small, now has a story that precedes their appearance on the page. She knows every person’s routines and habits; she knows what they crave to eat and what hides behind the doors of their armoires. She sees their wrinkled foreheads and pursed lips; their hair, carefully arranged or disheveled and unwashed; their stooped shoulders, their straight backs, their striding or mincing steps. She knows what makes their hearts swell and their blood run cold.

"The next three weeks go to researching hundred-year-old paintings and photographs from Elena Aleksandrovna’s collections and the archives of several Moscow libraries. They examine every piece of furniture and silverware, every hat and hairstyle, every necklace and scarf. No detail is too small. On their teacher’s order, Lara and Sasha spend evenings walking around the dorm with dinner plates balanced on their heads, their waists constricted by thick strips of rubber so that they can feel corsets from the previous century on their own skin. Every day it takes a few tries before they learn to align their necks and spines so that the plates don’t tilt, threatening to crash onto the hallway floor."

" ... Her mother saw the truth: following in her steps was the only thing Sasha was good for. “But did I listen to her? And now I’m going to fail abysmally, to fall on my face in front of the whole Moscow drama school, in front of the entire city.” This is what she deserves, failure and torment. She shouldn’t be studying acting in the capital; she doesn’t deserve to stand on a Moscow stage. She doesn’t deserve to approach any classic, let alone Dostoyevsky. “What possessed me to choose a scene from Brothers Karamazov? Didn’t Vera warn me more than once? Didn’t everyone warn me? Was I overpowered by the demons of temporary insanity, and now it is too late, and now the only possible ending for me is disgrace and shame?”"

"Lara has already presented her archetype-appropriate scene and received an A, so Sasha is not sure her friend can understand her turmoil. She is now a professional actor, just as is Slava, and they are both going to star on the Moscow stage because they both have talent. They deserve to be here. What she deserves is nothing. She is nothing. Why did she think she had a gift? Why did she think she had enough strength for this?"

................................................................................................

27.

"Ten days before the acting exam, the three of them first recite the lines of their scene. They do their best; they try to be persuasive and organic. They try to please their teacher who has invested months of time in their nineteenth-century immersion.

"Polevitskaya is quiet throughout the scene. She is quiet after the scene ends. “Well,” she finally says and rises from her chair, ending the rehearsal."

"But the day begins with a bombshell. Vera calls the three of them into a classroom to announce that Polevitskaya has fallen ill and will no longer be able to work with them. ... "

"“We can’t! We simply can’t!” Sasha shrieks, her voice on the verge of breaking. “I’ll mess up and they’ll kick me out and they will be right.”

"“Calm down,” Slava orders in a new voice edged with steel, a man from the Caspian Sea taking charge of the Dostoyevsky territory. “We are going to stage this scene ourselves. It’s a piece of cake.”"

" ... The pathetic handout of a credit Vera has offered will get her nowhere but into mass scenes of theaters in the provinces from which she will never again emerge. ... "

"Yet if she doesn’t finish this scene, her failure will be irrevocable and instant. If she doesn’t prove that she belongs in the world of Theater, she might as well pack up and take the first train to Ivanovo, where for the rest of her life she will be like everyone else, building their bright socialist future, one red brick at a time."

"“Today we’ll block the scene, and then we’ll run through it twice,” he decrees. Sasha is glad someone has made a decision, and she forces herself to concentrate on what Slava is saying. “Remember your objective,” he tells her. “You want to humiliate your rival. You promised Lara’s Katerina, who wants to marry Dmitri, to give him up, and she believed you. She invited you to her house to thank you. But you love Dmitri and have no intention of giving him up. You play with Lara, the way a cat plays with a mouse before devouring it. You let Lara praise you; you let her kiss your hand in gratitude and adoration, and then you strike. You tell her you’ll never give up Dmitri. What you want is to keep your lover and to humiliate your rival. This is your objective in the scene. Remember this and everything will work.”"

"On the way to the exam, she thinks of the scene, and images begin to roll before her eyes. She sees the dusty streets of Ivanovo where she grew up, bird-cherry and lilac bushes with the white and purple froth of flowers, a window with lace curtains looking out into a small garden, a horse harnessed to a carriage by the gate into a courtyard. She is Grushenka, restless and willful; her movements are tender and her steps are soft; she blooms with the kind of beauty that will lose harmony by the time she is thirty: the beauty of the moment, a flighty beauty. She walks noiselessly, like a cat, and she speaks slowly, stretching the vowels to bring significance to every word. Her right hand is small and plump, the hand that Katerina, with all her nobility and wealth, will hold and kiss three times with strange ecstatic adoration, an act of reverence and revenge Sasha is about to stage for the kindhearted Alyosha, the brother of her beloved Dmitri. The passionate and proud Dmitri, who she knows will choose her over the noble, beautiful, and rich Katerina. The Dmitri she has always loved, her soul mate Dmitri, who now in her mind has Andrei’s face. She loves him maddeningly, madly—him alone and only him, Dmitri-Andrei, engraved on her heart for as long as she lives."

"“Brothers Karamazov,” Vera announces. The title, with Sasha’s name attached to it, scrapes her ears, emphasizing the incongruity between the two, exposing her impudence to the entire school. Vera pauses and looks up. Sasha’s heart stops.

"“The opinion of this committee is that in your scene, you have persuaded the audience by masterfully portraying the atmosphere of Dostoyevsky. Aleksandra Maltseva will receive the highest grade and credit with distinction. The scene is judged outstanding and will serve as proof of high professionalism in her acting diploma.”

"This is when Sasha feels that something has cinched her throat, and she knows she is crying. She heaves with sobs as if a dam has broken, releasing all that has been stored inside since she first read the Grushenka scene. A few friends jump up from their seats, but Vera stops them. “Let her cry,” she says, waving her hand. “She needs to let it out.”"

" ... One thing is obvious: something significant has just come to an end, and she is standing at a threshold. From this moment on, she will have to start everything anew.

"She cries because her former life is over. She cries because what lies before her is daunting and unknown. Or maybe she cries because her drama school ordeal has ended, and she has prevailed. She, not Grandpa and her mother, who have been waiting for her to crawl back, humiliated by her lack of an acting gift. She cries to sear into memory the moment she heard Three Sisters on the radio, the moment she realized that Theater would be her destiny. She now knows she was right. She and Grandma, and no one else."

................................................................................................

28.

"Leningrad is more dignified than Moscow, its low skyline letting the winds from the Baltic Sea bloat the Neva in the fall when the water rises and floods the streets, closing schools but never canceling performances at her theater. The Bolshoi Drama Theatre is in the center of the city, on the Fontanka embankment, an imposing building with white columns along the facade. It is this theater that Sasha, Lara, and Slava have been invited to join upon graduation.

"She could have stayed at her school’s Vakhtangov Theatre, along with Sveta, but after years of studies, Moscow felt too familiar, too provincial, too much like Ivanovo. She knew exactly what roles she would be playing, all Russian classics; she knew her future acting partners, all her former classmates. She also knew she would be expected to come to Sergey’s apartment every time his wife went on tour; she even knew what pastries he would carefully arrange for her on a dish with the lily-of-the-valley border.

"Leningrad, on the other hand, is an enigma, and the Bolshoi Drama Theatre, a legend. She has always wanted to live in Russia’s only European city where art graces every street with the curved facades sculpted by architects from Italy and France who reinvented their designs for this northern climate, where the air is grainy with the afternoon twilight in winter and the milky nightglow in June. Besides, she has wanted to live in the place where Kolya studied art; she has wanted to stand on the bridge where he met Nadia. She has wanted to see with her eyes what she has only pictured in her mind: the building on Herzen Street where Nadia lived with her parents, Leningrad University on the Neva embankment where she studied philology and, not far from it, the Academy of Arts where Kolya learned to draw and paint.

"She now has her own place to live. After the first six months of work, when she lived in the dormitory, her theater gave her a one-room apartment, perhaps to offset the dismal salary of all stage actors in repertory theaters dictated by the state."

" ... The Bolshoi Theatre is like a medieval fortress, and if they decided to reside here and never return home, every requirement of their life, from food to clothes to books, would be easily sustained within these walls."

" ... “There is an informer in every workplace in our vast motherland,” Sveta warned them back in drama school, “but Theater is always in the avant-garde of Soviet spying,” she insisted, “because plays have the power to influence so many people all at once. ‘Theater is a very dangerous weapon,’” she quoted the legendary director Meyerhold. Sasha wasn’t sure she believed Sveta back then, but in the few months working here, she has learned this much: trust is an exotic fruit that doesn’t grow in this semiarctic zone of freezing winters and rainy, mosquito-infested summers. Aside from their small kompaniya of three friends, they can trust no one in their Bolshoi Theatre."

"She trusts Lara and Slava unequivocally. The person she doesn’t trust is herself. She is still not sure she has acting talent. She is not sure if her final Dostoyevsky scene wasn’t simply a fluke, a lucky outcome of being coached by a master teacher.

"She knows one thing: she longs to be other people, not to be herself. A role—any role, even that of a Soviet janitor—is a mask, a costume she is compelled to wear, a disguise that turns her into someone else."

................................................................................................

29.

"After Sasha’s first year in Bolshoi Theatre, her mother is offered a job teaching anatomy at Leningrad Medical School, packs up the forty-nine years of her Ivanovo life, and takes a train a thousand kilometers northwest to live with her daughter. Sasha has become accustomed to living alone, and the prospect of living with her mother, again, stirs up anxiety and conflict. ... "

" ... They heave her two suitcases past the bust of Lenin presiding over the waiting hall and take bus 22 to her new apartment on the sixth floor of the corner building everyone calls by its prerevolutionary name of the Fairy Tale House. In a book on Leningrad history, her new place of residence is decorated with exquisite tiles picturing scenes from Russian fairy tales. There is no trace of those tiles left. The building was badly damaged during the siege of Leningrad in 1941, and the massive postwar restoration could not afford to focus on the aesthetic. Her mother and Sasha haul the suitcases through the front door only to discover that the elevator is out of order, and it takes them twenty minutes of tugging and resting between floors to hoist them up the six endless flights of stairs. When they reach the top, her mother, red-faced and breathless, dubs Sasha’s building the Reality House, and from that day on, the name will stick with both of them."

"March 14, 1942"

" ... That was the moment when I realized, with horror, that I didn’t know any of Nadia’s family or friends. Her mother had a sister, Nadia’s aunt, living somewhere in Sverdlovsk; Naum Semenovich had no siblings. If Nadia had any grandparents left alive, she never talked about them. She and I were so wrapped up in our own world, we were reluctant to open its doors to anyone from the outside. We didn’t need anyone else, she used to say; all we needed was each other."

"I don’t remember going down the stairs and walking out of the university, but I must have walked over the Palace Bridge because soon I was on Nevsky Prospekt. The day was mercilessly long—in a couple of weeks, the sun would barely bother to touch the horizon before springing back up. Fog hung over the oily surface of the Griboyedov Canal, mixing with the low gray clouds, obliterating the sky.

"I walked because I had to walk, cursing the secretary of the philology department, cursing the two men who had arrested Nadia’s father. I cursed the neighbor and the vigilant friend who ratted on Naum Semenovich for something he didn’t say. I cursed everyone who denounced Nadia and her mother because they were Jews or because—as a reward for being vigilant—they hoped to get their apartment that was so brazenly better than their own communal hovels."

"I thought of Volya, my uncle arrested in 1937 for telling a joke. I thought of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the camps for doing his job, writing poetry. I thought of my art professor, the one who showed us Picasso’s work that seemed to challenge the laws of socialist realism yet was so charged with life, who one day simply failed to show up to teach our seminar. “Do not try to investigate his disappearance,” cautioned the dean, a dire warning to my class of twelve that we obediently followed."

" ... On the other side of the street, the door leading to a store was open. I crossed and walked inside.

"On the shelf to my right, a few candlesticks made of jade and brass stood next to a lamp with a flowery cloth shade. In a cabinet of dark wood with glass shelves, a tea service with round cups and a teapot boasted its cobalt net of classic imperial design. A pile of spoons glimmered beside the saucers. Bigger pieces occupied the space in the back of the store: a set of four chairs with curved legs stacked up before a round dining table, a couple of mismatched stools, two nightstands with the surface of polished wood. The secondhand shop, selling the contents of people’s former lives.

"Behind the first room was another, to the left, and I made my way there without thinking, as if someone had grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me forward. I stepped inside and froze in place. Against the wall, between two lamps with hideous curlicues, stood a divan I remembered so well. ... "

" ... It only confirmed the worst scenarios hurtling through my mind, the dark scenes I’d been trying to banish so I wouldn’t go mad. It only validated the toxic fear that there were no more Goldbergs. It only pressed into my brain the monstrous, vomit-tasting probability that there was no more Nadia."

................................................................................................

30.

"“So what do we do now?” Sasha asks. “After we both know what Kolya went through at the front, after what they did to Nadia’s family, after all those arrests and murders? How many? Thousands? Millions? And for what?”

"“Don’t be so dramatic,” says her mother. “This isn’t the theater.” She shakes out the duvet and adjusts it over the rope. “Mistakes were made; we all know that. There was an abuse of power, a cult of personality. But look what we’ve built: a country that the whole world respects.” She hangs the pillowcase over the rope and clips it with a wooden clothespin. “And they admitted their mistakes,” she says. “Don’t you remember Khrushchev’s speech in 1956? They admitted they were wrong, and they released political prisoners. That was a start.”"

"“Do you remember the head of the Ivanovo anatomy department, Moisey Davidovich Zlotnikov?” she asks."

"“After the war, when you were nine or ten, I was summoned to the Ivanovo NKVD headquarters,” her mother says from the other side of the sheet. “He was my PhD adviser, and they demanded that I inform on him.” Sasha hears a sharp intake of breath. “Every month, I would come to this secret apartment and write the most mundane, innocuous things I could think of: a conversation about the percentage of enlarged thyroids at the Ivanovo textile factory, a shortage of scalpels at a dissection class, a lab assistant’s alcoholic son.” She pauses, and Sasha waits. “Those were still Stalin times, carnivorous times. I couldn’t refuse. Once a month, I came to that apartment, as though to an illicit, sordid rendezvous that had to be kept secret from the honest world. A young, plain-clothed man sat there, on the other side of the room, and watched me write. He always smiled when he saw me, a wide, open smile that dimpled his cheeks. But even though what I wrote was harmless and benign, I was always afraid that something I wrote would be twisted and used against Dr. Zlotnikov. Every day at work, I waited for them to come and arrest him, and then he would only need to take one look at me and he would know who was to blame.” She pins the last nightshirt on the rope and wipes her wet hands on the apron she is wearing. “This lasted for one year. Then Stalin died.”"

" ... If she were in her mother’s place, would she have done the same thing? Would she have come to an NKVD apartment every month and concocted reports about her teacher, no matter how benign? And although she wants to think that she would never succumb to spying, how can she know this for certain? And if she refused—if her mother had refused—what would have happened then, to her and to Sasha?"

"“We wrote to Leningrad to find out about Kolya,” her mother says. “Right after the war and then again, at least three more times. It was always the same answer: not listed among the dead or the living.” She takes a sip of the tea from her spoon, then pours it into the saucer because it is too hot to drink from the cup. “I even went to the island of Valaam soon after Stalin died. There was a holding pen for war invalids in the old monastery there, men without arms or legs, some without both arms and legs—they called them samovars. I don’t know how those people got there. There was a rumor they were rounded up at night in the streets and railroad stations of the cities where many of them begged for a living. They put them in cattle cars, the rumor went, and brought them to this faraway island on Lake Ladoga so people wouldn’t have to see their deformities and be reminded of the war. Anyway, that’s what we heard.” She lifts the saucer to her lips and takes several sips of the tea. “And then there were some who chose to go there because they didn’t want to be a burden on their families after the war.” She pauses. “This is what Kolya would’ve done, I thought, if he’d been badly wounded. So I took a train to Leningrad and boarded a boat—they had excursion boats going to Valaam once a day. It’s a serene island, with a striking northern nature, stark and beautiful. I knew they didn’t let tourists visit the invalid home, and even giving someone directions could cost you your job. So I’d packed my white doctor’s coat and hat. The monastery wasn’t difficult to find—it was the tallest structure on the island. The white coat worked: the nurses and doctors all wore white gowns, as I knew they would.”"

" ... One man Kolya’s age, with four medals and the familiar softness of the chin, called to me as I was walking by. “Sestrichka,” he said, ... I did, even though he wasn’t Kolya. Even though not one of the invalids was Kolya.”"

................................................................................................

31.

"“They trained us on classics and then graduated us into the world of socialist realism and gray Soviet plays,” she says to Lara.

"At the drama school, they played characters from Tolstoy and Chekhov, from Brecht and Pirandello. Slava and Sveta even did a scene from The Catcher in the Rye by an author from America, where Pravda tells them capitalism is in a state of deep, permanent rot.

"Lara nods but says nothing. Maybe she thinks that the drama school’s lack of warning to its graduates about the paucity of their future repertory is not as serious a crime as allowing its assistant dean to routinely rape its students. Maybe she is waiting for their artistic director to decide to stage The Seagull so that she can finally declare onstage that she is in mourning for her own life.

"A week after their talk, almost as though the director heard Sasha’s rant, he announces the next play to add to their repertory, Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. A classic at last. He casts Lara as Viola, a young shipwrecked woman who disguises herself as a man, and Sasha as the servant Maria, sharp-witted and daring, the engine that fuels all the tricks concocted by her own small kompaniya of friends.

"Although Sasha feels happy, she is also anxious. What’s going to happen if she fails, if this classic finally reveals her professional inadequacy? She reads Twelfth Night the way her mentor taught her to read Brothers Karamazov, assiduously and with the utmost attention. She goes to all the rehearsals, even those where they work on scenes that aren’t hers, and writes down the director’s every word."

"She doesn’t see Andrei until the entire cast comes out for a curtain call. They were all at their best that evening—Vladimir Ivanovich, who plays her earthy partner Sir Toby Belch; Lara, the willful Viola in men’s clothes; Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian, played by Maksim, just out of drama school; and the rich and ravishing Olivia, played by the director’s wife. For two and a half hours, she was Maria, and they lived inside a mesh of golden light charged with the energy they have created, which has left them all breathless. As she smiles and curtsies in front of the curtain, adrenaline still pumping through her veins, something forces her to look down into the third row of the audience, as if the stage lights have instantly reversed direction and plucked Andrei’s face out of the crowd."

"They are drinking the Armenian cognac Andrei has brought, five stars imprinted on the label, the best cognac that never reaches their store counters. ... "

" ... “Mayakovsky was like a mayak—a lighthouse. He was everything I wanted to be.” Andrei pauses. “And everything I’m not.”"

"“Do you ever think about Marik?” she asks, because she knows that mentioning Yesenin has brought Marik up in his mind, too."

"“I can never forgive myself,” he says, and she empties her lungs of air, as though all the time he was silent, she has been holding her breath, waiting for something significant to announce itself. “I was stupid and young, but I should’ve known better even back then.” Andrei pauses. “I was so jealous of him. Of your bond with him, of those books you both read. Even of your piano lessons.” He drives the butt of his cigarette into the saucer they are using for an ashtray. “There were two of us and only one of you. It was as simple as that.”"

"“I got married a few months ago,” he says, staring at the radiator under the window, deeply inhaling the cigarette and breathing out a cloud of smoke as though he wished it to spread over the kitchen so that he could hide inside it."

"Andrei gets up and paces to the wall and then back. “I had no choice. It was a requirement from the ministry.” He pauses. “No. It was my father-in-law’s requirement,” he says. “I can’t explain.” He shakes his head. “It would make no sense to you.”"

"“I came here to repent,” he says. “I wanted you to taste my guilt and my humiliation.” He starts to open the front door and then turns back for the last time. His sentences are measured, delivered as one might hand over an unexpected gift. “My whole life, I have only loved you. What I did has crippled me. It has flayed off my skin, strip by strip. I cannot look at what I’ve become.” He pauses, and when she peers into his face, she sees hopelessness and torment, but she also sees grief. She has to avert her eyes because she, too, cannot look at what he has become. He raises his hand and runs a finger over her cheek, a tender goodbye touch. “I needed to tell you. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I know there can’t be any. I simply wanted you to know.” He pulls open the front door, then pauses and turns to her. “I need you to know that I love you.”"

................................................................................................

32.

"She is at the theater, at the shoemakers’ lair, a room full of broken and newly mended shoes, and she is weeping. She came here with a pair of pumps that needed repair, and when Uncle Tolya asked, “What happened?” her throat closed, and she burst into tears. ... "

"“The problem with this world,” he announces as Yuri pours, “is that you’re three glasses more sober than I am.” She smiles because it is true that she is still sober and because she thinks it is an insightful way of looking at the problems of the world. “To our Maria!” Vladimir Ivanovich proclaims, and they empty their glasses. The vodka flows down where the tears had erupted from, warming up her chest and making the image of Andrei smudge at the edges, as if she were looking at him through clouds of smoke from a departing train."

................................................................................................

33.

"The next morning, six months after Andrei’s visit, she is hungover and humble. Now it is her mother’s chance to say what she can’t say when Sasha is drunk. She drives her fists into her hips and delivers her lecture about the dangers of zelyoniy zmei, the green serpent—the color of the bottle—wringing its coils around Sasha’s neck. She rattles the silverware in the drawer and bangs the lid over a pot of soup to punctuate her statements because this is just what she predicted back in Ivanovo: Theater is too toxic, too unstable, and the love for zelyoniy zmei is what happens to everyone who comes under its corrosive influence.

"“There are so many normal jobs,” she says, knowing that after last night, Sasha has no choice but to listen. “Look at Valya from the fourth floor—she’s just got a position at the district library around the corner. Look at Irina Petrovna’s daughter. Your age and already a chief engineer.” These are the jobs her mother understands, practical and safe, unlike the chaos and frivolity of Theater."

"“When are you going to get married?” ... "

"She has poked at the topic before by bringing up various young men she knows: heaping praise on a young anatomy professor at her medical institute, lionizing the engineer son of their neighbor on the third floor. Sasha doesn’t want to discuss with her mother the possibility of marriage, especially now. She doesn’t want to give her mother the advantage of being privy to what is swirling in her daughter’s heart, of sighing and pitying Sasha for not getting the man she wants. She keeps it all inside her, away from everyone’s eyes, because, as Grandma told her, what’s inside you, no one can touch."

"“Don’t be so ironic with me,” her mother warns, letting her know that she is engaged in a serious conversation.

"“I’m not being ironic. This is what my teachers told us at the drama school.” She thinks of her Dostoyevsky scene mentor, Polevitskaya, who warned them that Theater would take over their lives and bring them to ruin. As a spasm of nausea begins to creep up her throat, she is willing to admit that Polevitskaya may have been right. All of this—clouded in the bank of fog her mind has become—seems like a century ago."

"“And do you know what else?” Sasha says. “All my life, I could feel that you never believed in me. Not when I lived in Ivanovo, not when I was in Moscow, and not now. You always told me I’d never make it as an actress. But here I am, in the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theatre. I did make it. And it must kill you and Grandpa that I’ve succeeded, that you turned out to be wrong. But you were right about one thing: Theater is toxic and corrosive. It has cost me plenty. It has cost me the only man I’ve ever wanted.”"

................................................................................................

34.

"The new play is called The Dawns Here Are Quiet, five women commandeered by a young male sergeant, a tiny regiment operating near the front line during the Great Patriotic War. Although it’s a Soviet play, Sasha can relate to the material better than any other contemporary play so far. Lara is the tall, acerbic Zhenya who comes from Moscow, and she is Liza, the daughter of a peasant from a small village.

"In Quiet Dawns, she is on a reconnaissance mission, making her way through the swamp, carefully stepping from one mound of earth to the next, feeling the ground before her with a pole made from a thick birch branch. The swamp is vast, several kilometers in any direction, but from the sun that is beating into her right cheek, she knows she is going north. ... "

" ... She tries to imagine those who drowned here, sucked into this abyss. She thinks about all who were killed in the war, all who died in the camps, millions of snapped, diminished lives. She thinks of the totality of death. She thinks about Uncle Kolya, who is not listed among the dead or alive, and Uncle Sima, who died in their Ivanovo house three weeks before she was born. She thinks, reluctantly, about her father.

"Sima, the youngest in the family, had been stationed on the border with Poland before the war began, writing only one letter home when the post delivery still functioned, a triangle of gray paper Grandma still keeps in the bottom of a drawer. “They feed us well here, thick soup and boiled potatoes,” he wrote for Grandma’s sake. “Yesterday the sergeant said they might soon issue us guns.” Her mother says she could never understand why soldiers on the Polish border, right before the German blitzkrieg into Russia, did not have guns.

"Unarmed and dazed by the sudden invasion of German planes and tanks on June 22, 1941, Sima, unlike most of his comrades, managed to survive. Six months later, he was wounded at the Belorussian Front and made his way back home to Ivanovo in 1942. This is how her mother remembers that day: It was January, and there was a knock on the door. When Grandma opened the latch, there stood Sima—in a military coat with burned bullet holes, on crutches, a torn ushanka hat tied under his chin. The hospital could no longer do anything, so they released him. Sima decided not to write home because he wanted to surprise everyone with his arrival. Grandma, wiping under her eyes and making sniffling noises, boiled water for him to wash, as Grandpa ordered Sima to take off his clothes immediately—everything down to the rags inside his boots—so he could throw the dirty heap outside, where it was minus twenty degrees Celsius, to save the rest of them from typhus and lice."

"Day after day, her mother sat by Sima’s bed thinking about her brother and her husband, both dying. She couldn’t cure them, so she concentrated on doing what she could do. She sold her ration of four hundred grams of bread and with that money bought fifty grams of butter, which, she hoped, might boost her brother’s and her husband’s chance for health."

" ... Sasha sees her parents walk through the ruins of the town and stand waiting for the train, her big-bellied mother and her husband, who would die of TB in his hometown on the other side of the Urals five years later, never having seen his daughter. When a plume of smoke billows out of the train’s stack and a spasm lurches through the cars, her mother takes a step toward the clattering wheels and raises her arm in a last goodbye. She waits until the train shrinks to toy size, until the only smoke she can see is a streak of soot rising from an apartment building bombed the day before."

"January 31, 1942

"A low-flying German plane chugs over the treetops, and our sergeant sinks to his knees, clutching at his throat. His eyes are desperate, but they are still the eyes of a living man. ... I press a cotton pad to the sergeant’s wound and wrap a bandage around his throat. Then I haul him up to his feet, and with most of his weight on my shoulders, we set off hobbling to the makeshift hospital about three kilometers away."

"Suddenly there are several explosions: first in the distance, then closer, then only a few meters away. On the ground, I see a soldier crouching in a puddle of blood, but all I feel is relief that it isn’t me. An older man who was walking in front of us is now on his knees, clutching his thigh. Next to him is a nurse, a girl who looks no older than sixteen, helpless, dribbles of tears streaking down her dirty face unwashed for days. She doesn’t know what to do, and I see that her hands are shaking. The older man lowers his pants, plugs the bloody hole in his thigh with a bandage, and tries to console the girl. “Don’t be afraid, dochka, don’t cry.” Dochka, he calls her, my little daughter.

"We reach the hospital at dusk. The bandage around the sergeant’s throat is all red now, but he is still hanging on to my shoulders, dragging his feet in the dirty snow. The hospital is not really a hospital; it is a train parked on an auxiliary track. There are scattered bloodstained rags and too many men to count. The young doctor with a face drained of color and short chestnut hair has lost her voice. She looks as if she could faint at any minute, but she tries to project authority. She looks a little like my older sister, Galya, who is also a surgeon at the front line, near Kalinin. I carefully lower the sergeant to wait in line with the other wounded sitting on the floor of what used to be a corridor when this train was a train, when there was no war. Then I turn around to take the road back to the front. This is the closest to Nevsky Prospekt I’m going to get for a while.

"And what if I didn’t go back to our trench carved in the frozen flesh of the field? ... "

" ... the front allows no benefit of the doubt for the cowardly and the weak, for those who have to think about whether they are ready to die for their motherland. If you are weak, you are killed like a rabid dog, like a horse infected with anthrax, to keep other dogs and other horses healthy and in working order. The verdict is quick: you are a deserter, so you stand in front of your platoon, your belt taken away, your pants falling down, the commissar aiming his gun at your head.

"I walk along the road back to the front, back to Seryoga, into the rapidly descending winter night."

"Sasha is at the rehearsal for Quiet Dawns, and she is feeling the swampy water before her with her birch-tree pole ... "

" ... she thinks of their sergeant, Gleb Petrovich. He is young, and giving the five of them orders makes him uncomfortable ... In her thoughts, she calls him simply Gleb, and sometimes even the diminutive Glebushka when she thinks of his blue eyes and his hair the color of straw, when she admits to herself that she likes him, the way she liked Andrei when Marik was still alive: longing, not yet desire, the small, unopened bud of future love. Gleb is from a tiny village, like her, and she can tell from the pink hue that floods his freckled cheeks that he likes her, too. He doesn’t blush when the tall and beautiful Zhenya-Lara sings “Katyusha” in her deep, seductive voice or when the other three girls whisper into each other’s ears and stifle giggles.

"As she takes careful steps onstage, she is thinking about Kolya’s fears at the front, of Uncle Sima’s, and sometimes even her father’s. She should be grateful that at least it isn’t winter, when Kolya said the insides of your nostrils stick together and when your teeth ache from the cold. It is June 1942, one year since the invasion spilled east from their borders, toward the Volga and beyond, a chilly June when even the weather doesn’t feel like warming up, when the sun remains hidden behind the gray haze, refusing to shine light onto this ravaged land. She is as scared as Kolya was when he first saw Germans roaring across the countryside on motorcycles, in helmets and big glasses; as scared as Sima must have been when he ran in retreat, deafened by the blitzkrieg of tanks and planes on June 22, 1941; as frightened as her father when he first saw droplets of blood on the handkerchief he pressed to his mouth to cover his cough. Her fear is uncontrollable and primal, like a small animal with razor-sharp teeth and viselike claws that has gripped her insides and will not let go of them until they turn liquid, just like this swamp under her feet. The fear is that at any moment, despite your best effort to survive, you can be shredded by a grenade; or minced to a bloody pulp by a bomb; or burned to a cinder in a locked barn; or hoisted aloft with your hands tied behind your back so that your arms, with a splintering crack, dislocate from their sockets at the shoulders; or sucked under the oilskin of this bog. This is the fear of dying she now knows all too well—despite her youth and strength and all the joy and love she hasn’t yet had a chance to taste."

"“How is Quiet Dawns going?” asks her mother. Sasha is in a hurry before a rehearsal, slurping soup in the kitchen, their usual place of conversation.

"“I think I’ve got it,” Sasha says. “I think I’ve got Liza.” She says this for her mother’s sake, but she is not at all sure that she has mastered the role. The knot of insecurity and fear tightens under her ribs every day, and she knows that the nauseating feeling of failure won’t let go until opening night, if all goes well. She forces herself to finish the last spoonful of barley soup and gets up to gouge a little leftover macaroni from the pot on the stove. She knows she must eat, although her stomach aches and contracts in protest. “I’ve reread Kolya’s journal, and it helped.”

"For a minute, her mother is silent, clinking the silverware in the sink. Then she turns and takes a breath. “Maybe he was too bitter, Kolya. Too disdainful about the country, about our way of life. Too negative.”"

"“ ... I’ve been thinking about this—maybe he had this pessimistic view because the one he loved had just been arrested. If they hadn’t arrested her, things would’ve been different for Kolya. Nadia’s arrest made him see everything through this dark lens.”"

"“So what are you saying?” Sasha hears irritation in her voice but does nothing to rein it in. “That he saw everything through a dark lens while in reality everything was rosy and light?”

"“No,” says her mother and shakes her head, getting defensive. “What I’m saying is that maybe this personal trauma blurred his vision, so he wasn’t able to see reality the way it was.”"

................................................................................................

35.

"It’s opening night for Quiet Dawns, and Sasha is onstage, flying through the forest as if she had wings, on an assignment from Sergeant Gleb to go back to their base and report that a regiment of Germans is laying mines around the lake. Gleb and Liza had a little time to talk after he told her how to retrace her steps back to the base: first through the forest, then through the swamp (make sure you take the birch pole we left by the big pine on the way here), and then across the field just before the base where they came from. There was a song they sang in their village, he said, a song Liza started to hum because she knew it well. Gleb pressed his hand to her mouth to silence her because the Germans were getting close, and for a few moments, he kept his palm on her face before he pulled it back. This is all that she is thinking of right now: his hand, the smell of it, tobacco and warm skin, the smell that is now propelling her through the forest.

"Thinking of that moment, she flies past the tall pine where they left the birch pole, not realizing it until it’s too late to go back. There are scores of big, dead branches scattered in the puddles on the brink of the swamp, and she quickly chooses one. Then she takes off her skirt, ties it to the top of the pole, and steps into the swamp."

"Suddenly a huge brown bubble burps out of the swamp’s gut right in front of her, so loudly and unexpectedly that without thinking, instinctively, she swerves off her path. Just one step sideways, but her feet instantly lose support, as if someone yanked the road from under her boots. With all her weight, she leans onto the pole, but the dead wood cracks and splinters and—face forward—she falls into the cold liquid mud. The path is close, a step away from her, maybe a half a step. But it is a step she can no longer make."

"She hears herself scream, an awful, lonely scream that rings over the rusty swamp, over the stage, and into the audience, then soars to the tops of the pines, gets tangled in the leaves of young aspens, and falls again. The sun sails from above the trees, and for the last time she sees its white light, as brilliant and warm as the promise of tomorrow."

"“No curtain call tonight,” Vladimir Ivanovich says, his eyebrows mashed together into one bristling line above his eyes. “We got a call from the hospital.” He pauses, giving time for all the blood to drain from her body, and she knows what he’s going to say next. She closes her eyes and shakes her head, but he says it anyway. “It’s your mother.”

"“When?” she asks as though it might make a difference.

"“Seven o’clock, half an hour before curtain.”

"She opens her mouth to say something, but he quickly adds, “They ordered me not to tell you until the end of the performance. That’s the protocol, the chief administrator said. I had to fight with him to even let you leave before curtain call.”"

"“I’ll take you to the hospital if you want to go,” says Vladimir Ivanovich.

"“If I want to go?” she asks."

" ... he strokes her hair and kisses her forehead and holds her tight to keep her together, like a father would, to prevent her from breaking apart."

" ... She rubs her eyes with her fists, and when she opens them again, she sees Andrei standing in the distance between two birches. She blinks to make him disappear, but he still stands there, black suit and black hair, as beloved as ever, until he realizes that she sees him, and then he raises his hand slightly and walks away."

" ... The table is filled with the usual zakuski: pickled mushrooms and cucumbers, baked pirozhki filled with egg and scallions, potato and beet salads bathed in mayonnaise. She can’t eat; everything inside her feels parched. Instead, she drinks. There is a bottle of vodka on her right, and the man next to her, probably a professor from her mother’s medical institute—maybe even the one she hoped Sasha would meet and marry—is attentive and generous in keeping her glass filled. Maybe her mother was right, after all, and Sasha should have met him. Maybe if she had, they wouldn’t be sitting at this table now, drinking toasts to her mother’s heroic life, bemoaning her death."

"“Nu, nu,” Grandma says, dabbing Sasha’s face with the wet towel. The room is spinning, but Grandma’s hands fix it in place. “Mama loved you,” she says in her soft, cottony voice. “She knew you loved her, too.”

"She knows Grandma says this to calm her down, but she is not at all certain she is right. Did Sasha love her mother as much as her mother loved her? Did she love her enough for her mother to know? She searches inside herself, but she is not sure it was enough to keep her heart going, enough for her to put up more of a fight against death and survive. Grandma’s hands are as soothing as her voice, wiping away the tears—for Mama, for herself—and Sasha needs to feel her warm palms pressing damp fabric to her cheeks."

" ... This loss is the most raw and bitter of them all, the heaviest, the most brutal. ... "

" ... She doesn’t know the answer, but she blames Theater for being the culprit in this death. Had Sasha been at the hospital, the knowledge that Mama was not alone to face the chasm opening before her may have soothed her heart and made it beat again.

"She was a Russian mother, with a very Russian daughter. A daughter who didn’t accept her for who she always was—a methodical, ferocious survivor. She had survived the famine, Stalin’s terror, Grandpa, and a frontline hospital during the Great Patriotic War. She had survived losing Sasha’s father. For nearly twenty-four years, she had survived Sasha. Was Sasha blind to fail to see all this, or was it merely convenient for her to look away? It was so much simpler to wish her mother had been more sophisticated and less concrete, to wish that Sasha could attach the word intelligentsia to her weighty figure in a polyester dress made by the “Bolshevik Woman” factory, to wish that she had come from Leningrad and not Ivanovo, from the world of Pushkin and the tsars, of granite embankments and lace ironwork, of pearly domes buttressing the low sky. It was simpler not to see her life as it had really been, an every-minute battle. In addition to teaching at the medical institute, on Sundays, she worked in an ambulance at the Ivanovo hospital, and during the summer, she treated fractured wrists and sick stomachs at a pioneer camp on a lake so that Sasha could stay there, too, and breathe some fresh air, as Grandma liked to say. So why wasn’t she kinder to her? Why did she need to be harsh and critical of everything she said, constantly aiming her stage voice at her chest, like a knife?

"She lies awake and stares into the ink of the night, with darkness gathered all around her and not a single drop of light able to glimmer through."

................................................................................................

36.

Fittingly, Koenraad Elst labels leftist creed 'Abrahamic-IV.

"Only now, her director is doing something very different from what they were taught in eighth grade. The merchant’s wife and daughter, in their production, are practically the same age, both abused, both locked up in the courtyard of the merchant’s house, behind three rows of fences, away from life and any chance of personal happiness. Her character Matryona, always played by middle-aged actresses as a petty tyrant, in their production is as much of a victim as her stepdaughter, who, in turn, is as far from being “a ray of light in the dark kingdom” as any of the play’s despotic merchants.

"They rehearse every day, and this routine—getting up, making coffee in a small copper pot she brought from Georgia where her theater went on tour last summer, when her mother was still alive, getting dressed and waiting for a bus under her windows—makes life purposeful and gives shape to the quiet, empty mornings. She wakes up to the silence in the kitchen and the silence in the room where her mother slept. Silence, despite the streetcars screeching on the turn under her windows and the neighbor behind the wall adjusting the volume of their radio to listen to the morning news. Silence in her apartment, silence in her soul, silence hand in hand with guilt. She gets up, pulls on a sweater and pants she wore the day before, and walks downstairs to the bus stop, almost sleepwalking, as if she’d been enmeshed in cobwebs, so every step requires effort to push through the sticky binding. Even the smallest task—taking her coat off the hook, for instance, or lifting a scarf out of a drawer—seems like a colossal endeavor that requires might and concentration almost beyond her power."

" ... Sasha is grateful to the director for helping her with the Matryona role and for keeping her in the rehearsal room, away from the silent emptiness of her apartment, from the guilt, from a bottle of vodka always stashed in someone’s dressing room."

"It is the middle of November, and she is leaning into the wind on Dekabristov Street, walking toward Theatre Square, where the green and white building of the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre looks pearly in the distance through the blustery air pregnant with rain. As she looks up, she sees low gray clouds rushing across the sky, across the narrow space between the roofs. They race overhead with decisiveness and deliberation, scurrying from one side of the roofs framing the street to the other, chased by more clouds blown in by the wind. There is always wind, blowing from somewhere far away, trapped between the fences, swirling dirt around the stump, then flying away. This is all she can see: the bustle of rain clouds above her head, the three rows of fences, and the low sky clamped over her head like a lid. This is her life, every single day until she dies—the towering fences, the courtyard with its racing clouds above ... "

"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 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."

" ... 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."

" ... 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?”"

"“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.”"

"“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.”"

"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."

" ... They told him to serve, and he served. They told him to execute, and he executed."

" ... 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.”"

"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."

"“Why don’t you ban me from existence, along with the play?” she asks. ... "

" ... “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.”"

" ... 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. ... "

" ... 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."

"“I’ll get you a taxi,” he says, although she knows that no cab, even if you’re lucky enough to see one, will ever stop at this hour in the middle of the Palace Bridge. They begin to walk back toward Palace Square, and when a car magically appears, he flags it down with a V sign—the sign for double fare—and the taxi obediently brakes where he is standing. Andrei’s figure is etched against the light-green car as he hands a small collection of bills to the driver—shoulders leaning forward, hair tossed by a wet, briny wind."

................................................................................................

38.

Very familiar to anyone who has revisited a childhood home, and been surprised at how much smaller it all seemed.

A false validation of a man who need mot have flogged a six year old child with his belt if he weren't a sadist, or a grown up granddaughter with nettles for that matter.

"“Why did you give him your ration?” she asked as the German hastily stuffed the bread into his mouth.

................................................................................................

39.

"It is three days past Grandma’s name day—Elena’s day, the day her name saint was born and the day Grandma was buried. This is always the time when lilacs burst into bloom, and through the kitchen window, Sasha can see a bush frothed in purple, branches swaying in the breeze. The kitchen now has a faucet—when did they lay down pipes for running water? An old nylon stocking used to wash dishes, crisscrossed by runs beyond repair, sits on the lip of the sink next to a bar of laundry soap, just as it did when she was a girl. She picks it up and closes her hand around it to feel the greasy silkiness Grandma felt only days earlier. Is she hoping that some of her warmth has remained in this rag that touched her hands daily, for decades, more often than anything else in the house?

"The dining room table is littered with issues of Pravda and a scattering of handwritten receipts, a sight Grandma would never have allowed in her house. Sasha looks up at the wall with Kolya’s paintings she remembers so well. One of them, The War Ration—a slice of black bread and a small fish, as dark and dry as the bread—is hanging at an angle, revealing a patch of blue wallpaper underneath, bright as a cornflower, not discolored by light. She straightens the frame, and the original deeper blue of the wallpaper disappears. It is back to its washed-out color, the wear of time. It’s back to order now, as Mama would say.

"Mama and Grandma are both gone. And how many are left of those who used to inhabit this house? Sima is buried in Ivanovo; Grandma is there, as well, although on the other end of the cemetery that burst beyond its original boundaries decades ago; Kolya, most likely, under layers of mud and other bodies at the Leningrad Front; Mama in Leningrad. Besides Grandpa, she is the only one left."

" ... She didn’t know he was so old. Or did he suddenly get old because Grandma is no longer here to fill him with reasons to go on, reasons beyond the garden with its watering and weeding?"

" ... She thinks of the storage space above the kitchen where years ago she found Kolya’s journal, of its cramped interior that smelled of dust and old shoes and that held so many secrets. She closes her eyes and sees the magazines with poetry by the writers no longer recognized by the state, recipes for dishes whose ingredients have long vanished from their store shelves, hats—the objects of frivolity and luxury—that women gave up wearing decades ago. She thinks of the small things that made up their life here: Mama helping Grandma shred heads of cabbage, then pouring salt over the crunchy layers that were stuffed into a barrel until the slivers of thick leaves reached the brim; of Grandma singing as she knitted another sweater or another pair of mittens; of Mama sorting strawberries and currants before she poured them into copper bowls to make jam; of the life Sasha so deliberately left to be an actress. And now the question stares her in the face: Was it worth it? Have her performances and her acting changed anything or anyone? Have they brought back the forbidden writers, or the forgotten foods, or even women’s hats that all those years before the Great Terror had kept her grandmother elegant and young?

"Inside the folder is an envelope, long and narrow, with foreign stamps and red-and-blue airmail stripes around the edges. It is not at all like one of the Russian envelopes, plain and square. It is addressed to her grandparents, in a handwriting that is definitely Russian in the way it effortlessly loops the letters together, the way they taught them cursive writing in first grade, through hard work, repetition, and shame. On the other side is the return address that makes the blood drain from her veins: Nikolai Kuzmin, 41 Grand Street, New York, USA. A letter from Kolya.

"The stamp on the envelope is a washed-out blot of black ink, the post date dissolved, impossible to make out. The top of the envelope is neatly cut open with a knife, the way Grandpa opens all mail, and Sasha yanks out the folded pages, the date glaring from the top right corner: 15 of April, 1956. Twelve years ago."

................................................................................................

40.

" ... You were our conscience, our truth. Just like Theater is for me. So why did you not return after the war? Why weren’t you here to give me guidance, to protect me from floggings and old neighbors’ gossip, to stand in for my father? Why did you abandon me?"

" ... I’ve heard that a letter from the West could land someone in prison, and I didn’t want this to happen to any of you, so I decided to keep silent, as difficult and heart-wrenching as it was. But after Stalin’s death, and particularly after Khrushchev’s speech, things seem to be different, so I’m hoping this letter will reach you and cause you no harm."

" ... I was lucky to survive when so many others didn’t. All these years since the war ended, eleven endless years, every day I fought with myself not to tell you I was alive, not to write to you, to send you a telegram, to call. It was a struggle, and I had to remind myself that I couldn’t selfishly announce what I wanted you to know because it would hurt you, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted so much to be with you, but I couldn’t be there. ... "

" ... Reality seems to have shifted, the past and the present bleeding into each other, the straight timeline crumpling into an accordion of chaos, making everything muddled and disorderly, something Mama would have hated. But she is no longer here to tell Sasha how unruly all of this is or how much she abhors this bedlam."

" ... As images flood her consciousness, the present and the past jostle for space, crowding the room like pieces of furniture from her childhood, bending and breaking the paths of their lives she has always assumed to be linear. She stares down at the letter in her hands, at her and her mother’s names written twelve years ago with such fierce urgency somewhere on the other side of the world."

"When the Leningrad Front moved west, I moved with it. So much death had passed before my eyes by then that I couldn’t comprehend how my soul could still take more in. I was almost numb, and yet we had to keep walking, pulling our cannons and machine guns and carrying our backpacks filled with rations, ammunition, and unsent letters home. I walked and pulled cannons, like everyone around me. As the Germans retreated, they mined the roads, and we had to move carefully, inching forward. In my mind, I can still see an armored vehicle twisted into a tangle of metal parts, bodies of soldiers blasted out of the truck. ... "

" ... One foolish misstep got me captured, although it should have cost me my life. Would it be better to have been killed than captured by the Germans? ... We were marched west, hundreds of prisoners, in our torn boots and uniforms ... until we arrived in a prison camp somewhere in Germany. It was as bad as you can imagine: yellow drinking water with stains of machine oil, dysentery, rotten turnips, routine beatings with a gun barrel, and yet I only grasped at one thing, life. I would have never known, even after three years at the front, how fiercely we claw for life, even life in a German prison camp.

"We escaped just before the camp was liberated in April of 1945, those of us who were still alive, everyone ecstatic and free, no longer prisoners of war. We were ready to go back home. Or were we? There were fifty-six nationalities in the camp, but I only made friends with two men. Yura was from Pinsk and slept on the bunk below mine. He was captured just as I was, on a reconnaissance mission, stalking through the woods right into the enemy position. My other friend from the bunk above was John from Saint Petersburg, America, who was captured in Normandy. Saint Petersburg, can you imagine? We were born on different sides of the world and yet our cities had the same name. He taught me some English, and I taught him some Russian, so he called me Nick and I called him Vanya. Yura didn’t trust him, accusing him of being a capitalist spy. But one look at John’s face—freckles and a gap between his front teeth—made me laugh off Yura’s warning, despite Yura being a veteran and having served in the Finnish War."

" ... We all knew what Stalin said: “Soviet soldiers do not surrender. There are no prisoners of war. There are only traitors.”

"There were no trials. There were days of interrogation, all ending in the same verdict. They were all declared traitors for having been captured and were given six years in labor camps in Vorkuta.

"So was I ready to go home? Yura was, despite what he witnessed in 1940. He was ready to see his family in Pinsk, silent about a possible Vorkuta camp diversion. The end of the war was in the air: we knew it when the guards deserted during the night and those of us who could escape, escaped. A day later, the US troops liberated the camp, although there weren’t many of us left to liberate. “So what are you going to do?” Yura asked as we stood in the field, our former barracks still in sight. I didn’t answer right away, and he became impatient. “Don’t you want to go home and live in a great country?” he asked, looking over the forest, where the sun was rising. “The country that won the world war?”"

" ... “I want to live in a normal country, not a great one,” I said. “A country that doesn’t kill its own.” Yura just shrugged, saluted us goodbye, and started walking east. I wish I felt as optimistic as he did, as certain about the future.

"I couldn’t go east, not yet. For a few weeks, John and I stayed with the American division that liberated our camp, pulling bodies out of shallow graves, then moving north from Bavaria toward Berlin. The west, despite the magnitude of its colossal ruin, lay powerful and calm, like a large, sleeping lion. By the time we reached Berlin, Germany had surrendered. “Come with me to the States,” said John, who by then—from our conversations in two broken languages and from my drawings—knew about all of you, my art studies, and Nadia. “If you go back, they’ll kill you. You’re talented, and maybe someday you’ll be famous and rich,” he said and smiled, a naive smile showing the gap between his front teeth."

" ... Nadia didn’t have the right of correspondence because she had already been executed."

" ... It was a strange time, almost surreal, pulsing with energy that radiated from the law-abiding Americans, the mild-mannered British, and from my compatriots, who drove too fast on the broken streets and shouted about their victories in the loud, arrogant voices of winners. I walked around the city with my pad and pencil, soaking in this air of impossible unity, albeit short-lived, of buds of the future unfolding before my eyes. And then one morning, John charged into the room where I slept, dropped his backpack by his feet, and yelled that I should get up and catch the plane with refugees leaving for America. I had only a few seconds to make the decision that has haunted me ever since."

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41.

" ... As she was memorizing her lines for her high school’s acting club, as the fire they’d made in the forest was licking at the snow and Andrei was handing the shell to Marik, as she was standing on the platform by the train bound for Moscow, this letter was already in this house, received and stashed away by her grandfather. Was it ever answered? Sasha can’t conceive of Grandma, who had been waiting for Kolya until the day she died, running to the gate every time it creaked, not answering this letter. She can’t imagine her not getting on a train to Moscow, with the letter in her purse; not taking a taxi straight to the Lubyanka KGB Headquarters and demanding—in a leaden voice Sasha heard only once—an immediate visa to see her son in the United States."

"His face has stiffened, a ripple of hard wrinkles, like bark on an old oak. He turns his head away from her, clamps his hand into a fist. His fingers are old and gnarled, joints swollen with arthritis, and there is dirt under his fingernails. “My son was a traitor,” he says, spitting the last word out as if he were spitting out poison."

"Sasha leans toward him, the pages with Kolya’s handwriting in her hand like a weapon. “Did you have the courage to tell Grandma about this letter?” she demands, although she already knows the answer.

"He is silent, and she is livid, sparks of rage spewing in her throat. “Did you tell her that her son was alive?” she shouts.

"“This”—he stabs his index finger at the letter—“would have killed her.”

"“This?” She lifts the letter. “This would have killed her?” she yells. “This?” She shakes the letter, a piece of damning evidence that sprang to light twelve years too late. “This would have given her a reason to live! She waited for this letter her whole life. For this piece of paper. For proof that Kolya was alive.”"

"“I did write back,” he says, his voice muffled, as if it came from an empty barrel. “I wrote back that we were ashamed of him. I wrote that he was a coward. That we no longer have a son.”

"“You wrote we?” she says. “You wrote we, without ever showing the letter to Grandma?” In her mind, Sasha can see her grandfather carefully inscribing the foreign address in Latin letters, sealing the envelope by spitting on the glue and holding it with two fingers, as though it were a worm."

"Sasha gets up and stuffs the pages of the letter into the envelope with foreign stamps. “I’m going back to Leningrad tomorrow,” she says, walking to the door, heading for the exit from her Ivanovo life. She turns back one last time and sees a commander again—snow-haired, rooted to this house, not nearly extinct—her grandfather, who has fought his last battle and won.

"Past Kolya’s paintings on the walls, past Grandma’s holiday teacups in the sideboard, she flees to the room she used to share with her mother, where she kneels by her suitcase and carefully fits the letter into the zipper compartment on the bottom. It will stay there in dark safety until she arrives home, to her Leningrad apartment, where she will expose it to the milky light streaming through the windows, the light Kolya painted so well, where she will decide what to do about the two secrets revealed today: her uncle’s letter from America and the truth just forced upon her."

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42.

" On a scale with love on one side and the Gulag on the other, shouldn’t love always outweigh fear? Shouldn’t love outweigh everything?

"She lifts the receiver and dials Andrei’s number."

" ... 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?"

" ... 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?"

"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."

" ... 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."

" 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.

"“Three weeks ago, Grandma died.”

"She sees him scrunch his face and shut his eyes for a moment, as if her words have struck him on the head. His eyes are even darker when he opens them, as black as Grandpa’s well.

"“I didn’t know,” he says, “otherwise I would’ve helped with the funeral.” This seems to be his main function in her life, arranging funerals for her family. “Are you all right?” he asks, although he knows that if she were all right, she wouldn’t be sitting in an armchair across from him in the middle of the afternoon with a glass of cognac in her hand."

"Why has she doubted Kolya’s intentions? Why did she blame him for not coming back to look after her, like a father would, or to search for Nadia? Why does she blame him that he was determined not to die, that he made a choice to avoid the fate of Uncle Seryozha, Uncle Volya, Nadia’s family, and millions of others? Why didn’t she see Kolya’s letter the way Grandma would’ve seen it—a triumph of life over death, a cause for celebration?

"“I have no one else to tell this to,” she says. “You are the only one left who knows about Kolya.”"

" ... if she hadn’t left it to go to Moscow, they wouldn’t be sitting here today, sharing their memories, talking about the transience of home. Sasha knows that Andrei knows this, too. Just as he knows that she knows. They are both poster children for vranyo, pretending that they live in a normal country, pretending that there is no fiery connection between them. Pretending he is simply helping out an old friend at a trying moment of her life, pouring her a few shots of cognac, offering a cigarette to calm her nerves. Nothing improper, nothing that the Party would frown upon."

"“To talk to him, is this what you want?”

"Sasha nods and lifts her glass to acknowledge his insight."

"Andrei picks up the receiver and dials some numbers on his phone. “I need to be connected to Nicholas Kuzmin, 41 Grand Street, New York City, the United States. K-u-z-m-i-n,” he spells to the operator. He is told to wait, she guesses, because he holds the receiver away from his ear, as if it were a weight. Sasha doesn’t know if this is real or if it’s a sick Party joke Andrei has learned in his job at the Smolny. They can barely place a call to Moscow, let alone the West, so she is keeping her eyes on him, taking puffs on a cigarette, ensconced in her armchair, tired and tipsy and resigned to finish the cognac in her glass. She doesn’t believe that it is possible to pick up a receiver and be connected to someone in New York. They all know there is an indestructible barrier that stops any attempts to make such calls. A thick curtain between them and the rest of the world that prohibits all communication. But as the minutes pass and these thoughts grind through her head with crushing slowness, it dawns on her that they are in the Smolny, the control center for the dreaded barrier. It dawns on her—something she should have realized much earlier—that the barrier may be standing right in front of her, a telephone clutched in his hand."

"Andrei puts the phone into her hand, cradles his fingers around hers. “Talk to him,” he says."

"“Sashenka, wait . . .” She hears static again, the noises of fumbling, but now she is grateful for the pause, trying to sniffle away the tears, failing, rubbing them around her face with the palm of her hand. “This is so sudden . . . Please just give me a moment.” She tries to imagine Kolya on the other side of the line, the other side of the world, in pajamas and slippers, fumbling for his glasses. “Where are you, Sashenka? Are you in New York? Where are you calling from? How were you able to leave?”

"“No, Uncle Kolya, I’m in Leningrad. In a Party office, using an official phone. It’s hard to explain.” She is glad they are still talking about Party offices and phones and not about Grandma and Grandpa.

"“I still don’t understand. I never thought I would hear your voice. You weren’t even born.”

"“Grandpa said he wrote back to you.”"

"“Tell me about yourself, Sashenka,” he says finally."

"“Grandma never gave up hope that she would see you,” she says. “To the end of her life, with every creak of the gate, she waited for you to return. Mama brought your war journal to Leningrad when she moved in with me. Your paintings still cover the walls of our Ivanovo house. You have been with us every minute of our lives. We’ve never forgotten you,” she says, and the more she tries to resist crying, the stronger the pressure pulses behind her eyes, the more her mouth trembles uncontrollably. She sees Mama perched on a stool in Leningrad, telling the story of the demented soldier who brought Kolya’s war journal. She sees Grandma on the porch, her body leaning toward the gate she has just heard creaking open, her blue cotton dress as soft as her skin. She sees Nadia on the Palace Bridge, her face fallen, as if she has already glimpsed the future, looking down into the river at the yellow hat blown off by the wind. The three women who loved him, all gone. Sasha sees all this and weeps, and she can hear, through the static, that Kolya, all the way on the other side of the world, is weeping, too."

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43.

"“I need to go outside.” She gets up. “To clear my head.”

"“I’ll go with you,” Andrei says. “I’ll just walk by your side. We don’t have to say anything.”

Abrahamic-IV, indeed.

"Andrei must see the confusion in her face, because he doesn’t press her for an answer. “Let’s go somewhere we can sit down and talk,” he says. “I know a place that’s open late.

"“And if you like it there, in America,” he adds casually, as if in passing, as if what he is about to say amounts to nothing but a trifle, “you can do me a favor and never come back.”"

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44.

"Andrei stops, presses his palms over his eyes, as if he wants to black out what he saw.

" ... “This was the beginning of the end—not my first downfall and not my last.”"

It isn't the land, it's the Abrahamic-IV creed.

Not different from The Crucible by Arthur Miller.

" ... “I can’t start over. I wish I could.” ... “My back has been broken. I can no longer move forward. I’m now deep in this muck, up to my ears, drowning.”"

" ... Sasha has to try one last time. She needs to exhume her guilt of leaving Ivanovo for Moscow, surrender it to him.

" ... His silence is his answer. ... "

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45.

"She has nothing to say to offer enlightenment. Instead, she says what she has wanted to say to him for months.

"He stops before his desk and leans forward, his palms on the glass.

"“This job has cost me dearly,” she says, “and now I need to leave.”"

"Abandoning all of them at once, she thinks, is the only way she will ever leave.

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46.

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47.

"His wife will genuinely grieve, just as her mother and perhaps Vadim, who will be angered at seeing his daughter so devastated. And Sasha? She is gone from his life for good, vanished to the other side of the curtain. She is no longer here, within the confines of this reality. He has made sure of that."

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48.

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CONTENTS

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ACT 1 IVANOVO

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

ACT 2 MOSCOW

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

ACT 3 LENINGRAD

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

ACT 4 IVANOVO-LENINGRAD

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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REVIEW

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ACT 1 IVANOVO 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17