Is it really possible to cross to the other side? Is there a bridge between the two lives that seem to be so far apart, installed on opposite poles of the earth? Or are they—those living on this side—too burdened by their past and haunted by their memories: the physical and moral devastation of the Leningrad Front, of Nadia’s disappearance, of Mama’s scribbling spy reports on her professor? Is their past always going to hold them back, on this side of the Iron Curtain, wrapped—like babushkas in their kerchiefs—in their version of reality, always heroic and uplifting, always right, until they age and shrivel and become the grime of history? Or can she excise the images of this reality from her mind, rip them out of her heart, by the roots? Must Sasha clear her head of the past so that she can advance into the future?
She often sees Mama young, the way she looked in a photograph in Ivanovo before Sasha was born, her hair swept back in the style popular before the war, her smiling eyes still crinkled and ironic. This is how she now comes to Sasha in dreams, when she tries to hold fast to the diaphanous image of her mother in the first few moments of waking up. The mother she’d never known, the mother who still remembers Kolya in Ivanovo. Her mother, standing tall and straight, alone, outside time.
Maybe, after all, there is no solid demarcation between the living and the dead but rather a thin veil, more porous than they could know. Or maybe this thought is nothing but Sasha’s pitiful attempt to soothe the wound of guilt, of not being next to her mother when her heart was failing, when she was lying in the hospital, most likely in the hallway, on a bed without sheets, frightened and alone. Maybe this thought is nothing but her feeble effort to alleviate the grief of allowing her mother to die. It still festers, this wound, spewing guilt. With time, will it dry up? Will this wishful thinking transport her mother solely into their memory, hers and Kolya’s, where she will always be radiant and young, having achieved the impossible feat of slowing down the current of time?
Sasha thinks of Kolya’s voice reaching over to her from the past, the voice of a man who won’t, for her, remain forever young. A man she knows only from his paintings, his war journal, and his prewar photographs in the family album, a man who had in Sasha’s mind, for so many years, replaced her father. A man who did cross over to another life, almost an afterlife, from which, back then, there was no return. Is there a chance that today may be the dawn of time when crossing to the other side will become possible, despite what Grandpa thinks? Possible with Andrei’s help, which she is going to accept as the last arrangement he will make for her, the final manifestation of this corrosive, mutilated love.
On her way to the office of the administrative director, Sasha passes a sign for an upcoming meeting of her theater’s Art Council. The sign announces the agenda: Why don’t Communist Party members play more leading roles? She doesn’t know if this question deserves a meeting-length discussion or if it is even a valid question that merits an answer, but she knows what she is going to say to Pavel Petrovich, their chief administrator, who presides over the daily machinery of her theater. She is going to tell him she is leaving.
His narrow features tense, gathering even closer around his nose. “You’re leaving to go where?” he asks, peering at her from above his thin-rimmed glasses, his brow furrowed.
Sasha knows that the word America would explode in this stately office like a bomb, taking him and her and everyone else in the building with it, so she remains silent.
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.”