“And just how long do you plan to be away?” he asks, drilling into her face with one of his formidable stares that have extinguished scandals and severed careers. He is used to heartbreak and intrigue and all kinds of manipulation, having seen a great deal of drama, both onstage and off, in his twenty years of working in the theater, but Sasha can sense he knows that she is serious. His thick eyebrows have formed one line, and she notices that his left eyelid has begun to twitch.
“A couple of months, probably,” she says in a tone he will perceive as nonchalant because she no longer cares. “I’m not sure yet.” If she was honest, she would tell him that she is not sure of anything, except that she must leave. Leave Andrei here. Go where Kolya is.
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.
She does realize this. She realizes that she is about to abandon her entire life, a life she has worked so hard to achieve. A life with the three pillars at its foundation: the graves in Leningrad and Ivanovo; her dusty blackhearted motherland; and the Theater, which in her six years of work here has grown into her big, dysfunctional family.
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.”
She will stop to say goodbye to Lara and Slava, her former classmates, her fellow actors, her small kompaniya of friends. She will wish them happiness and luck in their lives in the theater. She will apologize to Lara for not protecting her from the assistant dean when they were students. She will thank her for listening to so many hours of rants about Andrei, about Marik, about insecurity and guilt; for being patient and quiet; for having survived to become Sasha’s close friend.
Then Vladimir Ivanovich will hold her and kiss her on the head, as a father would his departing daughter. He will pour them a drink of whatever is stashed in his room for her upcoming trip, for crossing the ocean to the other side. It is like crossing the River Lethe, he will say, the river of oblivion, which runs between this life and the next. Its waters will make her forget the past, he will say. They will erase all memory of her present life.
46
She can’t see Andrei as he stands in the check-in hall of Pulkovo Airport’s international wing, concealing himself behind a column in the corner, away from the counter with the handwritten sign where the words NEW YORK are scribbled in the neat cursive loops of a top English student. But Sasha knows he is there. She can sense him. He watches her walk from the customs area, dragging her half-open suitcase, which has obviously been rummaged through, and he shakes his head in frustration. This was the one thing he failed to do, to give her name to the customs director. One thing he failed to do, but not the only thing. He clenches his jaw, but it is too late now. It is too late for so much. He watches her drag her suitcase away from the door, where she starts to fold the rumpled clothes and pack everything back into the bag. When she is done, Sasha looks around, sees the loopy handwritten sign, and joins the line for check-in. It is a short line, uncharacteristic of lines in this city: not many people travel to New York from Leningrad.
He sees a red passport in her hand, which, he knows, has just been issued and still smells of glue, a special external passport granting her permission to leave for the United States of America. Sasha knows he had to cash in some huge favors he had accumulated over the years in order to have that passport issued. He even got his father-in-law involved—he had to—although he knew Vadim smelled the truth, by the way his son-in-law begged. He had never asked for anything before, so the old man looked him in the eye and said, “This is for her, isn’t it,” which they both knew was not really a question. Andrei didn’t nod or shake his head in denial. “Whoever this is for,” he replied as impartially as he could muster, “I’m sending her away. Far away.” “How far?” asked Vadim, a flare of suspicion in his eyes. “America,” he said and turned to the wall, because the sound of that destination made him have to catch his breath. That was when the old man walked over to the internal office phone, lifted the receiver, and dialed a number that only he could dial. “A visa and a passport will be issued in her name,” he said, his voice both a warning and a condemnation. “But if they investigate who authorized this, it will be you who takes the fall.”