He is ready to take the fall. He has nothing to lose.
He watches Sasha heave her suitcase onto the scale; accept a boarding pass from the clerk, a woman with doughy forearms and henna-colored hair; fit it into her passport. A week ago, at her request, he called Kolya in New York with her flight number; he was surprised that her uncle still rounded his vowels the way they all did back in Ivanovo, a dialectal peculiarity. He watches the clerk peer at her as she is looking down, a stare of recognition. Of course people recognize her; she is an actress. She is wearing a navy dress with short sleeves and a narrow skirt, a pair of high-heeled shoes that make her legs look more muscled, like the legs of a ballerina. Her hair is the color of ash, the color of burn and ruin, and is pulled back into a ponytail; her bangs come down to her eyebrows; her eyes are big and gray, like frozen water on the winter canals. He can see her eyes as distinctly as if she were standing next to him. On her arm she is holding a beige raincoat, the one he knows, the raincoat she wore two months ago when she appeared on the threshold of his office, when she brought Kolya’s letter to show him, when she thought there might still have been hope for the two of them. Or even hope for him alone.
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.
47
Andrei’s car is waiting outside the airport. He has just seen her pass through the glass door, gone through the passage to a life beyond the curtain. He gets into the front seat, next to Borya, leaning back into the familiar sweaty smell of old leather and gasoline. “To the office,” he says and stares into the rusty lock of the glove compartment as Borya steps on the gas and turns the car around to go back to the city. Wordlessly, they drive past rows of newly erected apartments that his office has yet to allocate to the best workers of this factory or that school district.
“Is it the actress?” says Borya, a question he has earned the right to ask by six years of not asking too many questions. Andrei doesn’t answer, and by not answering, by staring into the windshield, he acknowledges what Borya, who saw her get out of the taxi and enter the door of the small international wing, is asking. The actress, the airport, the final separation. All corroborated by his driver, who knows her from TV; all validated by the Aeroflot clerk who recognized her from one of her plays. They saw her leave, just as he did. They are witnesses. His feverish mind didn’t make it up. She is now waiting to get on the plane, past the passport control, in the neutral zone between the countries’ borders, unaffiliated with either land, free. She is free of him, finally. Ready to place the enormity of the Atlantic Ocean between them, as a confirmation. And is he free of her, as he has promised his father-in-law?
Borya pulls in front of the Smolny entrance and turns off the engine. Andrei opens the door and, with one foot on the pavement, fumbles in his pocket, takes out his silver lighter—the one shaped like a handgun, a birthday gift from his coworkers—and hands it to his driver. “Keep it,” he says and nods Borya good night, sending him home.
The Smolny hallways are echoey; the offices behind the closed doors are empty, deserted for the night. In the whole building, he is alone. He unlocks the door to his office, creaks it open, and turns on the light. Everything is the same way he left it this afternoon, the same way he found it six years ago when he asked to be transferred to Leningrad to be close to her. All is the same except for one thing locked in the desk drawer, something small and weighty, something he placed there after the dacha talk with his father-in-law about all those enemies of the people murdered in NKVD cellars.
He sits at his desk, shakes a cigarette out of a pack, and rolls it between his fingers. The ashtray is full of cigarette butts he has smoked when he sat there for hours this afternoon, before the trip to the airport. He doesn’t remember how long he sat there. His mind wandered, and his thoughts strayed, images rushing through his head, flooding, just as they are now, again. He sees their Ivanovo courtyard, a well with a creaky handle, chickens wading through the dust, the tar roof over the dump where he, Marik, and Sasha met after school. He sees the lilac bushes stretching their branches through the slats in the fence on the corner where he waited for her to return from a piano lesson. He sees the field where they lay among the tall grass, on the last day she came there before she left, rain falling in the distance, drawn toward the dark forest, like a heavy curtain.