She feels guilty because she loves Andrei’s love. It feels good being loved by an older boy, being admired and touched reverentially, as if she were an ancient Greek vase on display in the Hermitage. It feels a lot like Turgenev’s orchard scene or Nina’s part in Chekhov’s Seagull she is rehearsing in the school drama club. But even though she loves Andrei, she also loves Theater. The one thing she knows for certain is that she must go to Moscow, and it is time to tell Andrei about this, even if it makes his coal-like Mayakovsky eyes turn white with anger. She takes a breath and tries to release what has been stuck inside her for too long, but the words still refuse to clothe themselves in sound. She sits with her mouth open, silent. She knows that what she is not able to utter yet will catch him as off guard as an expert solar plexus strike and will be just as devastating. She also knows that soon—despite the pain it is bound to inflict on both of them—she will have no choice but to tell him she is leaving.
Andrei peers into the wall of grass before him, as though the ants crawling up and down the thick blades hold the key to what he senses she cannot yet say, as though if he stares long enough into the yellowish thicket, their future would reveal itself in its entirety. Yet their future is still opaque; she is not ready to say what she has to say.
She turns away from him. From the angle of the sun above the forest, she knows that Grandma has already started to prepare for supper, so she has a perfect excuse to extract herself from the thicket of this uncomfortable silence. “It’s getting late,” she says. “I have to go home.”
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
At home, Sasha steels herself for the announcement that she wasn’t able to utter in the field. She waits for everyone to be sitting around the table, for Grandma to stop running into the kitchen and lower herself into her chair. She ignores Grandpa’s dictum “when I eat, I am deaf and mute” because she knows that the severity of what she is about to say will overshadow the prohibition against speaking during the meal.
She takes a deep breath and focuses all her strength on the words, as if she were about to go onstage. “I want to be an actress,” she utters in what she thinks sounds like a Theater voice. “When I finish school this summer, I am leaving for Moscow to take the entrance exam to drama school,” she continues, even as her resolve is leaking out, making her look down into her plate, into the puddle of cabbage soup.
This is the first time she has wrapped words around this desire that has been burning inside her for almost ten years. Spoken out loud, her intent is now serious and real, validated by the fact of having been announced.
When she lifts her eyes, she thinks of the mute scene at the end of Gogol’s The Inspector General. Grandpa is sitting with his mouth gaping open, his hand with a spoon full of soup frozen in the air. Her mother is staring at her with her most serious frown, the one she saves for talk of war and other dangers. Grandma is looking down into her plate, her hand covering her mouth, as if she is afraid she will accidentally say something positive about Theater and acting.
Her mother is the one to break the silence. “And afterward, what will you do?” she demands. “Will you spend your life in some provincial theater so you can come out at the end of the first act to announce, ‘Dinner is served’？ Will you end up in Vladivostok or Pinsk, with the rejects who can barely make it through a plumbing course?” Her voice is her teaching voice, and this is a lecture. “You wanted to be a lot of things when you were growing up. You wanted to be a streetcar driver. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, I remember,” Sasha says. “I was six!” It makes her furious that her mother would compare Theater to streetcars.
“And what is acting, anyway? You don’t treat the ill; you don’t teach; you don’t produce anything. You aren’t doing anything of value. It’s all frivolous and chaotic, an unworthy job for a serious citizen.”
“You know nothing about acting! It’s not unworthy and it’s not frivolous,” Sasha says angrily, challenging her mother and her worship of the practical. “I will be producing something, but it’s something you can’t touch. Something you and Grandpa will never understand.”
“It’s time to grow up, Sasha.” Her mother takes a deep breath, a sign that she has heard enough arguments she considers senseless. “You’re not going anywhere,” she announces in a voice swollen with anger. “I’m your mother and I’m not letting you go. You will stay here and go to college and get a decent job. And that’s that.”