The enormity of Moscow’s possibilities is as thrilling as it is terrifying. In the night, terrible dreams return again and again. She bends over the ledge of their drinking well and falls in. She is flailing in icy black water, the logs of the walls closing over her head, as a tiny figure etched against a square of light high above watches her scrape the slime off the walls. “Help!” she cries, but no sound comes out. She takes a breath and shouts again, but she can only hear splashing water. She has no voice. She is thrashing desperately, mute, the figure above a dark silhouette of someone she doesn’t know. In her dream, she always wakes up before she drowns so that she could fall into the well again, the next night and the next.
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
Sasha does not see the fire. Only when she comes back from school, their last day of the last grade, a day of farewells, does she see what is left of Andrei’s house. It has always been more of a shed than a house, with a wood-burning stove in the front corner and two tiny rooms separated by a door with a missing upper hinge that always made it hang at an angle. But now there is no house; there is no shed. There is a heap of charred, broken ribs jutting out of the smoldering pile of crumbling boards.
No one saw how the fire started, her mother tells her, but once it did, it spread fiercely and fast, devouring the house.
“Andrei’s mother was inside when we heard a boom, like an explosion. I ran out into the courtyard and saw the house ablaze. His father was wobbling around, drunk, with a broken vodka bottle in his hand. So drunk he could barely stand. So when he lost his balance and fell, the jagged glass must have knifed straight into his stomach.” Her mother nods her head, whether to drive in the irony or to affirm the outcome, Sasha doesn’t know.
The courtyard is filled with the bitter smell of wet ash, and Andrei is slouched on the ground next to the fence, streaks of black across his face. Sasha kneels down next to him.
“Tell me what happened.”
He doesn’t move and doesn’t say anything, as if he didn’t hear her. And maybe he didn’t.
For about a week after the fire, Sasha cannot find Andrei. He is not in any of their usual haunts; he has completely disappeared. Asking her mother would only provoke another tirade on danger. Two years ago, Sasha would have asked Marik, but all that is left of her friend is a heavy stone of guilt in the pit of her stomach. And now there is more guilt staring her in the face: the approaching date for her Moscow drama school exam, the knowledge that she must leave her life in Ivanovo, the nauseating feeling that she must leave Andrei, in spite of what he has lost.
What would Andrei do if her house burned down, her mother, Grandma and Grandpa, and every one of Kolya’s paintings she knows by heart, gone? If she were alone and the only thing she had left was a charred carcass of what used to be her home spreading the reek of damp ash all over the courtyard? Would Andrei leave her for Moscow?
She stands at the streetcar stop when Andrei appears in the opening door, ready to get off. He freezes when he sees her. A wiry woman pushes him in the back with a string bag full of turnips, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t seem to notice the impatient passenger behind him. All he sees is Sasha, her face naked in its trust, open to him and no one else.
He steps forward and embraces her. For a moment, Sasha doesn’t know what to do with her arms, but then they rise and wrap themselves around him. The two of them stand like this, buried in each other, for how long she doesn’t know. Inside her, the love for Andrei pulsates with such intensity that it nearly burns, catapulting her back to the memory of a ball of lightning she saw when she was six.
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.