Her body suddenly feels ungrounded, because she knows that whatever she says now will only hurt him more. There are no words that will wipe the grimace of suffering off his face and allow her to do what she must. In vain, she fumbles for a reason that will extract her from this uncomfortable silence.
“It’s late.” She begins to get up from the grass, but Andrei doesn’t let her. He pins her to the ground with his body, his mouth clamped on hers, the taste of cigarettes as harsh as his forced kiss. His left hand is pressing on her shoulder, pushing her into the grass, and his right hand is fumbling beneath her shirt, his fingers hurrying into places that have up to now been forbidden by their unspoken understanding. His body is heavy and insistent as she wriggles and thrashes to get him off her, to arrest his hands that are now groping under her skirt, pulling at her underwear. Almost instinctively, she closes her teeth around his lip and bites hard. He releases his grip and pulls back, leaving a taste of blood in her mouth. She pushes him off her and quickly gets to her feet.
As she straightens her dress and brushes off whatever may have stuck to it, her heart still racing, she glances at him sitting in the grass. His head is hung, and his shoulders are stooped, her closest friend who has just hurt her. Or was it she who hurt him first?
“I’m sorry, Sashenka; I’m so sorry,” he says in a hollow voice, as if there is nothing left inside him. “Forgive me. I don’t know what came over me.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats over and over again, to which she says nothing, turns, and walks away without looking back.
On Sasha’s bed is an open suitcase, and she has just told her mother that two weeks earlier, she bought a one-way train ticket to Moscow for June 16, eight days from today.
“This is nothing but a stupid childish whim,” her mother says sternly. “You’re too young to know what’s good for you. I won’t allow you to leave.”
Sasha straightens her spine. Her posture makes her feel that she is looking down at her mother, and she realizes that in the past year, she must have grown taller.
She is wise, her mother, so she turns away and takes a few breaths, swallowing the furor bubbling up on her tongue.
“Do you know how fierce the competition is?” she asks, switching to a different strategy. “You must have extraordinary connections to get accepted. You must be related to the Minister of Culture. No one gets in, especially not a girl from the provinces.”
Her mother knows what to say to make Sasha feel even more frightened than she already feels. You know she is right, a little voice inside her whispers; you’re nothing but a provincial girl with no connections. She feels a gnawing sensation in her gut, as if a determined hand were trying to unravel her intestines.
“I’m not saying you don’t have talent,” her mother adds in a conciliatory gesture, sensing Sasha’s dread. “But with all those hordes of youth with connections, whose names are already on the list of the admission board—honestly”—she pauses and gives Sasha a sorrowful smile—“you don’t stand a chance.”
17
Every night leading to her scheduled departure, as she packs the notebook into which she has copied Uncle Kolya’s journal by hand, along with a few skirts and dresses Grandma sewed for her, she hears her mother and Grandma whisper in the kitchen. Her mother’s voice is sibilant and injured; her grandma’s—reassuring and calm. She hears Grandpa at his drafting table pressing thick, angry lines into yet another plan for a movie theater or a music school that will remain unbuilt.
Her hands feel unsteady, and her stomach churns, but she cannot show anyone, even Grandma, that she is terrified. She cannot admit, even to herself, that this is the end of everything she knows, that, just like Andrei’s house, her Ivanovo life is about to go up in flames.
The train station is a wooden structure with “Ivanovo” written in big brown letters on its facade. A leak under a second-floor window has reduced the final o to a dirty smudge, so her town’s name is now the same as Chekhov’s play.
“Ivanov,” she whispers, looking at the station facade, taking it as a good omen for the start of her acting career, then reciting in her mind Lermontov’s “The Sail,” which she prepared for the Moscow drama school audition:
A silver sail, the ocean loner
Is lurking in the azure mist.
What has she lost in foreign corners?
What in her homeland did she miss?
Her mast is clattering and bending
Midst whistling wind and raging wave.