Alas, she seeks no happy ending,
Nor runs from happiness away.
Beneath—the crystal torrent tempteth,
Above—the golden rays caress,
Yet she, rebellious, longs for tempests,
As though a tempest granted rest.
They are two hours early for her train to Moscow, so the three of them sit on the hard bench and wait. Grandpa, still furious at her for defying his orders and at her mother and Grandma for walking on a leash of the child’s foolishness, has refused to come to the station with them. Even with all the windows open, the room smells of stale beer and soot, and the air is permeated with the acrid melancholy of leaving mixed with the pungent anticipation of travel.
Sasha looks around at what she is about to give up. Across from them sits a skinny man with a red mustache and watery eyes, as if he has already started to lament his own exit from the life of Ivanovo. A few meters away is a family of five, the youngest child still an infant in the arms of a bovine-looking mother, the oldest a boy with scabbed knees and shifty eyes who is nine or ten and who wipes his runny nose with the sleeve of his shirt.
There is a suitcase by the feet of the father, a small man with curly black hair and a cigarette that hangs off his lip as if it had become a permanent feature of his face. He holds on his lap a whining girl of about three, who is trying to wiggle her way out of her father’s arms, wailing and rubbing her eyes with her clenched fists. Holding the baby with her left arm, the mother bends her right elbow, not a muscle twitching in her face, and slaps the girl on the back of her head. The girl stops wriggling and becomes quiet for a few seconds, then explodes into a new, louder wail. The mother whacks her again, and the girl swallows her sobs, curls into a ball on the man’s lap, and begins to whimper softly, like a beaten dog.
Sasha sees the girl’s brother, now by the station’s food kiosk, watching a stocky woman in a sleeveless dress eat a fried turnover, eyeing the grease the woman licks off her fingers when she finishes the last bite. The woman’s arms are as plump as loaves of white bread in the Ivanovo bakery where every morning, Grandma and Sasha stand in line for a brick of black bread and three rolls of white.
From now on, she will save every image she sees and set it onto the innermost shelf of her memory, next to everything else she has experienced and observed in her nearly seventeen years in Ivanovo. She is going to save it all—every glance, every head movement, every scene, and every face she sees—and she will store it all inside her until she needs to pull it out for the roles she will be playing when she becomes an actress.
“This is for you,” says Grandma and hands her a handkerchief tied at the corners. “Open it.”
Inside is a ring with a green stone, gold and delicate, a treasure worth more than everything she has ever owned.
Grandma lifts the ring and puts it on Sasha’s finger. “Fits you, just as I thought. This used to be my lucky ring. An actor’s stone.” They both stare at her hand, which now looks as if it belonged to someone else, someone talented and noble, someone who could easily fit into the life of hats and banned poetry, someone who could get accepted, even without connections, to the best Moscow drama school.
“Be careful when you get out of the station in Moscow,” her mother says. “Don’t stop and don’t talk to anyone; God knows what hoodlums hang out there in the middle of all that transit bedlam.” She has already warned Sasha several times, but she wants the message to remain fresh in Sasha’s mind, her proverbial message about dangers. “Cross the square in front of the station and wait for trolleybus number eighty-seven. The fourteenth stop is yours.” For the two weeks of auditions, she will be staying with Baba Yulia and Katya, whom they visited for the May Day parade when she was seven, and then, as her mother hopes, Sasha will come back to Ivanovo to start a normal, serious life.
She wishes she could convince her mother, the same way she has been trying to convince herself, that in two weeks, she will not be coming back. But what if her mother turns out to be right? What if Sasha’s readings from Lermontov and Chekhov make the judges yawn? What if she is too immature to understand what adults already seem to know—that everyday survival always beats art, that the material invariably trumps the intangible? What if, ever since she heard Three Sisters on the radio, she has been chasing after a phantom; what if life is indeed all utilitarian and tethered to the ground, like the spindly goat of one of their neighbors, circling the pole, day after day, over the dusty grass of the yard?
Her mother looks at her watch and gets up. They walk outside, onto the platform where passengers are already waiting, about forty people, the size of Sasha’s drama club. The family from the waiting room is already there, the mother rocking her infant on her left arm and holding her daughter with the same hand she slapped her with, the father clutching a suitcase and fumbling through his pocket in search of something to give to the boy, who leans forward in a stiff, pleading way.