But what about Sasha’s mother and grandma? Are they also on the audience side of the curtain, among the ordinary people, or are they with Sasha, on the stage side? Does Theater allow those close to you into the space where acting happens? And where is Andrei in this new scheme of things? Which side is he on?
She hasn’t written to him, not a single letter. She feels that acting, like distance, is building walls to separate them even further.
Moscow is full of things Sasha has never seen: hard salami and chocolate candies in bright wrappers, silk scarves and cakes adorned with pink cream roses, nylon see-through stockings and whimsical bottles of bitter-smelling perfume. There are also open exhibits of modern art labeled “cosmopolitan,” which were banned only a few years earlier. There are unofficial concerts by a young bard Volodya Vysotsky, who often comes to their dorm to sing about struggle, angst, and love while they sit on the kitchen floor, mesmerized and quiet, drinking teakettles of young sour wine Georgians sell at the nearby railroad station. There is a film called The Magnificent Seven playing in two central theaters, the first movie from America that ever made it across their borders.
Sveta, Lara, and Sasha sink into their seats as the galloping horses on the screen deliver American recklessness straight into their waiting hearts. After the movie ends, they walk out silently, filled with the joy of color and the thrill of danger, so different from the monochrome monotony of their own films. Although only three of the magnificent seven survive at the end, Sasha feels relieved that one of them, Chico, goes back to the village and the girl who loves him. The night air of the Moscow streets seems charged with energy, filling her chest with a lightness, transporting her back to the innocent times of her life in Ivanovo when she felt safe, loved, and protected by Andrei.
It is 1960, and to afford the benefits of what their teachers call “the political thaw,” Sveta, Lara, and Sasha participate in the mass scenes at the Vakhtangov Theatre, where they are paid seven rubles and fifty kopecks a performance. They can always count on Gorky’s Summerfolk and The Lower Depths, and Sasha’s singing voice gets her into a Gypsy choir in Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse, but they know that the mass scenes in movies pay considerably more. They also know that their school strictly prohibits first-year students from working in film, since their professors see motion pictures as a detrimental influence on the students’ stage training.
The three of them hold a discussion about the possible repercussions of challenging the ban, which ends with Sveta’s decree that The Magnificent Seven, which they have already seen three times, as well as the cosmopolitan art exhibits and Vysotsky unofficial concerts, are sufficient reasons to break the school rules. Sveta gives them permission to sign up for the crowd scenes at the Mosfilm studio and tells them to hide in the back so as not to be caught on-screen.
19
On those evenings when they do not participate in mass scenes at the theater, Sasha and her roommate Lara sit on her bed and talk. Lara is from Pskov, a town to the northeast of Ivanovo, a place as small as Sasha’s hometown, a place often paired with the adjective provincial. They are the same age, both children of the war, both fatherless. Lara’s father was killed in Poland in 1944, when the tide of the war had already turned and Russian troops were advancing west, when the word victory had already begun to form on people’s lips. “1944, when no one should have been killed,” Lara whispers, looking down as she straightens the corner of the duvet cover with her hand.
Does she feel a connection to Lara because they both grew up in small towns in the provinces and both left for the capital? Did the two of them sense that Ivanovo and Pskov were too suffocating, that both wanted more than their homes could offer? Is Sasha’s search for a different life in Moscow simply an extension of her looking for a father, someone noble and heroic, someone whose name wouldn’t make Grandma frown? Has Lara, all this time, been looking for a father, too? It is probably to fortify the growing bond between them that Sasha tells her the story from her childhood.
Sasha’s mother, who told her that her father died during the war, never specified how he died, and this vagueness created a vacuum that, in her seven-year-old mind, gradually filled with plots of nobility and valor. Some men in her fantasies turned out more heroic, tossing a grenade at a tank and dying in an explosion of flames, while others perished more slowly, like partisans living in the woods in the middle of winter, sleeping in log-reinforced trenches below the ground, hidden under a meter of snow.