An accident at the lake was what their principal called her death at a school meeting. But Sasha was not sure it was an accident, the same way she knew Marik’s death was not an accident. What was it, then? Did she die because her son died? Did this mean that Andrei was complicit in her death as well? Was Sasha complicit, too?
Her mother, Grandma, and Sasha went to Marik’s mother’s funeral. Her grave was next to Marik’s, which meant, Sasha wanted to think, that March and April were relatively happy months for Ivanovo because no one else had died.
21
In August, she is in Suzdal, filming The Tsar’s Bride. It is an opera, with the Bolshoi stars singing on tape as they act the scenes, so the experience is not unlike what they have been doing during the first year in drama school: living and acting but remaining speechless. The film’s director, Sergey Vladimirovich, gives her thoughtful notes at the end of each day, and she is grateful he treats her just like all the other actors. Or maybe not quite. Maybe he is a little too involved in her scenes, a little too attentive in his instructions to her. She closes her mind to this. He is married and middle-aged and besides, back in Ivanovo, there is Andrei. Or at least she hopes there is still Andrei.
Her character, Lyubasha, smolders with anguish and anger. She begs the man she loves, the man who has already laid eyes on someone else, not to abandon her, not to crush her life. Night and day, she thinks of him. Night and day, only him, she sings. Lyubasha, short for Lyubov, love. She is despondent, feverish, losing hope, as the Bolshoi orchestra echoes from a tape recorder with music as restless as her mood. Lyubasha is so desperate to keep her lover that she decides to buy poison to exile her rival from life. Poison that will extinguish her rival’s eyes, drain color from her cheeks, make her hair fall out, strand by strand; poison that will bring her lover back. “I will give you everything I have, all my pearls and all my precious stones.” She sings Rimsky-Korsakov’s lines to the chemist who has promised the deadly potion. “And if that’s not enough, I’ll borrow or steal. I’m not afraid of servitude or debt.” The orchestra reverberates in heavy chords throbbing with a premonition of tragedy. But the chemist doesn’t want her necklaces or her rings. He wants only her honor. Her honor she has already given to the man who is about to leave her.
“Night and day,” she sings, “I think of him. I have forgotten my father and my mother for him,” she laments, holding the procured poison, shadowing the harmonies that pulse with dread. “I have abandoned all my family. I’ve given him everything I have. And now he wants to leave me for a girl whose eyes are brighter, whose braids are longer. A girl who doesn’t love him, who is innocent of his desire, who is betrothed to someone else.” A French horn enters with a throaty solo. “What have I come to?” cries Lyubasha, brokenhearted, bitter, inconsolable, the violins of the orchestra weeping from the Bolshoi Theatre tape.
They are almost done with the outdoor shots, and at the end of this week, after a banquet thrown by the local government office, the film crew will pack up and take the train to Riga.
This is Sasha’s first banquet, and she has been looking forward to it for weeks. Back in drama school, when they have extra money, Sveta and her other classmates mark the end of exams at Café Leningradskoe, where they pool their rubles together for a bottle of wine and a few cheap zakuski, but she has never been to a celebration that is designed to honor artists. The local Communist Party Committee has invited them all—the actors and the crew—to the biggest restaurant in Suzdal, Bely Lebed, or the White Swan.
She watches Raisa, who plays her on-screen rival, Marfa, the woman Ivan the Terrible chooses as his bride, the woman Lyubasha poisons, spend half an hour teasing her hair and pinning up a shirt that in two months of work has become too wide at the waist. Sasha watches her thread a needle as she stretches out her arm that underscores the length of bone expected for a heroine. She is shorter than Raisa, and her Ivanovo bones boast in breadth rather than length. In the movie, Marfa, innocent of Lyubasha’s rivalry, doesn’t want to marry the tsar because she loves another man, and only a few days ago, in one of the ancient monasteries Suzdal is famous for—white stone walls covered with dark icons lit by candles—Raisa filmed the final scene where, after five takes, she goes insane and dies. As Raisa is finishing pinning her shirt, Sasha ties her hair back into a ponytail, makes up her face using the tricks she has learned from Sveta and their makeup class, and puts on her only good dress, stitched together from black cotton dotted with tiny daisies.