She puts her hand on his sleeve. “We have always been close,” she says. “You understand me better than anyone else. I wouldn’t have told you so much about my life, I wouldn’t have told you about my uncle’s journal, I wouldn’t be here in this room with you if I didn’t think I could trust you.”
He pulls her in again, and she presses herself against him. They stay in this tight embrace for a minute, or maybe several minutes, just as they did when she last saw him in Ivanovo before she told him that she had to leave.
“What happened that you couldn’t tell me?” she asks when their bodies separate.
He looks away. “I still can’t tell you. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to tell you.”
She feels that the air in the room has lost its charge; it is already a room that belongs to the past, a room waiting for its next encounter, a room to be forgotten.
He leans forward, his elbows on his knees, and stares into the space in front of him. “You left.”
“I left to go to acting school,” she says. “You know I had to leave. I had no choice.”
He doesn’t move, and in the silence, she hears the blood simmering in her ears. “Things are changing in my life, and I have decisions to make,” he finally says and gets up. He stops by the window to peer outside and then turns to her. He is standing in a parallelogram of sunshine, and his face is dark because all the light is pooled behind him.
“I cannot marry an actress,” he says, looking at the floor. “It’s one of the Party’s strictest rules.”
This is so sudden, she is rendered mute. His words feel like a gut punch that has left her trying to catch a breath and find her balance.
“How do you know I would even consider marrying you?” she spits out when she is finally able to speak, a question that makes him wince. “How do you know I would consider marrying anyone?”
There is a sharp intake of breath, his mouth tensing around what he decides not to say. Instead he steps toward her and pulls her into his arms again. “I love you, Sashenka,” he mutters into her ear. “But there are things happening in my life that I cannot talk about, at least not now. Please try to understand.”
“I’m going to Riga in two days,” she whispers. “To film the rest of the movie.” She is glad he can’t see her face, her constricted mouth. They are at the door, still on this side, the side of what happened last night.
“I’ll write,” says Andrei and kisses her on the lips, a goodbye kiss. He opens the door, a suitcase in hand. “Do you need a ride back?”
She doesn’t.
“I love you,” he says and starts running down the stairs.
“I love you, too,” she says, but he is already two flights down.
23
For nearly three months, she clings to a foolish hope that Andrei will write to her. He doesn’t write in September, when she runs to the main Riga post office every day. By the second week of her visits, the old spindly woman behind the general delivery counter shakes her head even before Sasha can utter a word. He doesn’t write in October, when she cuts her post office detours to twice a week. By mid-November, the post office with its general delivery counter is completely off her route.
When her scenes are not on the schedule, she walks on Riga’s narrow streets, past its cathedrals, so gothic and un-Russian, the antipodes of Suzdal’s churches. In her mind, she rewinds their Suzdal night again and again, looking for clues. He cannot marry an actress: what an absurd, insulting declaration. It reeks of the medieval stupor of old times when actors could not be buried inside a Christian cemetery, when their bodies were laid to rest behind the cemetery walls, away from all the decent, sinless souls. And who said she is ready to talk about marriage? Who said that Theater does not have its own requirements, just as severe as the Party does?
She walks and thinks about Andrei. She tries to remember how old she was when the two of them—young but no longer children—despite her family’s prohibition against it, snuck into his house. His father was still safely in Siberia, so was she twelve? And what were they planning to do there in his tiny kitchen? When his mother caught them that afternoon, she poured them milk, placing her glass on a doily embroidered with elaborate roses she had cross-stitched. It seemed impossible that her gnarled hands, big and full of calluses, could have produced the tiny filigree stitches on the doily, but that was the heart of Andrei’s house—and maybe of Andrei himself—roughness stitched into beauty.