The three of them come to the theater hours before their scheduled plays, the time when they own all this empty space. The backstage is almost as vast as the eight-hundred-seat theater itself: several dozen dressing rooms, along the maze of wide hallways winding around a resting area for actors, with couches and a scattering of armchairs, like a living room in an enormous apartment, if Russian apartments had living rooms. On the second and third floors, Ira and Tamara, the theater seamstresses, preside over a workshop filled with racks of costumes and bales of fabric; Uncle Tolya and Uncle Moishe hammer nails into newly cobbled shoes; and their makeup artist, Lida, upholstered in a blue lab coat and layers of cheerful plumpness, takes care of trays of greasepaint, arrays of brushes, and at least a hundred wigs. On the top floor, in a suite of four high-ceilinged rooms wallpapered with the posters of its century-long history, are copies of plays that have been performed here over the years, along with other exhibits of their theater’s museum. The Bolshoi Theatre is like a medieval fortress, and if they decided to reside here and never return home, every requirement of their life, from food to clothes to books, would be easily sustained within these walls.
They gossip about the latest liaisons and scandals and try to figure out the identity of the current KGB informer, because there is always an informer in the theater, listening in on their conversations, pretending to be one of them. “There is an informer in every workplace in our vast motherland,” Sveta warned them back in drama school, “but Theater is always in the avant-garde of Soviet spying,” she insisted, “because plays have the power to influence so many people all at once. ‘Theater is a very dangerous weapon,’” she quoted the legendary director Meyerhold. Sasha wasn’t sure she believed Sveta back then, but in the few months working here, she has learned this much: trust is an exotic fruit that doesn’t grow in this semiarctic zone of freezing winters and rainy, mosquito-infested summers. Aside from their small kompaniya of three friends, they can trust no one in their Bolshoi Theatre.
“Do you remember the exercise we did in drama school called Contact?” says Slava when Sasha asks about the informers in their theater. She remembers. You had to stand back-to-back with a partner and feel his pressure as you both squatted simultaneously and then slowly lifted yourself up again. It only worked if both did the equal amount of work, if you could give your partner a feeling of support and trust and, as a result, receive the same trust in return. It worked back then, when The Magnificent Seven from America was playing in Moscow theaters, when life was all in the future tense, when she could be—despite what her acting teachers thought—a Dostoyevsky heroine.
She trusts Lara and Slava unequivocally. The person she doesn’t trust is herself. She is still not sure she has acting talent. She is not sure if her final Dostoyevsky scene wasn’t simply a fluke, a lucky outcome of being coached by a master teacher.
She knows one thing: she longs to be other people, not to be herself. A role—any role, even that of a Soviet janitor—is a mask, a costume she is compelled to wear, a disguise that turns her into someone else.
29
After Sasha’s first year in Bolshoi Theatre, her mother is offered a job teaching anatomy at Leningrad Medical School, packs up the forty-nine years of her Ivanovo life, and takes a train a thousand kilometers northwest to live with her daughter. Sasha has become accustomed to living alone, and the prospect of living with her mother, again, stirs up anxiety and conflict. Is she still going to try to control Sasha’s life, the way she did in Ivanovo? Will she be capable of understanding that Sasha is now an adult? That she will be living in Sasha’s apartment, no longer in the provinces?
It is the end of July, and the rains have already washed the summer dust off the city streets when Sasha meets her at the Central railway station. They heave her two suitcases past the bust of Lenin presiding over the waiting hall and take bus 22 to her new apartment on the sixth floor of the corner building everyone calls by its prerevolutionary name of the Fairy Tale House. In a book on Leningrad history, her new place of residence is decorated with exquisite tiles picturing scenes from Russian fairy tales. There is no trace of those tiles left. The building was badly damaged during the siege of Leningrad in 1941, and the massive postwar restoration could not afford to focus on the aesthetic. Her mother and Sasha haul the suitcases through the front door only to discover that the elevator is out of order, and it takes them twenty minutes of tugging and resting between floors to hoist them up the six endless flights of stairs. When they reach the top, her mother, red-faced and breathless, dubs Sasha’s building the Reality House, and from that day on, the name will stick with both of them.