“All right, a tinsel rose,” Marik concedes. He stares at the river of the torn linoleum, sniffling and wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “But the soldier did not die. He melted down into a lump in the shape of a little tin heart.”
Sasha likes it that something remained of the soldier and the ballerina after they burned in the fire, but she is not sure about the little tin heart. Is it too sappy a finale for such a proud warrior? She doesn’t know, yet she decides to accept it without an argument. Despite its lack of what her mother values most, grit, Marik’s ending seems to be a good fit for the story of courage and love they have just played out on this make-believe stage of the linoleum-river setting. It makes her happy and lighthearted, and she feels her mouth stretch into a smile, all on its own.
4
“Stalin, our military glory,” sings a voice above her head. The radio, a little brown box with a woolen front, is perched on a shelf beside a wood-burning stove, and even if Sasha could reach it and silence the Stalin song they all know by heart, she wouldn’t dare. She is standing here because she is being punished. The offense didn’t approach, in its severity, the ride on the back of a streetcar, so the payback doesn’t rise to the height of a whipping.
This morning, Grandma decided to unfold the old newspapers piled on the porch and saw that they were all stained with grease. Each day before going outside, Sasha would hide a slice of black bread drenched in sunflower oil and sprinkled with salt inside the newspaper heap, and when Grandma’s face disappeared from the window, she would unearth the treat and savor it on the street in all its rich and oily glory. The best part was taking turns with Andrei and Marik, all three of them biting into the thick rye delicacy so much tastier in the fields, amid clumps of tall grass and sorrel. She doesn’t know what possessed Grandma to sort through the old papers, with three heads of cabbage wilting on the kitchen floor, waiting to be grated, layered with salt, and pressed into a bucket to be eaten in the winter.
She whined and whimpered as Grandma dragged her inside, up the creaky steps of the porch, across the dining room, and into the corner. “A fine thing for a girl to do,” she said and turned Sasha around to face the peeling wallpaper with faded berries and vines that must have been red and green at some time she doesn’t remember. “Nice girls eat inside, with their napkins tucked in the front and their elbows off the table.” She said this in such a determined voice that Sasha could almost see those napkins Grandma spoke about, squares of white linen she kept in her closet, part of her dowry （such an old, prerevolutionary word）， until she had to rip them up for diapers when Sasha’s mother and her uncles were born. She hadn’t lamented them; since there was nothing to eat, the need for napkins vanished right after the disappearance of food.
When the song praising Stalin ends with the bang of cymbals, the voice from the radio announces, “Tonight we perform Chekhov’s Three Sisters.”
She doesn’t know about Chekhov yet because she just finished the first grade, but this radio play doesn’t sound like anything they ever get to hear: the anthem of the Soviet Union that wakes them up in the morning or news from the fields with rumbling tractors her mother turns on when she returns from work. Sasha always wonders about the destination of these tractors filled with wheat. Maybe they are all sent to Moscow or Leningrad, which she knows are much more important to their country than Ivanovo, but she is afraid to ask because Grandpa is always within earshot, and he wouldn’t appreciate her questioning the news.
But no wheat can be important when a story so much like theirs is broadcast on the radio, a story of three sisters who seem to live their lives. As she faces the wallpaper, the sisters take over their house and their kitchen, with a pail of drinking water and a dipper floating on top, a table covered with a tablecloth Grandma has cross-stitched between frying onions for soup and turning up dirt for potatoes and dill, a wood-burning stove that looks like a checkerboard, since half the tiles have fallen off. The oldest sister, Olga, is Grandma; Masha is her mother; and Irina, the youngest of the three, is Sasha. They sit around a table where a samovar puffs out little clouds of steam, blow into saucers of hot tea, and talk about Moscow and another life.
What is this other, better life the sisters dream and speak about in urgent, breathless voices? “To leave for Moscow, end everything here,” says Irina, and Sasha repeats it in the theatrical voice the actress uses, a voice full of drama and importance. The men from the play are all in the military, although there is no war going on, and they’re called lieutenant and colonel and even baron—an ancient word, because all the barons were disposed of in 1917. “I’m so tired,” says Irina in the third act as Sasha picks at the grains of cement where tiles fell off the side of the stove. “This work is without poetry, without thought. I dream of Moscow every night; I’ve almost lost my mind.”