They drink, and then there is silence, but not the easy silence of the past few hours. This new silence makes her tense because it has become deliberate, with a strained presence of something heavy and unsaid hovering in the air.
“There is something I need to tell you,” Andrei says before he gets up and walks to the entrance hallway, where she hears him fumble through his clothes. He returns with a new pack of Bulgarian cigarettes called Stewardess, shakes one out, and reaches for a box of matches on the ledge of the stove. He motions the pack toward her, but something makes her shake her head, as if she cannot afford a distraction, no matter how small, as if she needed all her senses focused on what he is about to tell her.
“This is difficult,” he says, shaking his head, and from the pause that follows, she knows to expect the worst. It is indeed the worst, the most devastating news, an atomic bomb dropped out of the sky.
“I got married a few months ago,” he says, staring at the radiator under the window, deeply inhaling the cigarette and breathing out a cloud of smoke as though he wished it to spread over the kitchen so that he could hide inside it.
His words slam her forehead with the force of a truncheon; they make her heart stop; they empty her lungs of air. They make her as sober as she was when only hours earlier they fumbled for each other in the hallway, when she thought, like an idiot who never learns, that the pain of longing was over and they would finally be back together again.
She gulps down the cognac that is left in her glass because she no longer wants to be sober. Being sober means she must feel the hurt of this stunning announcement by erupting in anger or disintegrating into tears. She must say something in response to the words that have just crushed her windpipe and left her speechless.
“You have to understand,” he says. “I had to. I couldn’t not . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence, doesn’t want to repeat the words for what he has done. His eyes are downcast, evading hers.
“You couldn’t not?” she repeats. “What does this mean?” The cognac she has just swallowed instantly makes her drunk again.
Andrei gets up and paces to the wall and then back. “I had no choice. It was a requirement from the ministry.” He pauses. “No. It was my father-in-law’s requirement,” he says. “I can’t explain.” He shakes his head. “It would make no sense to you.”
She doesn’t want to hear how he was forced to marry someone else. “Fuck you and fuck the ministry and fuck your father-in-law,” she says, the drunken words sticking to her upper palate. What she really wants to say is, “Why did you do it? If you had to marry someone, why didn’t you ask me? You know I would have said yes. Why didn’t you come here and ask me to marry you? Why did you marry someone else, someone who knows nothing about Ivanovo, who never rode on the back of a streetcar, who doesn’t share with you the dark secrets hidden in the most remote corner of your soul? Why did you marry her and not me?”
Suddenly she knows why. The words swim up to the surface, struggling through the thick, slow current of her drunken mind. You told me why when I was filming The Tsar’s Bride. The Party told you that you couldn’t marry an actress. And, like a good Party member, you had to do what the Party ordered.
“Why did you come here tonight?” she asks. “To tell me this? To tell me one more time that you couldn’t marry an actress?”
Andrei stands with his head down, silent.
“You are only good at suddenly appearing,” she says, anger bubbling up from the dark cauldron inside her. “And then suddenly disappearing.” After what he has just told her, she no longer wants to love him, not even a little bit. She wants to hurt him and make him suffer like she is suffering. She wants to punch him straight in the pit of his stomach, a blow that will bend him in half and force him to whimper in pain. “You’re no different from any other man. You pretend that you care; you fold me into your arms as if you loved me; you get inside me, all the way down to my soul; and then you exit and abandon me again. And then, in case you hadn’t done enough damage, you get married.” She spits the word married out of her mouth as if it were a moldy crust of bread.
He sees the fury in her eyes and turns away, not able to face her.
“I know I hurt you.” He stares at the floor, and Sasha stares at his profile. “Honestly, if we could be together, you would be so disappointed. I’ve always wanted to be the man you wanted me to be, but I can’t. I never could. I came here to tell you that I hate myself for what I did. I hate myself as much as you hate me.”