“So why, then?” she shouts. “Why did you do it?” Why did you have to marry someone else, with me right here, waiting for you all these years, like a fool, like the Ivanovo idiot Grishka, always clinging to our shed in the rain, always begging. She doesn’t say anything about clinging or begging aloud, but somehow, Andrei hears her silent question.
“You know I love you, and I’ve always wanted to be with you. Only you,” he says, although she knows, of course, the proverbial “but” will follow next, already chomping at the bit, ready to gallop out of his mouth. “But I simply couldn’t. I made a deal with the Devil. I had to. I can’t tell you more than this. It was beyond my control.”
So here it is, his explanation, as murky as this January night. There is always something beyond his control, always something he cannot tell her.
“So you came to my theater and then to my apartment only to let me know that you got married.” The fire in her gut triggered by the alcohol has died down now, and she no longer wants to hurt him. She simply wants him out. Out of her apartment and out of her life. But there still remains an urge to lunge at him, to reassemble the shards of her self-respect, a desperation one feels clutching at the last straw of dignity. “What did you hope to get from this?” she says, even though she doesn’t want to hear his answers. She only knows one thing: she must harden her heart against him, now and for the rest of her life.
He is fully dressed now, wrapping a scarf around his throat, and she averts her eyes because looking at him seems to hollow her stomach.
“I came here to repent,” he says. “I wanted you to taste my guilt and my humiliation.” He starts to open the front door and then turns back for the last time. His sentences are measured, delivered as one might hand over an unexpected gift. “My whole life, I have only loved you. What I did has crippled me. It has flayed off my skin, strip by strip. I cannot look at what I’ve become.” He pauses, and when she peers into his face, she sees hopelessness and torment, but she also sees grief. She has to avert her eyes because she, too, cannot look at what he has become. He raises his hand and runs a finger over her cheek, a tender goodbye touch. “I needed to tell you. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I know there can’t be any. I simply wanted you to know.” He pulls open the front door, then pauses and turns to her. “I need you to know that I love you.”
32
She is at the theater, at the shoemakers’ lair, a room full of broken and newly mended shoes, and she is weeping. She came here with a pair of pumps that needed repair, and when Uncle Tolya asked, “What happened?” her throat closed, and she burst into tears. She is holding a shoe in each hand, wiping her eyes and nose with her forearm, wailing so loudly that the senior shoemaker, Uncle Moishe, bent over a piece of leather when she entered, now clucks his tongue and shakes his head and peers at her from above his glasses. “Nu, nu,” he says and pats her head with his gnarled hand. “Sit, little girl, and let me bring you some tea.” Uncle Tolya, bony and long-jawed, stops hammering a nail into the bottom of a shoe and looks at Uncle Moishe, who waves his wrist to send him on a tea quest. Uncle Moishe’s hands smell of old leather and shoe polish, a comfortable smell that makes her calm down, go from weeping to sniffling. Then Uncle Tolya returns with a kettle and pours steamy, strong tea into a glass. The tea has the color of cognac, which makes her start weeping again, and her tears leave stains on the broken shoes she is still holding in her hands.
When she leaves the shoemakers’ workshop, she is empty inside, as hollowed by the crying as she usually is by a performance. She walks along the endless hallway to her dressing room, when she passes the open door and sees Vladimir Ivanovich, her partner Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, who waves her in. She likes Vladimir Ivanovich, although he is in his fifties, almost thirty years her elder, and is married. He has a deep, fatherly voice; he is dependable and strong. His face is too idiosyncratic for him to be cast as a hero, even when he was younger—a fleshy nose; dark eyes, set a little too close apart; an imperious chin with a cleft—so he is a character actor, like Sasha.
“When leaving the stage, don’t forget to leave your character’s skin behind,” says Vladimir Ivanovich, who thinks that she just came out of a rehearsal and hasn’t had a chance to disconnect from her role. He is an inexhaustible source of these little sayings, small scatterings of acting wisdom that make her laugh even when she doesn’t feel like laughing. Behind every peacock tail, there is a chicken’s ass, he told her when Olivia, the director’s wife, tried to upstage her in their scene in Twelfth Night. Sasha attempts a smile and shakes her head, letting him know that her distress has nothing to do with acting.