On the other side of the room is Yuri, the assistant director, with an opened bottle of vodka in his hand. “Do we have an extra glass?” asks Vladimir Ivanovich, which is a rhetorical question in the theater. “You are our third,” he says, laughing his humid laugh of a smoker, pouring vodka.
“The problem with this world,” he announces as Yuri pours, “is that you’re three glasses more sober than I am.” She smiles because it is true that she is still sober and because she thinks it is an insightful way of looking at the problems of the world. “To our Maria!” Vladimir Ivanovich proclaims, and they empty their glasses. The vodka flows down where the tears had erupted from, warming up her chest and making the image of Andrei smudge at the edges, as if she were looking at him through clouds of smoke from a departing train.
33
“Again! Drunk as a plumber!” her mother wails. “What did I do to deserve this?” Every night, she listens to the elevator door bang shut and to a key scratching around the keyhole of their apartment, Sasha’s key. She claims that she knows when Sasha is drunk even before she opens the front door, just from hearing the key jiggling tentatively in the lock, trying to figure out the right way to turn. Then she stands by the door, waiting for Sasha to slump into the hallway, ready to pull off her coat, lifting her arms as if she were a rag doll, ready to lead her to the divan and throw a blanket at her, like a stone.
The next morning, six months after Andrei’s visit, she is hungover and humble. Now it is her mother’s chance to say what she can’t say when Sasha is drunk. She drives her fists into her hips and delivers her lecture about the dangers of zelyoniy zmei, the green serpent—the color of the bottle—wringing its coils around Sasha’s neck. She rattles the silverware in the drawer and bangs the lid over a pot of soup to punctuate her statements because this is just what she predicted back in Ivanovo: Theater is too toxic, too unstable, and the love for zelyoniy zmei is what happens to everyone who comes under its corrosive influence.
“There are so many normal jobs,” she says, knowing that after last night, Sasha has no choice but to listen. “Look at Valya from the fourth floor—she’s just got a position at the district library around the corner. Look at Irina Petrovna’s daughter. Your age and already a chief engineer.” These are the jobs her mother understands, practical and safe, unlike the chaos and frivolity of Theater.
Last night, they celebrated the opening of a new play until four in the morning, so today her mother is more upset than usual, trotting out a longer list of toxic outcomes that await Sasha, leaping a full meter further than usual in her condemnation.
“When are you going to get married?” she demands as she cranks the handle of the meat grinder to make kotlety for dinner. “Look at yourself: no family, no children. Everyone your age is married, and some are even divorced by now. Not that I am promoting divorce,” she adds prudently, so that Sasha doesn’t get any wrong ideas in her head.
She has poked at the topic before by bringing up various young men she knows: heaping praise on a young anatomy professor at her medical institute, lionizing the engineer son of their neighbor on the third floor. Sasha doesn’t want to discuss with her mother the possibility of marriage, especially now. She doesn’t want to give her mother the advantage of being privy to what is swirling in her daughter’s heart, of sighing and pitying Sasha for not getting the man she wants. She keeps it all inside her, away from everyone’s eyes, because, as Grandma told her, what’s inside you, no one can touch.
“I’m married to the Theater,” she says, pushing back a headache.
“Don’t be so ironic with me,” her mother warns, letting her know that she is engaged in a serious conversation.
“I’m not being ironic. This is what my teachers told us at the drama school.” She thinks of her Dostoyevsky scene mentor, Polevitskaya, who warned them that Theater would take over their lives and bring them to ruin. As a spasm of nausea begins to creep up her throat, she is willing to admit that Polevitskaya may have been right. All of this—clouded in the bank of fog her mind has become—seems like a century ago.
“You need a normal life,” her mother says. “You need order. You need a family. Not a married man thirty years older than you.”
Her mother has expressed her critical disdain for Vladimir Ivanovich many times, in pursed lips, silences, and frowns, but this is the first time she has verbalized the accusation. Sasha has never told her anything about him so that her mother wouldn’t feel sorry for her, or worry about her, or give Sasha unwanted advice. She can’t explain to her mother, an optimistic patron of order, anything about such hopeless and messy things as men or love. She can’t explain to her, for instance, that Vladimir Ivanovich has become her safety net. Without him, she would have quit the theater last year, when the new director, after watching all of their repertory, gathered the actors and slammed them with a scathing condemnation for their flat performances, singling Sasha out with a torrent of special scorn for her role of a village divorcée from a new contemporary play. Had Sasha quit then, when her humiliation was at its peak, where would her mother be living now? She can’t explain to her how many of Sasha’s anti-Soviet outbursts he has kept from spilling into earshot of their regular informers and, by extension, of their theater’s administration. Her mother wouldn’t understand that he is the most important actor, after Polevitskaya in her drama school, who was able to drive through Sasha’s head how ruthless Theater really is. To survive in a big company like this one, he said when she had just arrived from Moscow, you need teeth, horns, and hooves, and I’ll teach you how to grow them. Her mother would not understand the sad humor of his favorite sayings that, for her, encapsulate the essence of their work. Keep in mind, he told her after her debut in Twelfth Night, success is never forgiven, a piece of wisdom she has never forgotten.