But the most important thing she can’t even begin to explain to her mother is how much he feels like a father to Sasha. He is someone who keeps her safe, who protects her from other men always on the prowl, who steers her along the perilous maze of life in the theater. On their recent tour in Baku, Azerbaijan, when one of the local bazaar vendors cupped his hands over her breasts, he locked the man’s head in the vise of his elbow and made him whimper for mercy, begging forgiveness for what the man thought was a gesture of admiration toward the Russian buyer’s daughter.
Sasha takes a breath before she strikes back as a headache pulses through her temples and coaxes angry words out of their deep lair. “Maybe if I’d had a father to protect me all these years,” she says, “I wouldn’t look for older men.”
Her mother gives out a little gasp, then tightens her mouth. She hasn’t expected opposition in such close proximity to the time Sasha’s key scratched around the lock and didn’t find the keyhole. She is usually the one doing the lecturing; she is the master of dispensing guilt-provoking tirades and unsought advice.
“Your father perished in the Great Patriotic War,” she says in a wounded voice. “You know that.”
Sasha knows. His sepia photograph is on the first page of their family album in Ivanovo. Until she was seven or eight, she had been hopelessly waiting for him to walk through their gate, despite his “perished in the war” status, but then something snapped her waiting vigil. Was it her mother’s reluctance to share any memory of him, or was it Grandma’s inevitable sigh at the rare mention of his name? Or maybe it was an old neighbor, one of those who had to line up to use the outhouse, a babka with sharp eyes and a bent spine that made her look like a question mark, who one day coughed up the real story of Sasha’s father to her neighbor on their courtyard bench, making sure Sasha was close enough to hear every word.
“He didn’t perish in the war,” Sasha says. “He died of TB, two years after the war ended, in the town of Atkarsk, where he lived with his common-law wife and a ten-year-old daughter.” She sees her mother swallow hard, her face tightening. She remembers that afternoon in their Ivanovo courtyard, the babka’s coarse voice marking the moment when her mother’s heroic war-perishing story turned out to be nothing but another lie. Lying, their way of life, the stubborn abscess oozing into the cells of their system, infecting everyone.
Strangely, Sasha feels removed from this whole scene, watching the action from the wings, like a director during a performance. Her mother, the tragic heroine of the second act, admonishing her prodigal daughter who, in turn, admonishes an untruthful mother.
“I wanted to protect you,” her mother says, sniffling. “I only wanted to keep you safe. That’s all I ever tried to do.”
She wishes her mother would stop protecting her from danger, from experience, from life itself. She wishes she would stop protecting her from Theater.
Her mother wipes her eyes before she cranks the handle of the meat grinder, and its iron face erupts in red twists of meat squeezing out into a bowl underneath.
“I only want you to have a normal life,” she says. “To have a family of your own, like everyone else. Not to be alone.” She takes two slices of bread soaking in milk and with her hands kneads them into the ground meat. “These older men will never marry you. They will never leave their wives,” she declares, as if she were drawing a verdict, as if this were something she has learned from personal experience. “Anyone is better than an older, married man.”
“You still don’t understand,” Sasha says. “I don’t want to marry Vladimir Ivanovich. He’s done good things for me, but I see him mostly for sex.” The word hisses out of her mouth, sibilant and harsh, a shocking word never used in public, as noxious as a curse. It has produced the planned effect, draining blood from her mother’s face, turning it white.
Her mother turns away and begins to shape the pile of meat into oblong kotlety between her palms, her tense back a reproach to Sasha for wrapping such a scandalous topic in words.
“There is only one man I’d even consider marrying,” Sasha says. “Someone you’ve never approved of. Someone who is married to another woman because he is not allowed to marry an actress.”
What she has just uttered slaps her like a whip across her face. She feels blood rush to the wound; she feels her cheeks burn. Her thoughts shoot back to this very kitchen months ago, to Andrei sitting on the other side of this table.