She is back in her apartment, with the dining table open to its maximum length and lined on either side by the bed and the couch turned into seats. The table is filled with the usual zakuski: pickled mushrooms and cucumbers, baked pirozhki filled with egg and scallions, potato and beet salads bathed in mayonnaise. She can’t eat; everything inside her feels parched. Instead, she drinks. There is a bottle of vodka on her right, and the man next to her, probably a professor from her mother’s medical institute—maybe even the one she hoped Sasha would meet and marry—is attentive and generous in keeping her glass filled. Maybe her mother was right, after all, and Sasha should have met him. Maybe if she had, they wouldn’t be sitting at this table now, drinking toasts to her mother’s heroic life, bemoaning her death.
Then she is on a stool in the bathroom, leaning against the washing machine, a cold towel on her forehead. How did she get here? She doesn’t remember. She opens her eyes and sees Grandma fanning her with an old copy of Pravda.
“Nu, nu,” Grandma says, dabbing Sasha’s face with the wet towel. The room is spinning, but Grandma’s hands fix it in place. “Mama loved you,” she says in her soft, cottony voice. “She knew you loved her, too.”
She knows Grandma says this to calm her down, but she is not at all certain she is right. Did Sasha love her mother as much as her mother loved her? Did she love her enough for her mother to know? She searches inside herself, but she is not sure it was enough to keep her heart going, enough for her to put up more of a fight against death and survive. Grandma’s hands are as soothing as her voice, wiping away the tears—for Mama, for herself—and Sasha needs to feel her warm palms pressing damp fabric to her cheeks.
When she wakes up in the middle of the night, she stares into the darkness, alone in her apartment now, the enormity of loss pressing on her heart. This loss on top of other losses is keeping her awake, allowing the armoire to step out of the corner and cast an eerie shadow on her bed. This loss is the most raw and bitter of them all, the heaviest, the most brutal. This loss is as thick as glue, sticking to all the other losses scattered on the bottom of her soul, dragging them up, pulling off all the scabs.
There is always Andrei, who now comes to her in nightmares that wake her up drenched in icy sweat, dreams of her life collapsing quietly and suddenly, like a bank of sand. And there is always Theater, the cruel master of all actors, whip in hand, who didn’t even tell her that Mama had been taken to the hospital because she had a performance to deliver. Yet had they told her, would her being there have changed anything? She doesn’t know the answer, but she blames Theater for being the culprit in this death. Had Sasha been at the hospital, the knowledge that Mama was not alone to face the chasm opening before her may have soothed her heart and made it beat again.
She was a Russian mother, with a very Russian daughter. A daughter who didn’t accept her for who she always was—a methodical, ferocious survivor. She had survived the famine, Stalin’s terror, Grandpa, and a frontline hospital during the Great Patriotic War. She had survived losing Sasha’s father. For nearly twenty-four years, she had survived Sasha. Was Sasha blind to fail to see all this, or was it merely convenient for her to look away? It was so much simpler to wish her mother had been more sophisticated and less concrete, to wish that Sasha could attach the word intelligentsia to her weighty figure in a polyester dress made by the “Bolshevik Woman” factory, to wish that she had come from Leningrad and not Ivanovo, from the world of Pushkin and the tsars, of granite embankments and lace ironwork, of pearly domes buttressing the low sky. It was simpler not to see her life as it had really been, an every-minute battle. In addition to teaching at the medical institute, on Sundays, she worked in an ambulance at the Ivanovo hospital, and during the summer, she treated fractured wrists and sick stomachs at a pioneer camp on a lake so that Sasha could stay there, too, and breathe some fresh air, as Grandma liked to say. So why wasn’t she kinder to her? Why did she need to be harsh and critical of everything she said, constantly aiming her stage voice at her chest, like a knife?
She lies awake and stares into the ink of the night, with darkness gathered all around her and not a single drop of light able to glimmer through.
36
She is in a new play, a work by Alexander Ostrovsky, a classical playwright whose bearded portrait hangs in the literature classroom of every secondary school. This is the reason she gets out of bed, instead of huddling under a blanket and wallowing in the soupy dusk of an October morning. She is Matryona, a wealthy merchant’s wife. Her stepdaughter Parasha is the main character in An Ardent Heart, “a ray of light in the dark kingdom” of merchants, a world of hidden grief, gnawing pain, and deadly silence, as their eighth-grade literature textbook taught them. The famous literary critic Dobrolyubov called Ostrovsky’s works “the plays of life,” a phrase they all memorized to quote on an eighth-grade test. To Sasha, Ostrovsky always seemed preachy, so she used to doodle on her desk, pretending to listen to her teacher lecturing them about An Ardent Heart and its moral conflict between duty and personal happiness, which seemed to be the moral conflict of every work in their textbook, with duty, by the last few pages, always taking the upper hand.