It is the middle of November, and she is leaning into the wind on Dekabristov Street, walking toward Theatre Square, where the green and white building of the Kirov Opera and Ballet Theatre looks pearly in the distance through the blustery air pregnant with rain. As she looks up, she sees low gray clouds rushing across the sky, across the narrow space between the roofs. They race overhead with decisiveness and deliberation, scurrying from one side of the roofs framing the street to the other, chased by more clouds blown in by the wind. There is always wind, blowing from somewhere far away, trapped between the fences, swirling dirt around the stump, then flying away. This is all she can see: the bustle of rain clouds above her head, the three rows of fences, and the low sky clamped over her head like a lid. This is her life, every single day until she dies—the towering fences, the courtyard with its racing clouds above, and the stump behind which her drunken husband rapes her. Suddenly something clicks, and it all comes together: two months of rehearsals, the text and the subtext, her dead-end youth and her own old age she can already see peering from the face of her perpetually inebriated husband. Twenty more years of this revolting dead-end life is what she has to look forward to, if she survives that long.
This is the moment Matryona enters her and Sasha shapes her body around her soul. The moment every line she utters is carved into Sasha’s heart. The moment Matryona’s pulse begins to beat in sync with Sasha’s, the moment her blood begins to course through Sasha’s veins.
37
“They are going to close the play,” Andrei says.
They are walking along Nevsky Prospekt, away from Sasha’s theater, away from the three hours of intense magic at their seventh performance of An Ardent Heart. Nearly three years have passed since he told Sasha he was married and she hoped that if she ever saw him again, her heart would remain as frigid as this November night with snowflakes floating through the air. He was waiting outside the theater, away from the stage door, on the periphery of her vision, as she was signing programs for a small crowd of fans. Her heart lurched and then plunged when she registered his silhouette as she handed the last program back and said something she doesn’t remember to a handsome man with ears red from the cold.
They are walking toward the Neva, through the darkness diffused by the few neon signs still lit at this hour, breathing in the icy dampness that numbs the throat and metes frost into the lungs. Sasha opens her mouth to ask him how he knows the play will be closed, but she catches herself. Of course he knows. He works at the department that decides things like that—which plays to close and what books to ban—the Ministry of Culture of the Municipal Committee of the Communist Party. It is located in the Smolny, a former institute that prior to the Revolution housed a school for young maidens of noble birth. They no longer have nobles, and there are far too few maidens left among them.
“Why must they close the play?” she asks instead. It is an unnecessary question, but she wants to hear his explanation, feeling anger constricting her chest. She is angry at his official look, at his surprise late-night visit to tell her that the role she has just created will soon be relegated to the archives of the Bolshoi Theatre museum. She asks why they are closing her play, because she wants to hear him confirm his complicity.
“The public wants optimism, a positive hero,” he says, his voice flat. “They need something to believe in.”
Of course she knows this—one of many Party slogans—but the need to challenge him is itching in her throat. “How do you know what they want?” she says, refusing to continue this argument along Party lines they’ve both known from birth. She wants to hear what he really thinks, what is hidden behind the facade of his official face, although she doubts he will ever reveal it. “They buy tickets, those who are lucky enough to get tickets. They give us a standing ovation every night. They love the absence of light. They identify with the darkness. They applaud all our characters, and none of them are positive heroes the public can believe in. Why can’t your bosses ever allow the people to see life as it really is?”
She glances at his profile, waiting for him to answer. His hair is completely black in the dappled red neon from the Kavkazsky restaurant sign, still open.
“This only tells me that we still have a lot of work to do,” he says, and she can’t tell if he is being sarcastic. He doesn’t smile, so she must allow for the possibility that he believes what he has just said, even though it sounds too suspiciously close to what he would say to someone at work. How is it possible that she detests him as much as she does at this moment, and at the same time is searching for a pretext to stroke his hair?