He turns to Sasha and holds her by the shoulders. “I will be watching you from the Smolny, my Party perch,” he says and makes big eyes, trying to imitate what she said, trying to sound funny. “But really, if you ever need anything, anything at all, just let me know. Here is my number.” He slips a small card into her coat pocket.
She says goodbye and kisses him on the cheek and for a few moments stays pressed to his face, with its still-familiar smell of skin and tobacco. She thinks of their meetings in the field, of their bed in the Ivanovo grass, of the vast expanse of future, stretching before them, when everything was still possible. Then she does what she has wanted to do since she saw him by the theater door a few hours earlier: she gives him a kiss on the lips, salty and raw—the taste of their Ivanovo afternoons, the taste of this blustery night.
ACT 4
IVANOVO-LENINGRAD
38
She is back in Ivanovo, the town she has stayed away from for all these years, the memories she has hidden in the most remote corner of her soul. Everything is so much smaller than she remembers: the houses seem to squat under black tar roofs, the streets that she holds in her mind as avenues are alleys, and the trees whose branches blocked the entire sky now barely reach to the lines of the electric wires. The only thing that is still the same in Ivanovo is the dust. The silky dust of the summer covering the roads—its ubiquity, its warmth.
She is not here because she chose to come. A late-morning telegram is fate’s way of punishing her long absence; she is certain. It is fate’s way of letting her know that once you leave home, you become an outsider, and there is no way back.
In the telegram, her grandfather wrote that Grandma had been taken to the hospital. It was her heart. What else would it be? She got another telegram five days later with the date for the funeral. She didn’t go to the funeral. She had two performances of Twelve Months, Saturday and Sunday, and the understudy was on maternity leave, so the administrative director didn’t allow her to go to Ivanovo, either to say goodbye to Grandma or to bury her. She played Twelve Months and then Quiet Dawns, and then there was a week off, a rare break when no performance of hers was on the schedule. Every night before the break, she drank in Vladimir Ivanovich’s dressing room, to fill the emptiness left where Grandma’s image—her tender way of speaking, her cotton dress permeated with the smell of their armoire, her soft fingers on the piano keys—had rested next to Sasha’s heart. Every night, they emptied a bottle of vodka, and then she had a crying fit in front of his makeup mirror. A little less drunk than she was, he tried to hold her, but this only made her wail louder and slap her own face. Each time she sobbed and beat herself, Vladimir Ivanovich waited patiently until she calmed down, wiped her face clean of running makeup, and took her home in a taxi. This is what he told her; she doesn’t remember any of this. In the morning after the last performance, she went to the administrative director and told him she was leaving for Ivanovo.
Grandpa met her at the train station. Sasha saw him even before the train pulled to a stop, from her compartment, through the haze of the locomotive smoke and window grime. She saw him standing in the middle of the platform, trying to gauge where her car would pull to a stop, his white hair long and wispy, tangled by the breeze, his shoulders stooped. It suddenly became clear to her that Grandma was the one who cultivated his image of a commander. The power he projected, his weight, his authority Sasha was so intimidated by, his permanent seat at the head of the table—all existed because of Grandma. Like a sculptor, she molded him into a stern father and grandfather, a protector, the hard-edged face of the family everyone feared and respected, maybe so that she herself could remain gentle and kind and still survive in the heartland of their heartless motherland. And now, with her no longer there, he simply disintegrated down to his essence: an old man, lost to the point of being extinct, squinting at the numbers on the train cars, hobbling up the platform as the train chugged and clattered forward and sighed its last breath.
It only took seconds, as the front door gave a familiar creak and Sasha stepped over the threshold of the house, for memories to spill over and flood the senses. She had to prop herself up against the cupboard made from dark wood that only turned darker over the years. It was where Grandma kept the everyday plates on the lower shelf and the tea service with red roses they used for holidays—her family’s gift for their wedding—on top. The plates were all there, neatly stacked up, the holiday service probably not touched since May 9, Victory Day, when she always pulled out the cups and saucers with roses, two extra sets on the table for Sima and Kolya.