Andrei’s name stares back at her from the card, constricting her heart, making her wonder if what she feels for him is a disease, a stubborn virus she has been unable to clear from her system. Is that what has been feeding her toxic doubts about Kolya? Is that why she keeps returning to the question of how he could be in America, instead of searching for Nadia in the wastelands of their country? On a scale with love on one side and the Gulag on the other, shouldn’t love always outweigh fear? Shouldn’t love outweigh everything?
She lifts the receiver and dials Andrei’s number.
The car he sends for her flies along Nevsky Prospekt and then turns off toward the Smolny. It is a black Volga, the preferred apparatchik vehicle, a car that smells of gasoline and old leather. Borya, the chauffeur, who is close to his pension age, occasionally glances at Sasha in the rearview mirror, his broad face collapsing into a cascade of wrinkles when he smiles.
“Where do I know you from?” he finally asks.
The recent Gorky television production of The Philistines, probably, rather than the latest addition to the theater repertoire, The Shadow by Evgeny Schwartz, another play recently decreed as destined for closure by the Ministry of Culture.
“Yes, yes, the Gorky play.” Borya nods enthusiastically. “You were the merchant’s wife, the one who had an affair.” She nods. She is always the one who has an affair, or who is unkind to her stepchildren, or who is morally bankrupt in so many other ways. She is a character actress: a villain, or a bully, or a miser, or a simpleton. From Borya’s eyes in the rearview mirror, she can see he is completely satisfied with her character’s moral failings.
Why, in all these years, did Andrei tell her nothing about what he had done? Was he paralyzed by the fear of her judgment, embarrassed by the prospect of her condemnation? Did he think she would be harsh and unforgiving? She stares out at the tree-lined canal where a motorboat is plowing through gray water, overtaking Borya’s car, its engine revving up unsettling questions in her head. Does she really know Andrei? Did she ever know him? Why does she doubt him so much? Why does she doubt Kolya?
As the motorboat speeds under a bridge and disappears behind a bend in the canal, her memory springs twenty years back, to Mama on a park bench, smiling at the pilot in uniform Sasha had hoped would become her father. For months, when she was seven, she rode on his shoulders around the courtyard, triumphant of her accomplishment, past the neighbors’ envious glances, so certain that she had finally found a father, so sure that the thrill boiling inside her would never end. It did end, despite her stubborn, childish confidence in the future, despite the fact that she didn’t doubt him at all, not even for a second.
Is this the reason she now lacks certainty in Andrei and Kolya, the two most important people left in her world?
Soon, the Smolny Cathedral sails into view, its pearly cupolas glinting softly against the sky. Next to it in the yellow buildings of Smolny resides the Leningrad Communist Party. The car bounces through the main gate and pulls along the driveway to the entrance. Borya waves for her to get out, and they face two soldiers standing guard at both sides of the door, both holding guns as big as the ones from the classic painting of The Hunters at Rest by Perov she saw at the Russian Museum. The soldiers’ eyes stare into the distance, but when they see Borya, they silently step aside to let them in. She and Borya walk along a corridor that smells of fresh paint, toward a door with a black sign on the front, where Andrei’s full name is etched into a metal plate. Borya knocks on the door, politely shakes her hand, and disappears.
In the few seconds before the door opens, Sasha tries to conjure up the person on the other side, the person she hasn’t seen in almost two years, ever since he warned her that his ministry was closing her production of An Ardent Heart. The person whose dark secret is now lodged in her chest like a malignant lump. Although she cannot track his bureaucratic trajectory, she is almost certain he has been tracking her artistic one. Behind this door, she is certain that he watches over the entire city of Leningrad—shielded by a wall of bureaucracy everyone in the Theater can feel—controlling its exposure to culture, letting only those plays that won’t harm fragile psyches pass through the gates of his censorship. Or is it her anger surfacing, gearing up to distract her from listening to what he is reluctant to say? Would she have learned the truth about his father’s death from him rather than from her grandfather had she been ready to listen? Is she about to sabotage, again, the truth she can portray so well onstage?