Sasha has to turn away from the death of everything she sees in his eyes. Is this who she has been waiting for all these years, a man with dead eyes, a married Party functionary, a censor of her art?
“We should go,” she says.
She gets up, and the waiter, with an expression of relief on his face, rushes to their table with a bill.
“I will arrange for you to go to America to see Kolya,” Andrei says. He is back to being practical, back to arranging things, something he does so well. Does he think that his arrangement of this impossible trip, which Sasha knows involves breaking Party rules, is the deed that will redeem him? Does he think that sending her across the ocean will give him hope for atonement? The idea of going to America sounds surreal, but not any more surreal than hearing Kolya’s voice on the phone a few hours ago, which now feels like a different life.
45
She wakes up at three in the morning and stares into the dark, the previous night—colossal, endless—immediately asserting itself in her mind, burning through the fog of sleep like the morning sun. The bitter taste of cognac still lingers in her mouth, little hammers of headache banging against the inside of her skull. The images rise impatiently, pushing against one another. Andrei’s graying hair, a phone receiver pressed to her ear, a white tablecloth full of stains.
This is Sasha’s final resolution, sealed by the darkness in her room: she will no longer allow herself to think about him. This time, at last, she will purge him like a deadly contagion; she will scoop him out, like Grandpa scoops dry their Ivanovo outhouse, bucket by bucket; she will rip him out of her heart, just as Masha tears out her love in The Seagull, by the roots.
She will no longer allow him to invade her mind. Instead, she will think about the place where Kolya lives, America. Sasha peers into the dusk, which has revealed the outlines of the table and the white panels of the door. Is it possible to conjure up something one knows nothing about? Here, on this side of the Iron Curtain, with no cracks to peek through, what do they know about America?
In the summer of 1959, her first summer in Moscow when she was admitted to study at the drama school, a miniature America sprouted up in Sokolniki Park outside the city, the American National Exhibition that Sveta and Sasha waited three hours to enter. They had already read what Khrushchev said to the US president three weeks earlier, when the Expo opened. In another seven years we will be on the same level as America. When we pass you along the way, we’ll wave to you. With the rest of the curious crowd, they gawked at the world they were promised in only seven years: cars laden with chrome, cameras that dispensed instant pictures, films that were not banned, stainless steel refrigerators, robot vacuums, and a machine that washed your dirty dishes in less than thirty minutes. They stared at a blonde woman modeling a dress, which Sveta considered for a minute and said she could sew one just like it, if only she could get her hands on three square meters of decent fabric. Sasha didn’t know then that seven years later, just when they should have caught up with America, Sveta would lock herself in a hotel room in Kiev, where her theater was on tour, and pour down her throat a vial of drugs that were not supposed to exist in the healthy Soviet world.
But in 1959, with Sveta still alive, they stopped in each of the four model kitchens to watch a baking demonstration and then, when the American women in aprons, whether by accident or by design, turned their backs on their plates of finished little cakes called brownies, they grabbed as many as they could, like everyone else around them, and, their hands sticky with chocolate and sugar, raced to the next exhibit. Sveta’s image rises before her eyes, her blonde hair in a long braid, her index finger raised didactically, as if she were admonishing Sasha with another scrap of wisdom about life in the theater. Sasha would call if Sveta were still alive to ask whether she remembered the America they saw nine years ago, to ask what Sasha should do about America today.
When we pass you along the way, we’ll wave to you. Well, two years have passed since we were supposed to overtake America, and she hasn’t seen one dishwasher or a single brownie. Is this what America looks like, that Expo? A model house for every model family, shelves filled with books that no one tries to censor, plays that no one decrees to ban?
Or is it a country where people sleep in cardboard boxes under bridges, as Pravda constantly reminds them? A place plagued by hurricanes and guns, where round-bellied capitalists in top hats, who glare from posters glued to newsstands, multiply their fortunes by exploiting men in chains? A place where human beings are disconnected and alone, stooped under the weight of questions that have no answers?