A Train to Moscow Read online

  “Did you hear me?” asks her mother. “What did I just say?”

  “When I eat, I’m deaf and mute,” she answers, quoting one of Grandpa’s house rules.

  “Then I’ll have to feed you like a baby,” says her mother and gets up. She sits next to Sasha on the bench, lifts a spoonful of soup from her own plate, and pushes it against Sasha’s lips. She tenses her mouth, but her mother pushes harder.

  “Next time, it’s nettles,” says Grandpa and gives her a hard look from across the table. His eyes are blue, the color of the forget-me-nots he grows around the gate, with grooves of deep wrinkles radiating into his white hair. He was a peasant before the Revolution, but after 1917, when the people rose up with hammers and scythes to liberate themselves from the yoke of tsarist oppression, he became an engineer. Grandpa’s peasant ancestry is the reason they have three rooms and a kitchen all to themselves. Before the Revolution, the entire house belonged to Grandma’s father. He was a factory supervisor and because he hadn’t been exploited like workers or peasants, he didn’t deserve to keep the place where he lived. Now one half of the house is theirs, with three families of neighbors sharing the other half, one family in each room. Grandpa must have been a pretty important peasant because they have an indoor toilet on their side of the house, while the three other families all troop to the outhouse in the back. Sasha doesn’t understand why Grandma’s father deserved to be thrown out of his own house and then shot for supervising factory work, but she has a sense no one wants to talk about this, so she doesn’t ask.

  With her mother trying to feed her, Sasha can see she is at a disadvantage, just like when she was pinned to the bench, so she relaxes her lips and lets the spoon spill its contents into her mouth. She holds it there, warm, salty water with potato chunks and grains of barley, as her mother repeats the motion three times and then goes back to her seat. Maybe she realizes Sasha is not going to swallow it, or maybe she is simply tired and hungry after work and wants to finish her own food. When all the plates are emptied but Sasha’s and she is finally released from the table, she goes outside and, her body still aching from the policeman’s shove and her grandfather’s belt, spits out the soup into Grandpa’s gooseberry bush.

  3

  Marik is intelligentny, a word Sasha’s mother uses to characterize people. It is a salad mix of education, culture, intelligence, and manners, and all their neighbors and acquaintances have been divided into intelligentny and not intelligentny. Somehow the first group always comes out much smaller than the second. Not intelligentny: the three families who live in the other half of their house; every saleswoman in every grocery store, including Aunt Dusya from the bakery, with her carbon-penciled eyebrows and a kitchen voice; Sasha’s friend Andrei because his mother is a janitor who finished only the seven compulsory grades of secondary school and now wears a burlap apron over her cotton dress when she sweeps the yard with a bunch of twigs attached to a stick. Intelligentny: Irina Vasilievna, who gives piano lessons in her house two blocks away; Marik and his mother, pale and freckled and, as rumor has it, a Jew.

  Sasha doesn’t know what Jews are and how they are different from the rest of them, but from the way people lower their voices when they say yevrey, a word that is spat out like a wormy chunk of apple, she guesses Jews are worse than they themselves are in some dark and hidden way they cannot discuss in public. She knows only one other Jew—Moisey Davidovich Zlotnikov, the head of the anatomy department of her mother’s medical institute and the adviser of her dissertation. Sasha has seen Dr. Zlotnikov only once, when her mother took her to work because Grandma’s heart was hurting, and he didn’t look different from any other person in Ivanovo. He had glasses and a goatee, and he rose from his desk and bent down to shake Sasha’s hand as if she were an anatomy professor and not a first grader with two skinny braids.

  Marik is marked by another scar everyone knows about, an event Sasha can still see in her mind as if it happened only yesterday. In addition to being a Jew, he is now the son of a prisoner. After that morning, Sasha thought that Marik’s father had missed a bell and come late for work—solid grounds for an arrest, according to her mother—but then she heard her attach the word politichesky to his name. Her mother uttered the word in a low voice when they were all at the table slurping cabbage soup.

  “They don’t put innocent people in camps, Grandpa said. Stalin knows who is with us and who is against us. Stalin—our leader, our father, the successor of our great Lenin. The engineer of our thunderous victory over Germany.”

  Andrei expressed a similar view, only in less pompous words. “He must have done something if he got arrested,” he muttered, sharpening a branch with his pocketknife as they sat on the roof of the shed after Marik’s mother called him home.

  Andrei’s father is not here, either, but according to Grandpa, he has a better chance of coming home than Marik’s father because he is not a politichesky. Maybe Andrei’s mother, as she sweeps the yard, also turns her head at the creak of the gate, just like Grandma has done since the end of the war, still waiting for her son Kolya to come back from the Leningrad Front.

  It is her grandpa’s birthday, which means a samovar is puffing on the dining table and Grandma is standing over a frying pan, her hands white with flour, making pancakes. Marik and Sasha are under the table, where the old linoleum is torn, revealing boards worn through by many prewar and maybe even prerevolutionary feet. While the guests, all intelligentny, are busy eating boiled potatoes with pickled cabbage, the children are out of their sight, playing a game while waiting for tea, when they can load slices of bread with spoonfuls of strawberry and apple jam from the fruit in Grandpa’s garden.

  They are separated from real life by the linen tablecloth that almost touches the floor. The jagged tear in the linoleum, in their imagination, is a river, and the torn edges of plastic are its banks. They just finished reading a book of Andersen’s fairy tales, and the story they are playing is about a one-legged tin soldier. The brave warrior survives a fall from a window and the raging waves of a waterfall, only to die in a fire at the end. He is silently in love with a paper ballerina, who, in the soldier’s mind, has only one leg, too. She has a pretty tinsel rose pinned to her dress. Does she know about the soldier’s love? The hole in the linoleum is the river that will rush forward and drag the tin soldier to its depths, the river that will sink his boat and deposit him into the stomach of a big fish.

  Marik is the soldier, and Sasha is the paper ballerina. The soldier is terrified of the darkness inside the belly of the fish, but he is too proud to cry for help because he wears a uniform. Through the scraps of ripped linoleum, the river roars until it becomes a waterfall, the boat made from newspaper disintegrates, and the water finally closes over the soldier’s head.

  “Farewell, warrior! Ever brave,

  “Drifting onward to thy grave,” recites Marik from the book.

  Marik is as brave and proud in real life as the tin soldier is in the story, and, Sasha knows, he doesn’t really believe that he is drifting to his grave.

  Then, beyond the tablecloth, the din of voices quiets and the piano chords burst into the air before Grandma’s voice, trained in a prerevolutionary opera school and called a mezzo-soprano, begins to sing about fragrant bunches of white acacia flowers. The music swells, and Grandma’s voice does, too, soaring and then descending, the lyrics compelling her to remember her distant youth when she still naively believed in love.

  Sasha now hears the clinking of dishes, which means the table is being cleared of the dinner plates to get it ready for tea and jam, so she knows she has to be fast. “And back in the same room, the soldier saw the ballerina, still balancing on one leg.” She extends her leg, like the dancer in the story, although she has to crouch not to hit the top of the table. “And then the boy threw the soldier into the stove. And the ballerina, caught in the draft, fluttered into the fire, too.” She pauses. “They both melted, by the flames or by their love, no one knew.”

 
There is applause on the other side of the tablecloth curtain and requests for more songs, accompanied by the clinking of teacups against the saucers.

  “The ballerina was made from paper,” says Marik. “So there was nothing left of her.”

  “Not true!” Sasha cries out. “A tinsel rose from her dress the maid found in the ashes.” Despite the approaching tea with sweets, she can’t let the dancer disappear without a trace.

  “All right, a tinsel rose,” Marik concedes. He stares at the river of the torn linoleum, sniffling and wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “But the soldier did not die. He melted down into a lump in the shape of a little tin heart.”

  Sasha likes it that something remained of the soldier and the ballerina after they burned in the fire, but she is not sure about the little tin heart. Is it too sappy a finale for such a proud warrior? She doesn’t know, yet she decides to accept it without an argument. Despite its lack of what her mother values most, grit, Marik’s ending seems to be a good fit for the story of courage and love they have just played out on this make-believe stage of the linoleum-river setting. It makes her happy and lighthearted, and she feels her mouth stretch into a smile, all on its own.

  4

  “Stalin, our military glory,” sings a voice above her head. The radio, a little brown box with a woolen front, is perched on a shelf beside a wood-burning stove, and even if Sasha could reach it and silence the Stalin song they all know by heart, she wouldn’t dare. She is standing here because she is being punished. The offense didn’t approach, in its severity, the ride on the back of a streetcar, so the payback doesn’t rise to the height of a whipping.

  This morning, Grandma decided to unfold the old newspapers piled on the porch and saw that they were all stained with grease. Each day before going outside, Sasha would hide a slice of black bread drenched in sunflower oil and sprinkled with salt inside the newspaper heap, and when Grandma’s face disappeared from the window, she would unearth the treat and savor it on the street in all its rich and oily glory. The best part was taking turns with Andrei and Marik, all three of them biting into the thick rye delicacy so much tastier in the fields, amid clumps of tall grass and sorrel. She doesn’t know what possessed Grandma to sort through the old papers, with three heads of cabbage wilting on the kitchen floor, waiting to be grated, layered with salt, and pressed into a bucket to be eaten in the winter.

  She whined and whimpered as Grandma dragged her inside, up the creaky steps of the porch, across the dining room, and into the corner. “A fine thing for a girl to do,” she said and turned Sasha around to face the peeling wallpaper with faded berries and vines that must have been red and green at some time she doesn’t remember. “Nice girls eat inside, with their napkins tucked in the front and their elbows off the table.” She said this in such a determined voice that Sasha could almost see those napkins Grandma spoke about, squares of white linen she kept in her closet, part of her dowry (such an old, prerevolutionary word), until she had to rip them up for diapers when Sasha’s mother and her uncles were born. She hadn’t lamented them; since there was nothing to eat, the need for napkins vanished right after the disappearance of food.

  When the song praising Stalin ends with the bang of cymbals, the voice from the radio announces, “Tonight we perform Chekhov’s Three Sisters.”

  She doesn’t know about Chekhov yet because she just finished the first grade, but this radio play doesn’t sound like anything they ever get to hear: the anthem of the Soviet Union that wakes them up in the morning or news from the fields with rumbling tractors her mother turns on when she returns from work. Sasha always wonders about the destination of these tractors filled with wheat. Maybe they are all sent to Moscow or Leningrad, which she knows are much more important to their country than Ivanovo, but she is afraid to ask because Grandpa is always within earshot, and he wouldn’t appreciate her questioning the news.

  But no wheat can be important when a story so much like theirs is broadcast on the radio, a story of three sisters who seem to live their lives. As she faces the wallpaper, the sisters take over their house and their kitchen, with a pail of drinking water and a dipper floating on top, a table covered with a tablecloth Grandma has cross-stitched between frying onions for soup and turning up dirt for potatoes and dill, a wood-burning stove that looks like a checkerboard, since half the tiles have fallen off. The oldest sister, Olga, is Grandma; Masha is her mother; and Irina, the youngest of the three, is Sasha. They sit around a table where a samovar puffs out little clouds of steam, blow into saucers of hot tea, and talk about Moscow and another life.

  What is this other, better life the sisters dream and speak about in urgent, breathless voices? “To leave for Moscow, end everything here,” says Irina, and Sasha repeats it in the theatrical voice the actress uses, a voice full of drama and importance. The men from the play are all in the military, although there is no war going on, and they’re called lieutenant and colonel and even baron—an ancient word, because all the barons were disposed of in 1917. “I’m so tired,” says Irina in the third act as Sasha picks at the grains of cement where tiles fell off the side of the stove. “This work is without poetry, without thought. I dream of Moscow every night; I’ve almost lost my mind.”

  “I’ve almost lost my mind,” Sasha repeats, trying to sound as desperate as the actress on the radio. “And why I am still alive, why I haven’t killed myself, I don’t understand.”

  She doesn’t want Irina to kill herself. She wants her to go on acting.

  Then there is a gunshot, sharp and dry as snapped kindling, and Sasha starts sniffling. It wasn’t Irina, but the baron Irina was going to marry who just got killed in a duel, and that means she will never be able to leave this provincial town that is driving her toward insanity and desperation. She will never be able to move to Moscow and live that other life she’s been dreaming about, a life full of poetry and happiness.

  Sasha is standing in the corner, hoping that Grandma won’t call her in for dinner yet. The words of the play lap around her like the ripples of the river, washing over every pore of her skin, every fiber of her soul. She is afraid to move, breathing very carefully because she knows there is something big happening right now, more important than the gunshot that killed Irina’s fiancé, weightier than going to Moscow. Something even more significant than the ride on the back of the streetcar, the flogging, and the new respect in Andrei’s eyes.

  She imagines the three actresses playing the sisters, in long dresses and makeup, in front of an audience wrapped in prerevolutionary velvet and furs. They are tall and beautiful, and their big eyes, outlined in stage makeup, sparkle with tears. She admires them, but she envies them more. She imagines how they first read the play, repeating every word, committing them to memory the way her teacher tells the students to memorize Pushkin’s poems in her Russian class. She imagines them practicing the scenes, pretending to live in a world she knows nothing about, a world of nobility and servants. A swarm of questions buzzes in her head. How do they know what it feels like to have your supper cooked by a servant, to give parties and live in a house big enough for all those guests?

  Even if a miracle happened and the empty shelves of their store suddenly sprouted with bologna and cheese, if their half of the house stretched and doubled in size, whom would her mother ask to come to dinner? Would she invite anyone at all? Certainly not the three families on the other side of the wall, who bark at each other every morning because they can’t figure out the order of the outhouse trips, and not Andrei’s mother, because she is a janitor who sweeps the yard.

  And what if the actresses who play the sisters are not pretending at all? What if they have stopped being themselves and turned into the Chekhov sisters? Sasha is so fascinated by this possibility—the possibility of becoming someone else—that her cheeks burn as hot as the sides of the stove. The possibility of becoming Irina and living a noble life so different from theirs, a life of guests and servants and longing for Moscow. She can relate
to longing to live in Moscow better than she can relate to guests and servants. She has always wanted to go to the May Day parade in Red Square, and her mother said that she may even take her there one day, on an overnight train that whistles before it pulls into their platform, immersing the station in clouds of smoke and soot. It feels gratifying to find similarities between Chekhov’s Irina and herself; it makes Sasha feel sophisticated and almost grown-up. Maybe she can be like Irina, dreaming and hopeful and giving orders about what she wants for dinner. Maybe she can become an actress.

  She stands under the radio, struck by the simple realization of what her future is going to be. She is going to be an actress and live a thousand lives. Lives that her mother, or Grandpa, or even Grandma have never even heard about, lives they will never know.

  Sasha stands under the radio, pitying her old self, who only yesterday wanted to be an ice cream vendor and the week before a streetcar driver—such small, pathetic dreams. She feels sorry for her previous self, who only three hours earlier didn’t know anything about Theater. It’s a frightening thought that had Grandma not discovered the oily newspaper on the porch, she would never have had a chance to hear this radio play and find out what she was meant to be.

  By the end, when Irina realizes that she will never see Moscow, when the actress’s voice becomes heavy and drained of hope, Sasha knows that no matter what happens, she is going to be an actress when she turns eighteen, and this feeling of certainty spreads around her chest like a cup of hot tea sweetened with two spoonfuls of Grandma’s black currant jam. She will spend her life onstage, her voice projected and her soul transformed; she will live the lives of others, and shed their tears, and die their deaths.

  She will stow this secret inside her like a treasure, away from the neighbors’ inquisitive glances, away from her mother’s teacher’s voice and Grandpa’s blue stare. She will hold this secret on the back shelf of her heart, and no one will suspect anything, not even Grandma, who must have felt the hot touch of Theater when her retrograde father prohibited her from singing opera in Moscow. Sasha will pretend she wants to be an engineer, like Grandpa, or a doctor, like her mother, so no one will suspect anything until she finishes tenth grade and then leaves for Moscow to study acting.