A Train to Moscow(5)
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.