A Train to Moscow(6)
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.