A Train to Moscow

by Elena Gorokhova

We were all in the middle of a war, but we were amateurs, trying to avoid a bullet or a land mine, trying to balance our weight on the wire between life and death.

“They didn’t kill you, so you killed them,” Seryoga says. “It’s war.” Seryoga is right. It is that simple: we won because they died and we didn’t. I take another gulp from the mug, but it still does not convince me that I won. I don’t feel like a winner. The vodka may have cleansed my insides, but on the outside, I reek of exploded guts, shattered bones, and dried blood. I feel like a butcher.

Sasha walks past the dark buildings, wallowing in sadness, as despondent as Irina from Three Sisters. She walks and walks, burnishing her sadness with every step into the ancient cobblestones of Riga’s streets, and Chekhov, she thinks, would be proud of her angst.

suspects that he would agree with her mentors. The person she wants to tell about Grushenka is Andrei, someone who knows the viral labyrinth of small-town gossip and passion unhampered by reason, the fabric of Brothers Karamazov set in a small town not unlike Ivanovo. Someone who is familiar with the fiery temper and injured pride Dostoyevsky was so fond of dredging out of his characters. Someone who has infected her with the constant longing of toska and fits of senseless gazing into the distance that Sveta berates her for, as her mother would if Sasha were ever to open up to her about Andrei, or anything else.

“Do you want to know what acting really is?” she says as she describes her work in prerevolutionary Moscow. “Imagine you are bathing in a tub, with all your favorite oils and scrubs, and suddenly a tour group walks in.” They giggle at the image of a tour group barging into a bathing ritual, and Sasha notes to herself that she would like to learn, although she’d never dare ask, about the un-Soviet oils and scrubs.

“Theater will rob you of everything,” she says. “Everything.” She looks at Lara and Sasha as if their faces were open books with their life stories, where she could already read the future. “You, girls, will never have a family. It will be replaced by Theater, which will always control you, like a jealous husband. Nothing else will ever matter to you but Theater. And then, in the end, when you’re old and sick, it will chew you up and spit you out. You will end up all alone, and there will be no one to so much as bring you a glass of water on your deathbed.” She gets up and walks toward the window, where her small figure is outlined by the last streaks of pale spring light. What she has just said, despite her conviction, sounds so melodramatic that Sasha has a suspicion she has just recited lines from one of her many roles.

She doesn’t deserve to approach any classic, let alone Dostoyevsky. “What possessed me to choose a scene from Brothers Karamazov? Didn’t Vera warn me more than once? Didn’t everyone warn me? Was I overpowered by the demons of temporary insanity, and now it is too late, and now the only possible ending for me is disgrace and shame?” She works herself into sniffling and wailing, rubbing the tears around her cheeks. “Everything I’ve ever dreamed of, everything I’ve worked for is hinging on this scene,” she whimpers. “And it’s the wrong scene. And I am in the wrong role.”

“There is an informer in every workplace in our vast motherland,” Sveta warned them back in drama school, “but Theater is always in the avant-garde of Soviet spying,” she insisted, “because plays have the power to influence so many people all at once. ‘Theater is a very dangerous weapon,’” she quoted the legendary director Meyerhold. Sasha wasn’t sure she believed Sveta back then, but in the few months working here, she has learned this much: trust is an exotic fruit that doesn’t grow in this semiarctic zone of freezing winters and rainy, mosquito-infested summers. Aside from their small kompaniya of three friends, they can trust no one in their Bolshoi Theatre.

She trusts Lara and Slava unequivocally. The person she doesn’t trust is herself. She is still not sure she has acting talent. She is not sure if her final Dostoyevsky scene wasn’t simply a fluke, a lucky outcome of being coached by a master teacher. She knows one thing: she longs to be other people, not to be herself. A role—any role, even that of a Soviet janitor—is a mask, a costume she is compelled to wear, a disguise that turns her into someone else.

I don’t know why I am writing all this, and for whom. I suppose I am still clutching at the hope that this war will end before I get killed, that these pages will somehow find their way to my mother and sister even though no censor will let them pass through. But if I don’t write and if I don’t draw, I will become like my sergeant. I would invalidate every painting on the walls of the Hermitage. I would betray the milky air of Leningrad’s streets, and the softness of Nadia’s arms, and her foolish trust in my promise to save her.

If I believed in God, like Raphael or Michelangelo, I would have cursed God. In the absence of God, I cursed my motherland. It was supposed to nurture and protect us, the people it had inspired to its revolutionary ideals of a meager life and hard work, and while we had been busy keeping our end of the bargain, our motherland, like a courtyard thug, had turned around, pulled out a switchblade, and stuck it under our ribs.

I thought of those in the stratosphere of the Kremlin, dressed in generals’ uniforms and party suits, puffing on pipes at their desks, debating the fate of our lives between sips of cognac, issuing search warrants, signing decrees of death. Sitting like judges at their engineered trials, pounding gavels with their meaty hands: death, death, death. What made their hearts beat, what pushed through their veins instead of blood was the sludge of paranoia and betrayal. Who is not with us is against us, their eyes instruct us from the portraits hanging in every office. We do not arrest good people, they say. We’re simply protecting our motherland from its enemies with the help of other good people, all those neighbors with properly attuned ears, insufficient living space, and healthy socialist envy.

“You have to have patience,” her mother says, her usual refrain. “This is what Russia has survived on, century after century—patience and perseverance. We work, we wait, and we hope. And we believe. We have to believe in something. Before the Revolution, there was God. Now it’s our better future.”

“Look, I know it’s probably better now than it was under Stalin, but this is not enough,” she says, her words addressed into a barrier of wet cotton. “How am I supposed to live in a country where everything is based on lies? Our national game isn’t hockey. It is lying and pretending.”

“To fight, that was the goal. It sounded so heroic, the opposite of the filth we all waded through. Remember the poem Mayak wrote when Yesenin killed himself? “In this life It’s not difficult to die. To make life Is more difficult by far.”

“And do you know what else?” Sasha says. “All my life, I could feel that you never believed in me. Not when I lived in Ivanovo, not when I was in Moscow, and not now. You always told me I’d never make it as an actress. But here I am, in the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theatre. I did make it. And it must kill you and Grandpa that I’ve succeeded, that you turned out to be wrong. But you were right about one thing: Theater is toxic and corrosive. It has cost me plenty. It has cost me the only man I’ve ever wanted.”

“Then tell me, what do you want?” her mother asks. “I want you to leave me alone!” she yells. “Stop lecturing me. I’m not your student. I want you to stop waving flags for a minute and look around. I want you to stop pretending that everything is fine, stop making excuses for the mess we’re in.” She sharpens her voice like a knife. “This isn’t Ivanovo. We live in a country full of hypocrites and bandits, and of people like Grandpa and you, true believers, who have survived Stalin only because he was too busy murdering the other twenty million.” She pauses to take a breath, to ready herself for the final blow. “If you can’t empty yourself of this crap, of this toxic provincial thinking, you may as well go back to Ivanovo and tend to the chickens.”

I think that all those ancient men in Moscow have simply usurped the war. They have wrestled the war, the heroism and the death, out of the hands of those who lived it, and now they are the ones who own it. And now they wave it like a red banner on Victory Day. After all, they think they are the ones who made the victory happen, the Party and the KGB, and not the tens of millions who were murdered, by the Germans and by our own.”

“You’re hopeless, as hopeless and retrograde as Grandpa. As blindly patriotic. That’s why it was so easy for the Party to hijack the war and the victory from those who had fought for it. That’s why we live the way we live, wallowing in lies, like pigs in mud. Because of fools like you.”

“Acting is freedom. It’s searching for what’s real,” she says. “Every performance is different. Together with the other actors onstage and with the audience, I search for the truth—we all do—and sometimes we almost find it. That’s the essence of acting: looking for the truth. There is nothing fake about it. There is no pretending.”

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?

“I often think about how we itch to run away from home and then keep searching for it for the rest of our lives.”

“Isn’t it ironic,” says Andrei, “that the executioner becomes the victim, and the victim becomes the executioner? Our system, if you think of it, is pure genius: executioners and victims are the same people. The engine of death has been in motion for decades, and no one is guilty, because everyone is guilty.”

“You were born in the wrong country, Sashenka. You’re naive and uncompromising. You don’t bend, and sooner or later, our motherland will break you. It breaks everyone.”