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“In this life It’s not difficult to die. To make life Is more difficult by far.”
“This is difficult,” he says, shaking his head, and from the pause that follows, she knows to expect the worst. It is indeed the worst, the most devastating news, an atomic bomb dropped out of the sky.
“Maybe if I’d had a father to protect me all these years,” she says, “I wouldn’t look for older men.”
She tries to imagine those who drowned here, sucked into this abyss. She thinks about all who were killed in the war, all who died in the camps, millions of snapped, diminished lives. She thinks of the totality of death.
Everything is absolute: if you make a mistake, there is no second chance. One wrong step is your destiny. You have one moment to make a decision that will define your life, whatever is left of it. A single moment can either leave you balanced on ten centimeters of firm land or open a void under your feet, a bottomless quagmire of cold muck ready to suck you in and swallow you whole.
The sun sails from above the trees, and for the last time she sees its white light, as brilliant and warm as the promise of tomorrow.
was simpler not to see her life as it had really been, an every-minute battle.
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.”
“The opposite of banning plays that fail to lead the audience into the shining future. It is allowing people to think, to examine their failings and their faults, to peek into the dark corners of the soul. To see human beings as they are, not as we think they should be. Maybe that’s the reason Theater is so dangerous.”
“There were things done that couldn’t be undone. There were things said and choices made. It’s always about choices, dead ends and mistakes.”
“My love is an arduous weight, hanging on you wherever you flee.”
It suddenly became clear to her that Grandma was the one who cultivated his image of a commander. The power he projected, his weight, his authority Sasha was so intimidated by, his permanent seat at the head of the table—all existed because of Grandma. Like a sculptor, she molded him into a stern father and grandfather, a protector, the hard-edged face of the family everyone feared and respected, maybe so that she herself could remain gentle and kind and still survive in the heartland of their heartless motherland. And now, with her no longer there, he simply disintegrated down to his essence:
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If there was a line, she said, you must always join it because there is food at the other end.
So much death had passed before my eyes by then that I couldn’t comprehend how my soul could still take more in. I was almost numb, and yet we had to keep walking, pulling our cannons and machine guns and carrying our backpacks filled with rations, ammunition, and unsent letters home.
“We fought, we lost millions, but we won,” he says, the old fire sparkling in his eyes once again. “We saved the world. Soviet Russia, the first socialist state, under the leadership of Stalin, saved the entire world.”
It’s useless to tell him that Stalin killed as many millions of their own people as Hitler did, that their motherland is nothing but a colossal mountain of lies.
She turns back one last time and sees a commander again—snow-haired, rooted to this house, not nearly extinct—her grandfather, who has fought his last battle and won.
“I often think about how we itch to run away from home and then keep searching for it for the rest of our lives.”
She doesn’t believe that it is possible to pick up a receiver and be connected to someone in New York. They all know there is an indestructible barrier that stops any attempts to make such calls. A thick curtain between them and the rest of the world that prohibits all communication. But as the minutes pass and these thoughts grind through her head with crushing slowness, it dawns on her that they are in the Smolny, the control center for the dreaded barrier. It dawns on her—something she should have realized much earlier—that the barrier may be standing right in front of her, a telephone
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“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.”
“But there is one thing my father-in-law told me about choices that has always stayed with me: you either pull the trigger, or you kneel on the floor.”
“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.”
“It’s like when you try to carry a load that’s too heavy. At first you manage to lift it, but after you’ve lugged it for a while, you can no longer carry it any farther. I know this feeling from when I unloaded freight trains. You try to carry the weight, you try to balance it and steady yourself, but it pushes you down further and further and it finally breaks your back. It’s broken me, this load. It’s too late for me to stop doing what I do. It’s been too long.”
She peers into his face, waiting. He doesn’t say anything, but she can read the answer in his eyes. There is no light left there, no life. His silence is his answer.
He stands there behind the pillar, watching her walk toward the plane that will take her out of Russia, watching her leave, the same way he stood at the Ivanovo railway station when she was leaving for Moscow to study acting, the same way he stood at the cemetery at her mother’s funeral—always an observer, almost a stalker, always watching her from the sidelines, perched on the periphery of her life.
The miniature airplane on the screen is like a needle over the Atlantic, stitching the two hemispheres together with the thread of their route.
