She was a Russian mother, with a very Russian daughter. A daughter who didn’t accept her for who she always was—a methodical, ferocious survivor. She had survived the famine, Stalin’s terror, Grandpa, and a frontline hospital during the Great Patriotic War. She had survived losing Sasha’s father. For nearly twenty-four years, she had survived Sasha. Was Sasha blind to fail to see all this, or was it merely convenient for her to look away? It was so much simpler to wish her mother had been more sophisticated and less concrete, to wish that Sasha could attach the word intelligentsia to her weighty figure in a polyester dress made by the “Bolshevik Woman” factory, to wish that she had come from Leningrad and not Ivanovo, from the world of Pushkin and the tsars, of granite embankments and lace ironwork, of pearly domes buttressing the low sky. It was simpler not to see her life as it had really been, an every-minute battle. In addition to teaching at the medical institute, on Sundays, she worked in an ambulance at the Ivanovo hospital, and during the summer, she treated fractured wrists and sick stomachs at a pioneer camp on a lake so that Sasha could stay there, too, and breathe some fresh air, as Grandma liked to say. So why wasn’t she kinder to her? Why did she need to be harsh and critical of everything she said, constantly aiming her stage voice at her chest, like a knife?

She lies awake and stares into the ink of the night, with darkness gathered all around her and not a single drop of light able to glimmer through.

36

36

She is in a new play, a work by Alexander Ostrovsky, a classical playwright whose bearded portrait hangs in the literature classroom of every secondary school. This is the reason she gets out of bed, instead of huddling under a blanket and wallowing in the soupy dusk of an October morning. She is Matryona, a wealthy merchant’s wife. Her stepdaughter Parasha is the main character in An Ardent Heart, “a ray of light in the dark kingdom” of merchants, a world of hidden grief, gnawing pain, and deadly silence, as their eighth-grade literature textbook taught them. The famous literary critic Dobrolyubov called Ostrovsky’s works “the plays of life,” a phrase they all memorized to quote on an eighth-grade test. To Sasha, Ostrovsky always seemed preachy, so she used to doodle on her desk, pretending to listen to her teacher lecturing them about An Ardent Heart and its moral conflict between duty and personal happiness, which seemed to be the moral conflict of every work in their textbook, with duty, by the last few pages, always taking the upper hand.