MY MOTHER AND I are going to Moscow to see my sister’s graduation performance. She has been away for four years, studying theater and acting at the drama school named after the famous dead actor Schukin. It’s June, my mother has given the last exams, and I’ve just said good-bye to Vera Pavlovna and my third-grade class. I am a year older, content in the knowledge that Dimka the hooligan was held back, hoping that I will no longer be the gold setting for Zoya Churkina’s diamond.
We travel on an overnight train and stay in Marina’s dormitory room, which is itself an adventure. I’ve never traveled anywhere but to the dacha, where everything is dull and familiar. The dorm is the dacha’s opposite, with its large corridors and white walls, with its foreign smells of impermanence and other people’s clothes.
“To the end of this corridor and then two flights up,” says Marina, sprinting in front of us, her ponytail swaying as vigorously as the two string bags in her hands. The string bags are filled with pirozhki my mother had baked the day before and chunks of salami and cheese, all wrapped in last week’s Pravda.
Marina’s hair is long now, and she has bangs that fall down to her artfully curved eyebrows. Last summer, when she was home for two weeks before she took off for her first film role, I saw her pluck her eyebrows with tweezers in front of a hallway mirror, ruthlessly yanking the little hairs out of her face, biting her lip with each vehement tug. It looked barbaric to pull out your own hair, but Marina said that it was what the stage required, and I was as impressed with her courage as with the art’s severe demands. Other than her hairstyle she is the same Marina—loud voice, big eyes my mother calls photogenic, and a pudgy nose that my sister says typecasts her into character roles.
I don’t look anything like my sister. That’s because she is my half-sister and we have different fathers, which also gives us different patronymics. She is Marina Alexandrovna, the daughter of Alexander, and I am Elena Ilyinichna, the daughter of Ilya.
I don’t know when I learned that my sister had a different father. I didn’t know it when I was five, but I already knew it in Vera Pavlovna’s history class. I knew it when she told us about Pavlik Morozov, who had a living real father, which made me think of Marina, who didn’t.
Marina’s father died in 1947. Last year, when we were getting ready to join the Young Pioneers, I tried to imagine her father’s heroic death, worthy of Vera Pavlovna’s history lesson on valor. I saw him stopping a tank with a grenade or throwing himself over an artillery trench until I heard my mother say that he’d died of TB, not at all a heroic way to die, according to our history books.
Marina doesn’t seem to care that my father is not related to her by blood and calls him papa, just as I do. He is the only father she has ever known, my mother says, since her real father, that unknown Alexander, sick with TB, died shortly after the war. There is a murky period of five years between Marina’s birth and her father’s death, the time my mother doesn’t talk about, a time long enough, in my estimation, for Marina to have known and remembered her father.
“Papa couldn’t come,” says my mother, panting, as she climbs the stairs, heaving our black square suitcase from step to step. “Lately he hasn’t been feeling well.” She says this with a sigh, probably from lugging the heavy bag up the steps.
When we get to Marina’s room, my mother drags the suitcase into the corner and opens it immediately because she needs to hand to my sister what she’s brought for her—an iron, a set of thick rubber curlers the color of rust, and a cylindrical package of cotton for which my mother says she stood in line for a whole hour.
The room has three metal beds and an armoire. Luckily, one of Marina’s roommates just got married and went to live with her new Moscow in-laws, so we move the third bed next to my sister’s for the three of us. At night, I dream of living in the dorm and of long corridors that lead nowhere, that all end in brick walls keeping me away from what I know is behind them, the stage.
MY SISTER’S GRADUATING PERFORMANCE is tomorrow night. This performance is like a final exam, my mother says; you’d better be ready to show everything you’ve learned, or you’ll get a dvoika in acting and they’ll ship you straight to Pinsk to organize a theater club for street cleaners in their local House of Culture. My mother is still unsure that she made the right decision in allowing Marina to go to drama school. Now and then she shakes her head, saying that Marina should’ve listened to what she was told and chosen a real profession. She could have become a pathologist like Galya, my mother laments. She could be building airplanes.
My sister’s performance is a vaudeville, which, as Marina explained to me, is a short romantic comedy with music. Her play is called Little Orphan Susanna. She plays Madame Pichard, a widowed matchmaker unsuccessfully trying to find a husband for the orphan of the title.
In the morning Marina wakes with a scratchy throat and hoarse voice, and all day my mother has been heating milk in the dorm kitchen, adding chunks of butter into the pot. The best remedy for voice restoration, she says, carrying cups of buttery swirls up to our room.
“I can’t sound like a crow,” Marina cackles, swaddled under a blanket in bed. “This better work.”
I press my fingers into tight fists and wish for my mother’s remedy to work. We all understand the importance of tonight’s performance for, as my mother summed it up, Marina has to demonstrate everything she has learned in four years. I’m not sure it’s fair to judge eight semesters of schoolwork by an hour-and-a-half vaudeville, but these are the rules of the drama school and, I begin to suspect, of all schools.
A few hours later, I see Marina draw black lines along her eyelids with a tiny brush, paint little red spots in the inner corners of her eyes. I see her spread a layer of beige all over her face and neck and then rub little puddles of rouge she’d prepared on her dressing table into her cheeks and her chin. I see her put the rubber curlers my mother brought from Leningrad into her hair; I see her lift another brush and outline her mouth in crimson. I watch closely and Marina doesn’t mind, peering intensely into the mirror, stroking her eyelids with a little brush in elegant, exaggerated movements of her hand, utterly enjoying the attention.
I would give anything to do what she’s doing and watch my face change from a familiar Young Pioneer with braids to someone completely different, someone you couldn’t find in Vera Pavlovna’s textbooks. This is Theater, the real make-believe, exciting and meaningful, not at all like the everyday make-believe we all have to live by. This is the game that only the select few, those blessed with talent, one out of a hundred, are chosen to play.
My mother helps Marina lift the heavy burgundy dress, as rough to the touch as my winter coat, its skirt held wide by three metal rings, and pin a headdress of black plumage to her curled hair. Fascinated, I watch this transformation of my sister, two hours earlier wrapped in a dorm blanket, into a stranger called Madame Pichard.
Then we are sitting in the second row, my mother biting her lip as Marina performs an opening scene. She speaks her lines confidently and loudly, holding a fan in one hand and lifting her long skirt just a little bit to expose the tip of her pointy shoe.
Her voice is holding up in the first and the second scenes, but my mother and I both know that it is her song, the main number of this performance, which is going to be the test. Music starts out of the orchestra pit, which is two meters below the stage, and Marina steps onto the rim, a foot-wide strip running around the orchestra toward the audience.
I press my fingernails into the palms of my hands and in my mind call Marina all the curse words I know because this is what you are supposed to do if you want someone to have good luck. Unfortunately, I don’t know any curse words, so I can’t think of anything better to call Marina than an idiot, a fool, and a hooligan, although the latter is not even a curse since my teacher Vera Pavlovna uses it all the time.
My sister starts singing, reining her voice in a little, but only my mother and I know that she is afraid to strain it. Her voice rings out, filling the theater. She walks along the whole length of the stage rim, holding up her dress in one hand and a fan in the other, making small dancing steps with her pointy feet, driving her voice up and down the scale to coax the orchestra music out of its two-meter depths. “Little orphan Susanna, little orphan Susanna,” she sings in the wise, experienced voice of Madame Pichard, “let me find a man for you.” Her dress falls in glamorous cascades of fabric, brushing the stage behind her, as if it were made of fine silk and not of the scratchy polyester I held two hours earlier. She takes a breath and soars to the final roulade, my mother clasping her hands around the chair arms, my fingernails driven into the skin of my palms so deep they hurt. The audience is silent for a few seconds, as if they’ve collectively forgotten to exhale, but then we all realize that she is done and break into a frenzy of applause.
I clap so hard my palms begin to burn. This is the moment when I feel proud to be related to Marina, when I love her stage voice because it is powerful and sublime and isn’t directed at me. My mother claps and smiles, too, and there is pride beaming from her eyes, the same pride she must have felt when the famous actress told her about Marina’s gift.
I imagine myself on that stage, curtseying and bowing and graciously smiling, but as much as I want to be up there, in full makeup and a crinoline dress, I know in my gut that I could never do it. I could never perform in front of one pair of eyes, let alone five hundred. Maybe it’s genetics, our different fathers. Marina’s father gave her the acting gift and the operatic mezzo-soprano; mine gave me wooden limbs and two big front teeth.
Or maybe it isn’t genetics at all. Maybe it’s me, my own lack of that special talent that makes theater and its world of make-believe so thrilling and real. Without that natural gift I’ll always be doomed to being a part of the other, common, make-believe, the dull and phony pretense of Vera Pavlovna with her heroic valor and Aunt Polya with her rancid butter and mandatory chewing, the pretense of our history textbook that canonized Pavlik Morozov for the brave deed of turning in his father and of our school that bent the Code of Young Pioneers to allow Dimka, the dvoechnik and hooligan, to join in.
With this pitiful truth staring me in the face, all I can do now is clap my hands and shout “Bravo,” just as my mother and the other mothers are doing all over the auditorium. All I can do is admire and applaud this real make-believe, Theater, and within it my sister, who stands on the rim of the proscenium—batting her photogenic eyes and curling her crimson mouth in a smile, her arms outstretched toward the audience—fully aware that she isn’t going to be sent to Pinsk to work in the local House of Culture because her final exam performance deserves nothing less than pyatorka, a perfect five.
The next day, as we pack up to leave, I find out that a perfect five is not all her performance deserves. My sister says she has received an invitation from the chief artistic director of the Leningrad Comedy Theatre to join the company starting in the fall. “Imagine this,” says Marina as she folds her housedress and her nightshirt. “The director turned out to be married to that famous actress Elena Vladimirovna, for whom I auditioned in tenth grade.” My sister stuffs her folded clothes, the curlers, and the iron into a suitcase because she is leaving with us on the night train to begin her acting career in Leningrad.
My mother looks satisfied but not surprised, which makes it clear that my sister has already told her, that my mother knows about this favorable turn in Marina’s future.
It makes it clear that the only person who doesn’t know anything is me.