We stopped at the hotel. Two motionless red glow-worms twinkled under one of the windows. As I got down the glowworms simultaneously flew apart and the voice of Oleg rang out poignantly, “She has appeared!” The other glow-worm made no comment.
“Come here, Oleg,” I called into the darkness.
Both of them joined us.
“I’d like you to get acquainted,” I said. “This is Kolya Pospelov.”
“Uh huh,” Oleg said in a tone of voice which conveyed a firm conviction of the fact that this was Kolya Pospelov.
“Alexander,” the other man said, reaching out his hand. It was Sashka Godh, but somehow I wasn’t surprised.
They invited Nicolai to sit down but he thanked them. “Have to get up early,” he excused himself. He promised to come back within a week. His motorcycle roared again and vanished into the darkness.
“Well,” Sashka asked, “is he your hero?”
“Can’t you see he’s her hero?” Oleg observed.
“So what,” I snapped back. “He’s at least a man. He will be awarded The Hero, it’s only a matter of time.”
“You’re chasing after stars,” Oleg insisted.
“We were all ready to report you missing,” Sashka quipped. “ ‘A handsome reward is promised for the return of a foundling.’ Since twelve o’clock we’ve been discussing nothing else but where you may be hiding.”
“What about you?” I asked. “Were you two on the same assignment?”
“We met at the pier,” Oleg explained. “But let’s have some fun now.”
“No, kids, count me out,” I said, completely forgetting that I wasn’t at the university but that right beside me stood this pompous, hateful literary associate Godh. “I’m terribly sleepy,” I added, as I ran off to my room, waving them goodbye.
I was only putting it on. For a while I simply couldn’t bring myself to start working on my story. My roommate was fast asleep so I first switched on the table lamp and pulled it up to my corner, then undressed quickly and accomodated myself as cozily as possible with the papers and notebook on my lap. The writing went smooth and easy, fancy phrases kept coming by themselves. Things turned out to be easier than I had thought.
When morning broke I was in my bed, red-eyed, with only a couple hours of sleep behind me. But I had something to show for it: twenty-four pages of quick handwriting, almost no erasure, lying neatly under the pillow.
I got to work late but it didn’t bother me. With me I had an exonerating document, the proof of penmanship. No doubt, laurels were in store for me.
I stepped in like a triumphant tribune, barely feeling the floor under my feet. As I entered, all three of them raised their heads from their desks. Slowly I walked up to Nikita’s desk, slowly I opened the folder and pulled out my stack of papers. “Here,” I said, modestly laying it at the edge.
Nikita seemed overwhelmed by the volume. He glanced at me like a baited rabbit and asked in a low, low voice, “What’s this?”
My reply was terse but dignified, “My feature story.”
“Uh huh,” Sashka exclaimed.
“Oh, I see,” Nikita cheered up. “I’d thought for a moment more poetry.”
I went to my desk. Nikita had pulled up my manuscript and begun to read, his head leaning on his hand.
Time dragged on.
“You know,” the chief spoke up at last. “I’m afraid I have to give it to you straight: no good. Come here. … Now have a look for yourself. In the first place, on almost every page you have ‘glimmer of steely eyes,’ or ‘his eyes flashed like steel,’ and this ‘straw-blond vortex’ has obviously taken the better part of your judgment. Here, ‘the cutter bites in, sputtering. …’ Come on, where have you seen this kind of writing? But all right, forget this, but where is the pivotal point? You see what I mean? You simply haven’t thought things through and haven’t digested the material. And then something else—twenty-four pages of story, and half of it your own concoctions. … no, it won’t do.”
Nikita had his say while I sat on the dunce stool, unable to lift my eyes.
“Listen, Nikita,” Sashka interposed. “There must be something we could do with it.”
Hopefully I looked up. Nikita peered straight at me but this time his full face had the old profile expression—no difference anymore. “As of now,” he said coolly, “there isn’t a thing we could do with it. Let’s think it over and then try to tackle the problem.” He got up and hastily left the room.
I cautiously picked up my sorry effort from his desk and trudged back to my place. For the rest of the day everybody was careful not to pay me any attention. Sashka was trying to be funny, watching me from the distance on the sly. But this made me even worse. After work I went to bed early and had no trouble falling asleep.
Next morning, same as usual, I worked on the incoming correspondence. A few days passed, and on one of those heavy-hearted mornings the door opened, and unexpectedly the familiar straw-blond tuft of Kolya Pospelov peeked in.
I jumped up as if scalded by hot water. Before he realized what I was doing, we were both outside in the corridor. No doubt he had detected a strange expression on my face because he asked me feelingly, “Well, how have things been with you?”
This was all I could stand. Stammering with shame and self-abasement, I told him about the “epithets” and the “pivotal point,” and above all, of my own ineptness. We walked back and forth in front of our building, and each time we passed the ice cream stand, Kolya felt embarrassed by the salesgirls’ looks and stopped to buy eskimos. He’d remove the silver foil very diligently and treat me in silence, finding no words for comfort. Finally he got an idea: “Would you care for a ride in the breeze?”
I consented. We went back to the office to pick up my purse and handkerchief. Kolya exchanged greetings with Sashka and Oleg, and as I cleared the table of all the papers Nikita walked in. In his hand he carried a galley proof still raw from the ink, and I noticed that he and Sashka traded knowing glances. Nikita laid the proof on my desk. “Well, why don’t you read it?” he asked me in a chilly voice.
I was about to tell him that I was leaving when one glance at the proof made me change my mind. It seemed as if I’d just arrived. On the upper right corner of the proof was a poem. My poem.
1965
The Backstage Cry
by Yelena Uspenskaya
Yelena Uspenskaya, born around 1920. During World War Two she worked as a traveling feature editor for Komsomolskaya Pravda. She has published a collection of short stories, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow which deals with the life and work of young textile and construction workers.
The railroad clerk shoved out Anya’s ticket and slammed down the window shutter.
Forty-five minutes to wait for the train! The waiting room had a pungent odor of smoke even though nobody was smoking. She looked around: it seemed almost empty and yet there were quite a few people in it. Too big for this town, Anya thought. And not only the waiting room, everything in this town was too big—everything, the station, the theatre (never a sell-out), even the stores of the main square.
The stores! Always selling white pumps that gather dust like the dickens but when you try to buy a pair of simple rubber boots—none to be had. And without rubber boots you just can’t get anywhere when the theatre goes on a tour of the province, Anya found that out quite some time ago.
“Our town, Anna Vladimirovna, is still small, true,” said Anton Petrovitch, the director, when he had invited her to come. “Small, but not for long. Our theatre, though, is large. …”
Whether it was because she was addressed by her first and father’s names for the first time in her life, or because this little lilac-covered town reminded her of her native place, or perhaps because Anton Petrovitch was so nice—Anya had immediately accepted the job.
Then things turned out not as they had seemed. There were no quiet little streets here, no luxurious front gardens, no little samovar smokes in the evenings—none of the things
Anya associated with her childhood. In brief, this town had no outskirts at all. It was being built from the middle—from the main square which had the theatre and the stores. Everything was big, yellow, columned. The streets ran off the square in squares. The houses, one looking exactly like the other, were all four-storied bricks which nobody got around to painting yet. Neither did the trees planted all along the streets get around to growing—they remained the same size as their stake props. One street, the one which led to the railroad station, was really in bad shape: the linden plants died, but the props shot up, grew, and turned out to be little poplars. The poplars, though, were so tiny and dusty that Anya often felt like giving them a bath.
And she used to have dreams! She’d rent a room in a little house and each morning before leaving for rehearsal she’d fool around with her flowers in the front garden. … And after the show her landlady, a nice old person, would treat her with tea from a noisy little samovar. Everybody in town would get to know her and when she passed on the street schoolgirls would give her friendly smiles and whisper behind her back. …
When Anya was a little girl her mother took her once into a store. Mother smiled warmly at a young, dreamy-eyed woman. Later Mother explained that that had been a famous actress who played Nina in the Seagulls. “You’ll go to see her too, when you’re a little bigger,” Mother had said. But Anya never did. The war had started. All the performers and that beautiful actress had left. Then during one of the air raids the theatre burned down and a bomb fell into the dugout where Anya and her mother were taking shelter.
Anya woke up in a hospital train car. From the kind way the medsister treated her she understood that her mother was no longer alive. She had tried to scream, cry, but couldn’t. Her mouth had felt hot and big, terribly painful to move. She found out only a few days later that her lip had been cleft by a splinter.
“She got off easy,” the doctor had said, caressing her head. He was big, white, and hung over her bed like a vault.
In the orphanage Anya sulked, kept hiding her face and hiding from people.
It was a year later, when the dramatic circle was to produce Cinderella, that she unexpectedly got the main part. She disbelieved at first. They’re having a joke on me, she had decided and became offended. But Nina Vassilyevna, the director, had convinced her that nobody would even notice the scar under her make-up and that she should have no trouble with her part. In fact, Anya’s performance was said to have been a success: there was long applause, they sent her flowers. After the show, as they were walking through the dark, sticky raspberry alley which seemed to have more cobweb than autumn-swept leaves, Vitya, who had played the prince, kissed her on her cool cheek and they both swore to remain friends forever. Vitya had turned fourteen already, and a few days later he said goodbye to everybody in the orphanage and left for Magnitka. He had sent her two postcards on the journey and that was all. Obviously Vitya had plunged headlong into work and forgot all about her. In time she, too, stopped thinking of him. She never suspected, though, that Nina Vassilyevna had arranged the whole Cinderella plot for her benefit. But from that time, Anya had begun to feel unashamed of her face and gained confidence in herself. Those had been hard times—the kids had to plant potatoes, get wood for fuel, do repairs around the house. Each day would bring more kids into the orphanage, and they’d be crying at night and Nina Vassilyevna would have no mind for any more shows.
They had staged Cinderella three more times: in the Home, at school, and in the kolkhoz. Then the costumes were made over into New Year’s masquerade dresses and the circle fell apart. For a year-and-a-half they had no performance. Then times began to improve and life became easier. That was when Anya had decided to become an actress. Because of that she had to wage fierce struggles to get passing grades in physics and mathematics since one wasn’t accepted into the Theatrical Institute without a high school diploma.
At the exam first she had to read a fable; after that she read Tatyana’s letter from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. She was terribly frightened but tried to look for comfort to the famous old actress who was nodding encouragingly. But then the actress smiled condescendingly—Anya hadn’t reminded her of Tatyana. “Now let’s see,” the old lady said in a deep, beautiful voice which Anya had heard so often over the radio. How dear it sounded now. “Honey,” the old lady said, “why don’t you try a scene like this: you’re home, sewing, and suddenly you hear the doorbell. Your dear friend whom you haven’t seen for a long, long time enters.”
Anya frowned. She found nothing to say. The actress was silent too for a while, then resumed, “Come on, honey. Don’t be nervous. Collect yourself.”
Anya envisioned herself in the dining room of the orphanage. There she was sitting at the window, sewing, and there … Vitya comes in. He’s tall, big, grown-up. … She jumped up, threw away her kerchief that was supposed to be the make-believe handiwork and dashed across the room toward the door, her arms outstretched. Her eyes had been damp from tears.
“A smart girl,” the actress had beamed.
But Anya could never get used to Moscow. She had always felt like a visitor there, a visitor who came for just long enough to go through all the museums and see most of the shows in the theatres. And during all those years that she had studied in Moscow she had been losing her way in the rushing crowds—as if she were a newcomer. Only late in the evening, after the insitute was over and they all went to Red Square, Anya would stand for a long time and admire the outlines of the Kremlin, of the Historical Museum, unable to tear her eyes away, trying hard to engrave all the impressions on her mind. She knew then that there was a Moscow which became dear to her heart, the quiet, transparent night Moscow.
Why was she going to Moscow now? She couldn’t say. Nothing pleasant was in store for her there. Nothing at all! It was even frightening to think of what was going to happen to her after they found out she had run away from the theatre. Of course, she’d tell them she was ready to go where they wanted her to—even Chukotka or Sakhalin. Because after yesterday’s flop she couldn’t show her face here anymore. Besides, who said she was even an actress? So what, why not become an instructor in a children’s home and organize there a world-shocking dramatic circle!
Here she was a total failure; everything went wrong. Not even a nice old woman to rent a room from. Anya had been simply assigned a little room in a large four-room apartment in a new house, together with the store manager and his wife, Matilda Yegorovna, who often bitterly complained that she and her husband got no more than two rooms. Matilda Yegorovna had no place for her furniture which she had brought from Kursk, so she put some of it into Anya’s room. On the one hand Anya found this arrangement quite accomodating—she had no money to buy her own furniture; on the other hand, this was a cause of some inconveniences. Matilda Yegorovna had put a couch into Anya’s room. The couch was wide but quite old. The springs were sticking out, and sleeping on it was worse than sleeping on a harrow with its peg teeth up. She had made an offer to Matilda Yegorovna to have the couch reupholstered at her own expense. “No,” Matilda Yegorovna said. “This is a Gobelin antique, and I won’t let you have it covered with the kind of stuff you get in this town.” That antique, though, had another thing wrong with it—it was full of bugs. And those were Kursk bugs which Matilda Yegorovna had brought with her into this new town. And they were mad, too, probably because they were lonely here, and it was impossible to get rid of them completely—they seemed to have no fear of boiling water, kerosene, or DDT. Anya’s braids and dresses smelled all over from DDT, but those bugs were still very much alive. Apart from the couch, Matilda Yegorovna kept in Anya’s room a huge redwood secretary full of drawers that were always locked—they contained all kinds of household souvenirs. Whenever Anya had visitors Matilda Yegorovna came in without knocking to remind her not to put cups with hot tea on the secretary. But Anya kept her cups on the windowsill because there was no room in her “apartment” for a table. There was a corner into which she might have been
able to squeeze in a little table but Matilda Yegorovna had taken care of that, too—with a large potted fig plant.
Whenever Anya came into the kitchen Matilda Yegorovna would step in front of her husband and try to hide him from her view. “What do you need here?” she’d invariably ask. “You’ve got nothing cooking.”
In fact Anya never did have anything cooking. It baffled her to realize that as a rule nothing was left of her paycheck toward the end of the second week. Who knows how she’d have managed had it not been for Fedya’s handouts. Fedya, the electrician and richest man in the theatre, occupied the second room in their apartment. A man of his profession had always plenty to do in a new town. Even Matilda Yegorovna treated him with indulgence. Of course, he did all the wiring for her free of charge (as a good neighbor) and never refused to fix her stove or iron. Into Fedya’s room Matilda Yegorovna had put more livable furniture: an armchair, a round table and two chairs. True, she had asked him to cover the table with plywood and a woolen blanket, but it was undeniably more comfortable to eat at a table than at a windowsill.
After they returned from the theatre, Fedya would invite Anya into his room and treat her with tea, biscuits and kelbasa, while he’d read Hamlet’s soliloquies to her. Fedya dreamed of becoming an actor and she was conscientiously trying to help him. Whether because she believed he had some talent or simply because he was a kind fellow, Anya had no doubt that his dream would some day come true. Every day she had wanted to talk about him to Anton Petrovitch and each day it became more difficult.
When Anton Petrovitch had invited her to come and work for this theatre, Anya had been under the erroneous impression that she would be receiving all the main parts. Nothing of the kind happened. True, she wasn’t left out of any play but the parts she had! A little boy, an old crone, a cleaning woman, or … barking like a dog. The group was small and sometimes she played two, three roles an evening. Anton Petrovitch was after her constantly—picking, drilling her like a sergeant, and when she once declared that playing old women was not her type of food, he smiled. “My friend,” he said good-naturedly, “you don’t realize yourself yet what type of animal you are.”
Treasury of Russian Short Stories 1900-1966 Page 18