Rock, Paper, Scissors

by Maxim Osipov

  I moved into the theater right away, into the attic above and a little behind the stage. A corner room, with windows on two sides. Accommodations for visitors. No one had lived there before I came along. A table, two chairs, a bed. Even a pitcher. What good fortune! My office and bedroom, all in one. Just for the time being, they said, until permanent housing could be arranged. Time passed, and it never even occurred to me to remind them of their promises.

  Mir Savvich—that was my first director’s name—took me up the stairs and showed me around.

  “We beg your pardon, but water will be a problem for the time being.”

  Don’t worry, I’ll get along.

  He was a good man, Mir Savvich. Even tempered, thoughtful. We worked together for a long time. Then he retired and went back home, I don’t remember where—Pyatigorsk, Kislovodsk. They say it’s hard to adjust to a new climate at an advanced age, dangerous. Yes, he was a good man.

  I never did keep a diary, unfortunately, and the days of my past flow into each other. What am I saying, days? Years and entire decades flow together and fuse in my mind. But my first evening at the theater I remember in all its detail. I unpacked my suitcase and put my books and photographs on the shelves, jittery with joy. I went downstairs after midnight, into the auditorium: the doors were shut, the darkness impenetrable. I waited for my eyes to adjust, got up onto the stage, and strutted around. I took a few deep breaths, wanting to cry out: “How shameful, prince!” Or at least: “My carriage, quick, my carriage!”15 But all I managed was a quiet laugh. Then I stood there in the dark, for a long, long time.

  THE GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES

  To the right of the stage is the actors’ canteen. I ask Valentina Genrikhovna to give me an egg with peas and soup.

  “It’s yesterday’s soup, Alexander Ivanovich. Have the fish. It’s good.”

  Valentina Genrikhovna writes what we owe into a notebook. What does she do with these notes? In the course of thirty years, I’ve never seen her refuse food to anyone—and I don’t mean just employees, but also theatergoers. I always settle up, but not everyone is in a position to do so. As Pushkin wrote, “We aren’t playing for the money.”16 Am I right, Lyubochka?

  Lyubochka is out of sorts today. I make my way into the auditorium. There’s going to be a rehearsal of Pushkin’s The Stone Guest in ten minutes. Should be interesting. A young director has come to us from Saint Petersburg.

  •

  “While far away—in Paris to the north . . .”17

  Laughter all around: Don Juan appears in the gallery, naked to the waist, a guitar hanging around his neck.

  The director gives the cue: “Shouldn’t you get dressed, Slava?”

  He himself is in a coat with the collar raised. It’s forty below outside. The theater has heat, but not enough. Our Laura is treading the stage in a quilted jacket. A redhead, all in ringlets—they call her Hairspring.

  Lyuba didn’t get a role, but her husband, Zakhar Gubaryev, an Honored Artist of the Republic, was cast on the spot. Like Slavochka, he needs no makeup: Gubaryev is the Commander incarnate.

  The director removes his glasses, breathes on them, wipes them with his handkerchief. Then he addresses Slavochka again: “You have a handsome body,” he says thoughtfully. “But let’s put something on it.”

  No, Slavochka has prepared some kind of acrobatic feat. He used to be a circus man. Dona Anna takes a swig from a thermos—everyone knows that the “tea” in her thermos is warming. The director from Petersburg doesn’t know, but perhaps he too can guess: not all city folk are dense.

  “What’s the holdup? I don’t understand!” screeches Dona Anna. “Come on, get to it, block the scene!”

  The director stops the rehearsal, gathers the actors into a circle.

  “We’ll search for the scene together, try things.”

  Gubaryev comments: “In other words, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s about to stage—you see?”

  Everyone smiles but the director and me. It hurt me to see it, and it hurts to remember it now.

  The director turns to Dona Anna: “I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go. Why? You can’t venture a guess? Do you want me to say it in front of everyone? And I’ll have to lodge a complaint with the management . . .”

  “Oh no you don’t!” shouts the actress. (I’ll omit her surname. For all I know, she’s still working today.) “I’ll tell them how you cursed. I ‘bungled it,’ eh? ‘Bungled it’? That sort of language has no place in the theater . . .”

  The director laughs. His teeth are a brilliant white. No one in Eternity has such teeth. They say there’s something wrong with our water.

  Why do I remember this scene in particular? A lot had happened before then, and a lot would happen afterwards. Did it just happen to come to me? No, there’s a reason for it: The Stone Guest was the first in our stagings of classics, our little stagings.

  •

  The director came in February, that’s for certain. Lyubochka was born in February, she’s an Aquarius; this meant something to her. But what year it was I can’t be sure. 2005, I think. Or 2006.

  “Did you hear, Alexander Ivanovich? Your Petersburg protégé has left us. He tore up his contract.”

  Yes, Lyubochka, he came round to say goodbye.

  Gubaryev is smiling broadly: “He couldn’t take the pressure.” Is that any cause for celebration? “Now he can flash his teeth on Nevsky Prospect.”

  “At all the bronze horses!” jokes Slavochka, with whom it’s impossible to be seriously annoyed.

  “You’ve got to be able to take it on the chin.” Gubaryev won’t relent. “Strength of character, that’s what you need in this profession. Take it from an Honored Artist of the Republic.”

  Technically, Gubaryev hasn’t yet received the title. The documents had only just been submitted.

  “Alexander Ivanovich, why didn’t they let me play Dona Anna?”

  I shrug my shoulders: artistic whim.

  •

  It’s hard to tell things in order when you’ve lived a simple, peaceful life, the same routine every day. The seventies, the eighties—a quiet life, very quiet. Obviously the literary director isn’t the main figure in any theater. There’s the art director, the troupe manager, the stage manager (I won’t say anything about each play’s director—our directors were all by invitation), but if you work long enough, you acquire clout, whether you want to or not: you recommend staging something, comment on the distribution of roles, and they listen to you. My relationships with the actors were stable, problem free. They had their misunderstandings: an actress wants to rehearse a role, reaches for her notebook, but it won’t open—someone has dripped jam in between the pages. Where do they run? Upstairs, to me. I’m not bragging, just stating facts.

  The country was starting to change—someone would go to the capital and report back—but the news had a long way to travel to Eternity, and to the theater in particular. This is what life was like: rehearsal first thing in the morning; rest during the day, while the actors went over their parts; and in the evening—the performance. Our troupe wasn’t large; everyone had things to do. The actors loved their work: we’d put on two performances a day on Saturdays and Sundays, and children’s matinees on top of that. How did we do it? How did we cope? No time for television; in all those years I never even had a television set. Plays were my window onto that other world. The job had me reading a lot—the themes of the plays did change, that’s true.

  Here’s some of our repertoire from the nineties, just off the top of my head: Dmitry and the Drum, about the beautiful life, a comedy. The language wasn’t particularly interesting, but it had lots of action, lots of roles for women. The audience liked it. People would come to see it several times. Another comedy, a translation from English—Never Smile at a Crocodile—a solid piece about life in an American prison. And in complete contrast, Better Off Being a Jew, a melodrama about a special relationship between men. The audience didn’t get it—a very short r
un. I was surprised myself at opening night: Why had I suggested it? Something must have grabbed me, and it did cause a stir in Moscow and Petersburg. And another comedy, Who the Hell Knows, which I don’t need to describe—a famous piece. Such was our repertoire.

  The Severogorsk Messenger wrote us up frequently. “His Majesty Art reigns on the stage.” Always the same viewer, but she used all sorts of pseudonyms—Muse Vasilyevna, Melpomene Sidorovna, and even sillier combinations. “Your correspondent hearkened and gazed with eyes wide open and heart aflutter. Her ears rang from the ovations.” Slightly exaggerated, one might say—but our troupe ate it up: they’d cut the articles out and paste them to the dressing-room walls, especially if the paper had included their photos. Actors need attention, and when Melpomene was silent (although, to give her her due, she wrote about everyone), one still needed to put something up, if only a thank you letter, a certificate from the theater on the occasion of an anniversary, in recognition of many years of conscientious labor.

  Once we even made it into a Moscow paper. The article was titled “The Vale of Tears.”

  “Against the background of rather amateurish performances, several catastrophes occurred. First, during the intermission, the female lead seemed to come down with some sort of illness: she emerged swollen and puffy, and although she had been all squeaks in the first act, she now spoke in a deep contralto. Her fifteen-year-old daughter, at the appearance of the object of her ardor, began smacking and licking her lips. And the village priest paced the stage in a metropolitan’s garb and crossed himself without cease. Was he driving off an evil spirit? Or was he simply desperate to keep his hands busy? To complete the picture, his pronunciation suggested he had been summoned from the Ivanovo region. The audience, however, took it all in stride. Eternity is a small town: beggars can’t be choosers. The theater didn’t manage to print the poster and programs in time for the premiere. People were selling synthetic fur coats in the foyer. The vale of tears.”

  “During the intermission! All squeaks!” they say behind Anna Arkadyevna’s back. She’s our leading lady. Actors aren’t hard to amuse.

  “Alexander Ivanovich, let’s think about avoiding living authors,” is all Mir Savvich had to say after he read the article.

  I agreed: it wasn’t written by a critic. Critics give you a hard time if you’re well-known, successful—who were we for them to give us a hard time? I won’t name the author: he traveled to the premiere at his own expense—and he paid Valentina Genrikhovna three and a half thousand rubles to arrange the reception afterwards, but then didn’t show up.

  You know, I say to Mir Savvich, there’s a Petersburg director who’s long dreamed of putting on The Little Tragedies at our theater.

  “Well, well, well,” sighs Mir Savvich.

  In other words, do whatever you like, my dears. He’s already taking his leave, going home to Pyatigorsk.

  •

  And so, in February of 2005 or 2006, there’s a change in management. Our new director is Gennady Prokopyevich. Small, energetic, he all but flew around the theater—although, incidentally, he too was born in the forties. Eternity was on the small side for him, of course. He had been in charge of the Krasnoyarsk Regional Philharmonic Society. There were all sorts of rumors, which I won’t repeat.

  Gennady Prokopyevich gathered us together and examined us with his right eye—his left eye was made of glass, only good for winking: “Had your fill of art yet? Let’s make some money.”

  That’s how we first learned of grants. We’d never even heard the word before. Grants, said Gennady Prokopyevich, are most readily allocated for classic material.

  “We’ll put on a lot of work, quickly, using our own resources. A month of this, then a month of that. Alexander Ivanovich, you’re responsible for the artistic angle.” A wink in my direction: “You can’t lose your shirt on the classics. Tried and true.”

  Everyone threw their support behind Prokopyevich: down with visiting directors—all they do is get in the way, make a mess of things. And contemporary plays are worthless. Nothing but dull, bleak stuff, or dumb comedies. It’s time to get serious. The stockrooms are overflowing with old costumes and props—we can mix and match. We aren’t an academic theater; we needn’t get everything right, to the letter. “That’s the global trend these days, anyway.” What, exactly, is the global trend? “Never mind. Theater is a contingent art, it implies experimentation.”

  It seemed like just another conversation. Mir Savvich had also grumbled about our lengthy rehearsal process, our constant delays. But who could have guessed that the wind arising from that meeting would sweep away not only us and the theater, but the entire town. I call it up in my mind—some of it clearly, some of it not so clearly—and try to make sense of the motives of all involved. And I think: How reckless we were, how oblivious, toying with providence, with fate. The classics! Plays that theaters in the big cities would rehearse for several years and still decide not to stage . . . We’d take—what was on our list? I hesitate to utter the great titles—put it through its paces for a month or so, fetch some costumes and props from the storeroom, blow off the dust, and let it fly. Open, close, then go after another grant. We didn’t need to get our hands dirty, didn’t need all that money. Wasn’t Valentina Genrikhovna feeding us well enough? We all got along, staging our comedies—everyone was happy, always hugging: Wonderful dress rehearsal, Anna Arkadyevna! Brilliant premiere, Alexander Ivanovich! And things could have gone on that way forever.

  The accountant informed us that strangers had appeared on the payroll—stage managers, costumers, set designers, even composers, and, it’s hard to believe, a teacher in elocution for the stage, an Armenian!

  I kept silent at that February meeting, asking just one empty question: What if there’s an inspection?

  “There’s no need to fear an inspection”—and that was the end of it.

  Later on many people laid the blame squarely at Prokopyevich’s feet—but they shouldn’t have. The man acted in accordance with the given circumstances. Incidentally, theater jargon came to him very naturally indeed: “Our people have long lived in accordance with the given circumstances. It’s you up here in Eternity who have your heads in the clouds.”

  •

  It wasn’t long after this meeting that the fellow from Petersburg, the visiting director, came knocking at my door. He had had a talk with Prokopyevich. They didn’t see eye to eye. The contract was terminated.

  “I missed the mark with Dona Anna . . . Your—what’s her name? Schwalbe. She’s far too pretty; anyone would have eyes for her. But that . . .” He says her name. “They warned me she was a boozer. Well, I thought to myself, that’s just what I need—a tippling widow. Don Juan doesn’t pass up a single woman. Like old man Karamazov—‘No such thing as an ugly woman, that’s my motto . . .’ Staging the classics is no easy undertaking, Alexander Ivanovich.”

  I had to look away.

  •

  The new director ushered in a new generation of actors: Zakhar Gubaryev and his wife, Lyubochka Schwalbe. And soon we took on Slavochka Vorobyev. Don Juan was his first big role.

  Zakhar and Slavochka struck up their friendship just when the actors had acquired an unprecedented degree of independence. Gennady Prokopyevich was seldom present, and I—well, how could I manage them myself? Especially when the actors were so exceptional, especially these three.

  Lyubochka, that little swallow: past thirty, but how pretty! Not a single line on her face; long, long lashes; and that voice . . . And that hair!

  “Zakhar and I were the most beautiful couple in our class!”

  “I can imagine what sort of class that was!” laughs Slavochka.

  Gubaryev is older than Lyubochka. He didn’t go into theater right away: first the army, and even a course at the artillery academy.

  “Artillery is the god of war.” Gubaryev loves weaponry.

  He used his share of the grant to buy a revolver. He’d take it out to the shooting range. What di
d you need it for, Zakhar?

  “So there wouldn’t be any questions.”

  A round, shaved head, a broad nose—an expressive face. Many people recognize Gubaryev from his roles in film. He was lured to us with bonuses for working in the Far North, an apartment that was all his own, and the prospect of an honorary title. Lyubochka followed along: “Zakhar used to be a totally different man. He lo-o-oved me.” Lyubochka drawls the o, tilts back her head. A beautiful throat—so white. “He used to kiss each one of my fingers, wrote me poems.”

  Slavochka and I exchange glances: Gubaryev writing poems! Lyuba, give us a dramatic reading.

  “I wanted children so badly, Alexander Ivanovich!”

  I marvel at her dizzying leaps from one subject to another.

  “But Gubaryev couldn’t care less. He’s a Sagittarius, you know. Sagittariuses couldn’t care less about women, children. Especially children. Alexander Ivanovich, what do you think, is Fedyunin gay? He’s always hanging around Zakhar.”

  The questions you ask, Lyubochka . . . I doubt it. But I’d rather not talk about Fedyunin—not now, not ever.

  •

  It’s far more enjoyable to think of Slava. Slavochka Vorobyev, my neighbor and friend. Slavochka came to Eternity on the run from somebody’s husband. He got onto a train and kept going until he arrived—he liked the name of the place. He didn’t have an apartment either, and moved into the theater, on the same floor as me. He called me Uncle Sasha.

  Glorious biography: he’d been a circus man, an aerialist—walked the tightrope, turned somersaults under the big top. He’d climb a drainpipe to the fourth floor.

  “You’ll break your neck!”

  He’d shrug: been taking tumbles all his life, ever since he was a kid.

  “What on earth were your parents thinking?” That gets a laugh.

  “How should I know? Left home at fourteen.” A woman had fallen for him, an animal tamer.