Lily had been away for seven weeks. On the evening of the last Sunday of September she phoned, and Yomei went down to the front desk to speak with her. Lily was coming back in two days and asked Yomei to receive her at the train station, because she had things to carry. Yomei was thrilled and agreed to meet her there.
She was delighted to see Lily getting off the train, smiling with a face that was slightly weathered but glowing with health. Lily was carrying a sack of vegetables, more than fifty pounds of them. Yomei took the bag and threw it on her shoulder, then they were moving toward the exit of the platform. “How much did you pay for this?” she asked about the vegetables.
“Nothing,” said Lily, a proud smile on her lips. “They let me take as much as I could carry.”
Back in their room at the Hotel Lux, Yomei emptied the sack. There were three big heads of cabbage, half a dozen squashes, some twenty potatoes, four long cucumbers, a couple of stout eggplants, two stalks of celery, even a small pumpkin. She told Lily, “What a windfall—I haven’t eaten fresh vegetables in weeks.”
“I took with me only the uncrushable produce. They were nice to me.”
That evening Yomei cooked a vegetable stew spiced with chili flakes and soy paste, which she’d bought at a small Korean grocery store. They each ate two large bowls of the dish. Lily said this was the first time she had tasted homemade food since she’d left for Serpukhov. She also told Yomei that she’d go to the public bathhouse first thing the next morning, because she might still have a couple of lice and must get rid of them. Yomei reminded her not to wade into a bathing pool again. “Of course I’ll be more careful,” said Lily.
Lily was excited to learn that Yomei was to act in Three Sisters. She enthused that no Chinese actor had ever performed such a major role in a Russian play, but Yomei reminded her that it was only a students’ effort, purely pedagogical.
The premiere of Three Sisters was scheduled for the following week, after the play had gone through more than forty rehearsals. This was much less than a play produced for the general public, which usually had at least one hundred rehearsals. On the opening night, the small theater at the institute was crowded with some three hundred people, mostly from local communities and the theater circle. There were also a few Chinese expats who had heard that Yomei was going to perform in the play. Most of the audience were seated on oak bleachers, which formed a sloping semicircle. Some were sitting on the floor at the front. The back windows were all open to show a view of the riverside. On the stage, a couple of thick birch boles stood to give a country ambience. Inside the Prozorov house, there was a long table with a vase of mixed flowers at its center for Irina’s name-day party. The stage props were basic and minimal, but rustically authentic, with some pollarded willows whose drowsy branches wavered in the backdrop, outside the open windows that overlooked the abruptly dropping banks of the Moskva. A large carpet covered the center of the floor, on which stood some chairs and a pair of brown sofas.
Most of the male characters had on a military uniform, and Colonel Vershinin even bore a sword. As for the women, they had donned long dresses. Masha was wearing black, while her younger sister Irina was in white and her elder sister Olga was in a long, pea-green sleeveless dress and a beige shirt. All the female servants wore black with large white aprons around the waists, their hair wrapped in red bandannas. In spite of their nervousness at the beginning, the cast gradually grew at ease, proceeding smoothly. They managed to put the audience under a spell, and they didn’t move, even though some had to remain on their feet the whole time. Deep inside, Yomei was antsy largely due to her struggle with the lines she had to say in Russian, yet since she was playing Masha, having an affair with the colonel, her state of nerves did give a touch of neurotic intensity to her acting.
When the last episode was over, applause exploded, and some in the audience whistled. Katina was so pleased that afterward she told the cast with her eyes smiling, “I wish we could pop champagne to celebrate.” She thanked them with a small bow and with her hand on her chest, as if this were a high-quality professional production. Then the teacher pulled Yomei aside and told her, “To be honest, I was nervous about you, but you were excellent. The audience couldn’t tell you’re a foreigner. They might have assumed that you were a Soviet minority from Central Asia.”
“Thank you so much, Katina, for your encouragement and for all the help.”
Reslie Mironov, still wearing the brown vest and the felt hat for the part of Kulygin, came up to Yomei and said shyly, “Can I take you home?”
Yomei laughed and said, “You act like you’re still onstage.” Indeed, at the end of the play Masha’s husband is supposed to offer to take her home. Seeing him a bit embarrassed, Yomei added, “Maybe we can walk back together another day. My friend is here waiting for me, and I ought to go with her.” She threw her arm around Lily, who had been standing next to her waiting the whole time. There’d be another performance in two days, but she wasn’t sure she’d like to walk home with Reslie, still unable to shake off his stage image—Masha’s boring, ridiculous husband, Kulygin.
“Good night then, see you soon,” the good-natured Reslie said, and with his slim fingers, adjusted the steel-framed, powerless glasses he wore for the stage.
The moment Yomei and her friend left the theater institute, heading south to their dorm, Lily said, “That Reslie fellow must be interested in you. He might be after you.”
“I can’t date seriously here,” Yomei said thoughtfully. “Reslie Mironov plays my husband in the play, so I ought to be nice to him. We have to be together onstage.”
“How about offstage then?” Lily giggled.
Yomei smacked her on the shoulder. “You’re such an imaginative girl that you’re trying to catch shadows—nothing will happen between Reslie and me. Remember how we all refused to become Soviet citizens, saying we didn’t want to be Musty Bread?”
“Sure, but that’s not my point. I mean it’s natural for a young woman to have feelings for a young man, even a foreign man. Actually, even my little sister Linlin has been dating seriously.”
“Going with a foreigner?”
“A Russian boy in the same international children’s home.”
“How are your parents taking it?”
“They’re too far away to interfere with her life or mine. Things change constantly. We all have to adapt to circumstances, don’t we?”
“OK, I can see that you’ve become a true internationalist at heart,” Yomei said, swatting away the mosquitoes buzzing around her head.
“Just now, you were gorgeous onstage. Seeing you in the last scene, for the first time in my life I understood the word ‘sexy.’ My goodness, you were sexy like a filly in heat. What happened to you?”
“I was just acting. You shouldn’t mix drama with life.”
“But you were blooming like a real woman frustrated with her dull marriage—everything came out of you so naturally. Did you have to prepare yourself for that kind of presentation?”
“In our field we call it ‘expression’ instead of ‘presentation.’ One has to express the emotional experience onstage. Everything must come from within. I have to prepare myself psychologically for every one of my appearances in the play.”
“Then I can see why so many men are drawn to you. You could easily turn some of their heads.”
“Come on, you’re taking me to be a fox spirit that keeps men bewitched.”
“I guess deep down most girls want to become a coquette, even though we don’t say we do.”
“You know, Stanislavski used to play the part of Colonel Vershinin. If he were doing that tonight, I might have been so unnerved, sharing the stage with him, that I would have peed my panties.”
Lily laughed. “You know, Yomei, at heart you’re a wanton woman.”
“Ha ha ha, maybe only at heart.”
A tram passed by with a jangling bell, and they continued south and entered the Hotel Lux. They didn’t go to sleep until after midnight, lying in the dark with the heads of their beds against each other, chatting about their dreams of going back to China to build a new country. Both felt their hearts swelling with the lofty feeling of dedication and self-sacrifice. They wanted to work ardently for the revolution back home.
At one point, Lily mentioned Lucas, the French man at the Party school outside Ufa who had run after Yomei, but there hadn’t been a word from him. All Yomei had heard was that the group of Spanish students, Lucas among them, had gone to join a partisan force in Yugoslavia to fight their way back to Spain, and that some of them got killed on the way.
Director Lestov was pleased about their performance as a pedagogical success. For those students who had actually acted in the play, this opportunity helped them understand the dramatic art more intimately. Whether or not they continued to major in acting or directing, the experience of performing in Three Sisters was invaluable to them. Among the Chinese expats, word spread that Yomei was truly phenomenal. It was said that she acted brilliantly, and what was even more amazing, that she spoke Russian like a native speaker onstage. But those who knew her in person acknowledged that she must have worked extremely hard on her lines, considering that in everyday life she still hesitated a bit and even paused to find the right word or phrase when she spoke the foreign tongue.
The performance continued twice a week for the entire month of October. From the second night on, Reslie accompanied Yomei on her way back to the Hotel Lux. He was excited while walking beside her: his voice dropped whenever a car passed by, and then he would resume talking. He said he had attempted in vain to join the army again, but that they had kept a file on him and rejected him for his flat feet and asthma. In fact, when it was warm, he could breathe normally. He believed that the recruiting officers may have been biased against an educated, urbane young man their age, since they even accepted Professor Gorchakov, who was already forty-seven, though Gorchakov was stalwart, like a draft horse. Still, he, Reslie, could have been more useful for the military by far. At least, he believed he could have carried artillery shells and loaded cartridges for a machine gun. “But I’m happy now,” he said, eyeing Yomei sideways mysteriously. “Because I was left behind, I got to act together with you and to know you better. I have my reward. Life is truly amazing, unpredictable.”
Actually, Professor Gorchakov hadn’t been taken by the army. He just marched away with the militia, serving as a commissar in a resistance force, but Yomei didn’t correct Reslie. His shoulders hunched some as he was walking beside her. She could feel his pain from being rejected by the military—she too had been denied an opportunity to fight the Nazi invaders on the front.
Before they said good night, he hugged her and even gave her a peck on the cheek, which she believed was harmless, though it did make her face hot for a moment.
After the next performance, on their way downtown, they didn’t go back to her dorm directly. Before crossing the bridge over the Moskva, they strolled a little along its southern bank. Some nimbus clouds were gathering in the city’s shimmering sky, while faint lightning zigzagged, cracking a wall of dark clouds. The air was damp, and no mosquitoes and gnats were flying. In the dark a boat was blowing its horn, which sounded mysterious to Yomei. She was sure there was no passenger service on the water at this late hour. Neither could it be a fishing boat—the loud noise could scare fish away. She asked Reslie, “Why are they tootling like that while sailing on the water?”
“I’m not sure, perhaps they are signaling to someone they are going to meet.”
At this point, a male voice shouted and then a harmonica began shrilling from the boat. In response, a flourish of polka music on the accordion and the balalaika started in the distance. Reslie said, “There must be a party somewhere in the woods down the river.”
Yomei gave a loud whistle, like Masha does in Three Sisters, but the boat didn’t respond to her. Instead, a young female voice started singing:
My dear nightingale,
Please stop warbling before dawn.
Let my beloved sleep a little more.
He’s going to ride to the front in a few hours
To fight the horde from the south…
“I like that song,” Yomei said. “What’s it called?”
“I don’t know. It must be a folk song. This is the first time I’ve heard it too.”
In a flash, the boat disappeared downstream. A few waterfowl let out sleepy cries, and the river turned quiet again.
The moon came out suddenly, and its silver light rendered their faces clear to each other. Yomei said, “Moscow is such a spacious city. There’s still a lot of nature around here.”
“Would you mind living here for good?” he asked with a smile.
“I’m not sure. Probably, if I meet someone I really love—I will be happy to be a good wife and a loving mother.”
“Would you mind someday resuming our roles like in Three Sisters?”
In spite of his even tone of voice, his question, eager and heartfelt, threw her. For a moment, she didn’t know how to reply. Finally she found her words, saying, “But I don’t want to have Kulygin for a husband.”
He laughed, a bit nervously. “You know in real life, I’m not like Masha’s husband at all.”
“OK, I like you, Reslie, and will be happy to be a good friend of yours, but as for the other kind of relationship you mentioned, it can get complicated.”
“In what way?”
“Right before I enrolled in our theater institute, some official here asked me to get naturalized and said that with Soviet citizenship in hand, it would be easier for me to study and live here. Now I can see he was right, but I refused the offer.”
“What does this mean?”
“It means that without Soviet citizenship, it might be hard for me to settle down here. Eventually I’ll have to go back to my country, where I’ll be more useful.”
“You can always apply for Soviet citizenship, can’t you? Besides, I wouldn’t mind going to China and living there as long as I can be with you.”
Although he said those words readily, as if without thinking, she was still astounded. She had no doubt about his sincerity. He may have given a lot of thought to that scenario. On the other hand, she knew many Russian men were extroverted and more likely to change their hearts in the matter of love. All the same, she was touched, even though she didn’t feel very attracted to him.
From the next performance on, she had Lily accompany her back from the theater institute, so that she could prevent Reslie from sticking to her and pressing her for a definite answer to his question. She needed time to think through this matter, and by instinct she knew she must concentrate on her schoolwork for now. Lily was happy to serve as chaperone, since she also believed they must keep their life as simple as possible. Without any emotional complications here, they’d be able to go home for a clean start.