XXVII Molto Agitato

“You bastard! ” Anastasia crumpled the tiny silk panties she had just found in the bathroom and threw them at her husband. “We haven’t been home more than two weeks and already you’re screwing your tarts again. In our bed! All that time in Salzburg trying to patch things up, that meant nothing. You are such a liar, Boris. ”

“What do you want me to say? A man has appetites. ”

“That can only be satisfied by some twenty-year-old who’ll let you fuck her to get a recording contract? ” Anastasia snapped back.

“No, but by a woman of any age who seems to actually want to be fucked. ”

“What are you talking about? I’m always there for you. For five years I’ve been there for you. ”

“That’s a load of crap, and you know it. For five years, or at least the last three of them, you’ve been on one engagement after another. And even when you were home, you seemed always to just be doing your duty. ”

“Don’t twist this thing around to blame me for your acting like a goat. You’ve been doing those girls for years, getting all the erotic enthusiasm you wanted, and I never complained. I kept waiting for you to grow up and realize that marriage was more than daily orgasms. ”

“Don’t lecture me on what marriage is, Stasya. I never promised you anything except support for your career, and for five years you got what you needed from me. It was never a real marriage. Hell, it was a goddamn business arrangement. ”

“It was enough of a marriage to make me pregnant, and now I need more from you than recording contracts. We discussed all that in Salzburg. I need a real family now to raise this baby. ”

He picked up the scrap of red silk from the floor and folded it into his pocket. “You mean you want a nice docile house-husband who doesn’t demand sex too often. That’s not me, and you know it. Children were never part of our arrangement. ”

“You want me to have an abortion? So things can go back to the way they were? ”

“That’s your decision. But you know you can’t have everything—a glamorous career and a family. If you have an abortion I’ll pay for it. If you want to be a mother, I’ll send money, but I won’t come home at night to a screaming infant. ”

Anastasia ran her fingers through her hair searching for new terms, trying to reframe the dispute. “Look, infancy doesn’t last forever. ” She heard the whine in her own voice and hated it, but it was the only argument she had left. “We can hire help. A lot of opera singers have children. In a couple of years we can go back to this loose arrangement you are so fond of. ”

“Listen to yourself. You still don’t see what I’m talking about. Our marriage has been theater the whole time, a contract we both agreed on and benefited from. I’m sorry this accident happened, but pregnancy was not in the contract. ” He stormed out of the apartment and slammed the door behind him.

Anastasia stared, speechless, at the closed door. Betrayed. She fumed, less at Boris than at herself. All those quiet conversations in Salzburg with him, all those promises, though she realized in retrospect that Boris had simply repeated that he would support her no matter what. It was on that promise alone that she had made a painful sacrifice. For the word “support” she had closed a door to what might have been real happiness. But it was obvious now that all he had ever meant was money—the one thing she no longer needed from him.

She glanced over at the open score of Carmen that she had been reading and sighed. Boris had a point. She did want everything. How could a daughter of someone who named herself Olga Adrianovna Romanova not be ambitious? It was that very ambition, after all, that had enabled her to escape the grinding drudgery of Soviet Russia.

Singing with the Bolshoi fulfilled the dream of every music-loving child in Russia, and she had been happy—for a while. But the thrill did not last long. Within the first year, reality set in and she saw that it was a workplace like any other, subject to Soviet rules, overseen by commissars. New employees had to fill out questionnaires to prove they were good communists. The embarrassment of having a faintly Romanov mother, by then deceased, could be offset by producing evidence of a good communist father who fell in the Battle of Kursk, and of Uncle Georgi, who fought at Stalingrad.

But she hated living in the dormitory, since as a single person she did not qualify for an apartment, even a shared one. And she was decidedly single, having never felt the slightest interest in any of the men who courted her.

There were no contracts, only a monthly salary and a work assignment. Like any factory worker with a quota to fulfill, she could be assigned at any time to replace another singer. She could not tour, not even internally, without permission from management. And foreign engagements, even if she was invited to them, were like mountain peaks that she could reach only after she had battled her way through bureaucratic jungles.

It seemed like she was always poor. No matter how much fame she acquired, she earned honors, not money. Not until her last year in Moscow was she finally granted the coveted title “People’s Artist of the USSR, ” which entitled her to a tiny rent-free apartment and permission to travel abroad. Like a bird released from a cage, she sang in Bulgaria and Finland, relearning the old operas in new languages. And she was always under the eye of KGB to guarantee her return to Moscow. Then came Paris, where she’d had enough.

But Boris was right. Her legal identity as Frau Reichmann meant nothing. Like her Romanov names and the pretty roles she was hired to sing, it was all theater. What was left of her behind all the masks? Was there anything still of Anastasia Ivanova? What was real?

The answer was obvious now. The baby was real, and she wanted it.

She wanted something else too, something authentic and untainted that had offered her genuine love. But she had already thrown that away, hadn’t she? Overwhelmed with regret, she broke into tears.

What would she do now? She had to take stock. Humbled, she asked herself what pieces were left to pick up. What other things had she neglected that might still be saved?

Then she remembered an envelope of pages in Cyrillic.

⇐ Предыдущая 22 23 24 25 262728 29 30 31 Следующая ⇒