Afterward the theater company came over to the restaurant to eat, and Maya talked with the director, a middle-aged native woman named Latrobe, who was interested to meet her, to talk about the play, and about Brecht’s theory of political theater. Latrobe proved to be pro-Terran, pro-immigrationist; she wanted to stage plays that made the case for an open Mars, and for assimilating the new immigrants into the areophany. It was frightening, she said, how few plays of the classical repertory reinforced such feelings. They needed new plays. Maya told her about Diana’s political evenings in the UNTA years, how they had sometimes met in the parks. About her notion concerning the blues in the lighting of that night’s production. Latrobe invited Maya to come by and talk to the troupe about politics, and also to help with the lighting if she wanted, which was a weak point in the company, having had its origin in the very same parks Diana’s group had used to meet in. Perhaps they could get out there again, and do some more Brechtian theater.

And so Maya dropped by and talked with the troupe, and over time, without ever really deciding to, she became one of its lighting crew, helping also with costumes, which was fashion in a different way. She also talked to them long into the nights about the concept of a political theater, and helped them to find new plays; in effect she was a kind of political-aesthetic consultant. But she steadfastly resisted all efforts to get her on stage, not only from the company, but from Michel and Nadia as well. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to do that. If I did they would immediately want me to be playing Maya Toitovna, in that play about John.”

“That’s an opera,” Michel said. “You’d have to be a soprano.”

“Nevertheless.”

She did not want to act. Everyday life was enough. But she did enjoy the world of the theater. This was a new way of getting at people and changing their values, less wearing than the direct approach of politics, more entertaining, and perhaps in some ways even more effective. Theater in Odessa was powerful; movies were a dead art, the constant incessant oversaturation of screen images had made all images equally boring; what the citizens of Odessa seemed to like was the immediacy and danger of spontaneous performance, the moment that would never return, never be the same. Theater was the most powerful art in town, really, and the same was true in many other Martian cities as well.

So as the m-years passed, the Odessa troupe mounted any number of political plays, including a complete run-through of the work of the South African Athol Fugard, searing passionate plays anatomizing institutionalized prejudice, the xenophobia of the soul; the best English-language plays since Shakespeare, Maya thought. And then the troupe was instrumental in discovering and making famous what was later called the Odessa Group, a half-dozen young native playwrights as ferocious as Fugard, men and women who in play after play explored the wrenching problems of the new issei and nisei, and their painful assimilation into the areophany — a million little Romeos and Juliets, a million little blood knots cut or tied. It was Maya’s best window into the contemporary world, and more and more her way of speaking back to it, doing her best to shape it — very satisfying indeed, as many of the plays caused talk, sometimes even a furor, as new works by the Group attacked the anti-immigrant government that was still in power in Mangala. It was politics in a new mode, the most intriguing she had yet encountered; she longed to tell Frank about it, to show him how it worked.

In those same years, as the months passed two by two, Latrobe mounted quite a few productions of old classics, and as Maya watched them, she got more and more snared by the power of tragedy. She liked doing the political plays, which angry or hopeful tended to contain an innate uto-pianism, a drive for progress; but the plays that struck her as most true, and moved her most deeply, were the old Terran tragedies. And the more tragic the better. Catharsis as described by Aristotle seemed to work very well for her; she emerged from good performances of the great tragedies shattered, cleansed — somehow happier. They were the replacement for her fights with Michel, she realized one night — a sublimation, he would have said, and a good one at that — easier on him, of course, and more dignified all around, nobler. And there was that connection to the ancient Greeks as well, a connection being made in any number of ways all around Hellas Basin, in the towns and among the ferals, a neoclassicism that Maya felt was good for them all, as they confronted and tried to measure up to the Greeks’ great honesty, their unflinching look at reality. The Oresteia, Antigone, Electra, Medea, Agamemnon which should have been called Clytemnestra — those amazing women, reacting in bitter power to whatever strange fates their men inflicted on them, striking back, as when Clytemnestra murdered Agamemnon and Cassandra, then told the audience how she had done it, at the end staring out into the audience, right at Maya:

“Enough of misery! Start no more. Our hands are red.

Go home and yield to fate in time,

In time before you suffer. We have acted as we had to act.”

We have acted as we had to act. So true, so true. She loved the truth of these things. Sad plays, sad music — threnodies, gypsy tangos, Prometheus Bound, even the Jacobean revenge plays — the darker the better, really. The truer. She did the lighting for Titus Andronicus and people were disgusted, appalled, they said it was just a bloodbath, and by God she certainly used a lot of red spots — but that moment when the handless and tongueless Lavinia tried to indicate who had done it to her, or knelt to carry away Titus’s severed hand in her teeth, like a dog — the audience had been as if frozen; one could not say that Shakespeare had not had his sense of stagecraft right from the start, bloodbath or no. And then with every play he had gotten more powerful, more electifyingly dark and true, even as an old man; she had come out of a long harrowing inspired performance of King Lear in an elation, flushed and laughing, grabbing a young member of the lighting crew by the shoulder, shaking him, shouting “Was that not wonderful, magnificent?”

“Ka, Maya, I don’t know, I might have preferred the Restoration version myself, the one where Cordelia is saved and marries Edgar, do you know that one?”

“Bah! Stupid child! We have told the truth tonight, that is what is important! You can go back to your lies in the morning!” Laughing harshly at him and throwing him back to his friends, “Foolish youth!”

He explained to the friends: “It’s Maya.”

“Toitovna? The one in the opera?”

“Yes, but for real.”

“Real,” Maya scoffed, waving them away. “You don’t even know what real is.” And she felt that she did.

And friends came to town, visiting for a week or two; and then, as the summers got warmer and warmer, they took to spending one of the Decembers out in a beach village west of the town, in a shack behind the dunes, swimming and sailing and windsurfing and lying on the sand under an umbrella, reading and sleeping through the perihelion. Then back into Odessa, to the familiar comforts of their apartment and the town, in the burnished light of the southern autumn which was the longest season of the Martian year, also the approach to aphelion, day after day dimmer and dimmer, until aphelion came, on Ls 70, and between then and the winter solstice at Ls 90 was the Ice Festival, and they ice-skated on the white sea ice right under the corniche, looking up at the town’s seafront all drifted with snow, white under black clouds; or iceboating so far out on the ice that the town was just a break in the white curve of the big rim. Or eating by herself in steamy loud restaurants, waiting for the music to start, wet snow pelting down on the street outside. Walking into a musty little theater and its anticipatory laughter. Eating out on the balcony for the first time in the spring, sweater on against the chill, looking at the new buds on the tips of the tree twigs, a green unlike any other, like little viriditas teardrops. And so around, deep in the folds of habit and its rhythms, happy in the deja vu that one made for oneself.