Sasha doesn’t know how her mother or Grandpa can stop her from leaving, unless they bar the windows and double-lock the front door. The thought that they are powerless makes her sit up and pull her shoulders back.
It hasn’t gone unnoticed, this gesture of defiance, and she sees her mother pause, but it’s a pause before a storm.
“Why can’t you be normal, like everyone else?” Her mother’s voice is both authoritative and pleading. “Can’t you see that acting will take you nowhere? That all you’ll be doing is wasting your life?”
“I’m wasting my life now!” Sasha spits out.
Her mother gasps. “Better than an actress, why don’t you join a circus and become a clown! You’re certainly acting like one.”
“An actress?” roars Grandpa, who has been uncharacteristically silent. He throws his spoon to the table and fixes his blue-eyed stare on Sasha. “I won’t allow you to make this house into the laughingstock of the entire town. Do you hear me?”
His ridicule of Theater makes Sasha livid. “If I want to be a clown, I’ll be a clown!” she cries out in what remains of her stage voice. “I’ll be anything I want to be! Even a circus is better than this pretense of life.”
“Don’t you dare yell at us!” her mother shouts. “What makes you believe they will even look at you in Moscow? You think those plays you put on in your drama club were so great? They weren’t. They were pathetic. Pathetic plays in a pathetic theater in a pathetic little town. You’re nothing but a fool, like all the other young fools from all over the country who race to Moscow like flies to sugar, all wanting to be stars, all thinking they’re the next Sarah Bernhardt.”
Sasha cringes because she fears her mother may turn out to be right. The best drama school in Moscow, the one where she wants to go, admits only twenty-five applicants a year from all over the country, and there must be thousands of people like her who have been infected with the germ of Theater and who will do anything to have a life of real make-believe. The thought that she may fail makes her anger blaze even hotter.
“I will go to Moscow and I will become an actress!” she screams. “I’m not you and I won’t live like you’ve lived. I won’t spend my life in this house being ordered around by him.” She thrusts her finger in Grandpa’s direction.
Grandpa scrapes his chair back and stands up. “I’ve had enough. I’ll tell you what you will do,” he rumbles. “You will listen to me, that’s what you will do. You’ll go to school right here in Ivanovo. You’ll learn something useful. How to build a house or treat a disease, like your mother did when she was your age.” Sasha sees that Grandpa’s hands are shaking, as if he is about to hit her. “You will respect your family!” he shouts. “You will be like your uncle Sima, who died right here, in this house. He was a hero who made me proud. You make me sick. Your mother is right: you’re nothing but a clown. A disgrace.”
Then Grandma gets up and whispers something into his ear. She strokes his arm, hoping that his rage will dissipate. She is the only one who hasn’t condemned acting. From her abbreviated experience singing opera, she knows what it feels like to escape and have another life, even if only in her imagination. “Vsyo budet khorosho,” she says, her favorite saying. “All will be well.”
But all is not well.
“No one in this house is going to Moscow,” declares Grandpa and takes a step toward the door. He walks out into the yard, where the neighbors’ sheets fluttering on a line quickly hide him from their view. A few minutes later, he is back, a bunch of nettles clutched in his right fist. With his left hand, he grabs Sasha by the back of her neck, like he grabs blind kittens to be drowned in a ditch, and drags her onto the porch. There he locks her waist in the vise of his elbow and whips her bare calves until they become swollen and red, until blood begins to rise to the surface of her skin.
The nettles’ sting makes her clench her teeth, but she doesn’t wail, as she did when she was younger. Never again will she reveal her pain in front of him. She will remain silent, just as his dictum demands, deaf and mute.
She wonders if all will ever be well, as Grandma promises. She feels like Nina from Chekhov’s Seagull, bathing in Konstantin’s love yet yearning to leave her small town and go to Moscow to become an actress. And what then? Will she, like Nina, turn out to be naive and simpleminded, deceived by a famous man, one of the scores of heartbreakers who undoubtedly prowl the drama schools in Moscow? Will she, like Nina, end up performing in stuffy provincial theaters, riding crowded trains whose cars reek of beer and urine, from one dilapidated stage to the next?