The last thing Sasha wants is for Lara to relive that day, so she releases her from the hug, and Lara slides away, relieved not to be held, not to be touched. To get her mind off that day, it is now Sasha’s turn to unleash her secret, so she tells Lara about Andrei and Marik, about that day in the forest everyone still calls an accident in the woods. She tells Lara about the guilt she feels for leaving Andrei. She tells her how he begged her to stay and how she refused, even after the fire, even after his parents both died and his whole life went up in flames. She feels she betrayed him, she tells Lara. She is grateful to her friend for listening, for not holding her hand, and for not saying she is sorry. Like Lara, Sasha doesn’t want to be held. Unlike Lara, she is guilty.
Yet in her bones, Sasha knows how fortunate they are to be here, in this city and this school. She knows that acting will endow them with power, the power Lara lacked when she was in ninth grade. When they master its secrets of becoming someone else, Sasha says, Lara will be as liberated from her past as she is when she inhabits the characters in classic plays, strong yet conflicted, but always in control of their lives.
20
Despite her school faculty’s disdain for movies, the Mosfilm studio regularly scouts their hallways for fresh talent. Studio agents, unshaved men in denim and loose-haired women dressed in clothes they don’t see in stores, catch students between classes to invite them to screen tests, enticing them with fees only the studio can pay. During the spring semester, Sveta is offered the lead part in a film set in contemporary Moscow, and Sasha is invited for a supporting role in Rimsky-Korsakov’s film opera The Tsar’s Bride.
The studio sends its emissary to their dean, who has starred in many Mosfilm studio films himself, to plead for both of them. Sasha hopes the emissary is a green-eyed beauty in a peasant dress and no makeup, a look the dean is rumored to favor. But all that Sveta and Sasha can do to influence a favorable outcome is to sit on her bed and curse each other with the foulest epithets they can fish out of memory, a superstition for good luck Grandma and her mother both believe in. It turns out Sveta knows many more despicable obscenities, so for Sasha, this cursing session has become a learning opportunity.
Sveta is lucky. The dean allows her to accept the role, since all the shooting will be completed in the summer, during their vacation. Fortunately for her, the filming of her movie will not interfere with her education. Sasha’s case is more complicated. The Tsar’s Bride will film all the outdoor scenes in the summer, just like Sveta’s movie, but the indoor shooting in Riga is scheduled during her first semester of the second year, throughout the fall.
She imagines the dean sitting behind his massive desk, weighing her future in his hands. His dark hair is chafing like a storm around his unsmiling face as he tears up the letter from Mosfilm in the same fit of splendid anger he recently exhibited in his own on-screen performance in The Idiot. This image makes hope leak out of her, drop by drop, like hot water from the broken radiator in their dorm room. Sasha knows he is not going to allow a second-year student to miss the whole fall semester, with classes in literature, political economy, and history of art, not to mention the new sophomore classes of ballet and fencing. With regret, she thinks of Riga, the capital of Latvia, where the indoor filming will be done, the Soviet Union’s most western city she will never see.
When their artistic director Vera relays the dean’s decision, Sasha is stunned.
“We’ve taken your good grades into consideration,” says Vera, blowing out a cloud of tobacco smoke. “You will study the required general subjects on your own and take exams in January. The film will be counted as a pass for all the other classes that have to do with acting.”
Sasha doesn’t know what has swayed the long odds in her favor. Was it the classic opera contained in The Tsar’s Bride or perhaps the white beard and serious gaze of the revered composer Rimsky-Korsakov? Was it the stunning emissary from the film studio who showed up in a flowery dress and no makeup? Or maybe it was something else entirely, a recollection that floated unexpectedly to the surface of the dean’s mind: his own first film role when he was still a student—unrecognizable now, with bony arms, short hair, and surprised eyes—the role that forty years ago silenced his venerable teachers into consternation and inducted his name into the esteemed columns of the national movie magazine, Screen.
Sasha is triumphant and relieved. She will spend the summer in the old town of Suzdal, which she imagines to be a lot like Ivanovo, only full of ancient churches. Then, in the fall, when her classmates move on to improvisations with words, she will be living in a real hotel in Riga, as foreign as any city abroad, getting paid a salary exponentially greater than any Moscow mass scene could offer.