She thinks of her character’s death at the end of The Tsar’s Bride. In the final scene, Lyubasha admits that she has poisoned her rival, who has just been chosen as the tsar’s bride. Her lover is furious, grief-stricken, desperate. He knows they are both doomed, and he plunges a knife into Lyubasha’s chest. A quick death, for which she is grateful. “Thank you.” She sings Rimsky-Korsakov’s words in a pale voice to the mournful wail of cellos. “Straight into my heart.” Lyubasha dies first—to a coda of tragic chords—just before her poisoned rival goes mad and expires, just before her lover is dragged away to be beheaded.
Why is it, Sasha wonders, that she was able to intuit such tragic, crushing love? What made the director so satisfied with the way she acted in the scene? How was she able to get it right so that the camera believed her? She has so many questions she would like to ask, although she knows she would never dare pose those questions to the director or to anyone else. Why did she have to die? Is death Lyubasha’s punishment for her intense, unbending passion? Does death stalk under the murky vaults of medieval and contemporary mores, her punishment for sex?
Sasha walks past the dark buildings, wallowing in sadness, as despondent as Irina from Three Sisters. She walks and walks, burnishing her sadness with every step into the ancient cobblestones of Riga’s streets, and Chekhov, she thinks, would be proud of her angst.
In the beginning of November, the film director, Sergey Vladimirovich, calls her into a scene that isn’t hers, and as she sits in the corner knitting another sweater for the winter, she feels his gaze on her. If she is honest with herself, she doesn’t dislike this gaze. It is inviting and admiring, and it emanates from someone who—while not as good-looking as her acting partner who plays her lover—is still attractive, with his dark curly hair and thin-rimmed glasses pinched low on his nose. She doesn’t dislike his medium height and build, the solidity of him. Sergey Vladimirovich is also twenty years older than she is and, technically, he could be her father.
As she sits there, dipping her knitting needles, she fumbles inside herself for feelings toward Sergey Vladimirovich, itemizing in her mind all the pros and cons. He has been kind and generous to her, an acting student, although he is a film director with two major motion pictures to his credit. He is older and more established than anyone who has been interested in her before, but he is also married to an opera singer who is voicing over the main part of the film, which is a definite con. She should be grateful it isn’t her part, which would be utterly ironic. She thinks of having raced to the post office for three months, and she almost hopes that the director decides to keep his eyes on her a little longer. Besides, shouldn’t she be grateful to him for teaching her how to act on camera, a lesson her drama school has deliberately denied its students? Shouldn’t she thank him for showing her how to make the camera caress her face with radiance and light?
Sasha looks back at the director and smiles, letting him know that his attention hasn’t gone unnoticed, telling him with her eyes that she is almost ready.
24
Sasha returns to the Vakhtangov Drama School in January, with full credit for all the courses she missed during the fall semester. In a year and a half, she has learned to observe. She has learned to watch what people do, how they move, and how they speak, how they squint their eyes, tighten their jaws, and knead their hands. She remembers every character she sees and every emotion she feels and stores them in a little box inside her, like photos in an album, where they will wait until she will need to pull them out for a role. She has also learned about heartbreak, thanks to Andrei and Rimsky-Korsakov, the opera composer.
In acting classes, they have moved to scenes. Yet they rarely see themselves onstage the way their acting teachers see them, and their stage personalities don’t even hint at their real ones. Why does the most stunning woman in their class, Zhanna, with raven-wing eyebrows over dark-blue eyes, become average and boring onstage, while her roommate Lara, quiet and unnoticed in life, suddenly grows ten centimeters taller, her face illuminated from within? “Stage charm,” their teacher Vera says, the term she has just introduced in their new class, Manners.
“You don’t lose your stage charm when you’re angry,” Vera tells Sasha. “You have a rare quality: your charm is in your anger.”
Of course, Sasha doesn’t want to hear this. And who would? She wants her charm to be in her heroism and beauty, not her anger. She wants to play tragic lovers, not character sidekicks and irate bullies. They all do. But Vera stands in front of their class, her fingers firmly wrapped around a cigarette, letting them know the rules: “Next year, when you are allowed to choose your own scenes, you can play whatever characters you like, but right now, be so kind as to play the roles you are assigned and work within the emploi we see you in.” She flicks off the ash at the new word emploi, the role archetype. Their school has told them what their archetypes are from now on: Sveta is an ingenue, Zhanna is a Soviet heroine, and Sasha is a character role catchall: a funny klutz, a peasant bully, or a heroine’s sharp-elbowed friend.