She doesn’t go back to Ivanovo in the summer. She, Sveta, and Lara are free from classes for almost a month, and they have Moscow, sunny and breathless thanks to Khrushchev’s political thaw, to themselves. With the extra income from film, they live like they imagine artists should live, recklessly and freely. They feast on bowls of pelmeni dumplings and bottles of Georgian wine in a café two blocks away from their dorm and dive into the Moskva River with a bunch of schoolboys who are not afraid of swimming in the shadow of the Kremlin. They race one another on merry-go-round horses in Gorky Park, their faces whipped by the wind and their hearts brimming with happiness at their utterly un-Russian independence from their families and their pasts. Sasha begins to think there may be a slight possibility that Andrei no longer matters.
She asks herself whether she would go back home if she was not afraid to see him, if she was sure she could kiss him on the cheek without bursting into flames, if she could engage in insincere talk about her neighbors’ potato field and the Party’s progress. Would she have given up holding Grandma’s soft cotton shoulders in her embrace if Andrei wasn’t there? She only knows that forcing herself to say something meaningless to him would empty her body of breath and curdle the edges of her heart.
Instead, she accepts the director’s invitation to see his apartment. Why couldn’t Sasha shed her emploi, her funny-peasant archetype, and plunge into a magnificent love affair, the kind only a drama heroine can have?
“Please come in and feel at home,” says Sergey Vladimirovich, pointing to a couch.
It is the biggest apartment she has ever seen, cavernous and full of light, warm air hovering somewhere around the intricate ceiling molding four meters high, an apartment where the excessive space hypnotizes and intimidates.
“I want to show you a book on acting by Vakhtangov, a first edition,” he says, fumbling through the book spines on the shelf behind the couch. Vakhtangov was the founder of Sasha’s drama school, an indisputable object of her interest. The director’s wife is on tour with the Bolshoi Theatre, and Sasha knows what this book viewing invitation means. She has learned many things since her night with Andrei in Suzdal, and she tries to suppress the gnawing feeling in her gut that she will end up doing something she is not sure she wants to do.
But she also knows that Sergey Vladimirovich has been mindful of the difference in their ages, and his courtship since November has been considerate and kind. Just last week, in one of their late-night conversations, Lara told her that she is lucky her suitor is courteous and gentle, that she is not the object of interest of their school’s assistant dean, as Lara was when they started school. “He didn’t bother to invite me anywhere,” she says, trying to keep her voice from clotting. “He didn’t even bother to pour me a glass of water. He just pointed to my clothes when he was through and said I could leave. He treated me like I wasn’t even human. Like a dog.”
They all know that the assistant dean, a balding man with a paunch, who used to be a decent actor before he found teaching more rewarding, is known for summoning female students to read for him in his office. When his secretary sent for Sasha a few months ago with an audition call, she scribbled a note full of the medical jargon she’d heard at her mother’s hospital that certified she had promptly come down with a bad case of strep throat. To make it look official, she stamped the phony paper with a doctor’s stamp she had long ago stolen from her mother’s anatomy department. Had Sasha known the assistant dean had set his eyes on Lara first, she would have used that pilfered stamp to produce a fake note for her, too. The only thing she could do now was to sit and listen and try not to show how sorry she felt for her friend. She hoped Lara would find the strength to rip the memory out of her mind and fling it to the mental garbage pile where it belonged.
In the director’s apartment, Sasha finds herself sinking into the plush upholstery as he pours her a glass of golden wine from a bottle that she has never seen in the stores. She knows she is fortunate that the director is patient, but she can sense that his patience is wearing thin.
He sits next to her and hands her a filled glass. “To the end of our work together,” he says and clinks his glass against hers. “And the beginning of something brand-new.”
Sasha knows it is new, this post-filming territory where Sergey Vladimirovich can no longer give her orders to be more happy or less happy than she already is. The Tsar’s Bride is over, and so is their work together. Is she happy in this vast place where everything pleases the eyesight: big windows, half-opened, letting in the jingles of a streetcar; dark bookshelves filled with first editions of tomes by theater titans; a glass coffee table, a piece of furniture she has never seen before? Is she happy to feel the director’s hands on her shoulders? Is she, at least, not terribly unhappy?