She nodded and looked left, where for a minute the sun blazed into the windows of the Hermitage from under the clouds torn by the wind.
“I know,” she said.
Sasha closes the notebook with a sigh, wishing that Andrei, too, were always there to protect her.
25
In the spring of her last year at the drama school, there is the most important exam of all, the scene that will determine whether they will spend their lives playing important roles on the Moscow stage or huddling in mass scenes in provincial theaters. “You’d better be ready to show everything you’ve learned,” their artistic director Vera tells them, “or you’ll get a failing dvoika in acting, and they’ll ship you straight to Pinsk to organize an acting club for janitors in their local House of Culture.”
For this exam, they are allowed to choose their own scenes, and what Sasha chooses makes Vera light up a cigarette and silently gaze into the distance.
“This is not your role,” she finally says and exhales a puff of smoke.
“But this is what I want to play,” Sasha insists. Like everyone else, she wants to play a heroine.
“Child,” says Vera, calling her what she calls all her fellow students. To her, they are all naive and silly children, and she is here to guide them through the maze of Theater, lighting their way with an acting master’s torch of wisdom. “Listen to what I tell you. We know you, as an actress, better than you know yourself.”
“You only know what you allow me to play!” This sounds brazen, but if Sasha doesn’t say this now, she will never get another chance. She has to prove—to Vera, to her school, and to herself—that she can be more than just a heroine’s funny friend, or a rude saleswoman, or a clumsy cousin from the provinces.
She breathes in and out, just as Vera taught them. “I want to play Dostoyevsky’s Grushenka.” The beautiful, conflicted, and infinitely flawed femme fatale Grushenka in Brothers Karamazov. The tall, curvaceous twenty-two-year-old, a local seductress with feline movements, who is in love with the tempestuous Dmitri. A role that wouldn’t be assigned to her by anyone but her.
“It’s outside your emploi,” says Vera. She doesn’t have to say this, because Sasha already knows it. She is a character actress, and Grushenka is a seductive heroine. She can’t make Andrei write her even one love letter, while Grushenka has so many men buzzing around her that she has to swat them off like flies. But under the sheath of paralyzing fear that Vera may be right, there is a hot nerve of obsession that links Sasha to this woman, a character who seems to have risen from the pages of the novel and beckoned Sasha with her plump hand to embody her. She wants to feel her, to become her, to get into her skin.
She is also, as her mother often says, stubborn as a goat. “I don’t care about my emploi,” she says quietly, dizzy with her own audacity and disrespect. “I know Grushenka, and I want to play her.”
For a minute, Vera considers her silently, exhaling rings of smoke. Her face is an impenetrable mask, and Sasha doesn’t know what she sees.
“As you wish, then,” she says finally. “But you will regret this. Maybe for the rest of your life.”
She doesn’t tell Sergey about the Grushenka battle with the acting department of her school because she suspects that he would agree with her mentors. The person she wants to tell about Grushenka is Andrei, someone who knows the viral labyrinth of small-town gossip and passion unhampered by reason, the fabric of Brothers Karamazov set in a small town not unlike Ivanovo. Someone who is familiar with the fiery temper and injured pride Dostoyevsky was so fond of dredging out of his characters. Someone who has infected her with the constant longing of toska and fits of senseless gazing into the distance that Sveta berates her for, as her mother would if Sasha were ever to open up to her about Andrei, or anything else.
But is it possible that all this brooding about provinces and Dostoyevsky is nothing more than a distraction? Is she in such desperate need of Andrei simply because he has placed himself out of her reach, having exited the stage?
For her Dostoyevsky scene, the school provides a mentor whose name makes Sasha breathless, the legend of Russian theater Elena Aleksandrovna Polevitskaya. They all know about her from classes on the history of Theater, where their professor lauded her famous interpretations of classical roles on Russian and European stages. How someone could have performed both in Russia and Europe, Sasha cannot fathom. True, Polevitskaya began her acting career in tsarist Russia, leaving the country shortly after the Revolution, but then she chose to return to her motherland, which was by then Soviet, and to spend the rest of her life acting and later teaching at the Vakhtangov Theatre. They only hear about people leaving for the West; they never hear about anyone coming back.