The three of them run down the stairs, the sound of their boots springing off the walls like dry peas. Out in the street, life boils in the steam of early frost, and Sasha is twenty, and dying is so nebulous and far away that she expects Polevitskaya’s words to evaporate from her head like little clouds of winter breath. But they don’t. Instead, they lodge in her brain like splinters of doubt: about her stupid choice of role, about her acting gift, about choosing Theater as her life. A question scratches in the back of her mind like an ungrateful cat: What will she tell her mother and Grandpa when she fails? What if they were right all along? What if Grandma, the only one who ever believed in her, turns out to be wrong?
26
As Sasha reads her first line at their next meeting, Elena Aleksandrovna looks out the window, as if she hadn’t heard a word she said. “What do you think Grushenka was doing before her meeting with Katerina and Alyosha?” she asks. “What was she doing from the time she got up that morning?”
Sasha didn’t expect to be stopped so soon, and she certainly didn’t anticipate this question, so for a few moments, she sits there in a silent stupor.
“What time did she get up?”
“Not too early, probably.” Sasha has no idea what this is about. “She got up, and she ate breakfast.”
“What did she eat?”
She feels at a loss, not knowing what to say.
“Well,” Polevitskaya says as she rises to her feet. “For our next rehearsal, you will come alone. Read the novel again. Read it very carefully. You’ll find everything you need to know.”
During the next month, they each visit Elena Aleksandrovna separately. Sasha doesn’t know what happens with Lara and Slava, but they walk around with a tome of Brothers Karamazov, just as she does. When she asks them about their rehearsals, they both say that they simply talked. At her rehearsals, she does more than talk. She draws the plan of the house where Grushenka lived, complete with the view from her window, all based on the descriptions in the novel and on her memories of her grandparents’ house in Ivanovo. By the end of that month, she knows not only her role from the beginning of the novel to its end, but also the complete novel itself, almost by heart. And what she can’t find in the novel, she creates: every event and every character, no matter how small, now has a story that precedes their appearance on the page. She knows every person’s routines and habits; she knows what they crave to eat and what hides behind the doors of their armoires. She sees their wrinkled foreheads and pursed lips; their hair, carefully arranged or disheveled and unwashed; their stooped shoulders, their straight backs, their striding or mincing steps. She knows what makes their hearts swell and their blood run cold.
The next three weeks go to researching hundred-year-old paintings and photographs from Elena Aleksandrovna’s collections and the archives of several Moscow libraries. They examine every piece of furniture and silverware, every hat and hairstyle, every necklace and scarf. No detail is too small. On their teacher’s order, Lara and Sasha spend evenings walking around the dorm with dinner plates balanced on their heads, their waists constricted by thick strips of rubber so that they can feel corsets from the previous century on their own skin. Every day it takes a few tries before they learn to align their necks and spines so that the plates don’t tilt, threatening to crash onto the hallway floor.
After they untie the rubber strips and release their waists, Lara and Sasha huddle on the bed in their room with the overhead light out and only a desk lamp throwing a cone of yellow light onto the floor. On these evenings, all kinds of things get released and spill out into the dusk. She sits and rants, and Lara sits and listens. Sasha is grateful to her friend for being there, for being quiet, for letting her purge the crippling, vomit-tasting poison of doubt and guilt.
“My mother was right when she tried to force me to stay in Ivanovo,” she says. She is not sure she really believes this, but she knows she needs to dress the idea in words. “I should’ve listened to her and gone to study at the medical institute.” There she would never fail or get dismissed for professional inadequacy. And then she would become a doctor, just like Chekhov. Noble and safe, with no doubts and no guilt. Her mother saw the truth: following in her steps was the only thing Sasha was good for. “But did I listen to her? And now I’m going to fail abysmally, to fall on my face in front of the whole Moscow drama school, in front of the entire city.” This is what she deserves, failure and torment. She shouldn’t be studying acting in the capital; she doesn’t deserve to stand on a Moscow stage. She doesn’t deserve to approach any classic, let alone Dostoyevsky. “What possessed me to choose a scene from Brothers Karamazov? Didn’t Vera warn me more than once? Didn’t everyone warn me? Was I overpowered by the demons of temporary insanity, and now it is too late, and now the only possible ending for me is disgrace and shame?”