These ifs are hanging in the air, and she is in their midst, grateful that Slava has taken charge. He is their director now, and he tells them that they are going to reserve time for three rehearsals in the student theater.
“Today we’ll block the scene, and then we’ll run through it twice,” he decrees. Sasha is glad someone has made a decision, and she forces herself to concentrate on what Slava is saying. “Remember your objective,” he tells her. “You want to humiliate your rival. You promised Lara’s Katerina, who wants to marry Dmitri, to give him up, and she believed you. She invited you to her house to thank you. But you love Dmitri and have no intention of giving him up. You play with Lara, the way a cat plays with a mouse before devouring it. You let Lara praise you; you let her kiss your hand in gratitude and adoration, and then you strike. You tell her you’ll never give up Dmitri. What you want is to keep your lover and to humiliate your rival. This is your objective in the scene. Remember this and everything will work.”
The next three days slouch by like the heavy fog of this cold, late spring. Lara bounces around their dorm room, tense as a drum. Slava has become quiet and pensive, just like Dostoyevsky’s Alyosha, watching them from the corner of the stage as they go through the scene. Sasha wallows in a strange cloud of calm, as if nothing matters anymore.
On the night before the exam, Lara and Sasha use their student IDs to see a performance at the Vakhtangov Theatre. Ironically, it is Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. Sasha is certain this is another sign that she should stay away from material she is not ready to handle, but she knows it is much too late to change anything. For three hours, they stand in one of the loges （as always, there are no empty seats） and then walk back to the dorm under a cold drizzle without uttering a word. More than ever, she is resigned to never playing Dostoyevsky, or any other classic, on a Moscow stage.
The next morning, she takes Grandma’s ring with the green actor’s stone out of the small box where she keeps her most important things and puts it on her finger, the way she did for the three admission rounds of auditions. What is she hoping for? That a miracle will happen and it will protect her now as it did three years ago? That it will conjure up Grushenka, in all her flesh and blood, and plunge her down into Sasha’s heart?
On the way to the exam, she thinks of the scene, and images begin to roll before her eyes. She sees the dusty streets of Ivanovo where she grew up, bird-cherry and lilac bushes with the white and purple froth of flowers, a window with lace curtains looking out into a small garden, a horse harnessed to a carriage by the gate into a courtyard. She is Grushenka, restless and willful; her movements are tender and her steps are soft; she blooms with the kind of beauty that will lose harmony by the time she is thirty: the beauty of the moment, a flighty beauty. She walks noiselessly, like a cat, and she speaks slowly, stretching the vowels to bring significance to every word. Her right hand is small and plump, the hand that Katerina, with all her nobility and wealth, will hold and kiss three times with strange ecstatic adoration, an act of reverence and revenge Sasha is about to stage for the kindhearted Alyosha, the brother of her beloved Dmitri. The passionate and proud Dmitri, who she knows will choose her over the noble, beautiful, and rich Katerina. The Dmitri she has always loved, her soul mate Dmitri, who now in her mind has Andrei’s face. She loves him maddeningly, madly—him alone and only him, Dmitri-Andrei, engraved on her heart for as long as she lives.
She doesn’t remember the exam itself. She remembers only the silence in the room after the curtain falls. She remembers only the complete emptiness inside her.
There are two scenes left on the schedule, other students’ scenes, but Lara and Sasha are finished, spent. Silently, they creep downstairs and sit on the porch steps at the entrance to their school. Tears roll down Lara’s face as they sit there quietly, with no need to say a word. A trolleybus rolls by, its wires like the antennae of a gigantic insect. A knot of girls in uniforms and red pioneer scarves bustles past on their way from school. Sasha registers it all automatically, as if watching everything from behind glass because nothing matters anymore. A strange calm binds her like a bandage. She fears that she has failed on an unprecedented and profound level, that this school has never seen such a colossal flop, that her entire future has just tumbled into the abyss of professional unfitness.
When they are called, they slink inside to hear and accept the verdict. Sasha knows she is the only one to blame for this abominable journey, from the cursed moment when the name Grushenka floated into her brain warped by egoism and grandeur, to this disgraceful finale open to the eyes and ears of everyone she knows. The curtain is down, the committee is in the first row, and they quietly slide into the two seats next to the door. From here, it will be easier to escape the shame.