“Brothers Karamazov,” Vera announces. The title, with Sasha’s name attached to it, scrapes her ears, emphasizing the incongruity between the two, exposing her impudence to the entire school. Vera pauses and looks up. Sasha’s heart stops.
“The opinion of this committee is that in your scene, you have persuaded the audience by masterfully portraying the atmosphere of Dostoyevsky. Aleksandra Maltseva will receive the highest grade and credit with distinction. The scene is judged outstanding and will serve as proof of high professionalism in her acting diploma.”
This is when Sasha feels that something has cinched her throat, and she knows she is crying. She heaves with sobs as if a dam has broken, releasing all that has been stored inside since she first read the Grushenka scene. A few friends jump up from their seats, but Vera stops them. “Let her cry,” she says, waving her hand. “She needs to let it out.”
Sasha is grateful to Vera for allowing her to cry in public. She sits there rubbing the tears around her face and weeps as spasms keep rising from her chest. The more she cries, the more she needs to, as if these tears are cleansing some grime inside her, as if they could deliver some kind of understanding of what has just happened. Or maybe she simply feels sorry for herself because she has just given away the most valuable part of her, something visceral and deep without which her life will no longer be the same. For six months she has kept it all inside, these fragile, intertwined images of Grushenka’s and her own life, and now they are gone, released into the wings of the theater, into the hearts of the audience. And now she is completely empty. Empty of everything she has learned, everything she has stored inside her, everything she has created. Yet she knows that this emptiness is fertile; it is the blank canvas to draw her future roles, the soil from which her characters will grow. One thing is obvious: something significant has just come to an end, and she is standing at a threshold. From this moment on, she will have to start everything anew.
She cries because her former life is over. She cries because what lies before her is daunting and unknown. Or maybe she cries because her drama school ordeal has ended, and she has prevailed. She, not Grandpa and her mother, who have been waiting for her to crawl back, humiliated by her lack of an acting gift. She cries to sear into memory the moment she heard Three Sisters on the radio, the moment she realized that Theater would be her destiny. She now knows she was right. She and Grandma, and no one else.
ACT 3
LENINGRAD
28
Leningrad is more dignified than Moscow, its low skyline letting the winds from the Baltic Sea bloat the Neva in the fall when the water rises and floods the streets, closing schools but never canceling performances at her theater. The Bolshoi Drama Theatre is in the center of the city, on the Fontanka embankment, an imposing building with white columns along the facade. It is this theater that Sasha, Lara, and Slava have been invited to join upon graduation.
She could have stayed at her school’s Vakhtangov Theatre, along with Sveta, but after years of studies, Moscow felt too familiar, too provincial, too much like Ivanovo. She knew exactly what roles she would be playing, all Russian classics; she knew her future acting partners, all her former classmates. She also knew she would be expected to come to Sergey’s apartment every time his wife went on tour; she even knew what pastries he would carefully arrange for her on a dish with the lily-of-the-valley border.
Leningrad, on the other hand, is an enigma, and the Bolshoi Drama Theatre, a legend. She has always wanted to live in Russia’s only European city where art graces every street with the curved facades sculpted by architects from Italy and France who reinvented their designs for this northern climate, where the air is grainy with the afternoon twilight in winter and the milky nightglow in June. Besides, she has wanted to live in the place where Kolya studied art; she has wanted to stand on the bridge where he met Nadia. She has wanted to see with her eyes what she has only pictured in her mind: the building on Herzen Street where Nadia lived with her parents, Leningrad University on the Neva embankment where she studied philology and, not far from it, the Academy of Arts where Kolya learned to draw and paint.
She now has her own place to live. After the first six months of work, when she lived in the dormitory, her theater gave her a one-room apartment, perhaps to offset the dismal salary of all stage actors in repertory theaters dictated by the state.
A week after Sasha moved to her new apartment, Aunt Luba, who guards the stage-door entrance, yells for her to come to the phone. When Sasha mutters a tentative “hallo” into the receiver—no one has ever called her there—it takes a few moments to recognize Sergey’s voice. He is in Leningrad, for a meeting with a screenwriter, he says, but the introductory pleasantries sweep past her ear.