The following evening, she is free, and they meet at the lobby of the hotel where he is staying. When he sees her, he gets up and beams and stretches out his arms, so she has no choice but to hug him, even though she doesn’t want to. He holds her in his embrace for a long time, too long it seems, before she can free herself and sit down in an armchair across from him. In the time they haven’t seen each other, he seems to have aged: his glasses magnify the bags under his eyes, and his hair is longer and more tangled than she remembers, with little sprigs of salt and pepper, all white around the temples.
After a few compulsory questions about her work in Leningrad, he grows silent for a minute, as though contemplating something important. When they said their goodbyes in Moscow, a month or so after her graduation, she thought it was a farewell. Their meetings in his apartment lasted as long as they did, and Sasha never planned to see him again, so sitting across from him in Leningrad now seems odd and out of place. His being two bus stops away from where she is working seems inappropriate, or maybe it is she who is inappropriate sitting in this hotel lobby, so close to a man for whom she is no longer able to muster even a semblance of affection, not one little tingle in her veins.
Sergey takes off his glasses and starts deliberately wiping them with a handkerchief, as if a great deal of what he is about to say depends on his clarity of vision. Without his glasses, his face appears even older and somehow more vulnerable; he looks like he is planning to reveal something she doesn’t know about him, something fragile that will make her want to protect him.
“I’ve realized something,” he begins in a small voice, as though afraid to warp the words with sound. “I hope you understand. It’s quite simple, really, so I hope . . .” His voice trails off, and he pauses to take a breath to start again.
“In these six months—and I counted each day—I’ve realized how much I miss you. I’ve realized that seeing you, being with you, was my happiest time.”
A nauseating sensation stirs in the pit of her stomach. The words Sergey is saying, is about to say, are beautiful and delicate, but to her, they only sound objectionable and distressing. They are the words that should be directed at someone else, someone who would appreciate their generosity, someone who would love this upcoming revelation and, by extension, love him. They are words completely wasted on her thick, impermeable skin.
Sergey must sense her tense posture implying rejection, but she guesses he wants to be certain, so he continues, racing to the crux of this encounter and the objective of his speech. “I’ve separated from my wife,” he says and swallows so hard, she can see his Adam’s apple move. “So now you and I can be together.”
Sasha can no longer look at him, his exposed face, his naked eyes. She lowers her gaze and peers at the red carpet under their feet, her head shaking slightly, delivering her answer.
He leans back, his body suddenly slackening and turning pliant, like a rag doll’s.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers and gets up. What else can she say? “I’m so sorry.”
His hand with a handkerchief rises to his face, and for the first time in the two years she’s known him, she sees tears glisten in his eyes.
Her first role in real Theater is as a cleaning woman who has two silent entrances in the first and second acts. She walks around the set, swiping a rag at typewriters and blowing dust off the office desks. It is a Soviet comedy, and her speechless performance makes the audience laugh. Since Soviet comedies make up a big chunk of their repertory, Sasha has to think that this is the genre the audiences prefer, the genre that doesn’t seem to demand much acting. She suddenly feels nostalgic for the classics her drama school required. She feels that her friends Lara and Slava, who make up her kompaniya, are more interesting and complex than the characters they play onstage.
Their small kompaniya—three like-minded friends with shared interests—is the microcosm of Theater, a tiny extension of the dictum they were taught in drama school that Theater was the microcosm of the world. The three of them don’t usually go home after rehearsals like everyone else. They sit in the backstage café and talk about the plays in their repertory and the roles they would like to play.
“Masha in The Seagull,” Lara says, not hesitating even for a second. “I’ve always wanted to be in mourning for my life.” What she has told Sasha about the secret pain of damage and debasement, about her older brother back home and then their assistant dean, may indeed require mourning. When she looks at Lara, her own anxieties and guilt tend to shrink, and that’s when she feels lighthearted and unencumbered, upbeat enough to want to play Irina from Three Sisters, at least Irina in acts 1 and 2, when there is still a featherlight measure of hope.