She doesn’t go back to Ivanovo in the summer. She, Sveta, and Lara are free from classes for almost a month, and they have Moscow, sunny and breathless thanks to Khrushchev’s political thaw, to themselves. With the extra income from film, they live like they imagine artists should live, recklessly and freely. They feast on bowls of pelmeni dumplings and bottles of Georgian wine in a café two blocks away from their dorm and dive into the Moskva River with a bunch of schoolboys who are not afraid of swimming in the shadow of the Kremlin. They race one another on merry-go-round horses in Gorky Park, their faces whipped by the wind and their hearts brimming with happiness at their utterly un-Russian independence from their families and their pasts. Sasha begins to think there may be a slight possibility that Andrei no longer matters.

She asks herself whether she would go back home if she was not afraid to see him, if she was sure she could kiss him on the cheek without bursting into flames, if she could engage in insincere talk about her neighbors’ potato field and the Party’s progress. Would she have given up holding Grandma’s soft cotton shoulders in her embrace if Andrei wasn’t there? She only knows that forcing herself to say something meaningless to him would empty her body of breath and curdle the edges of her heart.

Instead, she accepts the director’s invitation to see his apartment. Why couldn’t Sasha shed her emploi, her funny-peasant archetype, and plunge into a magnificent love affair, the kind only a drama heroine can have?

“Please come in and feel at home,” says Sergey Vladimirovich, pointing to a couch.

It is the biggest apartment she has ever seen, cavernous and full of light, warm air hovering somewhere around the intricate ceiling molding four meters high, an apartment where the excessive space hypnotizes and intimidates.

“I want to show you a book on acting by Vakhtangov, a first edition,” he says, fumbling through the book spines on the shelf behind the couch. Vakhtangov was the founder of Sasha’s drama school, an indisputable object of her interest. The director’s wife is on tour with the Bolshoi Theatre, and Sasha knows what this book viewing invitation means. She has learned many things since her night with Andrei in Suzdal, and she tries to suppress the gnawing feeling in her gut that she will end up doing something she is not sure she wants to do.