Sasha knows it is new, this post-filming territory where Sergey Vladimirovich can no longer give her orders to be more happy or less happy than she already is. The Tsar’s Bride is over, and so is their work together. Is she happy in this vast place where everything pleases the eyesight: big windows, half-opened, letting in the jingles of a streetcar; dark bookshelves filled with first editions of tomes by theater titans; a glass coffee table, a piece of furniture she has never seen before? Is she happy to feel the director’s hands on her shoulders? Is she, at least, not terribly unhappy?

Every time Sergey runs his hand across her back, she thinks of Andrei. She thinks of how much she misses him, of all the sadness she has hidden away in the darkest corner of her soul’s storage loft, where no one can find it unless they crouch and rake through years of discarded junk.

Everything is so much simpler with Sergey. He has the soft chest of an older man, and he enfolds her in his arms, grateful that she has agreed to come to his apartment, that she is almost twenty, that she listens with attention when he speaks about himself and the Theater. Every time they meet, he buys her a pastry filled with whipped cream from the best bakery in Moscow and watches reverentially as she bites into it and then licks the sweet cream off her lips. In addition to good cognac, he introduces her to the Hungarian Tokaji in round bottles with elongated necks you can’t find behind the counters of Soviet wine stores. He is always there, leaving messages with Aunt Sonya at the entrance to her dorm, and if he suddenly disappears for a week or two, she knows that his opera singer wife is back home from a Bolshoi tour.

But there are two quintessential Russian questions she asks herself: Who is to blame? and What is to be done? Raised in the nineteenth century by classical writers Herzen and Chernyshevsky, these questions were flung at all of them by her eighth-grade teacher, the one with the squirrel face and admiration for books with simple answers to questions fraught with infinitives.

Eighth grade, when everything was simple, when Marik was still alive, when Moscow was only a dream. Is it her fault that she is in the capital and Andrei is still in the provinces, that he has chosen to work for the Party, that he cannot marry an actress? Is she the cause of her own misery?