Sasha thinks that they have everything to lose. She has everything to lose. She will lose the respect of her acting teachers, of everyone in her school, and maybe even of the entire Moscow acting community. For the rest of her life, she will be known as a failure, as a talentless impostor, as professionally inept. She can almost hear hushed voices snickering behind her back, her acting career now undoubtedly somewhere in the depth of Siberia. The pathetic handout of a credit Vera has offered will get her nowhere but into mass scenes of theaters in the provinces from which she will never again emerge. And back in Ivanovo, her mother will shake her head, unsurprised, and her grandfather will glare with expected satisfaction.

Yet if she doesn’t finish this scene, her failure will be irrevocable and instant. If she doesn’t prove that she belongs in the world of Theater, she might as well pack up and take the first train to Ivanovo, where for the rest of her life she will be like everyone else, building their bright socialist future, one red brick at a time.

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.