On the night before the exam, Lara and Sasha use their student IDs to see a performance at the Vakhtangov Theatre. Ironically, it is Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky. Sasha is certain this is another sign that she should stay away from material she is not ready to handle, but she knows it is much too late to change anything. For three hours, they stand in one of the loges (as always, there are no empty seats) and then walk back to the dorm under a cold drizzle without uttering a word. More than ever, she is resigned to never playing Dostoyevsky, or any other classic, on a Moscow stage.

The next morning, she takes Grandma’s ring with the green actor’s stone out of the small box where she keeps her most important things and puts it on her finger, the way she did for the three admission rounds of auditions. What is she hoping for? That a miracle will happen and it will protect her now as it did three years ago? That it will conjure up Grushenka, in all her flesh and blood, and plunge her down into Sasha’s heart?

On the way to the exam, she thinks of the scene, and images begin to roll before her eyes. She sees the dusty streets of Ivanovo where she grew up, bird-cherry and lilac bushes with the white and purple froth of flowers, a window with lace curtains looking out into a small garden, a horse harnessed to a carriage by the gate into a courtyard. She is Grushenka, restless and willful; her movements are tender and her steps are soft; she blooms with the kind of beauty that will lose harmony by the time she is thirty: the beauty of the moment, a flighty beauty. She walks noiselessly, like a cat, and she speaks slowly, stretching the vowels to bring significance to every word. Her right hand is small and plump, the hand that Katerina, with all her nobility and wealth, will hold and kiss three times with strange ecstatic adoration, an act of reverence and revenge Sasha is about to stage for the kindhearted Alyosha, the brother of her beloved Dmitri. The passionate and proud Dmitri, who she knows will choose her over the noble, beautiful, and rich Katerina. The Dmitri she has always loved, her soul mate Dmitri, who now in her mind has Andrei’s face. She loves him maddeningly, madly—him alone and only him, Dmitri-Andrei, engraved on her heart for as long as she lives.

She doesn’t remember the exam itself. She remembers only the silence in the room after the curtain falls. She remembers only the complete emptiness inside her.