She trusts Lara and Slava unequivocally. The person she doesn’t trust is herself. She is still not sure she has acting talent. She is not sure if her final Dostoyevsky scene wasn’t simply a fluke, a lucky outcome of being coached by a master teacher.

She knows one thing: she longs to be other people, not to be herself. A role—any role, even that of a Soviet janitor—is a mask, a costume she is compelled to wear, a disguise that turns her into someone else.

29

29

After Sasha’s first year in Bolshoi Theatre, her mother is offered a job teaching anatomy at Leningrad Medical School, packs up the forty-nine years of her Ivanovo life, and takes a train a thousand kilometers northwest to live with her daughter. Sasha has become accustomed to living alone, and the prospect of living with her mother, again, stirs up anxiety and conflict. Is she still going to try to control Sasha’s life, the way she did in Ivanovo? Will she be capable of understanding that Sasha is now an adult? That she will be living in Sasha’s apartment, no longer in the provinces?

It is the end of July, and the rains have already washed the summer dust off the city streets when Sasha meets her at the Central railway station. They heave her two suitcases past the bust of Lenin presiding over the waiting hall and take bus 22 to her new apartment on the sixth floor of the corner building everyone calls by its prerevolutionary name of the Fairy Tale House. In a book on Leningrad history, her new place of residence is decorated with exquisite tiles picturing scenes from Russian fairy tales. There is no trace of those tiles left. The building was badly damaged during the siege of Leningrad in 1941, and the massive postwar restoration could not afford to focus on the aesthetic. Her mother and Sasha haul the suitcases through the front door only to discover that the elevator is out of order, and it takes them twenty minutes of tugging and resting between floors to hoist them up the six endless flights of stairs. When they reach the top, her mother, red-faced and breathless, dubs Sasha’s building the Reality House, and from that day on, the name will stick with both of them.

When Sasha switches on the lights in her new apartment, she watches her mother’s face as she looks around the hallway and into the open doors to the bedroom and the kitchen. Wrinkles gather around her eyes, and her mouth softens: she is clearly impressed.

“Good for you, Sashenka,” she says, stroking the rounded door of the refrigerator in the corner of the hallway. “Your theater must like you.”