“It was a day in August, unusually warm, and everyone who could get outdoors was outside, on the grounds of the monastery. The men without legs rode on boards with little wheels, and those without arms, who could walk on their own, sat on benches. The samovars with no legs and no arms were hanging in baskets suspended on tree branches, brought there by the nurses.” Her mother stares into her cup, as if trying to see once again what she saw on Valaam island back then. “They were hanging off the tree branches, talking to each other, arguing, laughing. With their war decorations displayed on their chests. I walked around and peered into their faces. They were young, most of them, but they all looked older than me. One man Kolya’s age, with four medals and the familiar softness of the chin, called to me as I was walking by. “Sestrichka,” he said, “can you help me?” He called me little sister and asked me to carry him inside and put him on top of a bucket so he could relieve himself. I did, even though he wasn’t Kolya. Even though not one of the invalids was Kolya.”

31

31

“They trained us on classics and then graduated us into the world of socialist realism and gray Soviet plays,” she says to Lara.

At the drama school, they played characters from Tolstoy and Chekhov, from Brecht and Pirandello. Slava and Sveta even did a scene from The Catcher in the Rye by an author from America, where Pravda tells them capitalism is in a state of deep, permanent rot.

Lara nods but says nothing. Maybe she thinks that the drama school’s lack of warning to its graduates about the paucity of their future repertory is not as serious a crime as allowing its assistant dean to routinely rape its students. Maybe she is waiting for their artistic director to decide to stage The Seagull so that she can finally declare onstage that she is in mourning for her own life.

A week after their talk, almost as though the director heard Sasha’s rant, he announces the next play to add to their repertory, Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. A classic at last. He casts Lara as Viola, a young shipwrecked woman who disguises herself as a man, and Sasha as the servant Maria, sharp-witted and daring, the engine that fuels all the tricks concocted by her own small kompaniya of friends.

Although Sasha feels happy, she is also anxious. What’s going to happen if she fails, if this classic finally reveals her professional inadequacy? She reads Twelfth Night the way her mentor taught her to read Brothers Karamazov, assiduously and with the utmost attention. She goes to all the rehearsals, even those where they work on scenes that aren’t hers, and writes down the director’s every word.