She is at the theater, at the shoemakers’ lair, a room full of broken and newly mended shoes, and she is weeping. She came here with a pair of pumps that needed repair, and when Uncle Tolya asked, “What happened?” her throat closed, and she burst into tears. She is holding a shoe in each hand, wiping her eyes and nose with her forearm, wailing so loudly that the senior shoemaker, Uncle Moishe, bent over a piece of leather when she entered, now clucks his tongue and shakes his head and peers at her from above his glasses. “Nu, nu,” he says and pats her head with his gnarled hand. “Sit, little girl, and let me bring you some tea.” Uncle Tolya, bony and long-jawed, stops hammering a nail into the bottom of a shoe and looks at Uncle Moishe, who waves his wrist to send him on a tea quest. Uncle Moishe’s hands smell of old leather and shoe polish, a comfortable smell that makes her calm down, go from weeping to sniffling. Then Uncle Tolya returns with a kettle and pours steamy, strong tea into a glass. The tea has the color of cognac, which makes her start weeping again, and her tears leave stains on the broken shoes she is still holding in her hands.

When she leaves the shoemakers’ workshop, she is empty inside, as hollowed by the crying as she usually is by a performance. She walks along the endless hallway to her dressing room, when she passes the open door and sees Vladimir Ivanovich, her partner Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night, who waves her in. She likes Vladimir Ivanovich, although he is in his fifties, almost thirty years her elder, and is married. He has a deep, fatherly voice; he is dependable and strong. His face is too idiosyncratic for him to be cast as a hero, even when he was younger—a fleshy nose; dark eyes, set a little too close apart; an imperious chin with a cleft—so he is a character actor, like Sasha.

“When leaving the stage, don’t forget to leave your character’s skin behind,” says Vladimir Ivanovich, who thinks that she just came out of a rehearsal and hasn’t had a chance to disconnect from her role. He is an inexhaustible source of these little sayings, small scatterings of acting wisdom that make her laugh even when she doesn’t feel like laughing. Behind every peacock tail, there is a chicken’s ass, he told her when Olivia, the director’s wife, tried to upstage her in their scene in Twelfth Night. Sasha attempts a smile and shakes her head, letting him know that her distress has nothing to do with acting.