On the other side of the room is Yuri, the assistant director, with an opened bottle of vodka in his hand. “Do we have an extra glass?” asks Vladimir Ivanovich, which is a rhetorical question in the theater. “You are our third,” he says, laughing his humid laugh of a smoker, pouring vodka.

“The problem with this world,” he announces as Yuri pours, “is that you’re three glasses more sober than I am.” She smiles because it is true that she is still sober and because she thinks it is an insightful way of looking at the problems of the world. “To our Maria!” Vladimir Ivanovich proclaims, and they empty their glasses. The vodka flows down where the tears had erupted from, warming up her chest and making the image of Andrei smudge at the edges, as if she were looking at him through clouds of smoke from a departing train.

33

33

“Again! Drunk as a plumber!” her mother wails. “What did I do to deserve this?” Every night, she listens to the elevator door bang shut and to a key scratching around the keyhole of their apartment, Sasha’s key. She claims that she knows when Sasha is drunk even before she opens the front door, just from hearing the key jiggling tentatively in the lock, trying to figure out the right way to turn. Then she stands by the door, waiting for Sasha to slump into the hallway, ready to pull off her coat, lifting her arms as if she were a rag doll, ready to lead her to the divan and throw a blanket at her, like a stone.

The next morning, six months after Andrei’s visit, she is hungover and humble. Now it is her mother’s chance to say what she can’t say when Sasha is drunk. She drives her fists into her hips and delivers her lecture about the dangers of zelyoniy zmei, the green serpent—the color of the bottle—wringing its coils around Sasha’s neck. She rattles the silverware in the drawer and bangs the lid over a pot of soup to punctuate her statements because this is just what she predicted back in Ivanovo: Theater is too toxic, too unstable, and the love for zelyoniy zmei is what happens to everyone who comes under its corrosive influence.

“There are so many normal jobs,” she says, knowing that after last night, Sasha has no choice but to listen. “Look at Valya from the fourth floor—she’s just got a position at the district library around the corner. Look at Irina Petrovna’s daughter. Your age and already a chief engineer.” These are the jobs her mother understands, practical and safe, unlike the chaos and frivolity of Theater.