Her mother has expressed her critical disdain for Vladimir Ivanovich many times, in pursed lips, silences, and frowns, but this is the first time she has verbalized the accusation. Sasha has never told her anything about him so that her mother wouldn’t feel sorry for her, or worry about her, or give Sasha unwanted advice. She can’t explain to her mother, an optimistic patron of order, anything about such hopeless and messy things as men or love. She can’t explain to her, for instance, that Vladimir Ivanovich has become her safety net. Without him, she would have quit the theater last year, when the new director, after watching all of their repertory, gathered the actors and slammed them with a scathing condemnation for their flat performances, singling Sasha out with a torrent of special scorn for her role of a village divorcée from a new contemporary play. Had Sasha quit then, when her humiliation was at its peak, where would her mother be living now? She can’t explain to her how many of Sasha’s anti-Soviet outbursts he has kept from spilling into earshot of their regular informers and, by extension, of their theater’s administration. Her mother wouldn’t understand that he is the most important actor, after Polevitskaya in her drama school, who was able to drive through Sasha’s head how ruthless Theater really is. To survive in a big company like this one, he said when she had just arrived from Moscow, you need teeth, horns, and hooves, and I’ll teach you how to grow them. Her mother would not understand the sad humor of his favorite sayings that, for her, encapsulate the essence of their work. Keep in mind, he told her after her debut in Twelfth Night, success is never forgiven, a piece of wisdom she has never forgotten.

But the most important thing she can’t even begin to explain to her mother is how much he feels like a father to Sasha. He is someone who keeps her safe, who protects her from other men always on the prowl, who steers her along the perilous maze of life in the theater. On their recent tour in Baku, Azerbaijan, when one of the local bazaar vendors cupped his hands over her breasts, he locked the man’s head in the vise of his elbow and made him whimper for mercy, begging forgiveness for what the man thought was a gesture of admiration toward the Russian buyer’s daughter.

Sasha takes a breath before she strikes back as a headache pulses through her temples and coaxes angry words out of their deep lair. “Maybe if I’d had a father to protect me all these years,” she says, “I wouldn’t look for older men.”