“I only want you to have a normal life,” she says. “To have a family of your own, like everyone else. Not to be alone.” She takes two slices of bread soaking in milk and with her hands kneads them into the ground meat. “These older men will never marry you. They will never leave their wives,” she declares, as if she were drawing a verdict, as if this were something she has learned from personal experience. “Anyone is better than an older, married man.”

“You still don’t understand,” Sasha says. “I don’t want to marry Vladimir Ivanovich. He’s done good things for me, but I see him mostly for sex.” The word hisses out of her mouth, sibilant and harsh, a shocking word never used in public, as noxious as a curse. It has produced the planned effect, draining blood from her mother’s face, turning it white.

Her mother turns away and begins to shape the pile of meat into oblong kotlety between her palms, her tense back a reproach to Sasha for wrapping such a scandalous topic in words.

“There is only one man I’d even consider marrying,” Sasha says. “Someone you’ve never approved of. Someone who is married to another woman because he is not allowed to marry an actress.”

What she has just uttered slaps her like a whip across her face. She feels blood rush to the wound; she feels her cheeks burn. Her thoughts shoot back to this very kitchen months ago, to Andrei sitting on the other side of this table.

Her mother turns and gives her one of her long, drilling looks. She may have heard Sasha mumble Andrei’s name when she is drunk. What does she say when her tongue is so heavy that it refuses to wrap around the sounds and form coherent sentences? Does she curse him, threaten him, or does she pledge eternal love? She would like to know, but she can’t approach her mother with this question.

“And do you know what else?” Sasha says. “All my life, I could feel that you never believed in me. Not when I lived in Ivanovo, not when I was in Moscow, and not now. You always told me I’d never make it as an actress. But here I am, in the Leningrad Bolshoi Drama Theatre. I did make it. And it must kill you and Grandpa that I’ve succeeded, that you turned out to be wrong. But you were right about one thing: Theater is toxic and corrosive. It has cost me plenty. It has cost me the only man I’ve ever wanted.”