As she takes careful steps onstage, she is thinking about Kolya’s fears at the front, of Uncle Sima’s, and sometimes even her father’s. She should be grateful that at least it isn’t winter, when Kolya said the insides of your nostrils stick together and when your teeth ache from the cold. It is June 1942, one year since the invasion spilled east from their borders, toward the Volga and beyond, a chilly June when even the weather doesn’t feel like warming up, when the sun remains hidden behind the gray haze, refusing to shine light onto this ravaged land. She is as scared as Kolya was when he first saw Germans roaring across the countryside on motorcycles, in helmets and big glasses; as scared as Sima must have been when he ran in retreat, deafened by the blitzkrieg of tanks and planes on June 22, 1941; as frightened as her father when he first saw droplets of blood on the handkerchief he pressed to his mouth to cover his cough. Her fear is uncontrollable and primal, like a small animal with razor-sharp teeth and viselike claws that has gripped her insides and will not let go of them until they turn liquid, just like this swamp under her feet. The fear is that at any moment, despite your best effort to survive, you can be shredded by a grenade; or minced to a bloody pulp by a bomb; or burned to a cinder in a locked barn; or hoisted aloft with your hands tied behind your back so that your arms, with a splintering crack, dislocate from their sockets at the shoulders; or sucked under the oilskin of this bog. This is the fear of dying she now knows all too well—despite her youth and strength and all the joy and love she hasn’t yet had a chance to taste.

“How is Quiet Dawns going?” asks her mother. Sasha is in a hurry before a rehearsal, slurping soup in the kitchen, their usual place of conversation.

“I think I’ve got it,” Sasha says. “I think I’ve got Liza.” She says this for her mother’s sake, but she is not at all sure that she has mastered the role. The knot of insecurity and fear tightens under her ribs every day, and she knows that the nauseating feeling of failure won’t let go until opening night, if all goes well. She forces herself to finish the last spoonful of barley soup and gets up to gouge a little leftover macaroni from the pot on the stove. She knows she must eat, although her stomach aches and contracts in protest. “I’ve reread Kolya’s journal, and it helped.”

For a minute, her mother is silent, clinking the silverware in the sink. Then she turns and takes a breath. “Maybe he was too bitter, Kolya. Too disdainful about the country, about our way of life. Too negative.”