Suddenly a huge brown bubble burps out of the swamp’s gut right in front of her, so loudly and unexpectedly that without thinking, instinctively, she swerves off her path. Just one step sideways, but her feet instantly lose support, as if someone yanked the road from under her boots. With all her weight, she leans onto the pole, but the dead wood cracks and splinters and—face forward—she falls into the cold liquid mud. The path is close, a step away from her, maybe a half a step. But it is a step she can no longer make.

Russian women die from the heart, Grandma used to say. This is what Liza-Sasha has always thought would happen to her: like all Russian women, she would die from the heart. Not from the cold burp of a bottomless muck that is pulling her under and beginning to leak into her lungs, extinguishing hope for any understanding.

She hears herself scream, an awful, lonely scream that rings over the rusty swamp, over the stage, and into the audience, then soars to the tops of the pines, gets tangled in the leaves of young aspens, and falls again. The sun sails from above the trees, and for the last time she sees its white light, as brilliant and warm as the promise of tomorrow.

Vladimir Ivanovich is waiting for her in the wings. Sasha doesn’t know why he is here: he is not in the Quiet Dawns cast and should probably be home with his wife watching the nine o’clock news. She sees him, but she doesn’t see him. She still holds Liza inside her, her short-lived love, her crushing fear, her unfaltering if rueful hope, her staunch surprise at her cruel, and utterly un-Russian, death. Or maybe every death, no matter how senseless, is fundamentally, at heart, a Russian death. She has been emptied by two onstage hours of Liza’s life, and she takes a breath before she can fill the void.

She knows there is time to decompress. Since her character has just died, she won’t be in the second act, but she has to wait another hour for curtain call.

“No curtain call tonight,” Vladimir Ivanovich says, his eyebrows mashed together into one bristling line above his eyes. “We got a call from the hospital.” He pauses, giving time for all the blood to drain from her body, and she knows what he’s going to say next. She closes her eyes and shakes her head, but he says it anyway. “It’s your mother.”

“When?” she asks as though it might make a difference.

“Seven o’clock, half an hour before curtain.”

She opens her mouth to say something, but he quickly adds, “They ordered me not to tell you until the end of the performance. That’s the protocol, the chief administrator said. I had to fight with him to even let you leave before curtain call.”