Her legs feel like cotton, and she sits down on a rolled-up rug, the green field of the last act, the field that Liza didn’t have a chance to see.

“I’ll take you to the hospital if you want to go,” says Vladimir Ivanovich.

“If I want to go?” she asks.

“They called just before you finished the scene,” he says. “The doctor at the hospital.”

“I thought they called before I went onstage.”

“They did,” says Vladimir Ivanovich. “Then they called again just now.”

He doesn’t need to explain why they called the second time. There can only be one reason. He pulls her into his arms and holds her, as if otherwise she would fall apart into a thousand pieces at his feet, and she knows what he is going to say, and he knows that she knows, so he doesn’t say it. Instead, he strokes her hair and kisses her forehead and holds her tight to keep her together, like a father would, to prevent her from breaking apart.

The funeral is a blur; the days before and after are a blur. There are cars, and heaps of flowers with a sickly sweet smell, and people with somber faces Sasha should know but cannot remember. There is Grandma and Grandpa standing in the door of her apartment, wearing black. A Volga bumps along Leningrad’s center, crosses the bridge into the city outskirts, and takes them to the cemetery where two men with unshaven, veiny faces loom near a freshly dug grave. They are always the same men, in Leningrad or Ivanovo, two drunks earning a few rubles for another bottle. Grandma bends down; scoops a handful of wet, heavy dirt; and tosses it into the grave—it hits the lid of the coffin with a thump. Grandpa circles his arms around her shoulders and leads her back, since she can’t see where she is going, tears clouding her glasses. She leans on Grandpa’s arm, blindly following his lead, wondering why there are any tears left in her at all.