After the rehearsals are over, she works with the director, who also senses that something is off in her, that she is not all there. They go over her words and add a subtext of what Matryona would think as she lashes out at her permanently drunken husband and her self-righteous stepdaughter conniving to take the reins of the house away from her. The subtext mostly comes out as mut, the lowest of the sordid jargon of obscenity, the mother tongue of construction sites and lines to beer kiosks. Sasha is grateful to the director for helping her with the Matryona role and for keeping her in the rehearsal room, away from the silent emptiness of her apartment, from the guilt, from a bottle of vodka always stashed in someone’s dressing room.

They are already six weeks into rehearsals, but Matryona doesn’t come to her. She hovers close but refuses to invade her. She is still a specter, a fleshless apparition, devoid of blood and bones, of meat and skin. Sasha senses her presence, but she does not feel her heft and cannot smell her breath. They are already at the stage in the production where the set designer has completed the layout of the scenery and brought it to one of their rehearsals. The stage set is the courtyard of her husband’s house, surrounded by three rows of tall fences, with a stump in the middle. Matryona and her stepdaughter live locked inside this courtyard, but the stepdaughter, at least, has a chance of getting married and breaking out of here. For Matryona, this courtyard will be her life until she dies, and she is only twenty-three. Her husband, more than twice her age, drinks all night and sleeps all day while she goes to the market, and when he wakes up late in the afternoon, he lumbers down the porch and lifts his eyes to the sky, certain that it has cracked in half and is about to fall. That’s when he screams for her to hold him upright and assure him that he is only hallucinating, that the sky is still whole, at least for tonight. That’s when he takes his first swig of vodka, crunches down the steps of the porch in his boots, and yanks her to the ground behind the stump. Then, with his filthy, callused hands, he tears at her dress, rips open her skirt, and rapes her.