She is back in Ivanovo, the town she has stayed away from for all these years, the memories she has hidden in the most remote corner of her soul. Everything is so much smaller than she remembers: the houses seem to squat under black tar roofs, the streets that she holds in her mind as avenues are alleys, and the trees whose branches blocked the entire sky now barely reach to the lines of the electric wires. The only thing that is still the same in Ivanovo is the dust. The silky dust of the summer covering the roads—its ubiquity, its warmth.

She is not here because she chose to come. A late-morning telegram is fate’s way of punishing her long absence; she is certain. It is fate’s way of letting her know that once you leave home, you become an outsider, and there is no way back.

In the telegram, her grandfather wrote that Grandma had been taken to the hospital. It was her heart. What else would it be? She got another telegram five days later with the date for the funeral. She didn’t go to the funeral. She had two performances of Twelve Months, Saturday and Sunday, and the understudy was on maternity leave, so the administrative director didn’t allow her to go to Ivanovo, either to say goodbye to Grandma or to bury her. She played Twelve Months and then Quiet Dawns, and then there was a week off, a rare break when no performance of hers was on the schedule. Every night before the break, she drank in Vladimir Ivanovich’s dressing room, to fill the emptiness left where Grandma’s image—her tender way of speaking, her cotton dress permeated with the smell of their armoire, her soft fingers on the piano keys—had rested next to Sasha’s heart. Every night, they emptied a bottle of vodka, and then she had a crying fit in front of his makeup mirror. A little less drunk than she was, he tried to hold her, but this only made her wail louder and slap her own face. Each time she sobbed and beat herself, Vladimir Ivanovich waited patiently until she calmed down, wiped her face clean of running makeup, and took her home in a taxi. This is what he told her; she doesn’t remember any of this. In the morning after the last performance, she went to the administrative director and told him she was leaving for Ivanovo.