“And just how long do you plan to be away?” he asks, drilling into her face with one of his formidable stares that have extinguished scandals and severed careers. He is used to heartbreak and intrigue and all kinds of manipulation, having seen a great deal of drama, both onstage and off, in his twenty years of working in the theater, but Sasha can sense he knows that she is serious. His thick eyebrows have formed one line, and she notices that his left eyelid has begun to twitch.

“A couple of months, probably,” she says in a tone he will perceive as nonchalant because she no longer cares. “I’m not sure yet.” If she was honest, she would tell him that she is not sure of anything, except that she must leave. Leave Andrei here. Go where Kolya is.

He lowers himself into the chair and stares at the massive ink blotter no one has ever used. “You do realize that if you leave, we may not be able to offer you a position when you come to your senses and decide to return,” he says.

She does realize this. She realizes that she is about to abandon her entire life, a life she has worked so hard to achieve. A life with the three pillars at its foundation: the graves in Leningrad and Ivanovo; her dusty blackhearted motherland; and the Theater, which in her six years of work here has grown into her big, dysfunctional family.

Abandoning all of them at once, she thinks, is the only way she will ever leave.

At the door, she turns, but not to bid him farewell. “By the way,” she says, “you don’t need an entire meeting to figure out why Party members rarely get leading roles. It’s simple. They rarely have any talent.”

She will stop to say goodbye to Lara and Slava, her former classmates, her fellow actors, her small kompaniya of friends. She will wish them happiness and luck in their lives in the theater. She will apologize to Lara for not protecting her from the assistant dean when they were students. She will thank her for listening to so many hours of rants about Andrei, about Marik, about insecurity and guilt; for being patient and quiet; for having survived to become Sasha’s close friend.

Then Vladimir Ivanovich will hold her and kiss her on the head, as a father would his departing daughter. He will pour them a drink of whatever is stashed in his room for her upcoming trip, for crossing the ocean to the other side. It is like crossing the River Lethe, he will say, the river of oblivion, which runs between this life and the next. Its waters will make her forget the past, he will say. They will erase all memory of her present life.

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