At home, Sasha steels herself for the announcement that she wasn’t able to utter in the field. She waits for everyone to be sitting around the table, for Grandma to stop running into the kitchen and lower herself into her chair. She ignores Grandpa’s dictum “when I eat, I am deaf and mute” because she knows that the severity of what she is about to say will overshadow the prohibition against speaking during the meal.

She takes a deep breath and focuses all her strength on the words, as if she were about to go onstage. “I want to be an actress,” she utters in what she thinks sounds like a Theater voice. “When I finish school this summer, I am leaving for Moscow to take the entrance exam to drama school,” she continues, even as her resolve is leaking out, making her look down into her plate, into the puddle of cabbage soup.

This is the first time she has wrapped words around this desire that has been burning inside her for almost ten years. Spoken out loud, her intent is now serious and real, validated by the fact of having been announced.

When she lifts her eyes, she thinks of the mute scene at the end of Gogol’s The Inspector General. Grandpa is sitting with his mouth gaping open, his hand with a spoon full of soup frozen in the air. Her mother is staring at her with her most serious frown, the one she saves for talk of war and other dangers. Grandma is looking down into her plate, her hand covering her mouth, as if she is afraid she will accidentally say something positive about Theater and acting.

Her mother is the one to break the silence. “And afterward, what will you do?” she demands. “Will you spend your life in some provincial theater so you can come out at the end of the first act to announce, ‘Dinner is served’? Will you end up in Vladivostok or Pinsk, with the rejects who can barely make it through a plumbing course?” Her voice is her teaching voice, and this is a lecture. “You wanted to be a lot of things when you were growing up. You wanted to be a streetcar driver. Do you remember that?”

“Yes, I remember,” Sasha says. “I was six!” It makes her furious that her mother would compare Theater to streetcars.

“And what is acting, anyway? You don’t treat the ill; you don’t teach; you don’t produce anything. You aren’t doing anything of value. It’s all frivolous and chaotic, an unworthy job for a serious citizen.”

“You know nothing about acting! It’s not unworthy and it’s not frivolous,” Sasha says angrily, challenging her mother and her worship of the practical. “I will be producing something, but it’s something you can’t touch. Something you and Grandpa will never understand.”