She wonders if all will ever be well, as Grandma promises. She feels like Nina from Chekhov’s Seagull, bathing in Konstantin’s love yet yearning to leave her small town and go to Moscow to become an actress. And what then? Will she, like Nina, turn out to be naive and simpleminded, deceived by a famous man, one of the scores of heartbreakers who undoubtedly prowl the drama schools in Moscow? Will she, like Nina, end up performing in stuffy provincial theaters, riding crowded trains whose cars reek of beer and urine, from one dilapidated stage to the next?

The enormity of Moscow’s possibilities is as thrilling as it is terrifying. In the night, terrible dreams return again and again. She bends over the ledge of their drinking well and falls in. She is flailing in icy black water, the logs of the walls closing over her head, as a tiny figure etched against a square of light high above watches her scrape the slime off the walls. “Help!” she cries, but no sound comes out. She takes a breath and shouts again, but she can only hear splashing water. She has no voice. She is thrashing desperately, mute, the figure above a dark silhouette of someone she doesn’t know. In her dream, she always wakes up before she drowns so that she could fall into the well again, the next night and the next.

Yet she knows she must go to Moscow and study acting. Even if she ends up in provincial theater, even if she has to announce that dinner is served. The need to leave this place gnaws at her bones like a hungry dog, poisoning her dreams, making her wake up in a cold sweat.

15

15

Sasha does not see the fire. Only when she comes back from school, their last day of the last grade, a day of farewells, does she see what is left of Andrei’s house. It has always been more of a shed than a house, with a wood-burning stove in the front corner and two tiny rooms separated by a door with a missing upper hinge that always made it hang at an angle. But now there is no house; there is no shed. There is a heap of charred, broken ribs jutting out of the smoldering pile of crumbling boards.

No one saw how the fire started, her mother tells her, but once it did, it spread fiercely and fast, devouring the house.

“Andrei’s mother was inside when we heard a boom, like an explosion. I ran out into the courtyard and saw the house ablaze. His father was wobbling around, drunk, with a broken vodka bottle in his hand. So drunk he could barely stand. So when he lost his balance and fell, the jagged glass must have knifed straight into his stomach.” Her mother nods her head, whether to drive in the irony or to affirm the outcome, Sasha doesn’t know.