“Ever since I was seven,” she says, “I’ve wanted to study acting. If I don’t try, if I don’t go to Moscow and at least try, I will never forgive myself.” She knows there is another reason for going to Moscow, something that has been percolating through her mind ever since she heard Three Sisters on the radio, something that she decides not to tell Andrei. There has to be more than Ivanovo. She needs to see Moscow, to experience a different kind of life.

She says the words she has prepared, but all she hears in response is silence, and all she sees is Andrei’s wounded face. She never knew she could possess the power to hurt someone so deeply, to inject such anguish into someone’s eyes. The power she will learn to wield in Moscow, the power that ten years earlier made her believe that the actors in the radio play were really desperate to leave their provincial town, the power that will make her audiences laugh or cry. Was her mother right when she called her an egoistka? An egomaniac basking in her freshly discovered power while plunging a knife into the heart of someone she purports to love.

Her body suddenly feels ungrounded, because she knows that whatever she says now will only hurt him more. There are no words that will wipe the grimace of suffering off his face and allow her to do what she must. In vain, she fumbles for a reason that will extract her from this uncomfortable silence.

“It’s late.” She begins to get up from the grass, but Andrei doesn’t let her. He pins her to the ground with his body, his mouth clamped on hers, the taste of cigarettes as harsh as his forced kiss. His left hand is pressing on her shoulder, pushing her into the grass, and his right hand is fumbling beneath her shirt, his fingers hurrying into places that have up to now been forbidden by their unspoken understanding. His body is heavy and insistent as she wriggles and thrashes to get him off her, to arrest his hands that are now groping under her skirt, pulling at her underwear. Almost instinctively, she closes her teeth around his lip and bites hard. He releases his grip and pulls back, leaving a taste of blood in her mouth. She pushes him off her and quickly gets to her feet.

As she straightens her dress and brushes off whatever may have stuck to it, her heart still racing, she glances at him sitting in the grass. His head is hung, and his shoulders are stooped, her closest friend who has just hurt her. Or was it she who hurt him first?

“I’m sorry, Sashenka; I’m so sorry,” he says in a hollow voice, as if there is nothing left inside him. “Forgive me. I don’t know what came over me.