“Ivanov,” she whispers, looking at the station facade, taking it as a good omen for the start of her acting career, then reciting in her mind Lermontov’s “The Sail,” which she prepared for the Moscow drama school audition:

A silver sail, the ocean loner

Is lurking in the azure mist.

What has she lost in foreign corners?

What in her homeland did she miss?

Her mast is clattering and bending

Midst whistling wind and raging wave.

Alas, she seeks no happy ending,

Nor runs from happiness away.

Beneath—the crystal torrent tempteth,

Above—the golden rays caress,

Yet she, rebellious, longs for tempests,

As though a tempest granted rest.

They are two hours early for her train to Moscow, so the three of them sit on the hard bench and wait. Grandpa, still furious at her for defying his orders and at her mother and Grandma for walking on a leash of the child’s foolishness, has refused to come to the station with them. Even with all the windows open, the room smells of stale beer and soot, and the air is permeated with the acrid melancholy of leaving mixed with the pungent anticipation of travel.

Sasha looks around at what she is about to give up. Across from them sits a skinny man with a red mustache and watery eyes, as if he has already started to lament his own exit from the life of Ivanovo. A few meters away is a family of five, the youngest child still an infant in the arms of a bovine-looking mother, the oldest a boy with scabbed knees and shifty eyes who is nine or ten and who wipes his runny nose with the sleeve of his shirt.

There is a suitcase by the feet of the father, a small man with curly black hair and a cigarette that hangs off his lip as if it had become a permanent feature of his face. He holds on his lap a whining girl of about three, who is trying to wiggle her way out of her father’s arms, wailing and rubbing her eyes with her clenched fists. Holding the baby with her left arm, the mother bends her right elbow, not a muscle twitching in her face, and slaps the girl on the back of her head. The girl stops wriggling and becomes quiet for a few seconds, then explodes into a new, louder wail. The mother whacks her again, and the girl swallows her sobs, curls into a ball on the man’s lap, and begins to whimper softly, like a beaten dog.