Sasha sees the girl’s brother, now by the station’s food kiosk, watching a stocky woman in a sleeveless dress eat a fried turnover, eyeing the grease the woman licks off her fingers when she finishes the last bite. The woman’s arms are as plump as loaves of white bread in the Ivanovo bakery where every morning, Grandma and Sasha stand in line for a brick of black bread and three rolls of white.

From now on, she will save every image she sees and set it onto the innermost shelf of her memory, next to everything else she has experienced and observed in her nearly seventeen years in Ivanovo. She is going to save it all—every glance, every head movement, every scene, and every face she sees—and she will store it all inside her until she needs to pull it out for the roles she will be playing when she becomes an actress.

“This is for you,” says Grandma and hands her a handkerchief tied at the corners. “Open it.”

Inside is a ring with a green stone, gold and delicate, a treasure worth more than everything she has ever owned.

Grandma lifts the ring and puts it on Sasha’s finger. “Fits you, just as I thought. This used to be my lucky ring. An actor’s stone.” They both stare at her hand, which now looks as if it belonged to someone else, someone talented and noble, someone who could easily fit into the life of hats and banned poetry, someone who could get accepted, even without connections, to the best Moscow drama school.

“Be careful when you get out of the station in Moscow,” her mother says. “Don’t stop and don’t talk to anyone; God knows what hoodlums hang out there in the middle of all that transit bedlam.” She has already warned Sasha several times, but she wants the message to remain fresh in Sasha’s mind, her proverbial message about dangers. “Cross the square in front of the station and wait for trolleybus number eighty-seven. The fourteenth stop is yours.” For the two weeks of auditions, she will be staying with Baba Yulia and Katya, whom they visited for the May Day parade when she was seven, and then, as her mother hopes, Sasha will come back to Ivanovo to start a normal, serious life.