For nearly three months, she clings to a foolish hope that Andrei will write to her. He doesn’t write in September, when she runs to the main Riga post office every day. By the second week of her visits, the old spindly woman behind the general delivery counter shakes her head even before Sasha can utter a word. He doesn’t write in October, when she cuts her post office detours to twice a week. By mid-November, the post office with its general delivery counter is completely off her route.

When her scenes are not on the schedule, she walks on Riga’s narrow streets, past its cathedrals, so gothic and un-Russian, the antipodes of Suzdal’s churches. In her mind, she rewinds their Suzdal night again and again, looking for clues. He cannot marry an actress: what an absurd, insulting declaration. It reeks of the medieval stupor of old times when actors could not be buried inside a Christian cemetery, when their bodies were laid to rest behind the cemetery walls, away from all the decent, sinless souls. And who said she is ready to talk about marriage? Who said that Theater does not have its own requirements, just as severe as the Party does?

She walks and thinks about Andrei. She tries to remember how old she was when the two of them—young but no longer children—despite her family’s prohibition against it, snuck into his house. His father was still safely in Siberia, so was she twelve? And what were they planning to do there in his tiny kitchen? When his mother caught them that afternoon, she poured them milk, placing her glass on a doily embroidered with elaborate roses she had cross-stitched. It seemed impossible that her gnarled hands, big and full of calluses, could have produced the tiny filigree stitches on the doily, but that was the heart of Andrei’s house—and maybe of Andrei himself—roughness stitched into beauty.

She thinks of her character’s death at the end of The Tsar’s Bride. In the final scene, Lyubasha admits that she has poisoned her rival, who has just been chosen as the tsar’s bride. Her lover is furious, grief-stricken, desperate. He knows they are both doomed, and he plunges a knife into Lyubasha’s chest. A quick death, for which she is grateful. “Thank you.” She sings Rimsky-Korsakov’s words in a pale voice to the mournful wail of cellos. “Straight into my heart.” Lyubasha dies first—to a coda of tragic chords—just before her poisoned rival goes mad and expires, just before her lover is dragged away to be beheaded.