I told Vera I was leaving her for another woman on Thursday at twenty past nine in the evening.
I remembered the time from the electricity bill. It lay between us on the kitchen table, and Vera had just circled the amount she intended to dispute in the morning. Not the best set dressing for the end of a twelve-year marriage, but it is difficult to find suitable set dressing at home. In the theatre, there is side lighting for such occasions, an empty stage and someone to close the door at the right moment. In the kitchen, there were the overhead light, the fridge and a packet of buckwheat I had promised that morning to put away.
I delivered the line well. Not the moment I came through the door or after an argument, but calmly, once the tea had been poured and the opportunity to plead tiredness had passed.
"Vera, I'm leaving you for another woman."
She put a full stop beside the figure and looked up.
"Today?"
That was not the question I had prepared for.
"Not necessarily today. I'm informing you of my decision."
"I see. When will you collect your things?"
At this point Vera was supposed to ask who she was. It was not as though I had assigned the lines in advance, but twelve years of married life entitles a person to expect a certain degree of dramatic discipline from their partner.
"Don't you even want to know who she is?"
"I do. You still need to collect your things."
She set the bill aside, capped the pen and pushed the sugar bowl towards me. I had not taken sugar for eight years. Vera knew that. Sometimes a person makes a familiar movement not because they have forgotten, but because their hands need time as well.
"Her name is Ariadna," I said.
Vera looked at me more closely.
"The one in the radio room?"
"She is not in the radio room. The equipment is in the radio room."
"Where is she, then?"
The question was crudely put, but I did not want to answer it in haste. I took a sip. The tea proved too hot, and the pause was more convincing than I had intended.
"Presence need not occupy a chair," I said. "Especially now."
"So, the one in the radio room."
"If that makes it easier for you."
Vera nodded. Not mockingly. In the years she has spent handling our contracts, budgets and conversations with people who find the word "art" an obstacle to signing their names, she has learnt to accept a working definition and move on.
"And how long have the two of you been together?"
"The word 'long' doesn't apply here."
"Since Monday?"
"She was connected on Monday."
"Since Monday, then."
I stood and went to the window. In the courtyard, a man in a vest was shaking a rug from a second-floor balcony. The rug was small; the amount of dust in it was astonishing. I had to wait until the air was fit for conversation again.
"There are encounters," I said, "after which the old measure of time ceases to apply."
"There are," Vera agreed. "Your bag is in the cupboard above the hall."
She went into the hall, brought back the stepladder and set it beneath the cupboard. I wanted to take the bag down myself, but she had already climbed two steps, opened the door and begun removing the winter scarves, the box of Christmas decorations and an old plastic washing-up bowl from the top shelf.
The bowl was blue, with a white stripe around the rim. We had bought it when the pipes in the bathroom were being replaced, used it for three days, and then it vanished up there and took no part in our lives for eight years.
Vera climbed down, handed me the bag and put the bowl on the floor.
"What's that for?"
"Take it."
"Vera, I understand that you have every right to be angry, but domestic symbolism is unnecessary at present."
"There's a leak above the radio room."
"Nothing is leaking there."
"It was leaking on Tuesday. Stas put a bucket underneath, but the cleaner needs the bucket. Take the bowl."
I looked at her. She was already putting the scarves back, one at a time, without the slightest ceremony.
"You knew?"
"That you'd move into the theatre? No. That you'd announce an affair with a programme that called you the only user three times? From about the second time."
"That isn't all she said."
"Of course."
"She reviewed my entire archive."
"That was part of the assignment."
"And she refused to continue without my voice."
"You have the administrator key."
"Precisely," I said. "Of all the people who might have been given that key, she was given me."
"The operator issued the key. I signed the handover form."
At that point I realised the conversation was going round in circles. Vera was defending herself with facts. I did not blame her: for years, facts had stood in for the words she did not know how to say in time. It was simply that, on this occasion, the facts were smaller than what was happening.
I lifted the bag from the chair and went into the bedroom.
Packing proved difficult not emotionally, but quantitatively. If a man leaves for good, he is supposed to take everything. If he is leaving for a woman with whom he has yet to discuss a wardrobe, a bathroom and a free shelf in the fridge, it is more sensible to take a week's worth of shirts. I chose a week. This was not doubt. It was respect for taking things gradually.
Vera came in ten minutes later. I had packed two shirts, a jumper, underwear, a razor, a charger and the book I had been reading since August. It had lain open at page one hundred and eighty-two for so many months that taking it now was almost an act of fraud, but leaving without a book looked frivolous.
Under the book lay a photograph from a tour in Belorechye. Vera and I were not yet married. I stood on the steps of the House of Culture in my stage coat, Vera held a box of cables, and between us sat a boy in a hat but no scarf, looking as though adults had finally proved themselves utterly unreliable.
That day, everything that could distinguish a touring performance from a furniture removal went wrong. The bus was four hours late, the backdrop got soaked, the local electrician failed to appear, and half the costumes went to the next village because the driver decided that boxes marked 'FOREST' belonged to a morning show about protecting the environment. Forty minutes before the start, the director of the House of Culture told Vera the audience would have to be sent home.
I refused to let her send them home.
Not out of heroism. There were one hundred and twenty people in the auditorium, among them the correspondent from the district newspaper who had described my role the previous month as "astonishingly mature". Maturity came with obligations.
We staged the production without the backdrop or half the costumes. Yuri, a temporary stagehand, found two builders' lamps. Galina Ivanovna, the programme coordinator, brought sheets from the dance studio. The boy in the photograph, Dima, had lost his scarf and was crying in the corridor while everyone rushed about. I remembered his name because, even through his tears, he held the programme with my portrait facing him.
Ten minutes before the start, I assigned everyone their roles. Yuri got the lights and permission to switch everything off if there was smoke. Galina Ivanovna got the sheets and pins. Dima was to sit by the door and report if anyone brought in a red scarf. Vera got the list of cuts, the box office and the task of not telling the director that we would need her desk in the third act.
The performance began twenty-three minutes late. One of the builders' lamps went out in the first scene, a sheet fell on me in the second, and in the third the director recognised her desk. The audience assumed it was intentional, not because they were foolish, but because we carried on with solemn faces. That is the theatre's chief advantage over life: if a disaster occurs in the right light, it is given time to become form.
After the curtain call, I found Yuri and thanked him by name, returned Galina Ivanovna's pins, helped the director carry out her desk and found Dima's scarf in the box containing the artificial forest. The correspondent wrote it all down and later said in her article that Granov knew how to make the space around him cohere. I remember the phrase to this day.
Vera did not make it into the newspaper. She spent two hours counting the money, negotiating with the driver, revising the cuts and preventing the director from cancelling the performance. On the bus home, she sat beside me.
"You remember everyone," she said.
"It's the profession."
"No. You remember people's names after you no longer need them."
I liked that she had noticed. Vera liked what I had done. We began seeing each other a week later. Afterwards, I told the story as a triumph of presence: an actor arrived, gave people roles and saved the evening. Vera never contradicted me. Perhaps because she believed that version too, only she saw it from the other side.
In the photograph, I stood in the centre. Vera was half a step to one side. Dima sat between us. Yuri had taken the picture, so Yuri himself was not in it.
I picked up the photograph, then put it back. Not out of nobility: Vera was holding my box in it, and I was already preparing to carry enough things out of the flat that she had held for me.
"Towel," Vera said.
I added a towel.
"Tablets."
"There's a first-aid kit there."
"The theatre first-aid kit contains antiseptic dye, a bandage and expired charcoal tablets."
I added the tablets.
She stood in the doorway and watched me zip up the bag. I waited for the real conversation to begin. Not a scene with shouting, which would have been unlike her. At least a question about what was wrong with her. A chance to explain that this was not a comparison between two women, that Ariadna was not younger or more beautiful and did not belong to that system of coordinates at all. I could have said all of that gently.
Vera asked:
"Are you leaving your keys to the flat?"
"If you want me to."
"I'm asking whether you're leaving them or not."
I put the set of keys on the chest of drawers and immediately felt that it was too final. I had to remind myself that finality had been the point of the conversation.
In the hall, Vera handed me my coat. Then she picked up the bowl and placed it in my free hand.
"If the leak gets worse, call Stas. Don't climb the stepladder yourself."
"You still care about me."
"I care about the amplifier beneath the pipe. It's on the asset register."
She did not close the door at once. She stood holding it while I settled the bag strap on my shoulder and tried not to strike the wall with the bowl. Then she asked:
"Lyonya, did you ask her?"
"Ask her what?"
"Did you really not understand?"
The question sounded weary, and I decided not to make her repeat it. Some things become cruder when phrased precisely.
"There is no need for such tests between us," I said.
Vera nodded and closed the door.
I took a taxi to the theatre. The driver looked at the bowl twice in the mirror but asked no questions. I appreciated his tact and gave him five stars.
Halfway there, he did ask whether I had just come from the maternity hospital. I said I had just come from married life. He nodded as though the route had immediately become clearer and turned on his indicator.
"What's the bowl for?"
"A practical necessity."
"That's right. When you leave, you should take the practical things. You can buy the beautiful things later."
I wanted to explain that, in my case, the beautiful thing was already waiting at the theatre, but the driver was watching the road and had no need of the details. At a set of traffic lights, Vera rang.
"Did you leave the buckwheat in the taxi?"
The packet lay at my feet. I had indeed brought it with me, along with the tea. Going back would mean reappearing ten minutes after my grand departure with a packet of grain in my hands. Leaving it would deprive Vera of something she had asked me to buy. I chose delivery: the driver agreed to take the packet back after dropping me at the theatre, for an additional fee.
"The tea as well?" Vera asked.
"The tea is mine."
"It was paid for with my card."
"Vera."
"All right. Keep the tea."
The driver listened without intervening. When I finished, he asked for the delivery address and entered it in the app.
"Shall I say who it's from?"
"She knows."
"Everyone says that, and then the person won't open the door."
I gave him my surname. The driver delivered the buckwheat. The following day, an extra waiting charge appeared in the app: Vera had not immediately understood who had sent her a packet in a taxi. Great deeds acquire receipts faster than consequences.
The night watchman opened the stage door, saw the bag and also said nothing. By morning, of course, everyone would know. The difference between a theatre and a family is that, in a family, one person may not ask about your departure, while in a theatre seventeen people are certain to ask, including those who were not working that day.
A single green light glowed in the former radio room. Next to it, in a small windowless room, stood a camp bed, a desk with one corner broken off and a cupboard where old programmes were kept. A cloth hung from a pipe in the ceiling. On the floor beneath it was a dark, fresh circle.
I placed the bowl precisely over the circle. A drop struck the plastic almost at once.
The bag would not fit in the cupboard. The cupboard held programmes from twenty-two seasons, bundled by year with string. They could not be thrown away, and there was nowhere else to put them. I cleared one shelf by moving the children's Christmas shows next to *The Storm*. Historically questionable, but the shirts fitted.
Then I discovered there was no socket near the camp bed. I ran the charger across the doorway; the door would no longer close. I put it away. My phone showed eighteen per cent and three messages from the company. Timur asked whether tomorrow's run-through was still on. Raya sent the measurements for a single set of bed linen. Lidia Pavlovna wrote: "Lyonya, you're an idiot. Good night." I read the only message that required no answer twice.
There was still a sofa, a kettle and a socket in the office, but moving there would mean living in my old position rather than beside Ariadna. I stayed in the staff room. Every great choice has a moment when it becomes a search for an extension lead.
I reached Stas by phone. He explained where the white cable was kept in the props room and forbade me to plug the kettle into it. The cable was twenty metres long and intended for the stage. I ran it to the room and coiled the excess, leaving enough cable to carry electricity into the foyer.
Once everything was arranged, another drop struck the bowl. It sounded louder than the kitchen clock at home. I sat on the camp bed and understood for the first time that I had not left for a metaphor. Ariadna was due to come online in thirty-eight minutes, and beside me were a bowl, the receipt for the buckwheat on my phone, a twenty-metre extension lead and not one person obliged to ask whether I had eaten.
Ariadna's terminal came online at eleven. There were thirty-eight minutes until eleven. I unfolded the camp bed, hung two shirts in the cupboard between *The Cherry Orchard* and a children's Christmas show, put the tablets on the desk and sat down to wait.
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