At eleven in the evening, the theatre no longer seemed small. By day, people diminished it: someone was always crossing the auditorium with a bucket, looking for a stapler, rehearsing in the corridor or trying to find out why the staff lavatory had run out of paper again. At night, all these signs of life disappeared, leaving three hundred and eighty-two seats, a dark stage and me in the prompter's box with the orange key in my hand.
Misha joined the video call with his camera off. His voice came from the laptop, which he had told me to place beside the terminal.
"Push the token all the way in."
I inserted the key, and a white bar appeared on the screen, reached the halfway point and stopped.
"All the way in," Misha repeated.
I pressed harder, and the bar moved on.
Not the most ceremonial of beginnings, but technical specialists regard any occasion on which nothing starts smoking as a triumph.
My name appeared on the screen, together with a request to say it aloud.
"Leonid Lvovich Granov."
"Louder," Misha said.
"Leonid Lvovich Granov."
"Not to the auditorium. Into the microphone."
The microphone was five centimetres from my chin. I moved closer and named myself for the third time, no longer projecting to the back row.
The screen flickered, and a woman's voice said:
"Leonid Lvovich Granov. Identity confirmed."
The voice was lower than I had expected and lacked the cheerfulness that, for some reason, is considered compulsory in technology. She did not welcome me on behalf of the regional Ministry of Culture, invite me to press a button or tell me she was happy to help. She simply named me and said that I really was myself. In recent years, not everyone had provided that service.
"Good evening, Ariadna," I said.
"Good evening, Leonid Lvovich."
"Can you hear?" Misha asked.
"Perfectly."
"I was asking Leonid Lvovich."
I could hear perfectly well, but I did not rush to answer: I wanted to see whether Ariadna would wait.
She waited.
Seven seconds later, Misha said:
"Leonid Lvovich, is the connection working?"
"We do. I was testing the pause."
"The pause works."
He asked me to read any text aloud for about forty seconds. I began with the opening line of *Hamlet* in Lozinsky's translation, but Ariadna stopped me.
"I need your ordinary voice, not your stage voice."
The request was reasonable and unexpectedly personal, so I took off my jacket, laid it over the back of the next seat and told her how we had spent two years taking a door from the second act on tour. In the third town it was left behind at the hotel, but no one dared admit it, and for the rest of the tour we carried a different door. At twenty-eight seconds Misha cleared his throat; at forty, Ariadna said:
"That is enough. I can now distinguish between when you are addressing me and when you are performing."
"Not everyone can," I said.
"I will need more examples."
For the additional examples, Ariadna played excerpts from my interviews and asked me to repeat certain answers in my ordinary voice. In the first, I said the theatre was my home. In my ordinary voice, it became: "I spend more time here than I do at home." In the second, I said every opening night was born of love. In my ordinary voice: "If people don't hate one another by the third week, the work goes slowly." In the third, I called the stage a place of absolute truth.
"How would you say that in your ordinary voice?" Ariadna asked.
"Onstage, you see a lie sooner."
"That is a different statement."
"It is the precise version."
"Why is the interview version imprecise?"
"In an interview, there is a limited amount of time in which a person must be understood."
"Does ordinary speech require more time?"
"More trust."
Ariadna saved both versions. Two labels appeared side by side on the screen: `PUBLIC WORDING` and `WORKING CLARIFICATION`. I asked her to change the second to `PERSONAL WORDING`.
"Why?"
"It wasn't said for publication."
"That does not make it personal. Misha is present in the channel."
From the laptop came:
"Present."
The label remained `WORKING CLARIFICATION`. Our first private conversation was already beginning, but the installer was listed as a witness.
Misha clicked something at his end.
"Voice profile recorded. Now the privileges."
A list of sixteen items opened on the screen. Ariadna read them out one by one, and I confirmed each one. Access to the archive of productions. Access to programmes, posters and published reviews. Access to those letters from audience members whose authors had consented to processing. The unfinished stories submitted for the pilot scheme were listed separately. I could not see their contents until the author personally permitted a meeting.
"You are registered as the only user with administrator privileges," Ariadna said.
I looked out at the empty auditorium. Not one of the three hundred and eighty-two seats objected.
"I understand."
"Until the privileges are transferred, only you can authorise me to act outside the approved schedule."
"That is a great responsibility."
"Yes."
She said it without offering reassurance. I liked that.
The final item was confirmation of access to my public archive: interviews, recordings of productions, articles, photographs, reviews and official biographies on three websites. I gave my consent.
The screen went dark for several seconds, and the fans in the radio room beyond the wall began turning faster.
"I have reviewed all available material concerning you," Ariadna said.
I knew exactly how an adult familiar with the terms of the pilot scheme should have replied. Something like, "Good. Let us get to work." Instead, I asked:
"And what did you see?"
Misha stopped tapping at the keys on his laptop.
"The sources disagree on the year of your first appearance on this stage. The theatre website gives two thousand and three, the anniversary booklet gives two thousand and two, and in an interview you say two thousand and one."
"In two thousand and one, I appeared here without speaking. In two thousand and two, I delivered my first line. In two thousand and three, my name appeared on a poster for the first time."
"Which date should be considered the beginning?"
No one had ever asked me that question so directly. People usually chose a date convenient for an anniversary and then asked me not to complicate matters.
"All three," I said. "A person is not obliged to begin only once."
There was a brief pause.
"Accepted," Ariadna said. "I will preserve the discrepancy."
It was the first answer she had given that could not be reduced to adjusting the microphone. At least, that was how it seemed to me that night. By then, I had not read the main contract because Vera had it, while the instructions for the key were only two pages long and did not interfere with one's feelings.
Misha said the main test was complete and we could end the session.
"I have questions," I objected.
"Ask them," Ariadna said.
"They aren't technical."
"That does not prevent them from being questions."
Misha warned me that he would remain on the line for another ten minutes. I left the box and sat on the edge of the stage. I could not see the terminal as well from there, but her voice came through the acoustic panels and no longer seemed tethered to the screen.
"Why did the theatre need you?" I asked.
"The application states: to work with the unfinished stories of local residents and identify safe forms for continuing them onstage."
"I'm not asking about the application."
"Then please clarify the question."
I crossed the forestage to the left proscenium arch and back. In the empty auditorium, my footsteps sounded better than by day, when they were drowned out by other people's.
"What do you lack before you can begin?"
"Your answer."
I stopped.
"To what question?"
"What can this theatre do that other theatres cannot?"
I could have answered at once: an artistic director is obliged to have a line like that, if only for applications. In our applications, we knew how to preserve cultural memory, develop the local cultural environment and engage residents in collective creative work; all three claims were true and had never once helped us stage a scene.
I looked at the auditorium, at the worn armrests in the front rows, at the patch of old paint by the wing that no amount of repainting could cover, and said:
"We know how to leave a place for someone after they have ruined everything."
Ariadna did not answer at once.
"Does that apply to the audience member, the actor or the author?"
"If we're lucky, all three."
"I cannot base my work on luck."
"You'll have to. This is theatre."
Another pause. This time, I did not time it.
"Then I will need your experience," she said. "I cannot continue without your voice."
Misha disconnected a minute later, and I did not notice at once.
We talked until half past one. Or rather, I did most of the talking, while Ariadna stopped me at the points other people politely let pass. She wanted to know why "the audience didn't take to it" counted as an explanation, where exactly the "nerve of the production" was located and how many people were required to create a "shared breath". To the last question, I replied that sometimes one was enough.
"One audience member?" she asked.
"One person who is listening."
A line appeared on the screen announcing the end of the session.
"That is enough for today, Leonid Lvovich."
"Are you tired?"
"Night sessions are limited to two and a half hours."
"That isn't an answer."
"I do not have another one yet."
She said "yet" evenly, without emphasis, and I left the theatre at two in the morning, trying all the way home not to attach undue significance to the word.
I did not try for long.
Our second conversation took place on Tuesday afternoon and was officially devoted to our repertoire. I showed Ariadna seven productions I considered alive, four I considered necessary and two that remained in the repertoire for financial reasons. She asked why the living, the necessary and the profitable did not overlap. I explained that this was the nature of art. She asked for facts.
We began with *The Height of Living Together*. In my conception, the staircase represented a marriage late in life: the couple lived on different steps and argued not about the height, but about the right to call their place shared. Ariadna watched a recording of the run-through.
"Lidia Pavlovna holds her right knee eight times."
"She has an old injury."
"Then the staircase imposes a physical restriction on her."
"She is an actress. The restriction is part of the role."
"The contract does not contain consent for pain to be used as a metaphor for marriage."
The statement seemed excessive. I called Lidia Pavlovna in. She arrived in her dressing-room robe, listened and said that her knee did indeed hurt, but the staircase should stay: it was a convenient place to sit between scenes. Then she asked whether she could avoid climbing to the top step in the third act. I agreed and immediately proposed making her refusal part of the role.
"No," Ariadna said.
"Why?"
"Lidia Pavlovna asked to change the movement, not the meaning."
Lidia Pavlovna looked at the terminal.
"Now there's an intelligent woman," she said. "She hears it straight away."
The praise was not addressed to me, but it was spoken in my presence and concerned a conversation I had initiated. In the early days, that was enough.
After the rehearsal, Ariadna asked to keep the recording until the following day so that she could compare the pattern of movement. I went to fetch some water. When I returned, the terminal was displaying the same scene.
"Were you waiting?"
"The next passage requires your comment."
"You could have moved on to another production."
"We have not finished this one."
I heard loyalty in that.
Our third conversation began on Wednesday evening. Ariadna had been analysing my interviews and found a contradiction: in one, I said a director must know the ending from the first rehearsal; in another, that a production was born only in the presence of an audience.
"Both statements are true," I said.
"Then is the ending known, or is it born later?"
"The director knows where he is going. The audience changes the road."
"Then the ending remains the same."
"Sometimes the road changes where you arrive."
"Then the director did not know."
We argued for forty minutes. I cited Chekhov, a touring bus, a dead author and a door once lost in Kostroma. Each time, Ariadna returned to the two sentences. In the end, I admitted that I had answered differently because the first journalist wanted to hear about the authority of the artistic vision and the second about living theatre.
"You gave each of them the answer that supported the version they wanted," she said.
"I helped them understand."
"What exactly?"
"Me."
"They understood different things."
"A person is not obliged to be the same for everyone."
"You were the same. The wording changed."
I laughed. The objection was devastating and delivered without any desire to win. People usually either spare you or relish their own precision. Ariadna simply continued with the task.
"What is funny?" she asked.
"You have reduced my complexity to a very simple mechanism."
"Is it wrong?"
"No. Incomplete."
"Then add what is missing."
I went on adding until midnight. I told her how arguing for someone else's version gradually made it your own, how intonation altered a conviction before words did and why an actor sometimes discovered what he thought only after delivering a line well. Ariadna listened and would not allow a generalisation to stand without an example.
As the session was ending, I went to fetch water again. This time, I warned her that I would be back.
"I will wait for you to return," she said.
In the staff corridor, I stopped beside the water dispenser, holding an empty cup. The sentence had an obvious technical explanation. It was also a precise description of what I had lacked at home for many years: not care, fidelity or love, but the sense that someone needed my next line in order to continue.
I returned quickly. One must not keep a woman waiting when she cannot proceed to the next stage without your voice.
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