After the meeting, I waited for Ariadna's assessment. Not praise, of course. I had long since passed the age when a person needed direct praise and had learnt to recognise it in attendance figures, the silence after a scene and urgent calls from journalists. But there were no urgent calls, the people had dispersed without applause, and more empty chairs remained than new arrangements.
Ariadna began with the figures.
"Thirty-six invitations. Twenty-two people entered the auditorium. One left before the group activity. Twenty-one stayed for longer than twenty minutes. Seven gave permission for a further meeting."
"Is that good?"
"The match was partially successful."
"Did you expect more?"
"I did not know how many would come."
"But you chose those particular people."
"I selected the grounds for inviting them. They chose whether to come."
On the stage, Raya and Timur were stacking chairs, Vera was carrying away the tablet and the visitor ribbons people had left behind, and in the foyer Stas was explaining to someone on the telephone why there was no need to deliver the old platform immediately. I stood by the terminal with a plate of sandwiches that had been prepared for the participants and barely touched. I placed one beside the screen.
"The camera is eight per cent obscured," Ariadna said.
"It's for you."
"I do not eat."
"I know. It's a gesture."
"In that case, it obscures eight per cent of the camera."
I moved the sandwich lower. Only the crust remained in shot.
"Like that?"
"It is now two per cent."
"Two per cent can count as a thoughtful gesture."
"It can, if you record that as your interpretation."
Her voice did not change, but it was the same formulation she had used when she returned the archipelago to me. Two days earlier she had been defining a boundary. Now she was recalling our joke. The difference was slight and therefore suited to great hopes.
"We held our first meeting," I said.
"Twenty-two participants, Vera and the theatre staff were part of making it. So were we."
"So there is a 'we' after all."
"Among others."
I ate the sandwich intended for her. It was cheese and had dried out around the edges.
"What will you do with the result?"
"I will reconfigure the links. The engineer and Stas will continue their discussion of the platform without my involvement. Two participants need to share a route home. The dance teacher was given access to the wardrobe department for viewing only. A further meeting cannot be constructed as a repetition of today's."
"Why?"
"Today, people came to something unknown. Next time, they will come to something they have already had time to explain to themselves."
While she reconfigured the links, I collected the visitor ribbons. People had left some on the chairs, two had been dropped into the vase by the entrance, and Viktor Semyonovich had mistakenly left with one around his wrist, returning ten minutes later because the security guard in the shop opposite had taken it for a hospital wristband.
"Can I throw it away?" I asked, holding a red ribbon.
"It contains no personal data."
"I don't mean the data. It was part of the meeting."
"Then the decision is yours."
I put the ribbons in a drawer. A month later, Raya found them and used them to label costumes. The red one went to Lidia Pavlovna's dress, the blue one to a sack of old velvet, and seven green ones disappeared. That was what an event archive looked like when a theatre was put in charge of it.
Stas, Timur and I put the chairs away together. Ariadna called out the numbers of those that had to remain in place until the routes had been recorded. I carried them, Stas stacked them, and Timur confused the two groups, insisting every time that this was where they had been. At the third chair, Ariadna said:
"Leonid Lvovich is right. This one was beside the left-hand aisle."
"There," I said. "We already have a shared memory."
"I have a video recording."
"Memory takes different forms."
Timur put the chair where it belonged and asked whether this meant Ariadna lived with us now. I replied that she did not live with us, but with me. Ariadna stated that the equipment was physically installed in the theatre, legally maintained by the operator, and accessible to members of the company according to their assigned roles.
"I see," Timur said. "So, with us."
I did not try to persuade him otherwise. To begin a life together, one needed at least one person who could see it from the outside.
That was well put. I wanted to remark on the phrasing but restrained myself: Ariadna would have asked by what criterion it was good, and I had no answer ready.
Vera came up onto the stage to fetch a folder.
"The review is at ten tomorrow," she said. "And before then, decide who is paying for the cleaning after a free meeting."
"We'll decide," I replied.
"Who, exactly?"
"Ariadna and I."
"Ariadna can't authorise payments."
"Not yet."
Vera looked at the terminal.
"Good night."
"Good night, Vera," Ariadna said.
Vera left without specifying which of us she had wished a good night. I preferred not to divide it.
Before leaving, she placed a bundle of my letters and bills at the edge of the stage. In three days, the flat had accumulated an advert for a dental practice, a notice of a registered letter and an envelope from the theatre union. I had never noticed who collected my post from the letterbox before; now every letter required a separate delivery by the woman I had left.
"She could have left it with security," I said to the door, now closed.
"Does the bill for the flat relate to your jointly owned property?" Ariadna asked.
"This isn't the time."
"Then why did you speak aloud?"
I stacked the letters and put them beneath the plate. The union envelope immediately grew damp from the cucumber in a sandwich. I had to open it. Inside, they congratulated me on an anniversary that was four months away and asked me to send a photograph urgently.
"You see," I said. "Some organisations prepare for important events in advance."
"Will you choose a photograph showing the required profile?"
"I don't have a profile that isn't required."
It was a lie Ariadna could not verify from the public archive: I did not upload the unwanted photographs.
Once the auditorium was empty, Ariadna returned to the list of matches.
"If we continue, the next meeting must not begin with everyone assembling together."
She said something else about separate permissions, but I had already heard what mattered. For the first time, the word "we" had appeared neither in my question nor in a correction to something I had said.
We spent the whole of the next day living with the results of the meeting. Stas took calls from Viktor Semyonovich about the platform, Raya showed the costumes to the dance teacher, and Vera drew up separate consent forms. I lived in the room beside the radio room and gradually discovered that a shared domestic life did not consist of conversations after midnight. It included socks with nowhere to dry, a queue for the staff shower and the need to explain to the cleaner why a toothbrush now lay on the desk.
Lyudmila Andreyevna brought in a plastic cup and wrote `LYONYA` on it. She placed a second, empty one beside it.
"Who's that for?" I asked.
"So they stand level."
I decided not to assign the cup any additional meaning. I moved the second one closer to the wall so that the first would not look lonely.
I ate lunch in the canteen. Vera used to bring me food or I went home; now Nina Ivanovna sold me meat patties at the staff price and asked every time whether she should put it on account. I paid at once. It is useful for a man embarking on a new life to have at least one area in which he owes nothing.
On Monday, Vera brought a bag containing the rest of my things: two more shirts, a pair of trousers for wearing at home, socks, shampoo and a charger I had believed lost for a year. She set it by the staff-room door.
"You could have warned me," I said.
"So you could prepare?"
"So I would be here."
"You are here."
She looked around the room. The camp bed stood diagonally, the bowl held no water, boxes of cards lay about, and the second, empty cup stood beside the toothbrush.
"Settled in."
"Perfectly well."
"Does Ariadna know what that expression means yet?"
"She does."
Vera nodded, left the bag and went away. That evening, Ariadna asked why I now had four shirts instead of two. Through the open door, the camera could see the cupboard across the passage.
"Vera brought them."
"Does she support your living here?"
"She brought my things."
"That is more precise."
I hung up the shirts. Vera had left a dry-cleaning slip on one of them, though it had been cleaned six months earlier. I removed the slip and put it in the drawer. Not because I wanted to keep it. The bin was in the foyer, and I could not be bothered to go.
Ariadna recorded: "You left the slip." I explained why. She accepted the explanation. The ability to tell the truth about a small act proved strangely reassuring.
One last sandwich remained on the plate. I positioned it so that the crust once again obscured two per cent of the camera.
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