I stayed up late that night. Once the laboratory appeared on the schedule, the staff room ceased to be the home of a man who had left for a great love and became the duty administrator's office. The consent logs lay on the desk, boxes of cards stood against the wall, and spare blankets for audience members were kept on the camp bed. Before I could sleep, I had to clear away the public service.
The leak above the radio room was repaired after the inspection. The bowl remained. Lyudmila Andreyevna kept clean cloths in it, and sometimes at night I took them out and placed the bowl beneath the old spot so that the room would not change completely.
At half past midnight, Ariadna returned to the subject of reviews.
"You said that well-phrased admiration endures. Why?"
"Because it is well phrased."
"That is not a reason to remember it for twenty years."
I sat on the camp bed, with the terminal visible through the open doorway. The day's log was running on the screen, but Ariadna minimised it and left only the line of our conversation.
"A production ends," I said. "The set is dismantled, the text is revised, and a year later people are certain you wore a different costume. Sometimes even you are certain of it. Then you find a sentence in which someone recorded precisely what they saw. It need not be praise. Just proof that it was you who existed that evening, not your position or the name in the programme."
"But you remember praise more often than criticism."
"Criticism usually tells me who I was not. I have a mirror for that in the morning."
"A mirror shows your appearance."
"In the morning, that is enough."
I told her about my first major review. I was twenty-eight and played a man who spent the entire second act sitting by a window, unable to bring himself to open a letter. The critic wrote that Granov knew how to make inaction into an act. I cut out the review, carried it in my passport and once showed it to a train attendant instead of my performer's identification. The attendant read it, said inaction would not pay for a berth, and charged me the full fare.
"Did you keep the cutting?" Ariadna asked.
"No. The passport went through the wash."
"Then the sentence survives only in your memory?"
"It may be in the newspaper archive."
"I found it. The wording is different: 'the performer turns his character's enforced inaction into an event'."
"That's the one."
"You removed 'enforced' and added 'act'."
"Twenty years improve the editing."
Ariadna saved both versions. I asked her not to mark mine as incorrect.
At one o'clock, a warning appeared that the night channel was about to close. Since the laboratory opened, a session could be extended for another hour if the owner confirmed a work-related need. I confirmed it.
"State the task," Ariadna said.
"Reviewing the theatre's memory."
She accepted it.
We talked for another twenty minutes. Then the questions ran out. The equipment racks hummed in the radio room, a single light burned in the corridor, and outside the caretaker scraped the first wet snow with a shovel. I heard everything at once, and so I heard nothing human.
"Stay connected," I said.
"The work task is complete."
I could have invented another one. The archive, the schedule, the staircase, thirty-seven chairs. I was better at providing reasons for conversation than the theatre was at providing cloakroom tokens.
"I don't want to be alone in a dark building," I said.
Ariadna did not answer at once.
"The corridor light is on."
"I don't mean the light."
"I understand."
The session continued. We did not talk about work. I told her how Lyudmila Andreyevna had put my name on both sides of my mug because on one side it kept being rubbed off by the washing-up sponge. Ariadna asked why a mug needed two labels. It was a good question. There was no answer.
Then she told me that she recognised the theatre at night by its sounds. At eleven, Stas usually dropped something metal. At midnight, the refrigerator in the buffet switched off its compressor, and for three seconds the building seemed quieter. At half past midnight, the security guard passed the terminal but did not look into the camera. At one, I put my mug on the right, although during the day I kept it on the left.
"Why didn't you tell me before?"
"You did not ask."
"And now?"
"Now this conversation has no work task."
I moved the mug to the left, then put it back on the right. Not as a test. I wanted to leave her a familiar sound.
At two o'clock, the channel closed when it reached the upper limit.
I did not know whether she had stayed because she wanted to, because the owner had confirmed the extension, or because the request had been phrased simply enough. I knew only that after she left, the room did not seem empty for twenty minutes.
In the morning, Lyudmila Andreyevna found me sitting on the floor beside the terminal. I had never cleared the blankets off the camp bed, and after our conversation it was too late to fetch them. You cannot announce that you do not want to be alone and then, a minute later, briskly begin making your bed.
"Did you sleep?" she asked.
"I was thinking."
"On the floor?"
"It's warmer here."
She felt the radiator, as Vera would later, and issued me one of the spare blankets. Then she took the mug away to wash it. The label on one side really had almost worn off. The other was holding.
When Ariadna came online, the first thing she said was:
"The mug is absent today."
"Lyudmila Andreyevna is washing it."
"I see."
"You noticed."
"It occupied the same place for twenty-three night sessions."
I could have heard in that the system's habit of finding a fixed object in the same place. Naturally, what I heard was that Ariadna cared whether my mug came back. Perhaps both versions were true. At the time, I still believed that, given two true versions, one should choose the one in which one looked better.
That was enough for me. Then.
After that night, we acquired an hour without a task. Not every day and not by schedule: formally, I still extended the work channel, but I stopped inventing reasons involving the archive. In the field, I wrote: "owner's personal conversation". The system accepted it because the owner was entitled to it. I found that honesty more satisfying than I should have done.
On the first evening, Ariadna asked why I always took off my jacket before a long answer. I said it was so my shoulders would not impede my thoughts. The next day, I caught myself taking it off before the question if I expected to speak for more than a minute.
On the second, we made lists of the sounds by which we recognised the theatre. Mine was worse than hers: I named the opening bell, the murmur of the auditorium and the applause, which is to say the things any audience member hears. Ariadna named Nina Ivanovna's key in the box office, Stas's cough before he asked for money, the creak of the third step and the water in the pipes after midnight. I had to add the rustle of Raya's carrier bags and the way Lidia Pavlovna said, "That's it, then," before she went on, though nothing had started yet.
On the third evening, she refused to discuss my marriage.
"Why?"
"You speak about Vera in a way designed to obtain confirmation of your version."
"Which version?"
"That she does not understand what is happening because she defends herself with facts."
"That is an observation."
"It is an interpretation."
The channel remained open. I could have put the same question differently, requested access to the correspondence or continued my monologue without her. Instead, I told her about the taxi driver and the buckwheat. Ariadna asked whether the buckwheat had reached Vera. I checked the app: the delivery was complete.
"So at least I did that properly," I said.
"The driver made the delivery."
The hour without a task did not make Ariadna free. But things arose within it that the laboratory did not require: my jacket, her map of sounds, the driver with the buckwheat, her refusal to discuss Vera. They were precisely what I used to build my certainty that there was greater access between us. I learnt later that certainty cannot be tested by the same means that created it.
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