Permanent funding could be refused. So could the money. That conviction lasted precisely until payday.
Vera gathered us in the bar: me, Stas, Raya, Lidia Pavlovna, Timur and four other members of staff. The payroll sheet lay on the table. The theatre was short by an amount equivalent to two and a half months' pay for the company, the cost of repairing the ventilation and half the ramp. The region had covered the refunds for the open rehearsal, but ordinary box-office takings had fallen: the public had decided that any of our productions could now be stopped with a blue card and that they could ask for their money back.
"We'll explain," I said.
"We already have," Vera replied. "On the website, at the box office and in the newspaper. It isn't a misunderstanding. People simply spend their money once."
The permanent programme would cover salaries until the end of the season, the ventilation and an accessible entrance. Without it, the laboratory would have to be reduced to one free evening a month, evening security would have to go, and some of the invitations from outlying settlements would have to be declined. Ariadna would continue working, but only within the basic pilot scheme, without the authorial module or permission to produce text independently.
"So whether her play exists depends on whether I remain the sole holder," I said.
"Under the current proposal," Vera replied.
"Convenient."
"For whom?"
I did not answer.
Irina Sergeyevna arrived after lunch. We showed her the distributed-privileges scheme: Vera would be responsible for procedure and the budget, the participants' council for the conditions of encounters, the theatre for safety and the operator for the technical framework, while Ariadna would receive permission to close private channels and refuse a task. My sole key had no place in the scheme.
"Who stops the scene immediately if a participant has withdrawn consent and the system has not updated?" she asked.
"Vera."
"If Vera isn't here?"
"The duty coordinator."
"Who appoints them?"
"Vera."
"Who is accountable if the coordinator misses it?"
We added a shift log and a second signature for high-risk actions.
"Who opens the technical framework in an emergency?"
"The operator."
"How long does it take the engineer to get here at night?"
"Forty minutes," Vera said.
"Then you need a local hardware key. Who keeps it?"
Everyone looked at me.
The orange token really was necessary. Not as a private channel, but as a means of cutting the power, opening the log and stopping an action. It could be kept in a safe under dual authorisation, but that would complicate every emergency and put no more money in anyone's pocket.
"A sole holder is simpler," Irina Sergeyevna said. "I don't dispute that. Simpler, cheaper and, until the first serious mistake, even more reliable. The question isn't whether things can be left as they are. The question is whether you accept that the system, a person and the theatre all depend on a single will."
She was not looking at Ariadna. She was looking at the payroll sheet.
"I can sign the current proposal today," she continued. "The distributed scheme will have to go to the lawyers, the finance team and the operator. The money will be delayed by at least a month. It may not be approved at all."
Lidia Pavlovna asked when they would be paid in that case.
Vera replied: in two weeks if we signed today; no one knew when if we changed the scheme.
No one demanded a sacrifice from me. Stas said he could keep the ventilation going temporarily. Raya suggested cutting purchases. Timur said he could wait a week, then remembered his rent and revised it to three days.
People began to leave. Lidia Pavlovna lingered by the payroll sheet and copied the amount she was owed onto the back of a receipt. She always wrote sums of money on receipts, because a separate notebook for money that did not exist struck her as extravagant.
"Don't you worry, Leonid Lvovich," she said. "I've got a little put by."
"I'm not worried."
"I can see that. That's why I'm telling you."
Timur came back from the changing room. There was a message from his landlady on his phone. He showed it to Vera, not me. Vera read it and asked how much he needed to get him through to the first of the month. Timur named the amount. Raya said she could provide a third. Stas offered another third. Lidia Pavlovna silently turned the receipt blank side up.
I could have paid the whole amount. My personal account held money from an old television recording and two fees for festival lectures on the future of theatre. I reached for my phone and stopped. If I settled the payroll myself, the decision would once again become an act of my generosity, and the month would become my production.
"The theatre will provide the remaining third as an advance," Vera said. "I'll arrange it today."
"What if there's no money?" I asked.
"There's enough for one advance."
"Why not for everyone, then?"
"Because no one else's landlady will be standing at their door on the thirty-first. Lyonya, don't begin fairness with a grand gesture. It comes with a long paper trail."
I transferred the cost of the ventilation work to the theatre after all. An ordinary donation, with no surname in the announcement. The bank required a payment reference. I wrote "remedying breaches" and stared at the words for a long time before confirming.
The following day, the theatre received a refusal from the hire company: they would release the new chairs for the laboratory only once an old invoice had been settled. The invoice related to a tour four years earlier, when we had returned forty chairs and one table, though for some reason the delivery note listed the reverse. Vera found a photograph of the unloading, Stas found the driver's receipt, and I found the driver through something he had said after the performance: "All your actors are light, but the set is as heavy as conscience."
The driver's name was Yuri. He had long since moved to another firm, but he remembered the table because his belt had become caught in it. He sent a message to his former manager, and the invoice was cancelled. I proclaimed it another victory for the theatre's collective memory.
"It's a victory for the belt," Vera said.
"The belt wouldn't have found Yuri."
"And you wouldn't have remembered without the belt."
We put both on record. The chairs that arrived were not new but refurbished; three of the seats still bore pale squares where their old numbers had been. Lidia Pavlovna chose one for herself and said the square helped her tell where the middle was.
Money increasingly made itself felt not as a sum, but in things someone could not do on time. Raya put off buying the fabric. Kolya did not replace two filters, but wiped down the old ones. The lemons disappeared from the bar. No single expense seemed worthy of the scene in which I signed as sole holder, yet together they were all its continuation.
I asked Vera to show me how long the theatre could last without the new funding. She gave me a spreadsheet. The optimistic estimate was six weeks; the honest one, four. The row marked "L. L. Granov pays for everything himself again" was left blank.
"Why the dash?"
"Because that isn't a budget."
"But the money is real."
"So is your habit of buying the right to decide for everyone."
I transferred no more money. For the first time, restraining myself from generosity proved harder than refraining from intervening in a scene.
I sat before the payroll sheet and saw for the first time that my exceptional status carried prices written in other people's names.
Open in the reader