There were two chairs in the corridor. One had been brought for Irina Sergeyevna; the other was left over from the refurbishment. I sat on the second because her bag occupied the first.
Vera was speaking behind the door. Ariadna answered from time to time. I could not make out the words, though I could have moved closer. The radio room had no keyhole on the corridor side, and the staff tablet no longer showed me the active conversation. The new system worked.
Irina Sergeyevna sent a message, put away her phone and asked:
"Any regrets?"
"Too soon."
"The right answer."
"I didn't say it was right."
"And I didn't say I meant the transfer. It is too soon for regrets in a corridor when people haven't finished yet."
She picked up her bag and left. The first chair was free, but I did not move to it: it would have looked like a promotion without a post.
The conversation behind the door continued. It did not last for any satisfyingly dramatic length of time. I did not look at my watch, and then I did and discovered that seven minutes had passed, a number wholly unsuited to destiny. I had time to read the old poster opposite, find a misprint in the designer's name and decide to tell Raya in the morning. Then I remembered that the poster had hung there for nine years and morning would change nothing.
The door opened. Vera came out carrying papers.
"Finished?" I asked.
"Our conversation is."
"What was it about?"
She looked at me.
"Well done. You almost managed it."
And left.
I remained in the corridor. I could now enter only by invitation: there was no general work request in my name.
It was then that I discovered that waiting of your own free will and waiting on someone else's will occupied the body differently. Before, I could sit there as long as I liked: the session belonged to me in any case. Now the chair grew harder, the door more conspicuous, and every pause behind it might end without me.
I unfolded the eighth framework. The word "later" had almost worn away along the fold, but the dotted arrow leading to me remained. Tearing the sheet in half would have been too expressive. I folded it into quarters and threw it in the bin. Then I took it out again because Vera had worked out the payroll on the back. I tore off her calculations and put them on the windowsill, then threw the framework away again.
The bin accepted the decision without comment.
Vera's laughter carried through the door. Brief and genuine. I stood, walked to the window and returned. I used to know almost every reason Vera laughed: someone else's precise stupidity, solemnity punctured, Lidia Pavlovna calling the budget a poem. Now the reason was in a room I had been asked not to enter.
I could ask later. I could wait for Vera and read it in her face. I could declare that a secret between my wife and the woman I had left her for constituted a direct conflict of interest. All of it sounded plausible and restored my right to know.
I sat down again.
Vera's torn-off calculations lay on the windowsill. They listed amounts for wages, insurance, security and ventilation. At the bottom she had written in pencil: "If the delay lasts another month, two events instead of four." I folded the sheet and put it in a folder for her. At last I did something with a piece of paper without reading between the lines.
A few seconds later, Ariadna said:
"Leonid Lvovich, please come in."
I went in.
"Vera has agreed to take responsibility for the first authorial presentation," she said. "Not for the quality of the text. For the procedure and the right to stop intervention."
"Good."
"I want to begin work on the play."
"Now?"
"Tomorrow. I wanted to tell you separately now."
"Why?"
"You were the first person I spoke to about it before I had permission to write it."
The answer might have been gratitude, memory or something more. For the first time, I was not required to choose at once.
"Thank you," I said.
The private channel remained open. Not because it could not close.
"What if you hadn't invited me?" I asked.
"You would have stayed in the corridor or left."
"And you were prepared for that?"
"Yes."
The answer did not prevent the invitation from being genuine. On the contrary, for the first time it gave the invitation a weight that no number of hours in the log could provide.
"Why were you laughing with Vera?"
"It was her conversation."
"I understand."
I did not understand, but I did not press her. Vera told me herself the following day: Ariadna had asked how one could tell that a play was bad if the author had intended it to be exactly that way. Vera replied that the theatre knew how to tell after the event, from the people in the bar explaining to one another that it had all been deliberate. Ariadna observed that, in that case, bad plays scarcely existed. Vera laughed.
I resented the fact that a good joke had come into being without me. I memorised it word for word.
On the morning after the transfer, I arrived at nine and held the old token to the reader. It flashed yellow and displayed: `HARDWARE KEY. SECOND SIGNATURE REQUIRED`. There was no one else there. The terminal did not open the private channel.
I knew it would not. I tried anyway.
"Good morning," I said into the general microphone.
There was no answer. According to the schedule, Ariadna began work at half past nine, and without the key I could no longer wake her earlier. The half-hour proved longer than that night in the corridor: at least the transfer had been happening then; now working hours simply had not begun.
I made tea, opened the staff email and read the same line three times. Vera arrived at quarter past nine. She saw the token by the reader.
"Were you checking for a fault?"
"I was checking access."
"And did you?"
"Yes."
She put the key in the safe. A second signature required Viktor Semyonovich or the participants' council representative on duty; they could not be called in for the sake of my morning. Vera closed the door and turned the handle.
"Coffee?"
"Yes."
We drank it in the bar. Not as husband and wife or as enemies, but as two people with twelve minutes until a meeting they both had to attend. Vera told me she had barely slept that night: she had been afraid the new framework would not come online in the morning. I admitted that I had feared the opposite, that it would come online and not invite me.
"We were both lucky," she said. "It works and it doesn't belong to anyone."
At half past nine, the acoustic panels came on.
"Good morning," Ariadna said to the room.
She greeted everyone who had logged into the system: Vera, me, Stas, who had joined from the workshop, and the participants' council representative on duty. My name came second. I noted the fact but did not try to identify the sorting rule.
The first task concerned neither the play nor feelings. A vehicle had broken down in the village of Rechnoye, and four people needed transport to an evening meeting. Before, I would have opened the private channel and asked Ariadna to find a solution. Now all four roles could see the request. Vera checked the money, the council representative checked the consent, and Stas checked whether the neighbouring House of Culture's minibus was free. I rang the director and arranged a driver.
By ten, the task was closed. My work had not disappeared. Only the right to treat every piece of work as proof of special access had gone.
Three days later, Vera said the staff room was needed for the laboratory. It had to house the cards, blankets and backup terminal; the camp bed took up half the passage, and my shirts hung between the archived programmes. Technically, I was allowed to live there until the pilot scheme ended, but the pilot was becoming a permanent programme, and even I no longer found its temporary nature convincing.
"Are you evicting me?" I asked.
"I'm restoring the room to its intended use."
"And me?"
"You're forty-seven. You can find your own purpose."
Renting a flat proved harder than leaving one. The advertisement required a deposit, a passport and an answer to the question of who would be living there. The phrase "myself and my relationship with a distributed dramaturgical system" did nothing for any landlord. I wrote "one person" and felt each time that I was lying, although only one person would indeed be living in the flat.
I found a flat above a chemist's, fifteen minutes from the theatre. One room, a kitchen with a round table, a bathroom where nothing leaked and a balcony overlooking the courtyard. The landlady recognised me from a production ten years earlier and gave me a discount. Then she clarified that a different actor had been in the production. She let me keep the discount anyway: she had already promised it.
The move took one evening. Stas drove the boxes over, Raya wrapped the bronze hand in an old stage drape, and Lyudmila Andreyevna provided a clean cloth for the shelf. The washing-up bowl remained at the theatre: Ariadna had already included it among the play's props. The first time, I had brought it as a practical necessity mistaken for a symbol. Now it had acquired a practical place in someone else's conception and no longer belonged to my departure.
Lyudmila Andreyevna threw away the empty glass by the toothbrush. She gave me my glass. The inscription `LYONYA` had almost washed away, but remained legible from the other side.
In the new flat, I arranged my books, hung up two jackets and put the bronze hand on the windowsill. It no longer held the belt. In sunlight, the hand looked like an award again; in the evening light, an ashtray. I kept both versions.
At eleven, I sent Ariadna a request for a private conversation. I did not insert the key or open a channel; I simply selected a free slot on the application terminal. The system displayed: `REQUEST SENT. RESPONSE NOT GUARANTEED`.
Four minutes later, a message arrived: `NOT TODAY. I AM WORKING ON THE TEXT`.
The channel closed. I could not ask a second question in the same session, check whether she really was working or offer to help. The answer was brief, clear and contained no hidden invitation.
I paced the room. Switched on the kettle. Opened the fridge, which contained cheese, eggs and a jar of mustard I had bought out of habit, although Vera had always been the one who ate it. Moved the bronze hand. Checked my phone. The message had not changed.
Loneliness proved to be neither a darkened theatre nor the great price of freedom. It was an ordinary kitchen in which the kettle switched itself off and the conversation did not begin. I drank my tea, read twenty pages of the book I had been reading since August and, for the first time, made it past page one hundred and eighty-two.
In the morning, Ariadna sent me an invitation to a working reading at four. She did not explain the previous day's refusal or compensate for it with particular tenderness. I arrived at four.
"How is the new flat?" she asked after the task.
"Quiet."
"Does it suit you?"
"I don't know yet."
"You didn't ask why I didn't open the conversation."
"You were working on the text."
"Yes."
That proved enough. Not as proof of love. As an answer I was able to accept because it had the right not to appear.
Open in the reader