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Now Nonna was watching neither Ksyusha nor Dmitry. Already in the first hour the sound engineer’s manner had put her on her guard. Nonna was watching not so much his words as the gestures of a man sure that no one was looking at him.
Something did not add up in his movements.
At first Nonna decided she simply did not like his habit of answering before Dmitry had finished a question. Then she noticed something else: he was too attentive to which files were open, and not attentive enough to the music itself when the conversation did not concern what he was doing. When the name of a new folder appeared on the screen, his eyes lingered. When Dmitry asked him to go back a few bars, he did it precisely, but a second later he was checking his phone again.
Nonna did not build an accusation out of gestures. She knew the cost of a suspicion that too quickly becomes certainty. So she only memorised: times, exits, a screen turned over, a brief tension in a face.
Between takes, while Dmitry and Ksyusha were bent together over some detail, he quickly checked the phone by the keyboard. It lay face down. After each glance he turned it over again, as though he had never picked it up.
“Coffee, anyone?” he asked during one of the breaks, getting up. “I shall be quick.”
“Go on,” Dmitry answered without raising his head.
He went out. During the eleven minutes he was gone, Dmitry and Ksyusha listened to one passage twice, and the coffee machine in the corridor came on only at the very end. Nonna looked at her watch when the door opened again.
He came back with two cups. Neither was his.
“None for you?” Ksyusha asked.
“I do not want any,” he said, sitting back down at the desk with the same calm, practised smile with which he always sat down.
Dmitry took his cup, had a sip and winced.
“No sugar?”
“You take it without sugar.”
“I do. Ksyusha does not.”
The sound engineer looked at the second cup as though seeing the marking on the lid for the first time.
“Mixed them up, then.”
Ksyusha shrugged and took Dmitry’s coffee. They swapped cups in silence. Nonna made a note of the mistake: after several months of working together such small things are usually learned.
Nonna sipped her long-cold tea.
Towards lunchtime he went out again — “to make a call, a personal one”. When he came back he stood in the doorway for a few seconds before sitting down at the desk. Before speaking he gave a strained smile.
Ksyusha noticed nothing. Nor did Dmitry — he was busy with the panning of the vocal, that same fraction of a tone for which they had been listening to the bridge for the twelfth time.
Nonna put her cup on the windowsill and went out into the corridor — quietly, as if just to stretch her legs.
She walked to the end of the corridor, to the spot where, as she already knew from last time, the signal was better.
There was no one there.
She was back in the control room before anyone could ask where she had been.
“Everything all right?” Dmitry asked, looking away from the monitor for a second.
“Yes,” she said. “I was thinking.”
In the corridor she had noticed the closed door of the technical room and the red light of a camera under the ceiling. If something untoward was going on here, there would be traces: times of entry, an access log, a copying history. How such things were checked, Nonna did not know. But she knew her brother: an empty hint he would either dismiss or take too much to heart. Both outcomes were bad.
Back in the room, she asked the first safe thing that came into her head:
“Much longer?”
“An hour and a half,” Dmitry answered. “Tired?”
“No. I want to know when to order food.”
The sound engineer looked up at her too quickly. Perhaps he had simply heard the word “order”. Perhaps he was checking what exactly she had been doing in the corridor. Nonna did not let herself pick the convenient explanation.
In the evening the sound engineer said goodbye as usual: he shook Dmitry’s hand and nodded to Ksyusha. His eyes rested on Nonna a second longer, and he was the first to leave.
Nonna watched him all the way to the door.
She said nothing to anyone that evening.
On the way home Ksyusha talked about the last take, which they had finally managed to get whole. Dmitry argued that the second verse would have to be listened to again with fresh ears. Nonna sat in the back, watching the reflections of the street lamps in the side window, and answered at random.
“Did you not like it?” Ksyusha asked, turning round.
“I did.”
“You have been quiet the whole time.”
“I know how to keep quiet.”
Dmitry grinned.
“Do not believe her. It is a temporary phenomenon.”
Nonna did not take up the joke. She was remembering eleven minutes, two cups and an empty corridor. All of it could have a dozen explanations. So far none of them gave her the right to interfere.
At home she wrote on the last page of her notebook a date and two stretches of time. The name she deliberately left out. Then she closed the notebook and put it under her things in the room with the sofa.
She decided to go again — without warning and half an hour before the appointed time.
A week later the chance came. Dmitry was due at the studio at noon, Ksyusha fifteen minutes later after a lesson. Nonna said she would go separately and meet them there. At eleven twenty-nine she was already standing at the entrance to the building.
The studio was open. The administrator was talking to a courier; there was no one in the corridor. Nonna did not go into the control room or try to catch anyone in the act. She sat on the sofa by the front desk, from where she could see the main door, and took out her wedding notebook.
The sound engineer appeared a few minutes later. He came from the direction of the technical rooms, although by the schedule his session began at the same time as Dmitry’s. In his hand he held a small external drive. Seeing Nonna, he stopped for a split second, then said hello.
“You are early today,” he said.
“I do not like being late.”
“Dmitry is not here yet.”
“I can see.”
He put the drive in his bag and went into the control room. Handling drives was part of his job. Nonna wrote down only the time.
When Dmitry arrived, she said nothing about the encounter. During the session the sound engineer worked attentively, did not go out once and carried out every task precisely. By the end of the recording Nonna was already angry with herself for being suspicious.
During a break the administrator asked him whether he had finished “that copy”. The answer was quiet:
“Later. There are people here.”
Nonna raised her head. The administrator had already turned to a phone call, and the sound engineer looked in her direction and smiled. “Copy” could refer to any project. And yet now she had three things: the time before the session, an external drive and a word she had overheard.
On the way back she asked Dmitry, as if in passing:
“Who makes your backups?”
“The automatic system and the administrator. Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
“You are never just curious about backups.”
“Today I am.”
He gave her a long, expectant look, but did not try to drag an answer out of her. Nonna did not like this: she demanded directness from others, and now she herself was dodging the conversation. But slandering a man without evidence would have been even worse for her.
At home she added to her earlier notes a date and a question: “Who authorised the copy?” Nothing more.
The next morning Dmitry came back to the subject himself. He was putting the mugs on the table when he noticed the wedding notebook lying open. Nonna managed to turn the page, but the movement was too hasty.
“So it is not just curiosity after all,” he said.
“For now it is just an observation.”
“Of whom?”
“Of a process. And do not ask me anything more until I can confirm something.”
Dmitry sat down opposite her and at once became serious.
“If this ‘observation’ concerns my files, I need to know.”
“If I name someone to you now, you will start seeing every action of that person through my still subjective opinion. And that alone will affect the work. I have a time, a drive and the word ‘copy’. That is too little for outright suspicion.”
“But enough to check the access rules.”
Nonna looked up. He had understood her rightly: first check the procedure, then the people.
Dmitry opened his laptop and found the studio hire agreement. An appendix stated that technical copies were made by the administrator, and that temporary working files could be kept by the engineer only for the duration of a session. Who confirmed their deletion, the document did not say.
“A gap,” he said.
“Not a crime.”
“I am not saying it is a crime.”
He wrote to the administrator, asking for a description of the backup procedure, the access logs and the rules for external drives. The sound engineer’s name did not appear in the letter.
They promised to prepare an answer by the end of the week. Nonna crossed out in her notebook the question “whether to tell Dima” and wrote a new one: “Compare the procedure with the actual dates.”
“Will you stop now?” Dmitry asked.
“Until the answer comes — yes.”
“And you will not go looking for anything yourself?”
“I am not a detective. I am your sister.”
Nonna closed the notebook. She had no intention of searching through other people’s data, demanding access or passing judgement in Dmitry’s place.
With the sound engineer she behaved as before. She said nothing about her suspicions to Ksyusha or Marina, and she did not look for any personal information about him either. If Nonna was wrong, her suspicions must not harm another person’s work.
The administrator’s answer came in the evening. It contained the general rules, but not a list of the actual operations. Nonna saw the difference at once.
“He has answered how it should be,” she said. “Not how it was.”
Dmitry reread the letter.
“Then I shall ask for the log for specific dates.”
“Will you mention what I observed?”
“No. I shall mention my projects and my right to know who opened the files.”
Dmitry wrote the request himself. Nonna did not dictate the wording or ask to be copied in. She closed her notebook and leaned back in her chair. Now all that was left was to wait for the administrator’s answer.
Ksyusha was told that they were checking the access procedure. Until the answer came, unfinished recordings were kept at home and brought to the studio only for the duration of a session.
Nonna did not go to the next recording. She stayed at home with the wedding lists. If facts turned up, she would tell them what she had seen. For now all she could do was wait, not accuse in advance a man whose guilt had not yet been proved.
Chapter Five
The Letter
The letter came on Thursday between rehearsal and supper. In those fifteen minutes Ksyusha usually dealt with everything that could wait.
The subject line was short: “A proposal for collaboration.”
Ksyusha almost scrolled past it. Since the chamber evenings she had had the odd separate work invitation, and none of them had needed an immediate answer. The sender’s name seemed familiar: this was the man who had come up to her after the performance and suggested in passing that they “give each other a ring some time”.
She opened the letter.
The first paragraphs were impeccably composed. They thanked her for her attention, noted “a rare combination of a recognisable timbre and sincerity” and referred to the chamber performance after which, supposedly, the whole team had been discussing her voice. Ksyusha read the words twice. The flattery was obvious, but that did not stop it working.
She sat down by the window with one leg tucked under her and downloaded the attached file. Eighteen pages of small print took a while to open. Ksyusha decided to look over the beginning and come back to the document after supper.
Twenty minutes later she was still sitting in the same place.
This was not a one-off offer, nor an invitation to perform.
It was a full contract. An album under her name. A production team “already chosen and ready to start at a time convenient to her”. A clause on the rights to the use of her image. A clause on the rights to archive recordings — and here she read it twice to make sure she had understood correctly: the songs recorded jointly with Dmitry, if reissued under this contract, would automatically pass into the category of “the performer’s solo material”, with his name given only in the acknowledgements.
Below that came a demand for exclusivity. Not only for future recordings, but for public appearances, interviews, taking part in other people’s projects. Each of them required written approval. The wording was polite and broad; the more closely Ksyusha read, the less she could tell where professional organisation ended and the right to decide how she spent her time began.
She opened a search engine, typed in an unfamiliar legal term, read two explanations and got even more confused. She could have called Dmitry. He was sitting in the study a few metres away, and his single question, “Show me”, would have been enough for the document to stop seeming a secret. Ksyusha did not call him.
If she showed it straight away, the letter would become shared before she had had time to feel it was hers.
She put the phone down.
She picked it up again.
She read it a third time.
The first feeling was joy, and Ksyusha was almost ashamed of it. The letter addressed her personally. Separately from the couple, separately from the Nexxe project.
She remembered the evening at the arts centre. After her solo numbers listeners had come up to her, talked about her voice, asked where to find a recording. Ksyusha had thanked them and almost every time added Dmitry’s name, although no one had asked her. That was honest: the songs had been born within their shared work. The letter, though, spoke only of her voice.
Ksyusha got up, walked across the room and came back to the screen. The document had a place for a signature. The empty line looked innocent, but it already changed the meaning of everything above it.
She had long wanted someone one day to approach her in her own right. Until this letter Ksyusha had not admitted such a wish even to herself.
Dmitry’s voice came from the next room — he was reminding her about tomorrow’s call with the mastering engineer.
“All right!” she answered too quickly.
He appeared in the doorway.
“Was that to me?”
“No. I mean yes. I heard.”
“I asked whether I should take the bathroom first.”
“Take it.”
Dmitry lingered for a second. His eyes slid over the phone in her hand, but he did not ask what she was reading.
“Supper in twenty minutes?”
“Let us make it half an hour.”
“All right.”
When he had gone, Ksyusha felt both glad and hurt. She wanted him to notice, and she was afraid he would ask. Dmitry did not ask, giving her space, and she took it almost as indifference. Catching herself in this unfairness, Ksyusha closed the document.
A minute later Ksyusha opened the letter again.
Then she closed it without replying and put the phone in her pocket. First she had to understand for herself what she felt. That was how Ksyusha explained her silence to herself.
Within half an hour she had invented a postponement: tomorrow she would reread the contract on a big screen, write out her questions, and then tell him. Ksyusha wanted first to work out whether she needed such an album, and only after that to go to Dmitry with her joy and her confusion.
The next day the sender reminded her of himself: “I would be glad to hear your first impressions.” Ksyusha did not answer this letter either. So far she was being asked only for impressions, but she already felt obliged to make a decision.
Over supper Dmitry asked how her day had gone.
“Ordinary,” she said. “Nothing special.”
He nodded. Ksyusha could not tell whether he believed her or had decided to give her time.
Nonna was having supper at Ksyusha’s mother’s that evening, and the flat had grown unusually quiet. There were two plates on the table. Dmitry talked about the mastering, about an argument over top frequencies that were too bright, then asked whether she was tired after the rehearsal. Ksyusha answered precisely and briefly. Once she almost said, “I have been offered a contract,” but Dmitry reached for the salt, and Ksyusha stayed silent again.
Ksyusha understood that she herself was looking for a reason to put off the conversation. She wanted to say it all without interruptions or muddle, so that Dmitry would understand at once: she was glad of the offer, but she was not going to leave.
Ksyusha finished eating in silence. The clause about the archive recordings worried her, and the ready-made image the company was offering along with the contract. But the thought of an album under her own name still gave her joy.
Before going to sleep she opened the letter once more and starred it so as not to lose it. Then she created a note headed “Questions”.
The first thing she wrote was: “Who do the songs belong to?”
The second: “What will happen to our recordings?”
The third line she left empty for a long time, and then typed: “Why am I afraid to tell Dima?”
The last question frightened her more than the legal clauses.
In the morning Ksyusha woke before the alarm. Dmitry was still asleep, turned towards the window, and in the grey light his face looked tired. The phone lay on the bedside table between them. The letter was a few movements of a finger away, but Ksyusha did not open it in bed.
She went to the kitchen and reread the note. Three questions were enough to start the conversation today. Ksyusha added a fourth: “Do I want an album on these terms?” First she wrote, “No,” then corrected it to “I do not know.” The second answer looked worse, but it was honest.
At breakfast Dmitry noticed the open notebook.
“Plans for the day?”
“I am trying to sort out a work question.”
“Do you need help?”
Ksyusha’s shoulders tensed and she gripped her mug harder.
“Not yet,” she answered.
Dmitry nodded. He was not hurt and did not ask questions. A minute later he started talking about the weather.
Ksyusha felt relief and was at once angry with herself. He had offered help without pressure. She had refused it in order to keep the letter hers alone a little longer — together with the feeling of a secret possibility.
When Dmitry had left, Ksyusha printed not the whole contract but the four pages about rights and exclusivity. The printer stood in the study and could be heard all over the flat. She collected the still-warm sheets and went back to the kitchen.
With a red pen she circled the words “irrevocably”, “for the whole term” and “at the producer’s discretion”. Beside the clause on archive recordings she wrote: “Can they even offer this?” Then she crossed out the question mark and put two.
On paper the contract was less unsettling than on screen. In front of Ksyusha lay sheets of small print with uneven margins and page numbers. She could not bring herself to throw them away: she folded them in half and hid them in her notebook of solo exercises.
Hid — the word came before she was aware of it. Ksyusha tried to replace it with “put away”, but the difference was too obvious: you could put something away on a table; you could hide it only from a person.
She took the pages out again. For a few seconds she held them, getting ready to take them to Dmitry. Then she put them back in the notebook, this time without closing the cover. The half-measure put nothing right, but it let her pretend for one more day that the decision to talk had almost been made.
In the afternoon the sender of the contract rang. Ksyusha saw an unfamiliar number but guessed from the area code, and did not answer. A minute later a message came: “I wanted to check whether you received the materials. I would be glad to talk it over informally.”
“Informally” sounded pleasant. There were far too many formalities in the contract; a living voice could explain everything more simply. She typed a reply suggesting a call in the evening and stopped before sending it. Why the evening, exactly, when Dmitry would be busy, if this was an ordinary work conversation?
Ksyusha deleted the message. She wrote only that she had received the materials and would come back with questions later.
At rehearsal she sang worse than usual. She hit the notes, but came in with a slight delay: her thoughts kept going back to the letter. After the third stop Dmitry took off his headphones.
“Let us finish early.”
“I can go on.”
“You can. But today you are not here.”
“Are you angry?”
“No. I am suggesting we do not waste our strength on the appearance of work.”
He did not ask where exactly she had got lost in her thoughts. Ksyusha gathered up the sheets. The silence was already interfering with their shared work, although she still considered the contract a personal matter.
In the evening Nonna talked about yet another venue, Ksyusha’s mother sent photographs of flowers, Dmitry answered letters. Ksyusha looked at the shared table. She could put the contract down beside everything else and discuss it without giving Dmitry the right to decide for her.
Later, when Dmitry had gone to the study, Ksyusha stayed to wash up. Nonna dried the plates and put them in the cupboard, though twice she put them on the wrong shelf.
“Something is the matter with you,” she said.
Ksyusha almost answered at once. It was easier with Nonna: her opinion decided nothing in this matter. She could tell her, test her own words and go to Dmitry prepared. But then a small alliance behind his back would appear between them.
“There is a work offer,” she said carefully. “But I am not ready to discuss the details yet.”
Nonna stopped drying the plate.
“Does Dima know?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not?”
“Because the offer is for me.”
“That is the answer to a different question.”
Ksyusha felt irritation, but she could not call the remark unfair.
“I want first to understand what I myself want.”
“Then understand it. Only do not ask me to hide it.”
“I am not asking.”
“Good.”
Nonna did not demand to see the letter or go to her brother. She put the plate on the right shelf and went out. Telling Dmitry was up to Ksyusha herself.
Left alone, Ksyusha opened the contract again. Now she saw before her an ordinary document with terms that could change her present life. Exclusivity for several years, the use of her image in promotion, advance approval of recordings with other authors — a separate career on such terms would inevitably touch their shared work.
She wrote out the specific clauses in her notebook. Beside each she drew two columns: “concerns me” and “concerns us”. Most of the lines went into both.
In the study Dmitry played one eight-bar fragment over and over. Ksyusha could hear through the door how he changed the bass, put the old one back, stopped the recording again. Usually she would have gone in and asked if she might listen. Today she stood in the corridor with her phone in her hand and could not bring herself to knock.
She went back to the kitchen, poured some water and wrote herself one more question: “How much time do I really need, and how much am I just putting it off?” There was no answer. But a date appeared: tomorrow after supper.
The next morning she moved the conversation to the evening because of an early session. In the evening her mother came, and Ksyusha told herself again that she would talk tomorrow. Each reason on its own seemed sensible.
For the first few days the letter gave her energy. Ksyusha woke earlier, read articles about contracts, wrote out unfamiliar wording. She called it preparation, although she had not asked the sender a single question. The more she learned, the more convincing it seemed that one more day of silence was necessary.
On the fourth day the company sent examples of a visual image: other people’s photographs, stage costumes and the caption “a possible direction for the artist’s growing up”. The word “growing up” stung Ksyusha. It meant that at present she was not grown up enough, while someone outside already knew what she should become.