As I return from choir rehearsal, the November wind drags leaves along the pavement like lost thoughts. The streetlights twinkle over B Street as if they are tired, and I try to breathe evenly as the minty smell from the rehearsal room - Mrs Berry's favourite gum - continues to circulate in my head along with the notes. We have a concert in three days' time and seemingly everything is ready, yet I feel as if someone is turning the lights on and off inside me. Mum has left me a message on a piece of paper by the hall mirror: "Soup on the cooker. I'm coming back late. Good luck at the rehearsal, Leno." Her letters are slanted, as if she's in a hurry. I drop my rucksack into a corner and only then notice the envelope slipped under the door. Yellow, the kind of old libraries. On the top - in stiff capital letters: "FOR LENA - OPEN TODAY". My heart leaps to my throat, but reason tries to joke: a neighbourhood prank. Santa, because he has a sense of humour like someone who drinks black coffee every morning and looks the world straight in the eye. Only Santa doesn't use envelopes, Santa sends memes at three in the morning. I carefully tear open the paper. Inside lies a cassette. A real one, plastic, with a transparent casing and screws like tiny eyes. On the paper insert one word in pen: "Today". For a moment I just stare at the tape, as if I can see what's inside it. A flash of cheek on the cover, some nails, someone's laughter? There's nothing left in my flat that can reproduce it. The tape recorder disappeared along with the promising order in our house around the time Dad decided to reinvent life for himself. I don't know when I'm dialing a number. My hands are cold, my voice tangled between the first and second notes of 'Snow that fell like a whisper', our concert hit. - Hello? - Santa picks up after two signals. - If it's about our viola being rearranged, I'm innocent. - I have... a cassette. In an envelope. Under the door. - I can hear what it sounds like. Strange and a bit like a story from my grandmother. - A cassette? - There's an interest in his voice of the kind that pushes him to play in a band and read an analogue camera manual. - You have two options: you ignore it and eat your soup, or we go play it. - Where? - School radio. The studio is open before the Night of Words. That's where they still keep the equipment. I can be there in twenty minutes. - A moment of silence. - Lena, breathe, okay? I think I forget to breathe more often than I should. I pull on my shoes, tuck the tape into my jacket pocket. The soup stays on the cooker, smelling of the usual - carrots, thyme and a care I can't always take. The school at this time of evening is like a stage set. The corridors smell of paint and tangerines because someone has split the peel at the vending machine. In the common room they decorate a banner: "Free Speech Night". By the stage in the auditorium they are rehearsing the lights - patches of colour move across the curtain like the breaths of jellyfish. I push my way through a group of first-year students who are debating whether a poem without rhymes is still a poem. Santa is standing at the door of the school radio, wearing a denim jacket and a hat whose ball looks like a planet. When he sees me, he lifts an eyebrow. - Show. I pull out the cassette. He takes it carefully, like something found in an old drawer. He points to the inscription. - "Today." This is either very romantic or very strange. - Romantic? Really? - Weird. - She smiles with one corner. - Come on. The studio smells of dust, coffee and the moments when someone turns on 'Rec'. An old tape recorder sits on a shelf, heavy and confident like his great-grandmother's sewing machine. Nikolai plugs it into the mixer, and I watch his fingers move the knobs with a tenderness I've never known in myself. - Are you ready? - he asks. - I don't know. - I whisper it into my own hands, but the head in the speaker responds: a regular, quiet hum of tape, like rain outside the window. Nikolai presses 'Play'. For a few seconds it's all that can be heard: a hum, a tiny crackle, something like the movement of a pen across a desk. And then a voice. Female, low, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. She's humming the melody my mum used to sing to me in my sleep when I was seven and afraid of dark corners. She hums it differently, suspending some of the notes so that I can feel them in my stomach. - Okay... - Nikolai looks at me meaningfully, but I don't know how to reciprocate the look, because a second later I hear my voice. - "I didn't fit into your plans, so I slipped out like a thread from my sleeve. I don't like myself in the daylight when you have to say things one by one. Night is more honest. 'The night listens,' Lena says from the tape, and I feel like shouting because those are my words. My poem from last night, the kind still unpenned, written in a notebook that I don't show to anyone. I listen to myself, but I speak differently: evenly, without hesitation, as if someone had put a tailor's meter in my mouth and told me to watch every inch. The voice finishes the poem and gets quiet. For a split second I think that's it. That someone overheard or found my notebook, recorded the joke. I feel something hot and unpleasant rising inside me, a mixture of shame and anger arguing for precedence. And then a whisper sounds on the tape: "Lena. Room two hundred and fourteen. Midnight." I lift my gaze to Nikolai. He's biting his lower lip, as he always does when he's processing something in his mind. - Who has access to your texts? - he asks. - No one. I keep my notebook in my bag, sometimes under my pillow. - The last word somehow sounds too childish, preferring to pretend to be more grown-up than we are. - I have a code on my phone, and I don't write anything down in the cloud. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. - We might not go. - Santa doesn't play the hero. He doesn't say: "Come on, it will be interesting". He is saying: "We may not go". But in his eyes I see that spark that only lights up when he feels something is important. I don't know what I'm feeling. A bit like when you're standing on the edge of a trampoline and you know the jump will either be the worst or the best decision of the day. The fingers of my hands tremble, though I try to calm them down. - Here we go. - I can hear my voice getting lower. - I won't be afraid of my voice on tape. The corridors after twenty-three are different. They echo off the walls as if the school is taking a deep breath. The lights half off, the clock above the secretary's office ticking too loudly. In one of the classrooms, someone has left a mug of tea and a note next to it: "I'll be back - H.". The burnt smell of the lamp mixes with something herbal - maybe nose drops, maybe someone's liquid courage. Room 214 is at the end of a long wing whose windows overlook the pitch. As we pass, I see in the grass the remnants of confetti from the last match - white circles that someone will probably still find here in May. - Have you got that? - Santa points with his head at my pocket. - The tape? - I confirm with a touch. - What for? - I don't know. - He smiles helplessly. - Maybe they'll want proof that you came. - They? - Stop. - He winks at me, but I just roll it around inside. I don't like the plural where I'd prefer the singular. It's easier to breathe then. It's five minutes to midnight when we stand at door 214. A strip of light is visible through a narrow gap at the bottom. That means someone is inside. Someone who knows what I call those who know my breathing melody when I'm trying to fall asleep. The phone vibrates in my pocket so suddenly that I almost jump up. An unknown number. A voice message. Nikolai makes inquiring eyes. I hand him the phone; he nods - turn it up - and I switch it on. First silence. Then barely audible beats, regular and steady, like drops of water... or like my own pulse recorded with a microphone put to my chest (I used to do this in biology, laughing that I could hear a little drum inside me). After three beats, a quiet whisper can be heard: "Lenka". That's how someone who hasn't been in the living room of our flat or in my morning plans for a long time spoke to me. I feel the skin on the back of my neck suffer. Not from the fear of ghost movies, but the real one that sits on your shoulder blades when the past reaches out its hand and you don't know whether to shake it. - Did you hear that? - I ask, even though I can see Nikolai blanching. - I heard. - He reaches out and touches my hand for a second, so briefly that it's a flicker rather than a hug. - We don't have to... - We have to. - I wonder to myself. - I can't pretend it wasn't there. From inside Room 214 comes the sound of a chair being moved. The light under the door vibrates, as if someone is passing back and forth. I put my ear to the wood. Someone on the other side also stops. And then I hear breathing. Real, close, with a slight wheeze, as if the nose was blocked or someone had cried earlier and is now pretending it's just a cold. The chill of the doorknob passes through to my fingers. My index finger finds its smallest crack on its own - I remember it from the day's lessons, when everyone is in a hurry and I'm touching things so I don't fall off. I count silently: one, two, three. - Lena? - resounds on the other side. A voice I know. Not like one knows a song from the radio. The way one knows the first snow, the taste of tea with lemon and what it hurts to grow up. For a split second, everything in me wants to go backwards. But the other self, the stubborn one that writes words in the margins, says "onwards". The air grows thick, the light under the door flickers again, and I tighten my fingers on the doorknob and begin to press it slowly, very slowly