She doesn’t know if he wants her to answer the first, existential, question or to attach the second, qualifying, half to it, but she knows that it is safer to remain within the confines of acting. The answers to these two questions, if she is honest, are diametric opposites: no, she’s not happy without him and yes, she is happy when she is onstage. She is happy to be breathing in the damp smell of wool from his coat. She is unhappy that they can’t go to her apartment, tear off their clothes, as they did three years ago, and ravage each other until they both melt and start coursing through each other’s veins like lifeblood.

“Acting is freedom. It’s searching for what’s real,” she says. “Every performance is different. Together with the other actors onstage and with the audience, I search for the truth—we all do—and sometimes we almost find it. That’s the essence of acting: looking for the truth. There is nothing fake about it. There is no pretending.”

They walk inside the courtyard and sit on the bench, which is freezing cold and damp from wet snow.

“So it is the opposite of our life here.”

“It’s the opposite of your job,” she says. “The opposite of banning plays that fail to lead the audience into the shining future. It is allowing people to think, to examine their failings and their faults, to peek into the dark corners of the soul. To see human beings as they are, not as we think they should be. Maybe that’s the reason Theater is so dangerous.”

He smirks, or maybe she only thinks she sees him smirk.

“Last time I saw you,” he says, and she hears an intake of breath, “I came to tell you what I’d done. I wanted to confess to you. I hated myself and wanted to tell you the truth. My truth.”

They are both silent for a minute.