There is not much in a night programme: music, the weather, and the kind of silence that only radio can make. Berta had presented the show called Until Dawn at the city station for eleven years, and in eleven years she had learned that at that hour people do not want music. They want somebody to be awake.
The line rang at half past one every night.
“Until Dawn, good evening,” said Berta.
“Good evening,” said the voice. A man’s, deep, calm, and always with the same pause after it, as if the caller first checked that somebody had really picked up.
He never gave his name. He never requested a song. He never said anything by which he could have been found. He only talked — about the weather, the neighbour’s dog, a book he had not finished because he did not want it to end.
At first Berta thought he was lonely. Then she thought he was ill. Then one evening, when the man said, “Today I saw a woman on the tram who held her book exactly the way you describe holding yours,” Berta realised that this was not loneliness.
It was something else.
“Why won’t you give your name?” she asked in the ninth month.
“Because if I give it, I will have a face,” said the man. “And then you will not be talking to my voice, but to a person. And that is a different programme.”
Berta laughed. But after the laugh she looked for a long time at the studio glass, with her own reflection sitting in it, and wondered how long she had been talking to a voice, and how long she had not been talking to anyone.
It was winter. Snow was falling over the city, and at the station that is always when most people call: that is when everyone thinks the snow changes everything. The line rang at half past one.
“Good evening.”
“Good evening.” Berta leaned towards the microphone, and suddenly said what she had not planned: “I am not asking anything tonight. Tonight I will talk.”
Silence. Then:
“All right.”
And Berta talked. She said that she had been sitting here every night for eleven years, and that this was not a vocation but an escape: because at night you do not have to explain anything to anybody. She said that there had once been someone who would have asked her to stop, and she had not stopped, and since then he had not come looking for her. She said that she, too, liked to read a book in such a way that she read more slowly at the end, because she did not want it to be over.
For a long time the man said nothing. Then he asked:
“Then why have you never called anyone?”
“Because I don’t know their numbers,” said Berta. “And because I am afraid they would not pick up.”
“I would pick up,” said the man.
Berta forgot to breathe. In the studio the music ran out, and the silence grew long, and for a moment the editor looked in through the glass to see that everything was all right.
“Then tell me your name,” whispered Berta.
“That is not the hard part.” For the first time the man’s voice trembled. “The hard part is that for eleven months I have been calling the city station at half past one every night, while living at the other end of the corridor from the woman who makes the programme. On the third floor. Beside the lift.”
Berta stood up. The chair slid back across the floor, and the sound was so loud in the microphone that the editor switched on the warning light.
“Beside the lift?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Flat six? Where the man lives who goes to work at dawn?”
“Who goes to work at dawn,” repeated the man, “and who sees every morning that you make coffee at the window, barefoot, and never look up.”
Berta put down the headphones. Then she picked them up again, because the programme cannot be stopped — not even when a person’s life is being rearranged.
“Stay on the line,” she said. “Two minutes, and it’s over.”
“I’ll stay.”
During the closing number Berta put her hands on the desk and watched the studio clock, which showed five past two. When the music faded, she said goodbye in the usual way: “Until Dawn. Tomorrow too.”
Then she switched off the microphone, took her coat, and ran down the stairs, because at that hour the lift does not run.
On the third floor, the door of flat six beside the lift was open. The man stood in it — in jeans, barefoot, a coffee mug in his hand, and with a face like someone who has been preparing for this moment for eleven months and still does not know what he is going to say.
“Berta,” he said.
“How do you know my name?”
“You say it at the end of every programme.” The man smiled. “For eleven years.”
Berta stood in the cold air of the corridor, and suddenly everything she had thought complicated became simple.
“Is there coffee?” she asked.
“There is. And there is a book I haven’t finished either.”
“Then I’m in the right place.”
Beside the lift, five minutes before two in the morning, two people stepped through a door that had been open for eleven years.
