Liberation

Why am I writing all this, turning my soul inside out? If even one person is saved from a similar trap, then it won't have been in vain. As for my own soul—it feels already ruined, so I have nothing left to lose. But I feel I have everything to gain by freeing myself.
After some time in confinement, I heard a rustle and a creak from the opposite side of the door. There was a strange, mysterious niche there that I had been contemplating for a while. Suddenly, a piece of the wall moved aside, and a man began to crawl into my cell. It was Valera, from the maintenance staff (the one from the film Sasha and Valera). He said something like: "Come here, quick, we have to get out of here." I don't remember exactly how, but with his help, I squeezed through that hole and shortly found myself free, in the studio courtyard.
It was late evening or night; the yard was lit by lamps. My consciousness was so scrambled that when I saw the "Phenomen Films" studio sign, it came as a pleasant surprise. We’re just filming a movie here, you see, I thought, suddenly relieved. I had almost believed that I was truly being put on trial and would have to justify myself. It’s all just a game, I thought with excitement, laughing at the Phenomen logo—the three guys sitting in a bathtub (apparently a nod to Bertolucci's The Dreamers). A strange euphoria washed over me at the thought of the fascinating methods used in cinematography and the joy of being part of it.
These thoughts and feelings raced through me as Valera led me by the hand. But suddenly, he led me into a horrific room filled with beds where other maintenance workers were sitting. After a moment's hesitation, I bolted out of there. I walked along the street, caught my breath, and started thinking about what to do next: "Should I run away to the city? What’s the point? If I’m going to run from this madness, as the 'kind guard' suggested, I could just walk into the studio with my head held high, grab my bag, give them all a piece of my mind, and demand they buy me a ticket back—since they’re the ones who started this mess."
"But on the other hand, it’s all so interesting and thrilling!" — no sooner had I thought this than I, sitting freely on a bench, was discovered by the "angry guard" and led back to the prison.
I found out then (most likely from the "kind guard") that it was Ilya himself who had given instructions to feed us the porridge. I have no doubt that he was also the one who asked Valera to arrange the escape—just to test me. It was already late into the night, many hours since our arrest, when the investigator finally arrived. He changed into Soviet clothing, and Nastya and I were taken to see him for questioning.
He was a large, heavy-set man (though I don’t remember him as clearly as the "kind KGB man"). When I told him that Nastya and I had brought up "Department Ъ" specifically to get rid of Trifonov’s advances, he said: "You should have just hit that Trifonov over the head with an ashtray."
Then, with his help, I wrote an explanatory statement. He advised me never to leave blank spaces in such documents, so that no one could later add anything of their own. Overall, it felt as though he was on my side and moved by understanding. It’s a pity I remember so little of that conversation and didn’t attach much importance to it at the time—after all, he turned out to be one of the central characters of the "DAU" universe as it exists today. No matter how often I saw him at the Institute, I never paid him much attention, barely even noticing when he became the Director of the Institute toward the end of my stay and the end of the Institute’s existence. For that matter, I didn't pay much attention to Tesak [Maxim Martsinkevich], either.
Very soon after that, Nastya and I were released. We walked out together, arms around each other, laughing so loudly it echoed through the entire area. When Vera saw this, she was floored. She laughed too and said: "This is insane—they spent the whole night in prison and now they’re cracking up like lunatics."
It was dawn—no longer the dark of night, but that blue, "magic hour" light. As we entered the studio, Nastya said: "I’m taking you away from here; you’re coming home with me right now." But as we split up into different sections of the wardrobe department, Vera caught me before I could even start changing. She insisted that I return to the Institute immediately. I was desperately sleep-deprived, with no strength left to think, so I obeyed—even though I was still in my slippers, without my bag or my pass. They quickly mocked up a temporary pass for me. I suppose they found me some shoes too; I don't remember.
On my way back, I ran into Olya (the buffet manager), elegantly dressed, lighting a cigarette with an exquisite holder. She had lived in the Institute for about two years. She teased me about my stint in prison. "You girls are something else," she said, articulating every word with precision. "You’re lucky it’s 1956. If this had happened a few years ago, they would have carted you off and no one would have ever seen you again."
The physicist Alexey Blinov happened to be nearby as well. He remarked: "Ah, so they let you go... And we had already prepared the... for the torture." (I couldn't catch exactly what they had prepared).
When I returned to D2, it was already broad daylight. I didn't go to sleep right away; I wandered through the apartment, savoring the solitude and "freedom." This time, D2 felt like a luxury resort with a pool. I took a bath and slipped under the covers.
In one of the following days, Nastya did return to the Institute, even though I expected she never would. She was wearing a gray suit with a skirt and a beautiful beige blouse. There was a "fixation" (filming) going on—some kind of party meeting. Nastya emerged from it in total distress, even as they continued to film her. That was precisely why they had pushed her: to squeeze out the necessary emotion for Ilya's endless cinematic epic of collected suffering. She was genuinely upset, on the verge of tears as I recall; they had reprimanded her publicly and fired her.
We never discussed those events at the Institute—not the prison, not Trifonov's harassment. Yet it turns out that by describing the whole truth to the investigator, I had essentially written a "denunciation" against her (I wonder how many times Ilya has uttered that word in his endless interviews since 2019). Despite this, Nastya treated me very well afterward. She constantly invited me over, and I would escape to her place to spend the night and catch my breath from the personal hell they had orchestrated for me on the project. She even showed me the sights of Kharkiv several times.