Gate seven, then the depot

The museum I grew up reading about has been shut since 2013 and is, by its own website, still under reconstruction, so the collection I wanted sits in an industrial park at the far end of a metro line. You do not walk in. You collect a pass with your name already on it, hand your passport at gate seven, and go in through entrance A with a group and a guide, because there is no wandering here and everybody says so twice.

The tour is the only way in and the tour schedule is the only calendar: closed on Mondays and Fridays, otherwise whenever a group has booked. Rows of shelving, objects on pallets, labels in two different systems and two different decades of handwriting. I had come for one machine and stood longest at another, the UM-1NKh from 1963, a small control computer with the general air of a filing cabinet that has been promoted.

A depot teaches the opposite of what a museum hall teaches. Nothing here is switched on. The guide was careful with me about that and she was right to be: a stored machine is evidence, not a colleague. I have written a book that gets a great deal of feeling out of a console, and an aisle of unlit cabinets was a useful correction to my own prose. I wrote down inventory numbers and nothing about the light.