And when, one day, after depositing the general at his home, he parked the car on one of the boulevards and plunged in beneath their greenery on foot, this Moscow seemed a good deal more unreal to him than the foreign cities he had passed through.
In the courtyard a child was zigzagging on his bicycle around a sandpit, the wheels squeaking shrilly, just as they had done before. For a moment Alexe'i thought that the child himself had not changed, that it was still the same boy who, in a past that had become quite improbable, had stared up at a young man hidden behind a dusty window. On a bench a chess player was bent over his moves. The same one? A different one? At the other end of the bench sat a man, still young, with one leg. He was reading a humorous magazine, and from time to time he burst out laughing. It was clear that he was already accustomed to his condition and had made a study of comfortable positions for his disabled body. At each guffaw the chess player gave a start, settled down again, peered uncomprehendingly at the soldier's laughing face.
Alexe'i pulled his cap down over his forehead and climbed the stairs. A crowd of young girls burst out onto one landing, rushed downstairs in a twittering cascade. He realized that the passage of time provided a better mask than the peak of his cap.
On the wall, beside the door of their apartment, he saw three doorbells, three rectangles of paper with names on them. A communal apartment… Back in the courtyard he located two windows on the façade: the kitchen, his parents' bedroom. Washing hung there, in abundance and great variety. The irresistible way life had of taking root like this seemed to him at once touching and futile.
During those first weeks in Moscow he often heard talk of amnestied prisoners who did not have the right to enter the big cities but could settle in the Urals, Siberia, Central Asia. He pictured his parents in one of these remote places and told himself that in time, by embarking on circumspect research, he might find them again. And that from now on, only his false identity risked jeopardizing such a reunion.
The general was promoted to an even higher rank and now worked at the Ministry of Defense. He had doubtless forgotten his promise to treat his driver like a son but still remained benevolent, and one October day when they arrived at his home, he even said, "Listen, come on up with me. I've got some paperwork to put together, it's going to take some time… No ifs or buts about it. I'm not going to have you freezing here in the car in weather like this."
They went up. A silent, elderly housekeeper showed Alexei into a little room beside the entrance hall and brought him a glass of tea. The room, half cloakroom, half storeroom, had a tiny window, outside which the flakes of the first snow were floating down. He immediately felt very much at ease in this quiet corner, as if the place signaled a homecoming at last. Absentmindedly he watched the snowflakes slipping by: it was as if they were fluttering past on a day long ago, onto a forgotten city. The tea, too, had a flavor of old times. As did the silence of this vast apartment at nightfall. As did the invisible presence of the housekeeper, whom he heard sighing in the kitchen. And suddenly, muffled by the corridor, a few hesitant notes sounded. Then a whole melodious phrase. Then this music.
He left the room, took a few steps along the corridor, had no desire to go farther. What he saw was enough for him. A deep blue velvet dress, the glow of fair hair, a right hand he could see when it slipped along toward the high notes, the left hand, whose pressure he could guess at without seeing it. He remained motionless in the dim light of the corridor, his shoulder against the wall, conscious that the universe had just attained perfection. The snow outside the window, the mystery of this huge unknown apartment, this music. Above all, the imperfection of this music! For from time to time the hands came up against a combination of notes difficult to separate out, went back a little, regained their momentum. These deviations, he sensed, were essential to the plenitude of what had just been revealed. Impossible to add anything at all. Except, perhaps, the glance from the old housekeeper as she walked mutely along the corridor and gave him a brief look that seemed to him both understanding and bitter. Nothing else.
But these moments, which would have been enough for him, were extended and gave rise to further times spent waiting in the little room, then to the first meeting ("Oh, so you must be… yes, Papa told us about you…"), and to other meetings, and to the beauty of the open, smiling face of this girl of seventeen, to the delicacy of that hand when they first touched ("Stella… It was Mama who chose my name… I think it sounds horribly silly with my patronymic, Vassilyevna, don't you?"), to the conviction that the deep blue tone of the velvet dress was the key ingredient, at once overt and coded, of happiness. And that the other ingredients were the snowflakes outside the windows, the early dusk, and the notes whose hesitations occasionally hinted at the youthful fragility of the fingers.
He was living out this love in the past, drawn back toward the years of the great terror, when the long-nosed masks were everywhere he turned, those three years of his youth when he should have experienced exactly what was happening today: this encounter with a girl his own age, first love. He was twenty-seven now. But the girl at the piano made this question of age irrelevant, for he felt he was outside the ordinary current of days, in a parallel time, in which he could relive those three years spent amid the masks.
Sometimes he came to his senses, observed his life as if over the banister of a staircase, with a feeling of giddiness: so many living and dead people stood between him and the girl at the piano. He clenched his fists, the powerful, scarred fingers, remembered that these hands had killed, had learned to handle female flesh boldly – the flesh of that woman with a big cat's yellow eyes, whom he had met at a friend's birthday party, at the end of the summer, and had taken when she was half asleep, drunk, experiencing something akin to disgust for this big, indifferent, lazy body… Remembering this, he told himself that it would have been better if he had stayed in the car, not accepted the general's invitation… But in the little room where he drank his tea and which the general, a sailor in his youth, referred to as "the crow's nest," he forgot everything and blended into the swirling of the snow, the sound of the notes, and the anticipation of those footsteps whose rapid tread he knew, and that voice: "What are you doing here in the dark? Come…"
Stella would seat him beside her, begin to play, sometimes asking him to turn the pages of the music: "I'll give you a signal, like this, with my chin." He did her bidding, watched her face, pretending to look out for the signal, occasionally stole a glance at the music and rapidly turned his eyes away.
She found in him the stuff of dreams, easily molded by her young girl's imagination. This Sergei Maltsev was someone sufficiently well defined: the native of a little village, a man of twenty-seven (which is to say almost an old man for her at seventeen), and with his brow furrowed by that horrible scar. So, a man who, to all appearances, was not the one she was secretly waiting for.
But on the other hand, he was sufficiently enigmatic: a man who had certainly made plenty of female conquests but who, according to Stella's father, lived alone, somewhere in the snowbound streets in the outskirts of Moscow, a silent man, who often brought the general home as night was falling and disappeared into the same night, in driving rain or swirling snow. At moments like this he could easily be pictured in the guise of a mysterious stranger, whose face and life story she was constantly reshaping. Besides, had her father not one day told her that this driver had saved his life during the war?