Little by little she was caught in her own game. She needed this man who drank his tea in the crow's nest. She needed to summon him, to see his face, to forget his face, no longer to see his soldier's uniform, to picture him as pale, refined, handsome (which he was in his way, but differently), to dress this shade in black, to thrust him onstage into plots she had dreamed up the previous night.

Beyond that, all she required of this stand-in was that he listen to her practicing and turn the pages of her music. One day he missed the brisk movement of her chin, their agreed signal. She stopped playing, saw him sitting up very straight on the chair beside her, his eyes tightly shut, as if seized by a bout of pain.

"Don't you feel well?" she asked him anxiously, touching his hand. He opened his eyes and murmured, "No, no, it's all right…" staring intently at the fingers lightly resting on his hand. After a moment of embarrassment she exclaimed, "Hey, I've got a great idea! I'm going to teach you to play a little yourself. Oh, yes, you can. It's as easy as anything. It's just a children's song."

The tune was called "The Little Tin Soldier." Alexe'i turned out to be a clumsy pupil of modest abilities. Stella often found herself obliged to tug at his stiff fingers, so as to guide them toward the right keys.

Thanks to "The Little Tin Soldier" she was able to elaborate her scenarios. The man she had at her beck and call could be scolded, flattered, sweetly tormented, complimented on an arpeggio well played, comforted after a mistake. She was discovering one of the most intensely appealing aspects of love, that of making oneself obeyed, manipulating the other person and depriving him of his liberty with his own fervent consent.

This man's silence, as he drank his tea peacefully while waiting for the general, no longer satisfied her. Now she wanted to make him talk, make him tell her about his life, about the war, to marvel or be jealous as she listened to his tales.

One day, under insistent questioning, he tried to venture into this wartime past but felt at a complete loss confronting memories in which everything led to partings, solitude, death. He guessed that what she was expecting from him was a love story set against the backdrop of war, but his memory was struggling among the bodies of mutilated men, among the bodies of women possessed in haste and vanished beyond recall. All he was left with was the smell of iodine on a woman's hands, but how could he talk about that, especially to this young girl, as she listened to him wide-eyed? Talk about himself? But who was he? That soldier washing in a pool of water after a bout of hand-to-hand combat, and the water turning red, with his own blood and the blood of those he had just killed? Or that youth shaking a dead man to get his boot off him? Or else that other one, watching at a dusty window, in another life, in a forbidden past? No, what was most real in all those years was the day he lost consciousness in the cemetery, when he was as good as dead and when all there was between him and the world was that unsteady line: an unknown woman sleeping beside him and giving him her warmth…

Under pressure from her questions, he began talking about the squirrel: a halt on the march, a fine spring day, the little animal flying from tree to tree. Suddenly he remembered how the story concluded, broke off, became confused, and invented a vague happy ending. Stella gave him a sulky smile. "Papa told me you fought like a hero… And you tell me about a squirrel! Pooh."

He fell silent, remembering the smooth warmth of the fur in the palm of his hand. Everything that had happened after that, he now realized, was linked to the killing of that animal: his assignment with the general, very probably his survival, his coming to Moscow, and his meeting with this young Stella who was now engaged in teasing him. She must have guessed that this man, whom she thought she had tamed, domesticated, had unspeakable deeds, shameful actions, and sorrows hidden away in his life, as in an underground cave. And the fact that his demeanor in front of her was embarrassed and tongue-tied gave him a childish air.

"I didn't mean to offend you. Not at ah. It was very amusing, the squirrel," she said, and put her hand on his, which still held the cup of cold tea. The moment lasted. Outside the window the dusk became tinged with deep blue. The fronds of hoarfrost writhed across the windowpane. Somewhere at the end of the corridor, the general's voice could be heard growling into the telephone. She shook his hand gently, as if to rouse him: "Now, let's practice our 'Little Tin Soldier,' shall we?"

During those weeks of great frosts she did not herself notice at what moment her make-believe story became confused with reality. Perhaps it was the evening when she proposed that they use first names. Or later, when they chanced to meet outside the entrance to the apartment building: he had just driven the general home, she was returning from her music lesson. With a resolute step she climbed in beside him, and they went for a drive along the streets of Moscow, in a slow progress through the white flurries.

Or perhaps it was that other night. Her parents, in Kiev for the birthday of an old fellow soldier of the general's, decided to stay there for one more day and asked Stella to warn the driver. Having waited in vain for them at the station, Alexe'i rang the bell at the apartment, and she told a lie: her father, she said, was going to telephone late that night… Alexe'i saw that she was wearing a pale linen dress, a summer frock, and had piled her curls high in a style that gave her a formal look. Her cheeks were burning, as if with a fever.

Heroically, she made a show of nonchalance, inviting him into the reception room, offering him dinner ("They may not telephone till one in the morning. There's no point in our dying of hunger"), opening a bottle of wine. Beneath the very thin fabric of her dress her body was shaking; her movements betrayed an ill-controlled brusqueness that she tried to pass off as casual bravado. Alexe'i realized that everything in this improvised soirée had been so well, so feverishly well, prepared that only a walk-on part was left to him. The whole scenario could have been acted out without him, in Stella's daydreams.

But he was there and understood that at any minute now his turn would come to play the part, to speak the lines, to step into a role that was at once obvious and absurd.

He stooped to pick up first a napkin, then a piece of bread she had dropped in her excitement; he poured wine, in obedience to a theatrically imperious wave of her hand, but most of all, taking advantage of his ghostly state, he was observing this girl, who appeared almost undressed in her summer frock. Her bare arms, with their bluish veins that looked as if they had been drawn on with schoolboy's ink, her neck, pink with excitement, her slender waist, and when she turned toward the stove, the delicate contours of her shoulder blades. He listened to her voice as it grew increasingly resonant and elated, sensing that the moment was approaching when he would have to embrace these shoulders, feel the delicacy of the shoulder blades beneath his hands.

He did not desire her. Or rather, it was quite another desire. For this night with her he would have been ready to… He saw himself reliving the war years and had the feeling that he would have gone through them all again for this one evening. But what was being acted out that night was intended for someone other than himself.

She had already drunk three glasses and was eyeing him in a brazen manner, at once aggressive and vulnerable, that he found painful. "Perhaps we should ring them now," he suggested, glancing at the clock. "No," she cut in, "it's still much too early!" Clapping her hands together, she declaimed in the tones of a circus ringmaster: "And now, our musical program!"