He moved away from the Kremlin now, diving in under the rain-bowed branches along the boulevards. The business with the violin, the nocturnal terror, his years of loneliness as a plague victim, still came back to him from time to time, but mainly to give a keen edge to the happiness he was now enjoying. The whispering of his parents in the night, the acrid smell of burning varnish, this was the only residue of those three black years, 1937, '38, '39. Trifling matters beside the many varied pleasures that had filled his life since then. Why, just the wet shirt clinging to his chest and the simple delight he took in the feel of his young, supple, muscular body banished all the anguish of those epidemic years. But above all his concert, in a week's time, and his parents, whom he pictured seated at the back of the hall (he had fiercely negotiated their incognito attendance) – and, in the front row, one of those girls with whom, on New Year's Eve, he had danced to "Velvet Glances." Lera.
He was again reminded of the image of a decal. The whole world bore a resemblance to this trick with colors: all you had to do was to peel back a thin, grayish membrane of unhappy memories, and joy shone forth. Just as, at the beginning of May, Lera's nakedness had shone forth from beneath that brown dress they had torn off together in the haste of still-secret kisses, their ears cocked toward the sounds in the corridor of the dacha: her father, an elderly physicist, was working on the veranda, and from time to time would call for a cup of tea or a cushion. Hers was a very wholesome nakedness, one of those bodies such as could be seen at that time, marching along dressed in flimsy sports shirts in parades to the glory of youth. What Lera said was also very wholesome. She talked about a family, the apartment they would live in, children. Alexe'i sensed that this marriage would at last make him just like the others, banishing the figure of that youth secretly listening to the notes of the violin strings consumed in the fire. His own dreams, if the truth be told, were less of that young family nest and more of his father's car, the broad, black Emka, as comfortable as a luxury cabin on an ocean liner, which he already knew how to drive. To put that frightened adolescent behind him once and for all, it sufficed for him to picture that car, himself, Lera, and the blue line of the forest on the horizon.
His thoughts slid on to the days spent at the dacha, in that village with the melodious name of Bor. To the peeling back of the decal as that body emerges from the schoolgirl's dress and abandons itself to the boldest of caresses, to a carnal struggle, to that laughing violence from which they both emerge breathless, their vision blurred by tears of pent-up desire. At the last moment the young body shies away, closing in on itself like a shellfish over its virginity. And this maneuver pleases Alexeï. In her resistance he reads a commitment to future fidelity, the promise of a responsible and sensible young woman. Only once does doubt arise. He wakes up in a sunlit room after a brief sleep and through his eyelashes sees Lera, already up, at the door. She turns and, believing he is still asleep, throws a glance at him that makes his blood run cold. It reminds him of the looks the long-nosed masks used to give him. To banish this resemblance, he leaps up, catches Lera on the threshold, and drags her back toward the bed in a battle that is a mixture of laughter, love bites, and attempts to get free. When she finally manages to escape, he feels not the exhilaration of happiness but a sudden weariness, as at the end of a drama he has been obliged to act out. And he senses that this female body, simultaneously offered and forbidden, this smooth, full body, belongs to a life that will never be his. Oh, yes, it will, he corrects himself at once; he will marry Lera, and their life will be made of the same stuff as this spring afternoon. One thing, though; he must forget the melody of the violin strings snapping in the fire. The life they are to lead will have the ring of music composed for a parade in a sports stadium. He remembers how one day he tried to tell Lera about those notes escaping from the strings as they burned. She cut him off with precisely this piece of enthusiastic advice: "And what if you wrote a march for sports parades?"
In the courtyard in front of the apartment building he could not avoid a brief stab of anxiety: "The Battleship game!" One day during the years of the terror that was how all the windows in this façade had appeared to him, with those belonging to their own apartment right in the middle: squares on a sheet of paper struck through by an invisible – unforeseeable! – hand, as it hurled the occupants into a black car that arrived in the wee hours and drove off again with its prey. Next morning they would learn that this or that apartment was now empty, "hit and sunk."
His gaze slid along to those three windows, three squares untouched amid so many vessels sunk. The old fear was gone. His present happiness was too intense to leave room for it. Alexe'i only regretted one thing: a very important phase of his life had been surgically removed by those accursed years, one that he would have found hard to define. The time of youth's first flush, an age of dreaming and exaltation, when one poeticizes woman, making a divinity of her inaccessible flesh, living in wild anticipation of the miracle of love. None of all that for him. He had the impression that, in a sudden leap, he had been catapulted from childhood, from that sidewalk shaking with the destruction of the dynamited cathedral, right over the years of terror into an already adult life, to face the nakedness of the beautiful, muscular body Lera offered him almost in its entirety, reserving that little "almost" for marriage.
He went up the stairs, and on each landing noted the number of departures and arrivals that had occurred, especially when the Battleship game was at its height in 1937, '38, '39. People dragged from their sleep, experiencing their departure as a dream that skidded into horror. There was the apartment beneath their own: a family a little girl who had met him in the street only a few days before their nocturnal departure and talked with him about a new flavor of ice cream they were selling on the boulevards…
He quickened his step and began singing an operatic aria from his mother's repertoire, a love song replete with heady, smoldering key changes. She heard him through the door and, smiling, came to open it.
Two days before the concert he went back to the factory's house of culture for the final rehearsal – "the dress rehearsal," as he had announced it to his parents during lunch. He worked all afternoon, played through the entire program, and then stopped, remembering his mother's advice: sometimes by dint of rehearsing you can lose the intimate thrill of novelty, the tiny element of miracle or conjuring trick that art cannot do without. "You know, it's like stage fright," she added. "If you don't have it at all, it's a bad sign." On the way home he was thinking about this beneficial fear, the shiver that spurs one on. It had been lacking that time, during the rehearsal. "Yes, but playing in a steam bath like that…," he excused himself. It was a heavy, hot, milky day. A day with no color, no life in it. "No stage fright in it," he said to himself, smiling. His mother had also told him about young actresses who claimed they never had stage fright, and to whom Sarah Bernhardt, ironically indulgent, would promise: "Wait a while. With talent, it will come."
Even beneath the greenery of the boulevards the muggy torpor hung there, stagnating, muffling sounds, swathing the trees, the benches, the lampposts, in a gray light, that of a day already lived through once before, into which one seems to have stumbled by mistake. Alexe'i was leaving the main avenue to take a shortcut when all of a sudden a figure he instantly recognized emerged from a row of trees: a neighbor of theirs, a retired man who could often be seen sitting in the courtyard, bent over a chessboard. Just now he was advancing with a hurried and oddly mechanical gait, coming straight toward him, and yet seeming not to have noticed him. Alexe'i was already preparing to greet him, to shake his hand, but without looking at him, without slowing down, the man walked straight past. At the very last moment of this abortive encounter, however, the old man's lips moved slightly. Very softly but quite distinctly, he breathed, "Don't go home." And he walked on faster, turning off into a narrow side street.