Taken aback, Alexe'i remained perplexed for a moment, not believing his ears, unable even to grasp what he had just heard. Then he rushed after the old man, caught up with him near a crossroads. But before he could ask him for an explanation, the neighbor, still avoiding his eye, whispered, "Don't go back. Run for it. Things are bad over there." And, with the red light against him, the old man scuttled across in front of a car, which honked its horn. Alexeï did not follow him. In the face turned away from him he had just caught sight of the long-nosed mask.
Pulling himself together, he realized to what extent the old man's words were absurd. "Things are bad over there." Sheer madness. An accident? An illness? He thought of his parents. But then why not say so clearly?
He hesitated, then, instead of going directly into the courtyard, walked around the whole block of dwellings, went up into the building where the windows in the staircase well had a view across to the façade of their house. On the top landing there were no apartments, just the exit leading out under the roofs. He knew this observation post, as it was where he had smoked his first cigarette. There was even a lingering presence of that vaguely criminal feeling. Through a narrow semicircular window he could see the whole courtyard, the bench where the retired folk read their newspapers or played chess, and, if he pressed his brow against the panes of glass, he could also make out the windows to his parents' bedroom and the kitchen. And as he peered across, the taste of the first puffs of tobacco came floating back.
He spent a long time with his face pressed to the glass. The façade of the building was familiar to him down to the smallest cornice, down to the designs on the curtains at the windows. The foliage of a linden tree that rose almost to the level of their apartment hung there, motionless in the dull heat of the evening, as if waiting for a sign. For a May evening there were surprisingly few people in the courtyard. Those who crossed it slipped along soundlessly and disappeared swiftly into the drowsiness of the alleys. Even the stairwell remained silent; no one seemed to be entering or leaving. The only noise: the creaking of a little bicycle on which a child was pedaling tirelessly around a bed of campanulas. At one point he stopped, looked up. Alexei shivered, moved away from the window. It felt as if the boy were directing a precise, hard gaze at him, an adult's gaze. A sly little adult on his bicycle.
The creaking of the wheels began again. Alexe'i decided his fear was stupid. Just as stupid as this waiting behind a dusty pane of glass, just as stupid as the old chess player's warning: he must have mistaken him for someone else.
He had an impulse to go down quickly, to return home, to get there ahead of his fear. "Stage fright," he laughed to himself nervously under his breath, and began racing down the stairs. But two floors below he stopped. A couple had just come in and were beginning to climb, forcing him to retreat to his refuge. He studied the windows of the apartment once more, and those of their neighbors on the floor below. Suddenly he realized what was keeping him here…
During the years of the terror that apartment had witnessed three departures. First of all they had taken away the aircraft manufacturer and his family. Rumor in the courtyard had it that his assistant had denounced him to have his job and this apartment. He had moved in there with his family, had just had time to buy new furniture for the dining room and to feel they were a permanent fixture. Six months later, the night when their turn came, people heard the wailing of their child, still half asleep, crying out for its favorite doll, which in the haste of the arrest no one had thought to take. A week later a man moved in who wore the uniform of the Commissariat for State Security. When he passed his neighbors on the staircase, he stopped and stared at them obstinately, waiting for them to greet him. And his son looked like a young boar. In any event, it was with that animal's brutish violence that he had one day pushed Alexei up against the wall and muttered between clenched teeth, "So, rotten intelligentsia. Still banging away on your stinking little piano, are you? Well, just you wait. One day I'm going to take a hammer and nail down the lid on your music!" Alexe'i had said nothing about it to his parents. And in fact, shortly after that, toward the end of 1938, the apartment was emptied once again…
He pressed his forehead against the glass. The curtains in his parents' apartment seemed to be moving. No, nothing. His mind went back to that young boar-man, his bulging face, his scorn. And especially to the threat, quite fanciful, of course, but one that had often seemed very real: his piano, its lid nailed down with great carpenter's nails. In fact, if he was still watching at this cobweb-covered window now, it was because of that young boar. Thanks to the man's disappearance one December night, he had realized no one was safe. Not even the victors. Not even those who had fought valiantly against the enemies of the people. Not even these fighters' children.
At this moment he saw the chess player crossing the courtyard with a measured tread. The old man raised his arm in greeting to a woman watering the flowers at her window, then disappeared through an entrance door. The dusk was already making it impossible to see the expressions on people's faces. And, as if in response to this perception, the light came on, lending a glow of color to his parents' bedroom curtains. A shadow appeared, very familiar. He was sure it was his mother. He even caught sight of a hand, her hand, of course, tugging at the curtains. "I'm a total jerk and the worst kind of coward," he said to himself, feeling a marvelous sense of relief in his chest. His gaze now slipped smoothly along the rows of windows that were beginning to light up, peaceful, almost sleep-inducing, in the calm of a May evening. Down below, in the building where he had taken refuge, a door slammed. The click of a lock, voices, silence. He decided to wait for one more minute, but this was now merely to avoid inquisitive glances. "And besides, I've got my concert on Saturday," a confident voice affirmed within him. This argument seemed to banish once and for all the danger invented by the old madman he had passed on the boulevards. "I'll go home. I should be able to practice for an hour before the neighbors start raising hell."
He took one last look at the apartment building, and it was with this glance, already careless and wearied by the tension, that through the dimness of their kitchen window he saw a uniformed officer staring down at the courtyard.
It seemed to him as if the staircase would never come to an end. Rounding corner after corner in a frenzied gallop, he followed the zigzags of the handrails that continued interminably, as if by an optical illusion. In the streets, then in the corridors of the subway, and at the station, he still felt as if he were thrusting downward in the murky spiral of that stairwell, dodging past doors that threatened to open at any moment. And his eyes carried with them the vision of a window at which the silhouette of a uniformed man wearing a shoulder belt stood out clearly. He was not running, he was falling.
His fall came to a halt at the ticket windows. The woman at the ticket counter extracted a little pink sphere from a box of candies and popped it into her mouth. And even while her fingers were taking the money and handing over the change, her lips were moving, pressing the candy against her teeth. Alexe'i stared at her in blank amazement: so beyond the glass flap of the ticket window an almost magical world began, made up of this wonderful routine of candies and yawning smiles. A world from which he had just been cast out.
He was so struck by the way this life continued serenely without him that he was not surprised at what happened in Bor at the dacha. Lera's father, the professor, generally cloistered in his study and deaf to all shouting and bells ringing, on this occasion opened the door to him almost immediately. At eleven o'clock at night. Nor did Alexei find it surprising that the old man hardly listened to him, in his haste to offer him a meal that seemed to be already waiting on the kitchen table. Furthermore, in response to his attempts to explain what was happening to his parents, all the professor could say was: "Eat up, eat up! Then try to get some sleep. You'll see things more clearly in the morning." He repeated this wise saying abstractedly several times, as if he were reaching the end of a train of thought that the young man's visit had interrupted.