She pictured how he would learn about the life of his grandfather, Ivan, and her own life. What had seemed to them like the disastrous collapse of all their plans would pass into his childish mind like a fairy tale, a kind of family legend: his heroic grandfather, who had suffered for the truth in his old age; his mother who had refused to live in Moscow, because the life they lead there is noisy, and dangerous even, on account of the crazy cars.

"For the moment I'll say nothing to my father," she thought. "After the court case, when he's well again, I'll tell him everything."

Vitaly Ivanovich listened to Olya without interrupting. His silence slightly disconcerted her. She spoke calmly, striving to be logical and convincing. Vitaly Ivanovich kneaded his face with his hand, nodding his head and from time to time threw her a twinkling and somewhat distant glance. Olya knew that from her very first words he had grasped everything she was about to tell him and was now patiently waiting for the conclusion of her speech. She uttered her final words in louder and more resolute tones: "You know, Vitaly Ivanovich, maybe this is my destiny. In the end we each have our cross to bear. For some it's Moscow for others, Borissov…"

Olya thought he would be in a hurry to dissuade her, and start to reason with her in an amiable and friendly manner: "Listen, this is just a whim, you'll get over it," or, alternatively, remind her in a dry voice of her duty and her responsibilities. But he continued rubbing his face, nodded, and said nothing. It was only when he heard her final words that he murmured: "Yes, yes, destiny… destiny…" Then, lifting up his face with its reddened cheekbones, he said: "It's been a crazy night, the telephone didn't stop ringing. I'm finding it hard to keep my eyes open. As soon as I sit down I fall asleep. I'm telling you this because, as you so aptly pointed out just now, we each have our cross to bear."

He smiled, weary and absent-minded. "When I was a student, you know, I studied philosophy at first; it was only later I changed to law. I was, so to speak, looking for myself. It always seemed to me that something didn't quite hang together, that it wasn't… When I embarked on philosophy I thought I should be immersed at once in the unfathomable mysteries of existence. Very well, I open Aristotle and he argues as follows: Why – excuse me – does the urine of a man who's eaten onions smell of onion? And the pinnacle of all philosophical thought was Brezhnev's speech to the last historic Party Plenum. When you're young all that's very painful! Now, of course, it's ridiculous even to think about it. We had a professor, you know, a kind of last of the Mohicans, one of the remaining ones who had qualified at St. Petersburg University. And been in the camps under Stalin, of course. Young people love professors like this. So I ran to him.

"'Here's how it is, Igor Valerianovich. I'm in the middle of an intellectual crisis, a crisis as profound as that of bourgeois philosophy itself. Suppose I do law studies. I qualify and I set out to crush the Rostov mafia as an investigating magistrate, braving the gangsters' bullets…'

"And then, of course, I talk to him about destiny, about vocation, about the cross I have to bear. And this old philosopher went on listening and then said to me: 'And you, distinguished young man, do you know the parable of the human cross?'

" 'No,' I told him. 'Never heard of it.'

" 'Well, listen. A man was bearing his heavy cross. He bore it and bore it and in the end he started cursing God. Too heavy, this cross. It's cutting into his neck, crushing him, bowing him low over the earth. He can't stand it any longer. God heard his lamentations and took pity on him.'

" 'Right,' he told him. 'Follow me, unhappy man.' He leads him to a vast pile of crosses.

" 'Behold. All these are human destinies, you see. Cast aside your own cross and choose another. Perhaps you'll find a lighter one.'

"The man is overjoyed and begins trying them out. He puts one of them on his shoulder. 'No, too heavy. Heavier than mine.' And he takes up another one. He spends the whole day running around the mountain of crosses and doesn't manage to choose one. Heavy are the crosses humans bear. Finally, toward evening, he finds one.

" 'Here,' he says. 'This one is lighter than the rest. It's not a cross, it's a real delight.'

"And God smiles. 'But that's your old cross, the one you cast aside this morning…'

"And that's the story. I approve of the professor myself, of course, and in my heart of hearts I think, like Goethe, as perhaps you do now: 'All theory's gray, my friend, and green and golden is the tree of life.' Ah, well. But in practical terms this is what we'll do, Olya. When is your vacation due? In October? We'll bring it forward to July. You'll have the time you need for reflection. To choose a lighter cross…"

Ivan's case came up at the beginning of July in the ugly little court building for the area, from which the Moskva River and the huge dockside warehouses could be seen. It was an old building on two floors, the staircases were worn and the courtrooms full of dust. In the dark corridor there was a whole row of doors, padded with black imitation leather. When one of them opened there was a glimpse of dark shelves piled high with thick files, a desk covered in papers, and, in the corner, a kettle on an electric burner. Out in the noisy, sun-drenched streets it was difficult to imagine that just two steps away from there such a place could exist, drab and silent, with people making tea on electric burner in this somnolent semi-darkness.

At one o'clock in the afternoon Ivan was led into one of the courtrooms where shaky chairs were set out in untidy rows. On a little platform stood the desk for the judge and the assessors; fastened to the front of this desk was the emblem of the Soviet Union. Behind a wooden rail could be seen the bench for the accused. The rail had been marked by hundreds of hands: scratches, crosses, dates, initials… On each side of the judge's desk stood the rather smaller tables for the prosecutor and the defense lawyer.

At one o'clock in the afternoon Ivan walked into this courtroom escorted by two militiamen: three hours later he was carried out from it, dead.

The window in the courtroom was half open but no coolness could be felt. The sun shone, hot and un-moving. Swaying gently, the fluffy seeds from the poplar trees floated in through the windows.

During those three hours facts had been produced apparently connected with the trial but at the same time infinitely remote from it. There were a lot of people. Everyone wanted to know all the details. The air in the courtroom was heavy and stifling. Some people fanned themselves with newspapers; others, going through clumsy contortions, took off their jackets, causing the chairs to creak. Two women in the back row talked the whole time, listening neither to Ivan's replies nor to the judge, nor to the witnesses. It was hard to understand why they had come there to waste their time in a Turkish bath like that.

The voices rang out dully, as if muffled by the lightly fluttering poplar down. One of the women assessors was allergic to these fluffy flakes. She was constantly blowing her nose, blinking her red eyes and thinking only one thing: let it end as quickly as possible! All her colleagues thought the same. The sun made people sleepy. Most of them were already getting ready to go on vacation, gleefully counting the days: just another week and then…

The judge, also a woman, had done too much sunbathing at her dacha the previous Sunday, and beneath her severe suit she now felt a stinging pain on her shoulders. She, too, wanted to make an end of these proceedings, pronounce sentence – a year's suspended sentence, she thought – and, as soon as possible, on her return home, anoint her shoulders with soothing cream. That was the advice of the assessor who was suffering from the poplar down. "Perhaps it's not an allergy but flu," the judge thought. "You sometimes get it in summer."