He was fourteen. Fantastic excitement as he felt the sidewalk shuddering after each explosion! Those were the years of happiness. Nineteen-thirty-four, 1935, 1936… Then suddenly this long quarantine descends, as it would during an epidemic. The city grows oppressive around their family. One evening, going up the stairs, he hears the whispering of a man one floor above him, climbing laboriously, absorbed in an almost inaudible but frenzied soliloquy. "No, no, you can't accuse me… What proof do you have? What proof?" Alexeï hears these snatches, slows down, embarrassed to be eavesdropping like this, and suddenly recognizes his own father. This little old man muttering away is his father!… The quarantine lasts. Certain words can no longer be spoken. The Dictionary of the Theater, published by his father at the beginning of the 1930s, is withdrawn from all libraries. Certain names that he included in it have to disappear, since the people who bore these names have recently disappeared. In class Alexeï notices rapid chess moves being made: his fellow pupils change places so as not to sit next to him. "They're castling," he thinks bitterly. At the school gates they move away from him, bobbing and weaving as they take off, like skiers on a descent strewn with obstacles. At the conservatory it seems as if the people he passes have all become shortsighted; they squint, to avoid catching his eye. Their faces remind him of those masks he once saw in a history book, terrifying masks with long noses, with which the inhabitants of cities invaded by the plague used to rig themselves out. His friends acknowledge his greetings, but only obliquely, furtively, turning their heads away, and this evasive action – half in profile, half face-to-face – stretches their noses into the long incurved stings of insects. They stammer out excuses for making off and gasp, as if they were inhaling the aromatic herbs that used to be stuffed into those antiplague masks… During the winter of 1939, he overhears his parents deliberating in secret, then, in the middle of the night, sees them putting their plan into execution.