They burn his father's old violin in the kitchen stove. On two or three occasions Marshal Tukhachevsky, a friend of the family and a good violinist, had played on it for their guests after dinner. He was executed in 1937, and the little violin with its cracked varnish became a terrible piece of incriminating evidence… That night they burn it, fearing arrest and interrogation. In his panic his father forgets to loosen the strings, and lurking behind the half-open door of his bedroom, Alexei hears the swift arpeggio of the strings snapping in the fire… After that night they begin to breathe more freely. One of his father's plays is staged again. Still very occasionally, his mother's name reappears on posters. During 1940 an increasing number of people look Alexe'i straight in the eye. As if thanks to some kind of ophthalmic miracle cure. He celebrates the new year in the company of these phony myopics. One of the tangos they dance to that night is called "Velvet Glances." After the years of fear and humiliation, he has a shrewd idea what this velvety languor and the glances of the girls he holds in his arms are really worth. But he is only twenty-one and has a dizzying backlog of tangos, embraces, and kisses to catch up on. And he is fiercely determined to catch up on it, even if it were to mean forgetting that night, the smell of burning varnish, and the brief moaning of the strings in the flames.

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.