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.