His thoughts slid on to the days spent at the dacha, in that village with the melodious name of Bor. To the peeling back of the decal as that body emerges from the schoolgirl's dress and abandons itself to the boldest of caresses, to a carnal struggle, to that laughing violence from which they both emerge breathless, their vision blurred by tears of pent-up desire. At the last moment the young body shies away, closing in on itself like a shellfish over its virginity. And this maneuver pleases Alexeï. In her resistance he reads a commitment to future fidelity, the promise of a responsible and sensible young woman. Only once does doubt arise. He wakes up in a sunlit room after a brief sleep and through his eyelashes sees Lera, already up, at the door. She turns and, believing he is still asleep, throws a glance at him that makes his blood run cold. It reminds him of the looks the long-nosed masks used to give him. To banish this resemblance, he leaps up, catches Lera on the threshold, and drags her back toward the bed in a battle that is a mixture of laughter, love bites, and attempts to get free. When she finally manages to escape, he feels not the exhilaration of happiness but a sudden weariness, as at the end of a drama he has been obliged to act out. And he senses that this female body, simultaneously offered and forbidden, this smooth, full body, belongs to a life that will never be his. Oh, yes, it will, he corrects himself at once; he will marry Lera, and their life will be made of the same stuff as this spring afternoon. One thing, though; he must forget the melody of the violin strings snapping in the fire. The life they are to lead will have the ring of music composed for a parade in a sports stadium. He remembers how one day he tried to tell Lera about those notes escaping from the strings as they burned. She cut him off with precisely this piece of enthusiastic advice: "And what if you wrote a march for sports parades?"

In the courtyard in front of the apartment building he could not avoid a brief stab of anxiety: "The Battleship game!" One day during the years of the terror that was how all the windows in this façade had appeared to him, with those belonging to their own apartment right in the middle: squares on a sheet of paper struck through by an invisible – unforeseeable!