He quickened his step and began singing an operatic aria from his mother's repertoire, a love song replete with heady, smoldering key changes. She heard him through the door and, smiling, came to open it.

Two days before the concert he went back to the factory's house of culture for the final rehearsal – "the dress rehearsal," as he had announced it to his parents during lunch. He worked all afternoon, played through the entire program, and then stopped, remembering his mother's advice: sometimes by dint of rehearsing you can lose the intimate thrill of novelty, the tiny element of miracle or conjuring trick that art cannot do without. "You know, it's like stage fright," she added. "If you don't have it at all, it's a bad sign." On the way home he was thinking about this beneficial fear, the shiver that spurs one on. It had been lacking that time, during the rehearsal. "Yes, but playing in a steam bath like that…," he excused himself. It was a heavy, hot, milky day. A day with no color, no life in it. "No stage fright in it," he said to himself, smiling. His mother had also told him about young actresses who claimed they never had stage fright, and to whom Sarah Bernhardt, ironically indulgent, would promise: "Wait a while. With talent, it will come."

Even beneath the greenery of the boulevards the muggy torpor hung there, stagnating, muffling sounds, swathing the trees, the benches, the lampposts, in a gray light, that of a day already lived through once before, into which one seems to have stumbled by mistake. Alexe'i was leaving the main avenue to take a shortcut when all of a sudden a figure he instantly recognized emerged from a row of trees: a neighbor of theirs, a retired man who could often be seen sitting in the courtyard, bent over a chessboard. Just now he was advancing with a hurried and oddly mechanical gait, coming straight toward him, and yet seeming not to have noticed him. Alexe'i was already preparing to greet him, to shake his hand, but without looking at him, without slowing down, the man walked straight past. At the very last moment of this abortive encounter, however, the old man's lips moved slightly. Very softly but quite distinctly, he breathed, "Don't go home." And he walked on faster, turning off into a narrow side street.