The façade of the building was familiar to him down to the smallest cornice, down to the designs on the curtains at the windows. The foliage of a linden tree that rose almost to the level of their apartment hung there, motionless in the dull heat of the evening, as if waiting for a sign. For a May evening there were surprisingly few people in the courtyard. Those who crossed it slipped along soundlessly and disappeared swiftly into the drowsiness of the alleys. Even the stairwell remained silent; no one seemed to be entering or leaving. The only noise: the creaking of a little bicycle on which a child was pedaling tirelessly around a bed of campanulas. At one point he stopped, looked up. Alexei shivered, moved away from the window. It felt as if the boy were directing a precise, hard gaze at him, an adult's gaze. A sly little adult on his bicycle.

The creaking of the wheels began again. Alexe'i decided his fear was stupid. Just as stupid as this waiting behind a dusty pane of glass, just as stupid as the old chess player's warning: he must have mistaken him for someone else.

He had an impulse to go down quickly, to return home, to get there ahead of his fear. "Stage fright," he laughed to himself nervously under his breath, and began racing down the stairs. But two floors below he stopped. A couple had just come in and were beginning to climb, forcing him to retreat to his refuge. He studied the windows of the apartment once more, and those of their neighbors on the floor below. Suddenly he realized what was keeping him here…

During the years of the terror that apartment had witnessed three departures. First of all they had taken away the aircraft manufacturer and his family. Rumor in the courtyard had it that his assistant had denounced him to have his job and this apartment. He had moved in there with his family, had just had time to buy new furniture for the dining room and to feel they were a permanent fixture. Six months later, the night when their turn came, people heard the wailing of their child, still half asleep, crying out for its favorite doll, which in the haste of the arrest no one had thought to take.