A shadow appeared, very familiar. He was sure it was his mother. He even caught sight of a hand, her hand, of course, tugging at the curtains. "I'm a total jerk and the worst kind of coward," he said to himself, feeling a marvelous sense of relief in his chest. His gaze now slipped smoothly along the rows of windows that were beginning to light up, peaceful, almost sleep-inducing, in the calm of a May evening. Down below, in the building where he had taken refuge, a door slammed. The click of a lock, voices, silence. He decided to wait for one more minute, but this was now merely to avoid inquisitive glances. "And besides, I've got my concert on Saturday," a confident voice affirmed within him. This argument seemed to banish once and for all the danger invented by the old madman he had passed on the boulevards. "I'll go home. I should be able to practice for an hour before the neighbors start raising hell."

He took one last look at the apartment building, and it was with this glance, already careless and wearied by the tension, that through the dimness of their kitchen window he saw a uniformed officer staring down at the courtyard.

It seemed to him as if the staircase would never come to an end. Rounding corner after corner in a frenzied gallop, he followed the zigzags of the handrails that continued interminably, as if by an optical illusion. In the streets, then in the corridors of the subway, and at the station, he still felt as if he were thrusting downward in the murky spiral of that stairwell, dodging past doors that threatened to open at any moment. And his eyes carried with them the vision of a window at which the silhouette of a uniformed man wearing a shoulder belt stood out clearly. He was not running, he was falling.

His fall came to a halt at the ticket windows. The woman at the ticket counter extracted a little pink sphere from a box of candies and popped it into her mouth. And even while her fingers were taking the money and handing over the change, her lips were moving, pressing the candy against her teeth. Alexe'i stared at her in blank amazement: so beyond the glass flap of the ticket window an almost magical world began, made up of this wonderful routine of candies and yawning smiles. A world from which he had just been cast out.