He was so struck by the way this life continued serenely without him that he was not surprised at what happened in Bor at the dacha. Lera's father, the professor, generally cloistered in his study and deaf to all shouting and bells ringing, on this occasion opened the door to him almost immediately. At eleven o'clock at night. Nor did Alexei find it surprising that the old man hardly listened to him, in his haste to offer him a meal that seemed to be already waiting on the kitchen table. Furthermore, in response to his attempts to explain what was happening to his parents, all the professor could say was: "Eat up, eat up! Then try to get some sleep. You'll see things more clearly in the morning." He repeated this wise saying abstractedly several times, as if he were reaching the end of a train of thought that the young man's visit had interrupted.

Strangely enough, despite the fever that shook him, Alexe'i sank rapidly into a brief, deep sleep. He wanted to hide himself in it, hoping to wake up on the other side of the ticket window behind which that young woman had been sucking a candy. He had a dream in which the window was located very low, almost on the ground. This basement window had taken the place of the ticket woman's, and you had to stoop to catch sight of the face at it: Lera's face. But an ambiguous Lera, revealed in an unmentionable activity. The old chess player was there too, seated on a rain-soaked bench. Alexe'i was playing with him, setting down the pieces not on a chessboard but on the pages of an anatomical atlas, in which the pictures were obscurely connected with their game. And his sleep was permeated by a fear of not grasping these connections, though they were obvious to the old man. Finally there was the figure of his mother, reciting lines of verse and suddenly singing them in a voice so shrill and desperate that he awoke with a stifled cry in his throat.