"My concert!" he breathed, sitting up suddenly. A beautiful moth was fluttering against the rear window, its wings covered in fine, mysterious calligraphy, leaving traces of pollen on the glass. And it was thus, as if through the thickness of the glass, that he pictured the hall, the lights on the stage, a young man walking toward the piano. For a moment, in a poignant fantasy, he watched the continuation of that life somewhere without him.

In the morning he left the forest on foot. And looked back several times: the sun, still low, filled the interior of the abandoned car with a golden light. It looked as if it had been left there by a family who had spread out among the trees to gather wild strawberries.

His aunt listened to him in silence, let him talk for a long time, repeating himself. She sensed that this was how he would get used to his new life. His uncle returned from the town about noon and was equally taciturn. Weeks later, Alexe'i would guess that behind this silent acceptance of his coming, and the danger of his coming, there doubtless lay an unspoken desire to make him understand: Now look, we're plain country folk. We welcome you with open arms. We don't have grudges against our own kin, even though they forgot all about us. But at the time all he needed was to be able to tell them his story, to win approval, to have confirmed to him that, in any event, even if he had stayed in Moscow, he could not have done anything for his parents. He also realized that, in a few swift moves, they were already preparing for his clandestine existence in that house. Their economy with words and actions reminded him that the epidemic of fear his own family had known in 1937 had made its assault on these people much earlier, at the end of the 1920s, from the time when collectivization began in that part of the world. They had lost their two children in the famine that followed it, and had hidden fugitives before.