DURING THOSE FIRST WEEKS IN MOSCOW he often heard talk of amnestied prisoners who did not have the right to enter the big cities but could settle in the Urals, Siberia, Central Asia. He pictured his parents in one of these remote places and told himself that in time, by embarking on circumspect research, he might find them again. And that from now on, only his false identity risked jeopardizing such a reunion.

The general was promoted to an even higher rank and now worked at the Ministry of Defense. He had doubtless forgotten his promise to treat his driver like a son but still remained benevolent, and one October day when they arrived at his home, he even said, “Listen, come on up with me. I’ve got some paperwork to put together, it’s going to take some time…. No ifs or buts about it. I’m not going to have you freezing here in the car in weather like this.”

They went up. A silent, elderly housekeeper showed Alexeï into a little room beside the entrance hall and brought him a glass of tea. The room, half cloakroom, half storeroom, had a tiny window, outside which the flakes of the first snow were floating down. He immediately felt very much at ease in this quiet corner, as if the place signaled a homecoming at last. Ab-sentmindedly he watched the snowflakes slipping by: it was as if they were fluttering past on a day long ago, onto a forgotten city. The tea, too, had a flavor of old times. As did the silence of this vast apartment at nightfall. As did the invisible presence of the housekeeper, whom he heard sighing in the kitchen. And suddenly, muffled by the corridor, a few hesitant notes sounded. Then a whole melodious phrase. Then this music.

He left the room, took a few steps along the corridor, had no desire to go farther. What he saw was enough for him. A deep blue velvet dress, the glow of fair hair, a right hand he could see when it slipped along toward the high notes, the left hand, whose pressure he could guess at without seeing it. He remained motionless in the dim light of the corridor, his shoulder against the wall, conscious that the universe had just attained perfection. The snow outside the window, the mystery of this huge unknown apartment, this music. Above all, the imperfection of this music! For from time to time the hands came up against a combination of notes difficult to separate out, went back a little, regained their momentum. These deviations, he sensed, were essential to the plenitude of what had just been revealed. Impossible to add anything at all. Except, perhaps, the glance from the old housekeeper as she walked mutely along the corridor and gave him a brief look that seemed to him both understanding and bitter. Nothing else.

But these moments, which would have been enough for him, were extended and gave rise to further times spent waiting in the little room, then to the first meeting (‘Oh, so you must be … yes, Papa told us about you….”), and to other meetings, and to the beauty of the open, smiling face of this girl of seventeen, to the delicacy of that hand when they first touched (“Stella…. It was Mama who chose my name. … I think it sounds horribly silly with my patronymic, Vassilyevna, don’t you?”), to the conviction that the deep blue tone of the velvet dress was the key ingredient, at once overt and coded, of happiness. And that the other ingredients were the snowflakes outside the windows, the early dusk, and the notes whose hesitations occasionally hinted at the youthful fragility of the fingers.

He was living out this love in the past, drawn back toward the years of the great terror, when the long-nosed masks were everywhere he turned, those three years of his youth when he should have experienced exactly what was happening today: this encounter with a girl his own age, first love. He was twenty-seven now. But the girl at the piano made this question of age irrelevant, for he felt he was outside the ordinary current of days, in a parallel time, in which he could relive those three years spent amid the masks.

Sometimes he came to his senses, observed his life as if over the banister of a staircase, with a feeling of giddiness: so many living and dead people stood between him and the girl at the piano. He clenched his fists, the powerful, scarred fingers, remembered that these hands had killed, had learned to handle female flesh boldly — the flesh of that woman with a big cat’s yellow eyes, whom he had met at a friend’s birthday party, at the end of the summer, and had taken when she was half asleep, drunk, experiencing something akin to disgust for this big, indifferent, lazy body…. Remembering this, he told himself that it would have been better if he had stayed in the car, not accepted the generals invitation…. But in the little room where he drank his tea and which the general, a sailor in his youth, referred to as “the crows nest,” he forgot everything and blended into the swirling of the snow, the sound of the notes, and the anticipation of those footsteps whose rapid tread he knew, and that voice: “What are you doing here in the dark? Come….”

Stella would seat him beside her, begin to play, sometimes asking him to turn the pages of the music: “I’ll give you a signal, like this, with my chin.” He did her bidding, watched her face, pretending to look out for the signal, occasionally stole a glance at the music and rapidly turned his eyes away.

She found in him the stuff of dreams, easily molded by her young girl’s imagination. This Sergei’ Maltsev was someone sufficiently well defined: the native of a little village, a man of twenty-seven (which is to say almost an old man for her at seventeen), and with his brow furrowed by that horrible scar. So, a man who, to all appearances, was not the one she was secretly waiting for.

But on the other hand, he was sufficiently enigmatic: a man who had certainly made plenty of female conquests but who, according to Stella’s father, lived alone, somewhere in the snowbound streets in the outskirts of Moscow, a silent man, who often brought the general home as night was falling and disappeared into the same night, in driving rain or swirling snow. At moments like this he could easily be pictured in the guise of a mysterious stranger, whose face and life story she was constantly reshaping. Besides, had her father not one day told her that this driver had saved his life during the war?

Little by little she was caught in her own game. She needed this man who drank his tea in the crow’s nest. She needed to summon him, to see his face, to forget his face, no longer to see his soldier’s uniform, to picture him as pale, refined, handsome (which he was in his way, but differently), to dress this shade in black, to thrust him onstage into plots she had dreamed up the previous night.

Beyond that, all she required of this stand-in was that he listen to her practicing and turn the pages of her music. One day he missed the brisk movement of her chin, their agreed signal. She stopped playing, saw him sitting up very straight on the chair beside her, his eyes tightly shut, as if seized by a bout of pain.

“Don’t you feel well?” she asked him anxiously, touching his hand. He opened his eyes and murmured, “No, no, it’s all right…” staring intently at the fingers lightly resting on his hand. After a moment of embarrassment she exclaimed, “Hey, I’ve got a great idea! I’m going to teach you to play a little yourself. Oh, yes, you can. It’s as easy as anything. It’s just a children’s song.”

The tune was called “The Little Tin Soldier.” Alexeï turned out to be a clumsy pupil of modest abilities. Stella often found herself obliged to tug at his stiff fingers, so as to guide them toward the right keys.

Thanks to “The Little Tin Soldier” she was able to elaborate her scenarios. The man she had at her beck and call could be scolded, flattered, sweetly tormented, complimented on an arpeggio well played, comforted after a mistake. She was discovering one of the most intensely appealing aspects of love, that of making oneself obeyed, manipulating the other person and depriving him of his liberty with his own fervent consent.

This man’s silence, as he drank his tea peacefully while waiting for the general, no longer satisfied her. Now she wanted to make him talk, make him tell her about his life, about the war, to marvel or be jealous as she listened to his tales.

One day, under insistent questioning, he tried to venture into this wartime past but felt at a complete loss confronting memories in which everything led to partings, solitude, death. He guessed that what she was expecting from him was a love story set against the backdrop of war, but his memory was struggling among the bodies of mutilated men, among the bodies of women possessed in haste and vanished beyond recall. All he was left with was the smell of iodine on a woman’s hands, but how could he talk about that, especially to this young girl, as she listened to him wide-eyed? Talk about himself? But who was he? That soldier washing in a pool of water after a bout of hand-to-hand combat, and the water turning red, with his own blood and the blood of those he had just killed? Or that youth shaking a dead man to get his boot off him? Or else that other one, watching at a dusty window, in another life, in a forbidden past? No, what was most real in all those years was the day he lost consciousness in the cemetery, when he was as good as dead and when all there was between him and the world was that unsteady line: an unknown woman sleeping beside him and giving him her warmth….

Under pressure from her questions, he began talking about the squirrel: a halt on the march, a fine spring day, the little animal flying from tree to tree. Suddenly he remembered how the story concluded, broke off, became confused, and invented a vague happy ending. Stella gave him a sulky smile. “Papa told me you fought like a hero…. And you tell me about a squirrel! Pooh.”

He fell silent, remembering the smooth warmth of the fur in the palm of his hand. Everything that had happened after that, he now realized, was linked to the killing of that animal: his assignment with the general, very probably his survival, his coming to Moscow, and his meeting with this young Stella who was now engaged in teasing him. She must have guessed that this man, whom she thought she had tamed, domesticated, had unspeakable deeds, shameful actions, and sorrows hidden away in his life, as in an underground cave. And the fact that his demeanor in front of her was embarrassed and tongue-tied gave him a childish air.

“I didn’t mean to offend you. Not at all. It was very amusing, the squirrel,” she said, and put her hand on his, which still held the cup of cold tea. The moment lasted. Outside the window the dusk became tinged with deep blue. The fronds of hoarfrost writhed across the windowpane. Somewhere at the end of the corridor, the general’s voice could be heard growling into the telephone. She shook his hand gently, as if to rouse him: “Now, let’s practice our ‘Little Tin Soldier,’ shall we?”

*   *   *

During those weeks of great frosts she did not herself notice at what moment her make-believe story became confused with reality Perhaps it was the evening when she proposed that they use first names. Or later, when they chanced to meet outside the entrance to the apartment building: he had just driven the general home, she was returning from her music lesson. With a resolute step she climbed in beside him, and they went for a drive along the streets of Moscow, in a slow progress through the white flurries.

Or perhaps it was that other night. Her parents, in Kiev for the birthday of an old fellow soldier of the general’s, decided to stay there for one more day and asked Stella to warn the driver. Having waited in vain for them at the station, Alexeï rang the bell at the apartment, and she told a lie: her father, she said, was going to telephone late that night…. Alexeï saw that she was wearing a pale linen dress, a summer frock, and had piled her curls high in a style that gave her a formal look. Her cheeks were burning, as if with a fever.

Heroically, she made a show of nonchalance, inviting him into the reception room, offering him dinner (“They may not telephone till one in the morning. There’s no point in our dying of hunger”), opening a bottle of wine. Beneath the very thin fabric of her dress her body was shaking; her movements betrayed an ill-controlled brusqueness that she tried to pass off as casual bravado. Alexeï realized that everything in this improvised soirée had been so well, so feverishly well, prepared that only a walk-on part was left to him. The whole scenario could have been acted out without him, in Stella’s daydreams.

But he was there and understood that at any minute now his turn would come to play the part, to speak the lines, to step into a role that was at once obvious and absurd.

He stooped to pick up first a napkin, then a piece of bread she had dropped in her excitement; he poured wine, in obedience to a theatrically imperious wave of her hand, but most of all, taking advantage of his ghostly state, he was observing this girl, who appeared almost undressed in her summer frock. Her bare arms, with their bluish veins that looked as if they had been drawn on with schoolboy’s ink, her neck, pink with excitement, her slender waist, and when she turned toward the stove, the delicate contours of her shoulder blades. He listened to her voice as it grew increasingly resonant and elated, sensing that the moment was approaching when he would have to embrace these shoulders, feel the delicacy of the shoulder blades beneath his hands.

He did not desire her. Or rather, it was quite another desire. For this night with her he would have been ready to … He saw himself reliving the war years and had the feeling that he would have gone through them all again for this one evening. But what was being acted out that night was intended for someone other than himself.

She had already drunk three glasses and was eyeing him in a brazen manner, at once aggressive and vulnerable, that he found painful. “Perhaps we should ring them now,” he suggested, glancing at the clock. “No,” she cut in, “it’s still much too early!” Clapping her hands together, she declaimed in the tones of a circus ringmaster: “And now, our musical program!”

She swung around on the piano stool, seized a piece of sheet music, and beckoned to him. He saw it was the Rachmaninov elegy she had worked on several times without success. She attacked it, managed to clear the first few hurdles with the courage of drunkenness, fell at the next. Started again, no longer concealing her anger, stumbled …

He listened to her, his eyes half closed, absent-mindedly. At the third, almost desperate attempt, as she hesitated again, he murmured, without thinking, “There’s a sharp there….”

She broke off, looked at him. The effort of reading the music must have cleared her mind for a moment. She saw this man, sitting motionless beside her, his eyes closed, a man she had for a moment believed capable of saying what she had heard (I really am drunk, she thought). He looked very old and exhausted, and the pink spots left by the stitches on the scar across his brow were clearly visible.

He roused himself when he heard her weeping. Her elbows on the keyboard, she was sobbing, trying to speak: “You can go now, Sergei’. They’re not coming till tomorrow. You have to be at the station at nine o’clock.” Despite her tears, a conspiratorial tone lingered in her voice. This was the admission she had rehearsed as part of the night’s scenario.

And then there was that other evening, in March, when the streets, roads, and buildings were blotted out by a snowstorm, the last one of the winter. And it was also the last time the general invited him up to the crow’s nest to drink tea.

Stella came in to see him; they remained for a moment watching the white fury outside the window. She had shut the door when she came in, and the sound of her mother’s voice reached them, muffled by the interminable corridor, calling out to the housekeeper: “Vera, do wipe up the hall floor. That driver’s left snow everywhere.” Stella pulled a wry face and made a gesture, as if seeking to make up for these words, then suddenly leaned over toward Alexeï as he sat there, his cup of tea in his hands, and kissed him. He felt her lips on his brow where it was marked by the scar…. Out in the corridor a cloth could be heard scrubbing the floor.

The following day he was going off with the general, who had several garrisons in the north to inspect.

The inspection trip lasted almost a month. They traveled back and forth across regions still immobilized by ice, skirted the White Sea, drove through forests where for the moment not a glimmer of spring could be sensed. Just as if winter had returned. As if the days of the war had returned with the columns of troops being reviewed by the general, tanks with their tracks grinding the frozen earth, the bleak concrete of the fortifications.

With every mile on their return journey it seemed to them as if they were taking shortcuts back into spring. And no trace remained of those wartime winters, apart from the sheet of ice on which the general one day slipped and sprained his ankle. Alexeï had to carry him to the car. “Hey, do you remember that time at the front, Sergei?” he said with a quiet chuckle. “You lugged me under the Fritzes’ noses for eight miles.” And, without admitting it to themselves, they both had the thought that if they could laugh about it now, the war really was over.

In Moscow, this springtime laughter could be heard everywhere — in the April sunshine that already burned the skin, just as it did in summer, in the clatter of the streetcars on the gleaming steel rails, in the carefree faces of the crowds of young people for whom the war was no more than a childhood memory. And it was such a pleasure to remain outdoors that it no longer even occurred to the general to invite Alexeï to come up and warm himself and drink tea.

Stella realized that the winter had been a long dream — sometimes dream, sometimes nightmare — from which she was now well and truly awakened. In the little crows nest Vera, the maid of all work, piled up the coats, strewed the furs with mothballs. The tiny window, bombarded by sunlight, was blocked with a thick rectangle of cardboard. In this place now it was impossible to imagine a man sitting there with his cup of tea, a man disfigured by a white scar across his brow and wearing a soldiers uniform.

But it was still more improbable to imagine him walking at her side in these springtime streets, meeting her classmates. No, no! The very picture of such a couple made her cringe. Besides, how had she ever thought that one day she could reveal this mans existence to the circle of friends around which her whole life now revolved? Talk to them about that dinner with him, her stupid tears? No, it was a long winter’s hallucination that the sun had dissipated.

She did not care to admit to herself that this fantasy had enriched her, that thanks to this soldier hidden away in the crow’s nest, she had learned a multitude of feminine wiles, so useful for manipulating a man; that he had been her toy; that she had used him. In an attempt to silence these disturbing little admissions, on one occasion she began to play “The Little Tin Soldier,” trying to imitate the mistakes he generally made, laughing at them, almost without forcing herself. Then she played “The Waltz of the Doves,” which she had also taught him, a much more cheerful tune, but one which suddenly made her sad.

She experienced the same sadness when one day she caught sight of him through the drawing room window. The car was parked in front of the entrance, waiting for the general. Stella saw the open car door, a hand holding a cigarette, and, mirrored in the windshield, the pale shape of his face. “He’ll spend his whole life waiting,” she thought and felt guilty, for in her case too many good things lay in wait for her: this beautiful spring, then, after the exams, the prom, then university, the intoxicating freedom students have, and then … All she could picture was a vast surge of brilliance in the days to come.

During these moments of compassion, she also felt gratitude. Why, in the course of that stupid dinner he could have undressed her, taken her, she might have become pregnant! The idea was so appalling, so compromising for her future, that she shook her head to be rid of it. And began to loathe him, for he was in fact in a position to ruin everything, almost without wishing to do so.

Ultimately, this whirligig of regrets, joy, pity, anger, and faded dreams made the exciting newness of this spring all the more piquant. Real life was about to begin.

He saw Stella only once more during these weeks of sunshine. One evening, instead of going home, he parked the car in the street behind a newsstand. He knew it was the day for her music lesson. She came into view, wearing a light summer coat, and walked along the avenue where the trees were still barely tinged with green. Her silhouette stood out against the blue of the dusk with a clarity that hurt his eyes. For a long time after she had disappeared, he retained the picture of her there, at the turning of the avenue, and in the palm of his hand felt the very real sensation of touching her, of gripping the delicate outline of her shoulders with his fingers. The sensation was familiar to him: the suppleness of the dead squirrel on his palm.

He drove off, plunging into the streets, now blue, now shafted with streams of copper from the sunset. He told himself that in this life there should be a key, a code for expressing, in concise and unambiguous terms, all the complexity of our attempts, so natural and so grievously confused, at living and loving. This beautiful evening in Moscow a year after the war’s end. That pale cream coat disappearing around a corner. The unbearable pain and the futile joy contained in that moment. The memory of the squirrel, and there, above the bridge, the silvery white of the clouds, just the same as last winter, seen through the window of the crow’s nest.

It suddenly seemed to him as if all that had restrained him just now from getting out of the car and running after that pale cream coat in the avenue was the false name he had been dragging around with him for all those years. Violently he strove to convince himself that this was the only obstacle.

*   *   *

The next day he sent off a request for information concerning his parents, signed with this false name.

A week later the general told him to come up to his office at the ministry with him. For a moment Alexeï thought Gavrilov was going to talk about Stella, that he might even say, “You know, my daughter has told me she’s in love with you.” This crazy hope survived for a few seconds and lingered only to show him later how blind one can be when one is in love.

“Listen, Sergei’,” the general began in embarrassed tones, “yesterday some information about you was passed on to me … mere rumors, I hope. But these days, as you know very well, you can’t be too careful. It appears that someone’s been using your name, or at least … How can I put it …? Well, his family claim that you’ve taken, that is to say, not you yourself, but … To cut a long story short, they think their son’s still alive. They know a friend saw him just before being demobilized but that he, you that is, don’t want to go back to the village and you’re hiding out. No one really knows why. Oh, boy, it sure is complicated. The fact is, it’s a case of false identity, know what I mean? And, in the army, you bet, that’s no joke. I don’t have to tell you that. You get sent to a camp for far less than that…. Well, I’m just telling you this for your own information. But if you think there’s any kind of problem, you’d better let me know. With stories like this, you know, it’s like land mines: better to defuse them before they go off.”

The telephone rang, and the general picked it up; his face grew relaxed, and he began dictating a long list of food, specifying quantities of sausages and smoked sturgeon and numbers of bottles of wine. In the crackling of the receiver Alexeï recognized the voice of Stella’s mother. He was waiting for the conversation to end so he could confess everything.

The general hung up, licked his lips with satisfaction. “We’re preparing a hell of a dinner for tomorrow night. And the guests are well worth the trouble. Future parents-in-law. Oh, yes, Sergei’, time really flies. When I went off to the war our Stella was just a little girl. Now, lo and behold, we’re going to marry her off. Her fiance’s a great guy! And his father, this is just between us, mind you, has an excellent post at the Ministry of the Interior. He’s the one, by the way, who tipped me off about that business of the false name. It’s all in the family, you see…. Otherwise they’d have carted you off without another word. Well, you can talk to me about that later. Now, about this dinner. I’m going to need you from dawn till dusk tomorrow and half the night as well. Stella’s invited all her friends. Well, engagements these days aren’t done the way they used to be — all settled in private. So you’ll have to take them home in groups. The subway will be closed by then. In other words, maximum state of alert!”

They installed him in the crow’s nest, all piled high with winter coats. The door was left ajar, and he watched the guests arriving, couples (the fiance’s parents: the sugary waft of the mother’s perfume, the father’s bass voice), a few single people, then small groups of school friends. Some of them lost their way, came into the cubbyhole where he was waiting, stared in perplexity at this man motionless amid the overcoats and piles of cardboard cartons, uncertain whether to greet him or not. Several times the general asked him to take the car and fetch this or that guest of note. Alexeï did his bidding, then returned to his vigil. Vera, the housekeeper, brought him a cup of tea, almost spoke to him, changed her mind, and simply smiled, with a sour little twitch.

He felt no bitterness, no jealousy, simply a pain so acute, so unremitting, that no other emotion could graft itself onto its cutting edge. Distractedly, he identified the sounds coming from the reception room that gave clues to the progress of the party. To begin with, there was a merry hubbub of voices, rhythmically augmented from time to time by deep bass notes. After this the popping of first one cork, then suddenly another, accompanied by shouts of laughter and squeals of panic. The words of the first toast being proposed by the general. And finally the clatter of knives and forks.

Rigid with grief, he felt nothing when, half an hour later, after a chorus of pleading voices, the music rang out. He readily recognized the polonaise Stella had been practicing the previous winter. He even noted that the moment for this musical interlude was very well chosen: between the first glass that made the guests receptive and the subsequent food and drink that would dull their senses. He listened and, despite his absent state, noticed two or three imperceptible hesitations in her playing that were like secret reminders addressed to him alone and which made him feel still further isolated. The sound of clapping burst forth, and this applause and some shouts of “Bravo!” prevented him from hearing the footsteps running down the corridor.

And now Stella’s face was framed in the doorway “Sergei”! Quickly! Do come! This means so much to me!” Her excited whisper was redolent of intoxication, but it was more the intoxication of happiness than that of wine.

Perplexed, he got up and allowed himself to be led by the hand into the reception room.

“And now for a surprise!” announced Stella, holding out her arms toward him as if to invite acclaim for him. ‘Our Sergei’s going to play us a little tune. I hope you’ll appreciate his performance … and my modest talents as a music teacher. ‘The Little Tin Soldier’!”

The young people applauded; the parents and the older guests found the jest rather daring but went along with it all the same, clapping a little, not wishing to seem unduly severe.

After the darkness of the crow’s nest, he was blinded by the light in the reception room, embarrassed by the eyes fixed on him. Searching for a way to avoid the torment and not finding one, he had time to notice several faces; a woman’s necklace with large pearls; the fiance, a tall, dark young man, seated among his classmates. In Stella’s gaze, for a fraction of a second, something like a forgotten shadow flitted by. He saw that she was wearing the pale linen summer dress.

The applause died down. He sat on the piano stool, sensing that his grief, the block of ice that had held him frozen, was breaking up, turning into shame, humiliation, anger, the stupid crimson flush that rose to his neck, the weight of his thick boots resting on the slippery nickel of the pedals.

He performed, as in the days of their lessons, with the stolid application of an automaton. They were already laughing as he played, so comic was the sight of this soldier playing a little song about a soldier. Some of the young people sang the words of the chorus, which they knew. The wine was beginning to liven up the merriment. The applause was unanimous. “Bravo, the teacher!” cried one guest, whom Stella favored with a curtsy. The bass voice of the fiance’s father rang out amid the laughter: “Well, I never, General. I had no idea that in your ministry the drivers were pianists as well.” “A drink for the pianist,” chanted one of the young men, and several voices joined in. A glass of vodka was passed from hand to hand in the direction of the piano. Stella raised her arms and shouted, so as to be heard above the noise from the table: “And now, the star item on the program: ‘The Waltz of the Doves’!”

Alexeï put down his glass, turned toward the keyboard. Little by little the shouting and talking died down, but still he waited, his hands resting on his knees, sitting bolt upright, with an abstracted air. Throwing a wink at the guests, Stella whispered, like a prompter: “Go on, then! You start by playing middle C with your right thumb.

As his hands fell upon the keyboard, it was still possible to believe a beautiful harmony had been formed at random, in spite of him. But a second later the music came surging out, the power of it sweeping away all doubts, voices, sounds, wiping away the fixed grins and exchanged glances, pushing back the walls, dispersing the light of the reception room out into the nocturnal immensity of the sky beyond the windows.

He did not feel as if he were playing. He was advancing through a night, breathing in its delicate transparency, made up as it was of an infinite number of facets of ice, of leaves, of wind. He no longer felt any pain. No fear about what would happen. No anguish or remorse. The night through which he was advancing expressed this pain, this fear, and the irremediable shattering of the past, but this had all become music and now only existed through its beauty.