‘You’re probably expecting company, Mother,’ observed Nikolay, and not quite knowing what to say next, energetically threw off his overcoat.

She moved away from him toward the table, which was set for a meal and sparkled with crystal in the semidarkness; then she came back toward him, and mechanically glanced at herself in the shadow-blurred mirror.

‘So many years have passed … Goodness! I can hardly believe my eyes. Oh, yes, I have friends coming tonight. I’ll call them off. I’ll phone them. I’ll do something. I must call them off … Oh, Lord …’

She pressed against him, palpating him to find out how real he was.

‘Calm down, Mother, what’s the matter with you – this is overdoing it. Let’s sit down somewhere. Comment vas-tu? How does life treat you?’ … And, for some reason fearing the answers to his questions, he started telling her about himself, in the snappy neat way he had, puffing on his pipe, trying to drown his astonishment in words and smoke. It turned out that, after all, she had seen his ad and had been in touch with the old journalist and been on the point of writing to Nikolay – always on the point … Now that he had seen her face distorted by its make-up and her artificially fair hair he felt that her voice, too, was no longer the same. And as he described his adventures, without a moment’s pause, he glanced around the half-lit, quivering room, at its awful middle-class trappings – the toy cat on the mantelpiece, the coy screen from behind which protruded the foot of the bed, the picture of Friedrich the Great playing the flute, the bookless shelf with the little vases in which the reflected lights darted up and down like mercury … As his eyes roamed around he also inspected something he had previously only noticed in passing: that table – a table set for two, with liqueurs, a bottle of Asti, two tall wine glasses, and an enormous pink cake adorned with a ring of still unlit little candles. ‘… Of course, I immediately jumped out of my tent, and what do you think it turned out to be? Come on, guess!’

She seemed to emerge from a trance, and gave him a wild look (she was reclining next to him on the divan, her temples compressed between her hands, and her peach-colored stockings gave off an unfamiliar sheen).

‘Aren’t you listening, Mother?’

‘Why, yes – I am …’

And now he noticed something else: she was oddly absent, as if she were listening not to his words but to a doomful thing coming from afar, menacing and inevitable. He went on with his jolly narrative, but then stopped again and asked, ‘That cake – in whose honor is it? Looks awfully good.’

His mother responded with a flustered smile. ‘Oh, it’s a little stunt. I told you I was expecting company.’