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the clock.
    “Someone to speak to you, Lev Sergeyevich,” a voice called from the adjoining room. It turned out to be his wife—phoning to say that she would have to stay on at work for an extra hour and a half to retype the director’s report.
    “All right then,” Lev Sergeyevich replied in a hurt voice, and he hung up.
    He did not hurry home. The city was buzzing, and the buildings, streets, and sidewalks all seemed somehow special, not like themselves at all. And this intangible something, born of the May Day sense of community, took many forms. It could be sensed even in the way a policeman was dragging away a drunk. It was as though all the men wandering about the street were related—as though they were all cousins, or uncles and nephews.
    Today he would have been only too glad to saunter about with Timofeyev. It was unpleasant being the first to get back home. The room always seems empty and unwelcoming, and there is no getting away from frightening thoughts: What if something had happened to Vera Ignatyevna? What if she had twisted her ankle jumping off a tram?
    Lev Sergeyevich would start to imagine that some hulking trolley car had knocked Vera Ignatyevna down, that people were crowding around her body, that an ambulance was tearing along, wailing ominously. He would be seized with terror; he would want to phone friends and family; he would want to rush to the Emergency First-Aid Institute or to the police.
    Every time his wife was ten or fifteen minutes late it was the same. He would feel the same panic.
    What a lot of people there were on the street now! Why were they all sauntering up and down the boulevard, sitting idly on benches, stopping in front of every illuminated shop window? But then he came to his own building, and his heart leaped for joy. The little ventilation pane was open—his wife was already back.
    He kissed Vera Ignatyevna several times. He looked into her eyes and stroked her hair.
    “What a strange one you are!” she said. “It’s the same every time. Anyone would think I’ve come back from Australia, not from theCentral Rubber Office.”
    “If I don’t see you all day,” he replied, “you might just as well be in Australia.”
    “You and your eternal Australia!” said Vera Ignatyevna. “They ask me to help type the wall newspaper—and I refuse. I skipAir-Chem Defense Society meetings and come rushing back home. Kazakova has two little children—but Kazakova has no trouble at all staying behind. And that’s not all—she’s a member of the automobile club as well!”
    “What a silly darling goose you are!” said Lev Sergeyevich. “Who ever heard of a wife giving her husband a hard time for being too much of a stay-at-home?”
    Vera Ignatyevna wanted to answer back, but instead she said in an excited voice, “I’ve got a surprise for you! The Party committee’s been asking people to take in orphanage children for a few days over the holiday. I volunteered—I said we’d like a little girl. You won’t be cross with me, will you?”
    Lev Sergeyevich gave his wife a hug.
    “How could I be cross with my clever girl?” he said. “It scares me even to think about what I’d be doing and how I’d be living now if chance hadn’t brought us together at that birthday party at the Kotelkovs.”
    On the evening of April 29, Vera Ignatyevna was brought back home in a Ford. As she went up the stairs, pink with pleasure, she said to the little girl who had come with her, “What a treat to go for a ride in a car. I could have carried on riding around for the rest of my life!”
    It was the second time Vera Ignatyevna had been in a car. Two years before, when her mother-in-law had come to visit, they had taken a taxi from the station. True, that first ride had not been all it might have been—the driver had never stopped cursing, saying his tires would probably collapse and that, with such a mountain of luggage, they should have taken a three-ton truck.
    Vera Ignatyevna and