When he felt uneasy, when despair set in for no reason, he took out a large envelope with old photographs, but one, the oldest, probably the first of those that captured him, with uneven edges, with a dull gray, as if smeared with a slate finger image, he looked at with particular attention and sometimes felt an inexplicable relief: from the fog a plump snowdrift covered with a spruce paw appeared, and he, four years old, in a short coat with a sash, in a hood, with a wooden spatula in his hand... Who decided to photograph him in the war winter, in evacuation? A solitaire of many photographs that recorded the changes in his appearance from childhood to old age, and in a mosaic unity were collected into an almost completed picture, he, in relatively chronological order, more and more often, mechanically laid out the writing on the worn green cloth for the coming sleep table - unsuccessfully searching for the through-line of life; in doubt, he looked from one photograph to another to shake up the kaleidoscope of memory and return to the beginning of the search. However, time fled faster and faster, he no longer experienced a feeling of relief, even the memories of him, the desired touching feeling, treacherously disappeared, as soon as his gaze touched the matte gray rectangle, with any variations of solitaire lying on the edge, at the starting point of the plot being sought, it seemed to hypnotize him a fuzzy little figure with fear, as if the virus of a fatal mistake that he was destined to make had nestled in it, so far away. Yes, it was this vague photograph, for some reason he began to perceive it after his seventieth birthday, as an alarmingly informative encryption of fate, rolled up in a long-ago photo-moment; now, before flying to Venice for the last, as he suspected, insight, he made extravagant attempts, painfully passing through himself the currents of the past, to read in the antediluvian - floating and faded - image the secret meaning of what awaited him in the rest of his days.