The sky outside the windows was growing so heavy and inescapable that it looked as if it would close over the house completely. The sun had long since disappeared, dissolved into the dense, low clouds; the gray light that barely penetrated the room made it look as blurry as an old photograph. The lamp in the corner was unlit, and the evening entered the dwelling silently, on tiptoe.

They sat on an old, soft couch covered in faded fabric, and a silence hovered between them, dense and strangely cozy. A few of his cats, lazy and important, settled around him-one on the armrest, another at his knees, a third curled up in a ball right on a stack of papers. Their tails wagged occasionally, their ears turned slightly at the subtle sounds outside the window, but on the whole they were content in this peace.

On the low table and on the rug beside them were notebooks, wanderers' notebooks written in uneven, almost illegible handwriting. The ink, which showed some haste, was interspersed with slower, neater lines. The pages were mottled with scraps of phrases, rhythmic repetitions, sometimes whole chunks of songs that were just born here, in the semi-darkness of this room. He went through these sheets unhurriedly, as if he were remembering rather than selecting. His fingers lingered on individual words, and his gaze lingered on the empty spaces between the lines, as if something important were hidden there. Sometimes he moved his lips quietly, trying the rhythm of a phrase, but there was almost no sound.

The smell of tea wafted from the kitchen, but he was in no hurry to get up. Outside the window, the wind was driving the humid air and the occasional raindrop tapped on the glass, quietly but insistently. There was a sense of something invisible but significant in this still scene, as if time flowed differently here, and each minute was absorbed into the pages, into the handwriting, into the half-asleep cats.