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Nor was this the first time he had been tormented by insomnia. There had been periods, even back when he still had some job or another, when he didn't really know what to do with himself. Strange and useless thoughts would cross his mind. When he did sleep, his dreams were even stranger.

Meanwhile, despite all the empty apartments and derelict buildings, the city was peculiarly lively, always humming its low hum. Meanwhile, everyone—mostly old people, for whatever reason—seemed to be rushing off somewhere or other, overtaking one other, always hustling and bustling; and the streets, roads, and avenues were engulfed in a stifling haze. And, too, at times it seemed to him that there was something wrong with all those elderly people hurrying along the street, acting so energetic and youthful—perhaps, in reality, many of them no longer had anywhere to live . . . And above the crowded rooftops and domes, the bell towers and apartment blocks, isolated puffs of white steam, each far apart from the others, twisted lazily, continually into the sky. As he watched them through his living-room window on the fifteenth floor of his apartment building, he imagined that they came from slaughterhouses, though he'd never tried to confirm it. And looming above the more distant puffs, the ones just below the eastern horizon, there would usually appear, at the first morning light, a bigger, billowing, mountain-like cloud.

At times this cloud would seem cold and gray, sometimes savage, sometimes pale and indistinct, but at other times it was pleasantly warm and gentle, glowing softly at its edges. The shape of the cloud, too, was constantly changing. And, based on these variations in the cloud, Valent eventually (he didn't really know when or why, it just seemed to happen) found himself making predictions about what the day would bring, what he should avoid doing, and what, indeed, he would have to do in order to make everything turn out well and good.

Later, after he had been forced to retire, after his two sons had moved away to their own respective futures in their own respective apartment blocks, and after his wife, who had retired the year before, had succumbed to tranquilizers and television—when, in short, he no longer had any work problems or family matters to worry about—he thought he might finally have reached the point where he could get over those ridiculous ideas of his, which could really be quite unpleasant, about the old people rushing around on the street and then the prophetic cloud. But even then he wasn't able to get up the courage. He began to feel a suspicious stabbing pain in his heart. But there was no way he could tell anyone about any of this. Not even his wife. He would be too embarrassed. Humiliated, even. His look of noble, long-suffering self-confidence, which for some time now he had been obsessively cultivating (most especially with his pipe between his teeth)—this guise of his would be exposed as nothing but common duplicity and dissemblance.

Even now, in fact, he was quite proud of how convincingly he managed it, though naturally it required constant care, constant maintenance, so much so in fact that sometimes, when the opportunity presented itself, it made sense for him to turn off the street and make his way to the door of this or that law firm or notary office and jot down its office hours in his appointment book . . . Of course, people had always been mistrustful of him, had always been wary, always looking at him askance, with a kind of dismissive yet menacing glint in their eyes, but recently he had noticed, generally speaking, that not only his wife but also the few others he knew in his building had begun to act differently toward him, as if, inadvertently and unwittingly, he now made them openly uneasy. It was partly because of this, because of them, that the "cloud mountain" was acquiring such terrible importance for him; and it was likewise because of them that he neither dared nor really wanted to stop interpreting its vague prophesies.