The spectre of an impending session loomed over Julia like a leaden thundercloud. Thunder rumbled mum's anger, threatened to turn into a natural disaster with the blocking of all accounts and the deprivation of the right to use Masyanya, without which Julka could not imagine life. She drove it in all weather, even in complete absence of the weather itself, loved to drive in silence, listening to only the sound of the engine, becoming one with the car, and it obediently obeyed the girl, rarely showed his unruly nature, even with the often blinking fuel light, always got to fill up than earned from the mistress of genuine love and affection.

• If you fail a session, you will remain without a car, - mother's verdict was categorical. Julia was wandering along a deserted winter alley of an old park, trying to find a suitable explanation in advance, knowing for sure that she will not pass the hated physicalloid chemistry. The teacher was also a strange, shaggy-haired, aloof-looking man. Sometimes it seemed as if he were not in class at all, but somewhere out there, in one of his retorts, in the middle of a chemical reaction. Agreeing with Plumbom was impossible. The nickname dragged behind the teacher from one generation of students to another, and no one else could remember what the professor of the department had in common with this chemical element, except that its heavy as lead character. Pressed nededvannymi as the eighty-second element of the periodic system thoughts, Yulyka did not notice that the short winter day was replaced by a rapidly approaching twilight. In the soft light of the park lights circled in an endless dance of snowflakes. Prior to the car park, where he spent his day devoted Masyanya, remained a few meters. At the end of the alley, under the last lamp a small table was placed. Street trading was not common in the park. A lonely counter attracted the girl with its piles of sundries. Julka watched with interest an hourglass encased in brass, an antique key with a monogram and a broken beard, a porcelain ballerina twirling in an endless fouette, a fan with hieroglyphics, a pocket mirror with a mother-of-pearl lid, a set of knuckles made of bone. The guillotine of the hated examinations receded into the background, Yulyka unbearably wanted to keep some of this splendor, she would have taken most of the old stuff with great pleasure, not even knowing what it was that attracted her in this antique. She put aside the hourglass, the mirror, and the scroll of paper with Latin writing, yellowed by time, and looked questioningly at the salesman, to whom she had paid no attention until recently. On the other side of the counter stood he, the lord of retorts and beakers.
• Kirill Levovich? - Yulka was frozen with a half-opened purse in her hands and a look of utter bewilderment on her face.

• You have made a mistake, my dear child, allow me to introduce myself, Dmitry Ivanovich, you have made a good choice, but I must disappoint you. You can only keep one thing, that is the rule, alas.

  Yulka was a little upset. She hadn't quite figured out what to do with all this old stuff, but things clearly appealed to her, each one had its own voice, its own story, which she couldn't wait to learn. After thinking for a while, she clutched the hourglass to her chest.

• You made the right choice, time is the most precious thing, believe me, an old man.

  Screaming shrieking Masyana alarm made Julka rushed to the car. Parking lot was almost empty, the sound of alarms faded as soon as Julka came to the car. Finding nothing suspicious, the girl returned to pay for her purchase, but there was no table or the Plumbum twin under the streetlight. Only the lightly trampled snow and the watch in Julka's hands told her that the events of the last hour were no mirage.

  All the way home Yulka tried to figure out where the old man had gone, and why it was so bad, she had not paid for the watch.