The dullest twilight hours at the University of Debrecen are said to have been when the professor of organic chemistry László Hatvani had his lectures in the concrete and glass building of the faculty of sciences. It is common knowledge that, as it grows dusk on Friday afternoons, time slows up and eyes become leaden as though the body wanted to recover the energy it had lost in the course of the week gone by. But to make things worse, Professor László Hatvani would have no lights on, and it often happened that, already at the beginning of his lectures, a dimness was cast on the shoddy old green desks, and students even in the front rows could see nothing but a dark blotch prancing up and down. And if autumn had already set in and the drizzling rain was smearing the windows, and the wind bringing the clickety-clack of the railway station at the other end of the town, it seemed as though the light outside and the darkness inside were blended, the professor looming above the trees and the clouds floating in over the worn out desks, lazily piling one upon another.

It should be known that, at such times, the professor would talk about the origin of matter. He would dwell upon the fact that the stars were but wonderful nuclear furnaces in which matter was transformed, that the hydrogen and helium produced during the Big Bang formed the heavier elements; that the death or explosion of a star scattered carbon in the universe so as to contribute to the creation of new stars and planets, and the birth of life. Having reached this point, Professor Hatvani would go to the window, hook his thumbs in his vest pockets, and say: "You know that we are all made of the dust of destroyed stars, don't you? You know that all men are the children of the stars?"

But on that last Friday afternoon as the rain was spitting outside, the wind-blown leaves were turning around and zigzagging down, and Professor Hatvani was but a blurry shadow in front of the window, he slowly bent forward, knelt down, and lay on the linoleum. Pulling his legs up and clutching his knees to his chest he curled up like an unborn baby, put his thumb in his mouth, and closed his eyes.

The room fell completely silent. A pencil rolled faster and faster and fell to the floor, and outside the wind whistled. The only sound was his breathing, his wheezing in and out as he slept soundly. The students sat still in the thickening gloom, then carefully, so as not to make any noise, tiptoed out of the room one by one. Inside nothing could be seen but an indiscernible and unrecognizable dark blotch.