“Stepan Arkadyevitch's eyes twinkled gaily, and he pondered with a smile. "Yes, it was nice, very nice. There was a great deal more that was delightful, only there's no putting it into words, or even expressing it in one's thoughts awake." And noticing a gleam of light peeping in beside one of the serge curtains, he cheerfully dropped his feet over the edge of the sofa, and felt about with them for his slippers, a present on his last birthday, worked for him by his wife on gold-colored morocco. And, as he had done every day for the last nine years, he stretched out his hand, without getting up, towards the place where his dressing-gown always hung in his bedroom. And thereupon he suddenly remembered that he was not sleeping in his wife's room, but in his study, and why: the smile vanished from his face, he knitted his brows.”

“Alexander. Here he is, before he was Tatiana’s, at the age of twenty, getting his medal of valor for bringing back Yuri Stepanov during the 1940 Winter War. Alexander is in his dress Soviet uniform, snug against his body, his stance at-ease and his hand up to his temple in teasing salute. There is a gleaming smile on his face, his eyes are carefree, his whole man-self full of breath-taking, aching youth. And yet, the war was on, and his men had already died and frozen and starved … and his mother and father were gone… and he was far away from home, and getting farther and farther, and every day was his last – one way or another, every day was his last. And yet, he smiles, he shines, he is happy.”

“Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct. He could not at this date repent of the fact that he, a handsome, susceptible man of thirty-four, was not in love with his wife, the mother of five living and two dead children, and only a year younger than himself. All he repented of was that he had not succeeded better in hiding it from his wife. But he felt all the difficulty of his position and was sorry for his wife, his children, and himself. Possibly he might have managed to conceal his sins better from his wife if he had anticipated that the knowledge of them would have had such an effect on her.”

“Ramrod felt a great sadness building up, deep within. There were no words to express his feeling of loss. The sorrow rose up from the pit of his stomach and caught in his throat. He had a strangled ejaculation buried deep down in his soul. Yes, Ramrod missed his wife very, very much. He missed the warmth of her breasts pressed up against him in the night. He even missed her cold feet. And he especially missed her bedtime facial. Yes, it’s true—he missed her eyes, he missed her mouth. He had trouble remembering how she wore her hair the last time he saw her, and he missed that, too. It’s like, where Love was concerned, Ramrod’s aim wasn’t very good. Yes, life was becoming very, very hard on Ramrod. ”

“Jane, last night was” — he raked a hand through his hair — “nice.” Her expression could only be described as crestfallen. “No,”he hurried to say. “Don’t look like that! I didn’t mean ‘nice.’ In fact, it wasn’t nice at all.” Her brows lowered. “No?” “No.I mean, yes! Yes, it was nice, but it was also very, very—” He tried with all of his might to grasp a word that would encompass that heart - pounding exertion that even now was making his balls hum,but to his horror, he heard himself say once again,“ —nice. But really, really, really nice.”

“As soon as he was half-awake he slipped his knickers off. Holding them close to his face, he handled them loosely for a moment with an absent expression, then suddenly buried his nose in them, his dark eyes huge, his face monstrous with the wisdom of evil. As well as the blood and the seepage from last night's ejaculation he had shit himself lavishly in his sleep, a sloppy, yellow liquid. Having spent a while burying his face in them, he folded the knickers up and put them carefully to one side on top of a stack of others. He would never wash them; he would never wear them again. Every secretion that had occurred in his underclothes, before, during, or sometimes just after a moment of action was a souvenir to be preciously kept and safeguarded.”