meeting. He dearly loved his father and mother; he had seen them but a
short while before, and now he was in a state of terror as to what
would happen when they came to see him. The execution itself, in all
its monstrous horror, in its brain-stunning madness, he could imagine
more easily, and it seemed less terrible than these other few moments
of meeting, brief and unsatisfactory, which seemed to reach beyond
time, beyond life itself. How to look, what to think, what to say, his
mind could not determine. The most simple and ordinary act, to take
his father by the hand, to kiss him, and to say, "How do you do,
father?" seemed to him unspeakably horrible in its monstrous, inhuman,
absurd deceitfulness.

After the sentence the condemned were not placed together in one cell,
as Tanya Kovalchuk had supposed they would be, but each was put in
solitary confinement, and all the morning, until eleven o'clock, when
his parents came, Sergey Golovin paced his cell furiously, tugged at
his beard, frowned pitiably and muttered inaudibly. Sometimes he would
stop abruptly, would breathe deeply and then exhale like a man who has
been too long under water. But he was so healthy, his young life was
so strong within him, that even in the moments of most painful
suffering his blood played under his skin, reddening his cheeks, and
his blue eyes shone brightly and frankly.

But everything was far different from what he had anticipated.

Nikolay Sergeyevich Golovin, Sergey's father, a retired colonel, was
the first to enter the room where the meeting took place. He was all
white-his face, his beard, his hair, and his hands-as if he were a
snow statue attired in man's clothes He had on the same old but
well-cleaned coat, smelling of benzine, with new shoulder-straps