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.