meeting with terror and anguish,
yet they dared not refuse the old people the last word, the last kiss.

Sergey Golovin was particularly tortured by the thought of the coming
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 crosswise, that he
had always worn, and he entered firmly, with an air of stateliness, with
strong and steady steps. He stretched out his white, thin hand and said
loudly:

"How do you do, Sergey?"

Behind him Sergey's mother entered with short steps, smiling strangely.
But she also pressed his hands and repeated loudly:

"How do you do, Seryozhenka?"

She kissed him on the lips and sat down silently. She did not rush over
to him; she did not burst into tears; she did not break into a sob; she
did