Chapter 1

Yuri watches Anna as she watches the bald market man. Snow begins to fall. It is soft snow, but thick. Through that white gauze of weather your wife is still visible -- only much less clearly. Yuri thinks:

“Why do I depend entirely on another person’s choice? Why do I decide nothing myself? So much hangs on what Annette chooses to do now!”

Good questions -- the kind many people might ask themselves. Why are we born free, live as slaves, and die as idiots? ... Perhaps you will answer that question if you take Yuri’s role upon yourself...

... Annette, sovereign of your heart and of every market man for blocks around, looks back over her shoulder at the bald one. Her piss-soaked leg is still erotically posed, her shoe resting on the jeep’s tire. Anna looks noble and majestic, despite the fluid glistening on her skin. Her beauty is like some rare, costly rose that still astonishes in the mud. Especially in the mud. Beside those market men, Annette looks like an anime heroine. How magnificently beautiful she is. And yet she let herself be degraded by two pieces of trash, and now she is staring at the bald man in confusion. It seems she never expected he would get so worked up that he would want her here and now, while you were waiting for her.

How does that happen? Annette is, unlike those losers, intelligent, cultivated, possessed of wide emotional and intellectual reserves ... what makes her stoop to the level of this market, of these stupid, interchangeable men? Apparently, life has no great fondness for the especially clever. Life itself is full of stupidity; it is built that way. And perhaps, by life’s own laws, Annette was living more wrongly when she gave herself over to self-perfection and her soul flew after the sun than she is now, when she invites these men to treat her like dirt and fixes them with that feverish gaze.

“Would you look at that -- Abbas has decided he wants her after all! Incredible!” Rosie says to you, engrossed. “What do you think -- will she let him or won’t she?”

“She will,” you say, with a strange, piercing feeling. After so many years together, Annette has entered your bloodstream, cut herself into your veins, and you feel her. You feel that now, for reasons beyond understanding, she is about to betray you.

But your wife surprises you. Through the curtain of snow, you see her suddenly shove Abbas away! There she is -- your Annette! At last, she has come to her senses! As if she has thrown off a spell. The sexual excitement that a moment ago seemed so precious becomes worthless compared to PRIDE IN YOUR WIFE. Yes, she allowed herself far too much, and she is far from any ideal of fidelity -- but still, she did not cross the final line! Maybe this moment will become the point from which everything changes. Maybe, having survived Omar’s darkness, you will gain immunity from it and never again confuse what matters more: lust, or closeness with the person you love -- honesty, fidelity.