Chapter 6

That night Yuri touched his wife’s belly under the blanket — warm, silky — and thought that if he had given their child life in that belly, everything would have been different. Children would have changed their lives, given them what they were now seeking in vice. At least that was how it seemed.

Yuri began recalling what else he had and hadn’t done. What could have brought him to this: a husband whose wife cuckolded him, while he enjoyed it. More than that, lately it was all he lived for, the main thing in his life. The more Yuri remembered, the more convinced he became that it was all his own fault. Hadn’t he given Omar the green light in the first place? ... With the years you look deeper into yourself, and a day comes when you no longer recoil from the ruinous abyss of guilt. You do not recoil from the edge; you examine every stone of that guilt, small and large, and carry that crushing burden, beneath which the soul cracks and groans, to the very end, shedding not one crumb, only occasionally complaining in silence to yourself, your throat trembling, into the blurred darkness of a sleepless night...