"No."
"Don't you want to talk to me, Maksim?"
"No."
"Good night, darling husband."
"G'night."
She lay there wide awake, with her head aching as it had ached for seventeen months — ever since Maksim, courting her, had been absent from work for three days in a row. He had been arrested, brought before the disciplinary court, and given a road-tending job in this awful place. Blaming herself for his misfortune, she had married him. But the loneliness! Nothing but the trees and the river and the sentries far away on the other side, and the road. And when they went into Yakovlevka, everybody looked so official and so scared. One or the other, always. It hadn't ever been this bad, back in Khabarovsk.
And now she saw hunched-up little men walking across the face of the moon.
Perhaps she was going mad.
The thought gave her a little comfort.