I raised my gun at him and noticed surprise and despair flashing in his eyes, as though he expected something that I was supposed to read in his eyes and understand—there was something else besides ferocity, there was something there which I didn’t pay attention to, and now I distressingly wanted to remember, as though my own fate and further life depended on this, but my memory didn’t return anything but this wrath of his. My finger froze on the trigger, perspiration covered my brow, my heart became vile and frightful.
He didn’t run away, he stubbornly looked at me and it seemed as if he were reading me like an ABC book, reading me—wretched and empty, because that’s exactly how I was at that moment. Didn’t he really have the strength to crawl away a little further, at least to move from
