Um final que tão depressa não se esqueça

He held out a tattered photograph. In it was Timofey Kurdyukov, a wide shouldered police constable in a policeman's cap, his beard neatly combed. He was stiff, with wide cheekbones and sparkling, colorless, vacant eyes. Next to him, in a bamboo chair, sat a tiny peasant woman in a loose blouse, with small, bright, timid features. And against this provincial photographer's pitiful backdrop, with its flowers and doves, towered two boys, amazingly big, blunt, broad-faced, goggle-eyed, and frozen as if standing at attention: the Kurdyukov Brothers, Fyodor and Semyon.

Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, Nathalie Babel (ed.), Peter Constantine (trad.), Norton, 2003