Shadows of the Morning

“It was spring. Pavel Afanasyev, an eighth-grade student exempted from exams due to illness, and Liza Chumakova, a gymnasium girl, stood by the fence that divided two gardens.

Liza leaned one shoulder against the fence, and with the same—childishly serious yet already girlishly tender—expression in her gray, slightly bulging eyes that always appeared when it mattered in her life, she listened and looked down at the book she was holding and at the ruffles of her light-gray dress…”