She pauses and cries out only when she suddenly feels me inside her. And seeking to recover her balance, overtaken by a joyful delirium, she leans on the piano, no longer looking at the keys. With both hands. Her fingers fanned out. A thunderous drunken major chord erupts. And the wild sounds coincide with her first moans. As I penetrate her, I push her, I lift her, I take her weight. Her only point of support is her hands, moving on the keyboard once more… A chord noisier and still more insistent. She is all curved now, her head thrown back, the lower part of her body abandoned to me. Yes, trembling, rippling, like a red-hot mass on a glassblower's pipe. The beads of sweat make this oval of flesh swaying beneath my fingers quite transparent…

And the chords follow one another, more and more staccato, breathless. And her cries answer them in a deafening symphony of pleasure: sunlight, the clangor of the chords, the loud outbursts of her voice, mingling happy sobs with cries of fury. And when she feels me exploding inside her, the symphony breaks up into a stream of shrill and feverish notes, bursting forth beneath her fingers. Her hands drum furiously as she clings to the smooth keys. As if they were clinging to the invisible edge of the pleasure that is already slipping away from her body…

And in this silence, still throbbing with a thousand echoes, I can see her glowing transparent form slowly suffused with the bronzed opacity of repose…

Utkin calls that "raw material." One day he telephoned me from New York and asked me, in a slightly bashful voice, to tell him in a letter about one of my adventures. "Don't polish it," he warned me. "In any case I'll change everything around… What interests me is the raw material."

Utkin writes. He has always dreamed of writing. Even when we were boys in the depths of eastern Siberia. But he lacks subject matter. With his lame leg and his shoulder that sticks up at an acute angle, he has never had any luck in love.