The Faraway Bride by Stella Benson — Read

Seryozha lay in bed in his little room, which was just an oblong bite taken out of the kitchen. His bed was the original kang of this Korean house -- a brick-and-plaster oven. On it -- since it was summer -- were spread all the winter quilts and blankets to intervene between Seryozha's heavy young bones and the hard kang. The colder it grew in autumn, the more quilts were taken from beneath his body to be placed above it. Seryozha always connected winter with heavy dreaming, since at that season he always had to sleep flat on his back to save his hip bones from contact with the almost unpadded heated kang. But now, in summer, there were three quilts beneath him, and Seryozha could lie comfortably on his side, bent into the shape of a query mark, glaring at the window. The window, carved by Anna long ago with a blunt saw out of the boards of the outer wall, was high up in the corner made by the flimsy kitchen partition and the ceiling. It was very crooked. Anna was, in all her contrivings, too ardent ever to measure things. "I work by eye only," she would boast, triumphantly daring you to make the obvious retort as she flaunted her results all askew.

Seryozha glared at the window till the foolish, crooked block of sunny morning light printed itself on his retina, so that when his eye wandered, a black crooked window was stamped all over the room. He was so full of angry single-hearted determination that, as he clenched his teeth, he felt as if his burning self, pregnant with its passion to get its own way, was too big for his skin; he had to keep his aching jaws and the smarting muscles round his eyes locked against its rising, bursting growth. There seemed to be a kind of explosion impending of swelling, thwarted will.