C. Forrest Gard’s Reviews > The Tartar Steppe > Status Update

Once you've resolved to sink yourself into the necessities of life and only those, when something more does come into the purview of our lives, we only scoff at the prospect, so as to not be mocked once again by hope....

...spreading around him an obscure plot to try to retain him there. Probably not even Matti was concerned in it. Neither he nor the colonel, nor any other officer was the least interested in him; whether he stayed or went was completely indifferent to them. Yet some unknown force was working against his return to the city; a force which perhaps without his knowing it had its origins in his own heart.