...of a son's corpse

The sky seemed somehow airless - as though all the air had been pumped out and there was nothing but dry dust over her head. And the pump was continuing its work: together with the air, faith and hope had now disappeared; nothing was left but a small mound of grey, frozen earth.

Everything living - her mother, Nadya, Viktor's eyes, the bulletins about the course of the war - had ceased to exist.

Everything living had become inanimate. In the whole wide world only Tolya was still alive. But what silence there was all around him. Did he realise that she had come...?

[Life and Fate, Grossman, V.]