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Olga did not immediately understand why her husband had started coming home from work in silence. Then she saw his correspondence with his sister. Seven days later, Viktor went to the bank, and everything fell into place. Olga noticed it because of the spoon. Viktor had always stirred his tea counterclockwise, slowly, thoughtfully, looking out […]

Galina Petrovna stood on the doorstep with two suitcases and a banana box. She was sure her son would take her in. She did not know the apartment was registered in her daughter-in-law’s name. The doorbell rang at half past eight in the morning, when Rita had not even managed to finish her coffee. The […]

Alisa sat in the dispatch office, staring blankly at her sneakers. The right one had come slightly unglued where the sole met the shoe, and whenever the street turned into a slushy mess of melting snow and road chemicals, her foot instantly got soaked. Gluing her shoes back together with superglue on Sundays had already […]

My mother’s visit caught me off guard, even though she had warned me about it in advance. … The phone call from Stuttgart had come in the middle of the night a couple of days earlier, filling the room with her feverish, ringing voice, threaded with that peculiar triumph people have when they have suddenly […]

The smell of cheap Turkish lavender air freshener had sunk permanently into the walls of their two-room apartment on the outskirts of the city. Yadviga Antonovna, who had turned thirty-nine a couple of days earlier, sat in the kitchen, thoughtfully looking at her hands. On the index finger of her left hand were barely visible […]

“Don’t cook half of the dumplings. Put them into containers; your father and I will take them,” my mother-in-law ordered as she walked into my country-house kitchen with such confidence, as if the dumplings had already been registered inside her bag. “A proper housewife should live more modestly and not teach her husband to be […]

My ex-husband Kirill had a unique talent: he knew how to burst into someone else’s life with the grace of a bulldozer that, for some reason, believed it was a ballet barre. He appeared on the doorstep of my apartment at seven in the evening on a February Tuesday, shaking snow from a coat that […]

Saturday morning began with a crash. I was still lying in bed when the sound of a frying pan hitting the floor came from the kitchen, followed by my husband’s muffled curse. Sergei always got up earlier than me on weekends, firmly believing that a day off was meant for getting a pile of chores […]