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 […]
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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 […]
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Ekaterina bought that apartment when she was thirty-one — on her own, without anyone’s help, after seven years of working as a senior analyst at an insurance company in Voronezh. It was a two-room apartment on the fifth floor of a new building, with a view of a small park and a sensible layout, where […]
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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 […]
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“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 […]
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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 […]
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