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How Much Women Know
This story concerns a perfect girl, raised by her perfect mother and grandmother. Three ageless beauties, crème de la crème of Moscow’s Jewish intelligentsia. The grandmother resembled a charming infant. A former pianist, she wore lace gloves in the summer. The mother, a ...

Story of an Illness
To tell you the truth, I much prefer to be sick at home. At a hospital, no question, the light bulbs are stronger and things are more scientific in general. But at home, as they say, even straw tastes better. Judge for yourselves. My family brings me to the hospital with typhoid ...

For Yama Is the Lord of Death
A: Because I guess my overall numbers are not where they should be? That’s what Rhimst said. He had the numbers all printed out. Numbers for the month, the quarter, the year, and then the projections. The projections, I think, did not look good. At least that was the feeling I ...

Bizness
If you were born in a decent, settled country, you may work for decades as an accountant, you may eat a nutritious dinner every night, and then you may die peacefully in your fluffy little bed, thinking you have lived a life. Not so in my country. Its path is capricious and ...

Among Friends
I’m a direct person, always smirking and poking fun when we all get together at Marisha and Serge’s on Fridays. Everybody comes. If one of us misses a Friday, it’s because he or she couldn’t get away, or has been banished by the enraged Marisha or the entire gang. Andrey ...

Solitude
I’ve got money. But money means nothing. I have no visa. So I can’t leave the airport. I can’t take the express train to Vienna. So I drink Viennese coffee and eat Sachertorte. I’ll be trapped in Terminal C for a full seven hours. How many perfumes can you try out in the ...

A Beauty
Peter Fedorovich was gorgeous as a morning star. The moment office ladies glimpsed his shimmering locks at the door they fell on the floor in a deadly swoon. A bookkeeper once had to be hospitalized: she fainted still hugging her enormous electric typewriter, and it crushed two ...

The Agony of Leaves
April 10, 2014
I do not want to beat about this bush or that bush. I will say it straight: I am not a perverted fellow. It has never been my habit to move with prostitutes or other women of that type. Not even once have I made a lewd remark to a lady or suggested some dubious act to anyone ...

Up in Birdland
They could eat and not care about bad cholesterol, heart disease, or cancer. They could forget about those colonoscopies they’d been putting off and those impending cataract surgeries. They could smoke cigarettes and drink the hard stuff again. No more wearing a mouth guard at ...

Invasion of Grenada
Maybe we weren’t meant to be foster parents. It’s important to learn these things early on, I would bet. My wife had signed us up for the project, and some Department of Social Services people showed up to make sure we didn’t have firearms scattered around the house or ...

Lancelot Gomes
February 14, 2014
It was Filomena Rodrigues who broke the news at the Panjim fish market. She ran into her neighbor Maravilha da Gama, who was haggling over the price of a glassy-eyed mullet with a large fisherwoman bedecked in gold necklaces which rested in serpentine spirals on her hillocky ...

Mr. Secondhand
February 13, 2014
When Cajetan Xavier sold his ten-year-old Vespa to buy a ten-year-old Maruti 800 it came as no surprise to the other residents of St. Jerome’s Colony in Dona Paula. The wiry frame of Cajetan putt-putting on his aging scooter up the steep slope before the National Institute of ...