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“You shouldn’t rush,” he said. “There are no taste buds in your stomach.” She paused to consider his reasoning, then took another bite. “There’s no hunger in your tongue,”
The old woman had grown up on a lemon orchard and for her first seventeen years she hadn’t eaten a meal that wasn’t made of lemon. There had been lemon cucumber salad, lemon vinaigrette beans, lemon-glazed chicken, lemon-stuffed trout, lemon lamb kabob, lemon-dill rice, lemon-roasted chicken thighs, lemon-curd dressing, lemon pudding, lemon-apricot cake, lemon marmalade cookies, and on it went. She was still four years and one month away from her seventy-sixth birthday and the miracle of her first lime.
She wouldn’t climb out of bed for her sister, but she had climbed into a crater. She wouldn’t cross a room, but she had crossed a continent.
“She just became boring. She wouldn’t stop talking about her ice machine. And she called me a solipsist.”
“You should teach the guard downstairs to juggle.” “But he only has one arm.” “But he really wants to learn. He’s embarrassed by his arm so he’ll refuse at first. But you need to be persistent.”
“My father says persistence is a polite way of being annoying.”
He spent the morning following her, nodding politely as she denounced the Russians for various earthly ills, and a few—volcanoes, winter, her arthritic hips—that fell within God’s jurisdiction. “If we could, we’d blame constipation on the Russians,” he said. “I already do. Roughage is so rare.”
You can choose your son no more than you can choose your father, but you can choose how you will treat him,
this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn’t immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it.
I want to be forgotten. There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”
“We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.”
Sonja’s gifts were too complex to be understood, and therefore less desirable.
Based on the average life expectancy of a Soviet woman, she could expect to live for another forty-eight years, but the Soviet Union had died, and she hadn’t, and the appendices couldn’t explain this discrepancy in data, when the subject outlasted its experiment.
The heat of the following summer weighed so much it would take an extra autumn to fully lift.
that hurt burrowed deeper than anything she’d ever felt, deep enough to change from the thing she felt to the thing she was.
“I believe in some things.” “In God.” He shook his head. “But I’ve seen you pray at noon.” “That’s like asking if I believe in gravity,” he said. “It doesn’t require belief.” “I’ve always thought Marx’s view on religion was the one thing he got right. Faith is a crutch.” “If you step on a land mine,” Akhmed said, “the crutch becomes the leg.”
The pearl of faith had dissolved, and at its core was a sand grain of doubt, and he held on to it, knowing that doubt, like longing, could sustain him.
Hadji Murád, the last and among the most powerful of Tolstoy’s novels, appears in a beautiful translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories.
