“Natasha”
The end of the title story has the narrator looking back upon his summer of love or something like it and musing in a sort of wistfully melancholic metaphorical state of mind:
“I saw what Natasha must have seen every time she came to the house. In the full light of summer, I looked into darkness. It was the end of my subterranean life.”
“The Second Strongest Man”
Sergei Federenko, weightlifting champion, is a hero to all and friend to the narrator’s family. As a young five-ish boy with an eager aim to please, he reinforces Sergei’s ideas of his own easy strength:
“I shadowed him around the apartment. I swung from his biceps like a monkey.”
“Choynski”
This story is ostensibly about the narrator’s obsession with a pugilist from the 1800’s, but in concert with that narrative thread is the worsening of his grandmother’s battle with cancer. He addresses it directly, but also obliquely through metaphorical emotional distancing:
“Each day my grandmother lost something more of herself, as if the disease knew that one day had passed and the next had begun.”
“Roman Berman, Massage Therapist”
The narrator’s father, Roman, is going into business as a massage therapist. Everyone is excited about the flyers that have arrived announcing the opening and now it is time to sit back and play the waiting game. But waiting game turns weird as the phone transforms into unfamiliarly menacing:
“Now with every rings of the phone there was potential for salvation. The phone existed like a new thing…it was either with us or against us.”
“Minyan”
Following his grandmother’s succumbing to the ravages of cancer, the narrator’s grandfather announces he no longer wants to stay where so many memories haunt. The process of finding another vacant apartment without the reliable system involving bribery is not so easy, however. How hard is it?
“No doubt and apartment existed and waited, like America, to be discovered.”
That’s how hard.
