"The Repatriates"

"The Repatriates"
by Sana Krasikov

Rating: 7.4



Short story about a Russian couple returning to Moscow after living in the United States for many years. The husband is taking them back with the hope of starting an investment business. The last days of Grisha and Lera Arsenyev’s marriage might have been a story fashioned out of commonplace…

After a while, they seemed to have no reaction at all to her story, which was what made her stop telling it.
When she was working again, in a lab at a medical-research park in Eastview, surrounded by test tubes and electrophoresis trays, she had a lot of time to think about Grisha. She imagined failures and disappointments for him in proportion to his smug magnanimous “principles,” in proportion to his pietistic love of his soil, his secret belief that he deserved to be a national hero. She imagined him bankrupt, drinking at eleven in the morning. She imagined him in a coffin surrounded by strangers and none of his old friends. But sometimes this hatred broke like a wave, collapsing under its own weight, and before it would begin to well up again she suddenly felt nothing but pure compassion for him, a kindness and forgiveness that almost broke her heart. ♦