Description

A RESCUE THAT WORKS. A PERSON WHO CANNOT BE IMPROVED.

Irina weighs a hundred and seventy-nine kilos and can no longer walk the eighty meters from the shopping center to her apartment building without stopping. One Sunday in January, three men with a stretcher pull up beside her. It looks like an emergency. It is a contract, and her daughter has signed it.

Zhenia is thirty-four, lives three hundred and fifty kilometers away, and for years has known her mother only as a voice on the phone asking for money. She hasn’t paid. She has given something else.

In a disused natural history museum, Irina sleeps for eight months. A doctor without a license keeps records. An unlicensed therapist puts her memories in order: Tiraspol, Moscow in the Soviet Union’s last winter, a man with beautiful hands, a child who watched. The readings improve. The woman gets lighter. Only the life she brought with her refuses to shrink.

When she wakes, she has a different body and is the same person. And her daughter has to face her.

How far can a rescue go when the person being saved never agreed to it?

BERND BEST

writes about people who cannot be saved and systems that try anyway. His stories combine psychological suspense, black humor, and the grotesque workings of modern institutions.