He Called My Name from Another Room

For nine years Yelena Fedorova has known the exits of every room in the apartment on Prechistenskaya — a map in her head, the way a wife of a pakhan learns to keep one. The night the police raid the flat, she hears her husband call her name from another room. She goes. He isn't there. He's in the courtyard, on the phone, laughing. What she heard was a recording Viktor plays to rile her, and has played before, and she has let him. Then a detective hands her a card and says a name: Katya. Viktor's sister-in-law, who went to Istanbul four years ago, and never wrote. What Yelena finds is not a mistress. It is a body, a cover-up, and the real shape of the marriage she has been living in. She can testify. She can disappear. She can become someone else in a town she has never seen. She can, in the end, walk past a man who calls her name.