Or that a third boot suddenly appears next to an existing pair. That little jar-it was just on this shelf! Where is it? Where did it go?īut never does it come to pass that you open up your closet and wham-there is an extra jar, out of nowhere. Other things dear to one’s heart also tend to disappear: they were just here, and now they’re nowhere to be found, but no one could have taken them, and there is no explanation for this. Forty-seven! That’s what my “Oka” had swallowed in eight years. And so, after recovering those four single socks and finding their pairs in my sock box, I counted the rest: there were forty-seven single socks. Times were tough-Soviet tough-good socks didn’t grow on trees, and I had two boys and my husband to think of: that’s six feet total! But I wasn’t saving these socks out of poverty or thrift, but rather out of spite. I had long suspected that my washing machine was up to no good, so I developed a system: any unpaired sock that was extracted from it, instead of getting thrown out, was carefully stored in a special box.

So with everything open to view, in the corners, under the ghosts of beds and sofas, a few socks were recovered. Not only did I strip off the wallpaper, I also removed all the doors. The apartment was stripped bare to the wallpaper, and I ended up taking that down, too, by way of revenge on the new tenant, a young communist-turned-priest, who pulled some political strings to evict me unfairly, just as the rain did to the itsy-bitsy spider. I spent almost a decade in an apartment I absolutely loved, but all good things must come to an end, and I had to move out. And besides, duvet covers must be ironed-there is no place to hide.

This isn’t actually so much an explanation as it is an attempt at avoiding one-every experienced doer of laundry, furious at yet another disappearance, shakes and turns all bed linens inside out. Socks get entangled in the other laundry, perhaps slipping into the corners of duvet covers and staying there quietly, like flattened mice.

The Slynx by Tatyana Tolstaya