WORLDLIT.ORG 63 father didn’t expect such a turn of events: he didn’t want to strangle him, only to crush his self-confidence. As soon as he realized what happened, he cried out for help. Lilian had seen the whole procedure, walked into the river, dived, and, embracing him with one arm, dragged the child ashore. There she pumped water out of him, Jadran Danica came to, while his father sat slumped on the ground, baffled, shaken, his head hanging between his drawn-up knees. Today it’s raining in paradise. At the onset of the cold war Time magazine featured the picture of Ana Pauker on the cover of its September 20, 1948, issue. In those days she ranked as one of the world’s most influential women. The title ran “A Girl Who Hated Cream Puffs.” It didn’t say a word about what it was like to grow up in Bucharest when the law didn’t allow her to go to school, what it was like to save Jews during the pogroms: the aim was to offer a monster to the civil, cream puff -loving eyes of the readers. Beczásy’s younger daughter, who was starving most of the time, being reduced to stealing bread from the shop, received a small sum of money on the first of every month; she would go straight to the confectionery and ask for three bombs, those artificially colored, creamy, sickeningly sweet cakes. The little abandoned girl had to fight back her nausea, but once a month stuffed them all into her mouth. This of course I have hardly any means of knowing here, in icy Dobrogea, in the company of Beczásy and Zina, so nothing can stop me from naming the cakes that little Tanietchka gorged on once a month the Gadget, the Little Boy, and the Fat Man. There was a joke about someone calling Radio Yerevan: Could you please tell me why Ana Pauker is walking with an umbrella on the streets of Bucharest in broad sunshine? Certainly we can: because today it’s raining in Moscow. Today it’s raining in Congo, in Monrovia, in Baghdad, Falluja, in Jerusalem, Guinea-Bissau, today it’s raining. I too was saved by the sex bomb a few years later, in Rome. I was a tiny abandoned kitten shivering on the streets alone, when she came by with her dancing gait, with her blond mane, in her gown with the long train; she placed me on her head and laughed. Then she spotted the Trevi fountain, today it’s raining in paradise , she put me down and waded into the water, and never as much as turned around for all my mewing. Translation from the Hungarian By Erika Mihálycsa editor’s pick Petina Gappah Rotten Row Faber & Faber 2016 Petina Gappah’s new collection of stories is named after the street where the criminal courts in Harare sit: Rotten Row, where the powerful avoid punishment with a bribe and if the mob mentality doesn’t get you, a pothole probably will. The characters are policemen, divorcing spouses, the Old Familiar Faces gathered for a workshop, an executioner, and a ghost who will not depart until he sees justice. In two of her stories, Gappah, an international lawyer, creatively uses the forms of documents daily seen on Rotten Row, a postmortem report and a judicial opinion, to tell her stories. In the opinion, a female judge sets out in sixty-six numbered paragraphs the story of a failed marriage in her legal decision granting a divorce, including her explanation that since 2004 it is illegal in Zimbabwe for a man to rape his wife. In doing so, Gappah demonstrates the narrative dimensions of legal writing while bringing the law, literally, into her literature. And what of the women in these stories? None of the stories is solely about how a woman suffers because of her sex. No, misogyny is omnipresent on Rotten Row and throughout Harare and across the geography of these pages. It rides the kombi in the second story, where a man harasses a female commuter; it speaks through a woman-hating female avatar online...