Free The Rise & Fall of Great Powers by Tom Rachman

unlocked the front door. “Good to be home,” he said.
    As they looked at this latest apartment, it felt like home to neither of them.

1999
    B LINKING TO WAKEFULNESS , she glanced at her few possessions with estrangement: corduroys splayed across the floor, sweater and coat heaped on sneakers, bra twisted over a low-rise of books. She pushed open her bedroom door and clomped across the main room toward the toilet.
    “Good mornink,” Humphrey said in his thick Russian accent. Seated on the couch holding a book, the old man nearly said more, but thought better of it, knowing Tooly to be grumpy at this hour, barely 11:30 A.M.
    She lapped water from the bathroom faucet, then returned to her bedroom, pulled on her oatmeal cable knit and a dressing gown, its belt dragging along the cold concrete floor. At her window, she raised the blinds, contemplating their little-trafficked street under the shadow of the Gowanus Expressway in Brooklyn. The sidewalks were icy that November day. Shoes hung from the power lines, tossed up there years earlier by kids who’d long since grown into adults.
    Much as Tooly wanted to impose her mood on the morning, she couldn’t resist Humphrey in the other room. He’d probably been waiting hours for her company. When she joined him, he had a steaming cup of coffee for her on the Ping-Pong table. She collected it, sat at the other end of the couch, and frowned in order to win a few minutes’ silence. He turned a page, pretending to read, though he peeked at her from under his overflowing eyebrows, raccoon shadows below his eyes, creases around his mouth, which kept tightening,ready to pounce on a conversation, then relenting. Humphrey, who was seventy-two, wore baby-blue slacks high around his gut, a polyester dress shirt of the small size he’d once been, and a loosened paisley tie, all from the thrift shop. Bits of stubble, like toast crumbs, adhered around his thin lips and prickled the cords of his throat; one ashen sideburn was longer than the other, giving the impression that he might tip over. “I’m so tired,” he sighed, “of being loved for my beautiful body.”
    She smiled, took a sip of coffee, and plucked the book from his hands: The Maxims of La Rochefoucauld .
    “I also have maxim in life,” Humphrey informed her. “My maxim is never let Tooly Zylberberg take book, because it goes and never comes back.”
    “If I borrow a book and like it,” she contended, “it becomes mine by law.”
    “I overrule this law.”
    “I appeal to a higher court where I’m the judge, and I uphold the law.”
    “System is flawed,” he observed.
    “I have my own maxim in life: Why is it so freezing here?” She reached behind the couch frame to where he dumped his bedcovers each morning and dragged up his comforter, wrapping herself in it. (He slept on the couch and made efforts to move from it minimally. His seat was at the far end, amid a swamp of newspaper pages that he’d flung into the air in contempt. Under the cushion, he stuffed clippings and crosswords that over time had elevated him; each time he sat, newsprint crunched.)
    Considering her swaddled in his bedcovers, Humphrey remarked, “You look like bear hyperbating for winter.”
    “A bear doing what?”
    “Hyperbating.”
    “What is ‘hyperbating’? Sounds like a bear that can’t stop masturbating.”
    “Don’t be disgusting pervert!”
    “It’s a reasonable conclusion, Humph. There aren’t that many other words that end in ‘-bating.’ ”
    “Plenty words end in ‘-bating.’ ”
    “Like what?”
    “Like … Like ‘riverbating.’ ”
    “What is ‘riverbating’?”
    “ ‘Riverbating’: when there is echo, you say it is riverbating.”
    “ ‘Reverberating,’ ” she corrected him, “isn’t a word that ends in ‘-bating.’ ”
    “Okay, I give you other.” He paused. “Here, I have it: ‘verbating.’ ”
    “ ‘Verbating’?”
    “When you speak something and I repeat it back