The Elephant Vanishes: Stories

A female friend of the narrator’s wife tells him about how her parents split up over a pair of lederhosen. When she went to visit her sister in Germany years earlier, the woman’s mother went to a shop to buy her husband a pair of souvenir lederhosen (this was the only souvenir her husband had requested). But the shop attendant, concerned about their reputation, would not sell her lederhosen without her husband present, saying they needed him there for a proper fitting. After some bargaining, the mother and the shop attendant reached a compromise: If the mother returned with a man her husband’s size and build, they could use him for the fitting and sell her the lederhosen. The mother found a man the size of her husband, and during the fitting decided she wanted a divorce.