A fable about the disintegration of a good man. At the insistence of his wife, Eibenschutz leaves his job as an artilleryman in the Austro-Hungarian army for a civilian job as the inspector of weights and measures in a remote territory, near the Russian
On a fictional Sapphic island where women live exclusively among themselves, the narrator-protagonist, in a series of invocations to her lover and descriptions of the island's life, celebrates the contours, contents, and satisfactions of the lesbian body.