The silence in the village house was its own kind—thick and ringing, like ice on a winter well. It didn’t soothe; it pressed down. Every clink of her mother’s spoons against the bottom of the enamel bowl, every rustle of her housecoat echoed in Liza’s soul as a quiet yet unmistakable reproach. Her mother never said outright, “Go away.” She spoke in sighs, meaningful pauses, and phrases tossed out as if in passing when her daughter walked by.
“Clavdia Petrovna’s son from Petersburg drove in a new car. They say he’s got a three-room apartment…” Her mother’s voice dissolved into the smell of boiled potatoes and cabbage soup, but the meaning hung in the air—tangible, heavy.
Liza knew where the wind was blowing from. It wafted off her stepfather, Uncle Slava. He sat at the table, gloomy as a November sky, rattling the newspaper pages as if he wanted to shake the world’s sorrow off of them. He didn’t look at his stepdaughter, but every movement of his said: you don’t belong here. Once, pretending to be asleep, Liza heard his grumbling whisper through the thin partition:
“When’s somebody going to take her off our hands, eh? She’s an eyesore. Can’t find her place.”
Her heart tightened into a sharp, affronted lump. Then she thought: in a way, he’s right. What was she doing here? The village was dying before their eyes. The young scattered like cockroaches from the light; only old folks and plain jobs remained—milkmaids, night watchmen, clerks in the half-empty shop. She had studied accounting in the district center, come back with a diploma, and the only position available was the same cashier’s slot in that same store. It felt as if life had sucked her into a slow, sleepy bog with no way out.
The thought of the city—huge and full of promise—ripened like an abscess. Her friend Katya, with whom she’d once written letters to a conscript named Tolya, now seemed, judging by her rare postcards, to be living like a TV heroine: a high salary, her own apartment, cafés and clubs. Burning with shame and hope, Liza announced she was leaving. Her mother, overjoyed, practically pressed ten thousand rubles from a secret stocking into her hand—“to get set up.” Her stepfather muttered something and went out to the shed. It felt as if the door to the past had slammed shut.
But the city didn’t greet her with open arms. It deafened her with the roar of the metro, the piercing squeal of brakes, the feverish, chaotic stream of people rushing somewhere without seeing anything around them. They bumped into her, shot her irritated looks, muttered curses under their breath. Lost, clutching a plain little suitcase, she tried to explain to five different people how to find the address she needed. Only the fifth—an older man with tired eyes—pointed toward a bus and mumbled, “You want the outskirts, girl. Ride to the end.”
The outskirts turned out to be a kingdom of bleak panel giants, alike as cells in a honeycomb. When Katya opened the door, she froze for a second with a look of genuine horror that she at once tried to cover with delighted exclamations. The delight evaporated for good when her gaze dropped to Liza’s bag.
Illusions collapsed one after another. There was no apartment. There was a room in an old Khrushchyovka that Katya rented from a stern, perpetually displeased landlady, Aunt Galya. “An apartment is very expensive,” Katya apologized, embarrassed. “Salary? Well, yes, it’s good… by our standards. But here everything’s different: transport, food, utilities… You have to pay for everything—feels like even the air.”
After long, humiliating pleading, the landlady agreed to let Liza stay for a week. Not a day more. And for two thousand. The money she’d brought from home was melting before her eyes.
Job hunting became the next circle of hell. It turned out a district-center accounting diploma was just a piece of paper in the big city. Everyone wanted experience, a capital-city education, knowledge of specialized software. Despair drove her in a vicious circle: without a job there’s no money, without money you can’t rent a place, without a place you can’t get a decent job. She had to go back to sales—at a stuffy supermarket on the outskirts, with a pittance for pay and customers who were always yelling.
The room hunt turned into a nightmare. Realtors charged fees she couldn’t possibly pay. One agency offered a “unique” service: they’d take her money and hand over a list of addresses. No guarantees, no accompaniment. Liza poured her last hopes into that sheet of paper.
First address: the room had been rented out yesterday. Second: the owners stared at her as if she were mad—they weren’t renting anything. The third address didn’t exist at all. By the fourth and last, she no longer expected a miracle. The miracle, however, appeared in the form of a tall guy in a grease-stained T-shirt, who opened the door, frowned in puzzlement, and announced he’d been renting that room for half a year.
Despair, hunger, exhaustion—all fused into a single knot inside her. She couldn’t hold back and burst into tears, leaning her forehead against the cool stairwell wall, sobbing so loudly and hopelessly that the guy grew awkward and flustered.
“Hey, come on now. You’ll find a room,” he tried to comfort her, patting her shoulder.
“And tonight? Where am I supposed to sleep tonight? At the station?” she cried.
“Well, where were you before?”
“At a friend’s! But I got kicked out!”—which was almost true.
The guy—his name was Anton—was silent for a moment, scratched his head, and unexpectedly offered,
“All right, come in. You can crash at my place. There’s room.”
Fear stirred in Liza’s chest. A strange man, an unfamiliar apartment… But fatigue and despair were stronger. He swore “scout’s honor” he had no bad intentions, and she, curled up into herself, crossed the threshold.
The room in the communal apartment was piled with discs and clothes; it smelled of cigarettes and takeout. But it was a roof. Anton turned out to be a decent fellow—cheerful, reckless. His parents had sent him from the district center to study, but he partied, got expelled, and now he lied to them on the phone that everything was fine while he worked as a loader in a warehouse.
A week stretched into a month. Liza almost stopped looking for a room. Together they scraped by; their meager wages pooled into one common wallet. She began to feel that this was the real city life she’d come for—hard, but her own. She even let herself believe that something more than friendly help was growing between them.
The first alarm bell rang quietly and almost unnoticed—a bit of morning nausea. She chalked it up to dodgy dumplings. Then the smells in the store started making her dizzy. A seasoned coworker narrowed her eyes:
“Sweetheart, you wouldn’t happen to be pregnant, would you?”
“Me? No… I mean… I don’t know,” Liza stammered.
“Then take a test! Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of those?” the woman snorted.
Liza hadn’t. It turned out two lines on a tiny strip could turn the whole world upside down in an instant. Her first thought—wild and frightening—was: “Where will we get money for a wedding?”
That evening, with a tremor and naive hope, she told Anton everything. He listened, staring at his phone screen, and when she finished, he just laughed. It wasn’t the laughter she’d been waiting for.
“A wedding?” he scoffed. “What are you even talking about? Liza, look at yourself. A village simpleton without a penny to your name. I want a city girl—with an apartment, with a future. Why would I need that burden?”
The words fell like knife blows—cold, sharp shards.
“And the baby?” she whispered, already feeling everything collapse.
“Your kid isn’t my problem. In fact, I think it’s time we wrapped this up. I gave you a breather, and this is how you thank me.”
She cried, degraded herself, begged him to come to his senses. But his face had turned strange and stony. He packed her few belongings into that same little suitcase, shoved it into her hands, and literally pushed her out the door. The click of the lock sounded like a sentence.
Katya, seeing her with a tear-streaked face and a bag, could only spread her hands helplessly: Aunt Galya wouldn’t let her in for anything. Then, looking at Liza’s belly, she asked quietly:
“Are you… going to keep it?”
“Of course!” Liza didn’t even grasp the question.
“Well… as you wish. Then there’s only one way for you—home.”
Home. To her mother. To her stepfather. With a belly, without a husband, without money. Shame for the whole village. Liza could physically feel herself shrink with shame and fear. But there was no other way.
At the bus station in the district center where the coach had dropped her, it smelled of cheap coffee and loneliness. She sat on a hard plastic chair, furtively wiping away treacherous tears with her palm, waiting for the fateful bus to the village. Her world had shrunk to the size of the bitter lump in her throat.
Someone suddenly dropped heavily onto the seat beside her. She turned away, not wanting to talk to anyone.
“Liza? Is that you?” a man’s voice said. “Why the long face? Feels like a graveyard in here.”
She turned. Tolya sat there—the guy from her village, three years older. His face, familiar since childhood, seemed like an icon in a dark church now—known and steady. She remembered him as somewhat reserved, serious. She remembered how at his farewell before the army she, still a gawky teenager, had twisted her ankle. Without a word he had picked her up and carried her three streets to her house. She remembered how she and Katya, for laughs, wrote him letters to his unit. Then he came back, she left to study, and their paths diverged.
And something broke inside her. All the pain, fear, and humiliations of the past months poured out in an endless torrent. She told him everything, breathless, jumbled, bitter: about Katya’s misleading postcards, about cruel people, about the realtors’ fake addresses, about Anton, his laughter, and betrayal. About the child she already felt as part of herself and who was now destined to be an outcast.
“You know my stepfather, Uncle Slava,” she sobbed, finishing her confession. “He’ll make my life hell. No one will speak up for me; they’ll just point fingers.”
Tolya listened in silence, not interrupting. His face was serious. He scratched his head, sighed, and looked her straight in the eye.
“How about you come stay with us. I’ll tell everyone the child is mine.”
She stared at him, not believing her ears. Her eyes were so full of confusion and distrust that he hurried to add:
“Don’t be scared. I won’t lay a finger on you. Like in those TV dramas… a marriage of convenience, I think they call it.”
“Why would you do that?” she whispered, searching his eyes for a catch.
“Well, for one thing, I’ve always liked you,” he said simply, without flourish. “I love kids. And… I owe you. In the army it was soul-crushing. Of all the folks back home, only you and Katya—and my mom—wrote to me. You didn’t forget.”
She never understood herself what made her agree to this crazy venture. Maybe the last hope of clutching at a straw. Maybe something clean and reliable in his gaze.
They had a quiet wedding without fuss. In the village, everyone “understood” such weddings correctly—as a necessity to cover an early heir. And so it was: seven and a half months later, Liza gave birth to a boy. They named him Alexei.
The baby was dark-skinned, black-haired, with eyes as dark as coals—the spitting image of his biological father. He stood out as a little grump in a family of fair-haired, light-eyed parents. One of Tolya’s buddies, getting merry at a party, couldn’t resist a stupid joke: “Tolyan, your boy looks like the neighbor, I swear! That big-eyed one with the Volga.”
He didn’t finish. Tolya, usually calm and taciturn, transformed. There was no anger in his movements—only a cold, swift resolve. In a second the joker was on the floor, clutching his bloody mouth.
Tolya stood over him; he didn’t shout or wave his arms. He spoke quietly, but in a voice everyone heard, and each word dropped to the floor like a steel nail.
“If anyone ever again,” he slowly swept his gaze over all the frozen guests, “says even half a word about my son, I’ll tear his head off. And stick it on a scarecrow. For scaring crows in the garden.”
In the deathly silence that followed, the only sound was little Alexei’s soft snuffling in Liza’s arms.
And Liza… Liza looked at her husband, and her heart tightened with a strange, aching feeling. Suddenly, with absolute clarity, she understood that long ago—very long ago—she had stopped thinking of their marriage as fictitious. Somewhere between sleepless nights at the baby’s crib, his quiet smiles over breakfast, Tolya’s steady strength, and this fierce, all-out protection, she had found what she’d gone to the city for: her real, unfeigned home. And it wasn’t a place—it was a person. This silent, strong man who wasn’t afraid of another man’s blood and made it his own.
