Ver, what—did you lock yourself in? Open up!” Igor’s voice was hoarse, irritated.
Vera didn’t move. She set her book aside and simply stared at the door that separated her new life from his old one.
“Vera! I’m talking to you! What, are you deaf in there? Open up—I said open!”
Silence was her answer. That silence, apparently, enraged him more than any scream could have. His fist slammed into the door—harder this time. The door shuddered slightly.
“What, you don’t get jokes?! I’ll kick this door in! You know me!”
Tyoma stirred in his room in his sleep. Vera stood up, went into the nursery, and pulled the door more tightly shut. She didn’t go back to the kitchen. She stayed in the hallway, a few meters from the epicenter of his rage. That was better. She had to face it head-on, even if a steel barrier stood between them.
The blows came one after another. Now he was hitting not only with his fist but with his foot too, aiming somewhere around the new lock. Dry, dull thuds reverberated through the entire apartment.
“Open up, you bitch! Who do you think you are?! This is my apartment too! You’ve got no right!”
Vera smirked to herself. The apartment. That’s what he remembered first. Not his son asleep behind the wall, who could wake up scared. Not her. The square meters.
“I’m calling Sanya—we’ll break it down together! You’ll regret this, you hear me?! You’ll come crawling to me on your knees!”
He shouted, spat threats, swinging from drunken fury to a whiny, pleading tone and back again. He begged, demanded, insulted. And she simply stood and listened. The pounding, the yelling—none of it terrified her. It confirmed she was right. She saw him clearly: a weak, infantile, selfish man used to the world revolving around his wishes. Now that world had cracked, and he could respond in only one way he understood—brute force and meaningless threats.
She made Tyoma cocoa for the morning, set a cezve filled with water on the stove so she could brew herself coffee when it was all over. She went on, demonstratively living her life while he thrashed outside the threshold. Every blow against the door seemed not to weaken her resolve, but to strengthen it. He wasn’t breaking into the apartment. He was trying to break into the past—where he no longer had an entry.
The crashing stopped for a moment. Heavy breathing followed, then the sound of a body sliding down the door. He sat on the stairwell floor, spent.
“Ver… come on, Ver… what are you doing, huh?” he whined pitifully, almost sober. “I’m sorry, okay, if I did something wrong… Open up? It’s cold…”
It was his last trick. An attempt to press on pity. But Vera knew that behind the pity would come a new explosion of rage the moment he got inside. She stayed silent. And that silence was her strongest weapon. Realizing it hadn’t worked, he sprang up again.
“That’s it, you bitch! You’ve asked for it!”
A new, desperate kick landed square in the center of the door. Something inside clinked. Vera knew it was time to end this. Enough. She took a deep breath and stepped decisively toward the door.
She didn’t bother looking through the peephole. She already knew who it was. She knew what state he was in, and she could almost predict the words that would spill from his mouth. Vera took a deep, calm breath, turned the top key, then the bottom. The heavy new mechanism gave way with dull clicks. She grabbed the handle and yanked the door open toward herself.
Igor—who had been winding up for another удар—lurched forward with momentum and nearly stumbled into the hallway, catching himself at the last second.
He stood on the threshold, disheveled, his face red and swollen from alcohol and anger. His shirt was wrinkled, and he reeked of beer and some cheap street cheburek. He looked pathetic and, at the same time, disgusting. For a second drunken surprise flashed in his eyes, but it immediately gave way to a fresh wave of fury.
“Have you lost your mind?!” he barked, trying to squeeze past her. But Vera didn’t budge, blocking his way. She didn’t shove him—she just stood there like a rock. “Let me into my house!”
“There’s nothing of yours left here,” she said. Her voice was quiet, but in the stairwell still ringing with his shouts, it sounded like a sentence. “No home. No family.”
“What?!” He recoiled as if she’d hit him. “So you decided that, did you? All by yourself? Forgot to ask me? And did you think about our son?! What are you going to tell him?!”
He tried to look over her shoulder, as if searching for Tyoma—his main and last ally in this apartment.
“He’s asleep. Today he didn’t have to listen to his father choosing a bottle of beer over him. And unlike you, tomorrow he’s going to the zoo. With me.” Vera clipped each word cleanly. She looked him straight in the eyes, and there wasn’t a drop of pity in her gaze—only a cold, burned-out emptiness where love used to be.
Igor understood he was losing. Every argument—property rights, fatherly duty, masculine force—shattered against her impenetrable calm. He was a drunk, shouting clown on the threshold of someone else’s play, a play in which he no longer had a role. And then he reached for the last thing he had left.
Humiliation.
“Who’s going to want you?” he hissed viciously, twisting his mouth into a sneer. “A dumped woman with baggage. You think anyone’s going to look at you? You’ll die alone with your little litter.”
He expected tears. A tantrum. Screamed insults. He wanted to hurt her—hurt her the way he hurt from his own helplessness. But Vera only slowly looked him up and down. Her eyes weren’t those of a wounded woman; they were the eyes of an orderly examining a dirty stain on the floor that needed to be cleaned up.
“I was ashamed of you in front of our son when you left,” she said slowly and clearly. “And now, looking at you, I’m simply ashamed. Of myself. That I once chose such a nobody.”
She didn’t wait for a reply. Didn’t give him a chance to spit out one more vile thing. She simply stepped back and, firmly but without slamming, pulled the door toward herself. The heavy slab closed right in front of his face.
Three turns of the new key sounded like the final nails driven into the lid of the coffin of their life together.
Igor was left alone in the dimly lit stairwell. Not a sound came from behind the door. Inside, a new, quiet life was beginning. And he—with his spite, his hangover, and the useless keys in his pocket—stayed outside.
Forever…
