Polina Vladislavovna climbed out of her brand-new SUV as though she were stepping off a private jet in Monaco rather than onto the muddy back road of our village. One leg in a beige pump hovered uncertainly above a puddle, her face twisted in disgust, and the expensive perfume hanging around her lasted only a second before being defeated by the scent of freshly cut grass and the neighbor’s manure pile.
“My goodness, what an… authentic atmosphere,” my mother-in-law said at last, finally setting foot on the ground and brushing an imaginary speck from her sleeve. “Yulia, dear, I do hope your mother has disposable slippers. I read that fungus mutates faster in rural areas.”
“Don’t worry, Polina Vladislavovna,” I replied with a smile so wide it hurt my cheeks. “The fungus here is very well-bred. It avoids city people. Looks down on them, really.”
My husband Anton, unloading the bags, snorted into his fist and carefully avoided meeting his mother’s eyes. He had long ago adopted a policy of “neutrality,” though in truth he quietly fought on my side, usually by slipping me the best pieces of meat at dinner.
My mother, Darya Dmitrievna, came out onto the porch, wiping her hands on her apron. She’s an intelligent woman, a retired literature teacher, the kind of person who can make even a simple greeting sound graceful.
“Polina! How was the drive?” my mother asked warmly, glowing with hospitality that my mother-in-law immediately mistook for naivety.
“Darya,” my mother-in-law replied with a curt nod, not bothering to smile. “I hope the water in the house is filtered. My cosmetologist says hard water turns a woman’s face into a baked apple. Though I suppose for some people it hardly matters anymore.”
That was the first insult. My mother only smiled gently, but I saw the corners of her mouth tremble.
“Polina Vladislavovna,” I cut in, taking hold of her suitcase, “our water comes from an artesian well. And baked-apple faces are not caused by hard water. They come from too much bile in the system. Scientific fact.”
She froze. Her mouth opened as if to protest, but when she met my icy look, she merely adjusted her hair. Like someone who had swallowed a whole lemon without chewing.
The evening began with an inspection. My mother-in-law prowled through the house like a sanitation officer about to shut down a questionable kebab stand. She hated everything: the curtains (“hopelessly old-fashioned”), the rugs (“dust collectors”), even the air itself (“too much oxygen, it makes me dizzy”).
But the real disaster struck when Bim entered the room.
Bim is both our pride and our heartbreak. An old one-eyed spaniel we had practically dragged back from death two years earlier. He had been hit by a car, abandoned by his owners, and my mother nursed him back to life. He limped, breathed heavily, and required special care, but he was the sweetest creature on earth.
“Get that thing out of here immediately!” shrieked Polina Vladislavovna, springing onto a chair with the agility of a startled goat. “He’s diseased! Just look at his fur!”
Bim, wagging the stub of his tail, wandered up happily to sniff her shoe.
“Shoo! Get away! Go on!” she cried, swinging her Gucci handbag at him. “Anton, throw him outside! Or I’m leaving!”
Anton stiffened, and his face went hard.
“Mom, Bim lives here. You’re the guest,” he said quietly, but firmly.
“A guest in this unsanitary nightmare?” she snapped. “If that mutt stays in the house, I refuse to sleep here! He reeks of dog and old age! His place is in a pit, not on a sofa! He should have been put down a long time ago instead of everyone dragging this out!”
I felt cold fury rise inside me. It was that particular kind of anger when you stop shouting and begin speaking in a calm, razor-sharp voice. I walked over to Bim, stroked his gray head, and turned to her.
“Polina Vladislavovna, statistically speaking, the handle of your designer handbag carries three hundred times more bacteria than this dog,” I said in the tone of a university lecturer. “So if anything here needs to be disinfected with bleach on the porch, it’s your accessory.”
She stared at her bag, then at me, then back at the bag, as if desperately trying to reboot her brain.
“How dare you…” she whispered, clutching the handbag to her chest.
“That,” I said, “is how a trained biologist speaks. Bim stays. And I’ll make up the guest room for you. The door closes tightly, so the bacteria won’t seep in. You can ride it out like a bunker.”
The next day the queen mother changed tactics. Once she realized a direct attack was getting her nowhere, she switched into her “wise mentor among barbarians” role.
That morning, she stepped out onto the veranda where my mother was sorting berries and began another lecture with a dramatic sigh.
“Darya, who plants hydrangeas like this? It’s so tasteless. The colors clash horribly. In Europe, monochrome landscaping is in fashion. This looks like a gypsy carnival.”
My mother, who loved those hydrangeas like her own children, looked genuinely thrown off.
“But Polina, this is the Endless Summer variety. They change color depending on the soil…”
“The soil has nothing to do with it. It’s simply bad taste,” my mother-in-law interrupted, sipping her coffee. “You ought to pull them all out and replace them with thuja. I can give you my landscape designer’s number. He charges a fortune, of course, but he could turn this… patch of vegetables into something decent.”
I happened to be passing by with a bucket of water and stopped.
“Polina Vladislavovna, thuja is lovely if your goal is to turn my mother’s garden into a luxury cemetery,” I said, setting the bucket down with a loud thud. “And hydrangeas have been in style for the last three years. Strange that your landscape designer forgot to mention monochrome went out with low-rise jeans.”
She froze with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth. Her eyebrows climbed so high they practically tried to merge with her hairline.
“You are becoming far too bold, my dear,” she hissed.
“I simply don’t take advice from a gardening magazine printed in 2005,” I said. “As they say, style is what you possess, not what you purchase.”
The climax came that evening.
Bored, restless, and itching to humiliate somebody, Polina Vladislavovna wandered into the summer kitchen where my mother kept her preserves and various household odds and ends.
Her gaze landed on a shelf of jars. One in particular caught her eye: a round, squat jar filled with a cloudy yellow-brown substance and no label.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, narrowing her eyes like a predator. “And what is this, I wonder? That famous country honey? Or maybe clarified butter? Probably made in horrifyingly unsanitary conditions, but I hear such things are excellent for face masks.”
I stood in the doorway chewing an apple.
This was the moment. The moment of truth.
The jar held neither butter nor honey. It contained an ointment my father, a former veterinarian, used to make himself from an old recipe for treating horses’ joints and… let’s just say softening extremely rough skin. The mixture was powerful: goose fat, propolis, a bit of tar, and hot pepper extract for warming. The smell was tolerable—until you started rubbing it in.
“That is…” my mother began, but I stepped firmly on her foot.
“That, Polina Vladislavovna,” I cut in, putting on the most mysterious expression I could manage, “is an exclusive formula. Altai Gold. An eco-friendly bio-lipid complex. My mother keeps it for special occasions. Instant lifting effect. Smooths even the deepest… trenches carved by fate.”
My mother-in-law’s eyes lit up with the greedy sparkle of someone who had just found free luxury.
“Hm.” She unscrewed the lid and sniffed it. “It smells… unusual. Natural.”
“Exactly! No chemicals,” I said eagerly. “French creams can only dream of competing with this. But you mustn’t use too much. It’s an extremely active formula.”
“I’ll decide for myself how much I need,” she sniffed, hugging the jar to her chest. “Darya, may I take a little? My skin needs resuscitation after your water.”
My mother wanted to object. I could see disaster already taking shape in her eyes. But I shot her a look that clearly said, Don’t.
“Of course,” my mother squeaked weakly.
My mother-in-law swept off to the bathroom carrying the jar like a royal scepter.
Ten minutes later, an inhuman scream came from behind the bathroom door.
It was not just a scream. It was an air-raid siren.
The door flew open, and Polina Vladislavovna shot out of the bathroom. Her face was blazing crimson and slick with grease that, thanks to the tar and wax in the mixture, absolutely refused to come off with water.
“It burns!” she shrieked, flailing her arms. “It’s on fire! You poisoned me! Acid!”
Anton came running at the noise and stopped dead in horror.
“Mom, what happened?!”
“Your wife… gave me… poison!” she gasped, trying to wipe the ointment off with a towel, only managing to smear it around even more.
I walked over to her with the calm composure of an Olympic judge, though inside me a whole chorus of tiny wicked devils was dancing.
“Polina Vladislavovna, I did tell you it was an active formula. The pepper extract stimulates circulation. That’s the lifting effect. In a moment your skin will tighten so much your ears may meet at the back of your head. Beauty does require sacrifice, doesn’t it?”
“Get this off me! Right now!” she screamed, stamping her foot.
“Grease doesn’t wash off with water,” I said with a sigh. “Anton, bring alcohol. Or vodka. And a lot of cotton pads.”
For the next hour we were treated to the unforgettable spectacle of my husband scrubbing his own mother’s face with cotton soaked in homemade moonshine, because there was no other alcohol in the house.
By the time the ointment was finally removed, Polina Vladislavovna’s face was red as a revolutionary banner and shining brightly.
“My foot will never cross this threshold again!” she hissed while stuffing her things into her bag. “You… you savages! Sadists!”
