— Take off your boots and go straight to the bathroom. Don’t bring that street dirt into my kitchen.
Irina’s voice was even and cold, like the tile underfoot, meeting Andrey right at the door. He had just finished a twelve-hour night shift, his body aching from exhaustion, and in his head, the monotonous drone of the factory machines. All he had dreamed about for the last two hours on the rattling bus was silence, a hot shower, and the leftovers of yesterday’s pilaf. But instead of the smell of warmed-up food, he was met with the sterile scent of bleach and tension sharp enough to cut with a knife.
He silently pulled off his heavy work boots, set them on the mat, and without raising his head, walked to the bathroom. Irina didn’t move from the spot, still standing in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed over her chest. Andrey saw her reflection in the dark screen of the turned-off TV in the hallway — a frozen, tense figure, a perfect illustration of the word “conflict.”
Returning to the kitchen, he saw confirmation of his worst fears. Irina wasn’t just angry, she was in a state of cold rage. She was wiping the spotless countertop with a rag so forcefully it was as if she were trying to erase an invisible stain — and the memory of it. Her movements were sharp, economical, without a single unnecessary gesture. A cold coffee pot sat on the stove.
“Did something happen?” he asked, though he already knew the answer. This ritual repeated with frightening regularity.
Irina threw the rag into the sink and turned to him. Her face was pale, and her eyes seemed darker than usual.
“We had guests today. Early ones. In case you forgot.”
Andrey wearily closed his eyes. He knew who the “early guest” might be. There was only one possibility.
“You mean your mother came by?”
“She didn’t come, Andrey,” Irina snapped, metal ringing in her voice. “She materialized. Right in our bedroom. At seven in the morning.”
He sat on a stool, feeling the leaden exhaustion filling not only his muscles but his thoughts as well. He had no strength to argue. He just wanted to fall asleep and wake up realizing it was all a dream.
“Ir, I asked her not to…”
“You asked? What did you ask? Not to come so early? She didn’t make a noise. She’s a genius at stealth. She learned to unlock the door without making a sound. She takes off her shoes in the hallway without turning on the light. She moves through the apartment like a ghost, like… like a predator stalking its prey.”
She said this without yelling, but each word pierced him like a shard of glass. She walked to the window and stared into the yard, as if looking for her own mother-in-law.
“Do you know what it’s like, Andrey? To wake up not to an alarm but to the feeling that someone is watching you? I open my eyes, and above me stands a shadow. Just a dark silhouette in the morning twilight. For a few seconds, I didn’t even understand where I was or what was happening. I thought it was a burglar. Then the shadow leans in to get a better look at how her son is sleeping, and I realize it’s your mother. Standing there, looking. At me. At you. At our bed.”
She turned sharply, her gaze prickly.
“Do you like being stared at while you sleep? Having someone enter your personal space, your bedroom, your bed without asking or being invited?”
Andrey rubbed his nose bridge. His head was splitting. He understood her anger but part of him still wanted to defend his mother. He knew her. Knew her all-consuming, suffocating anxiety she called care.
“Ir, she worries, it’s not out of malice.”
That phrase, uttered almost automatically, became a detonator. Irina’s calm snapped like an overheated bulb. She stepped toward him, her face distorted.
“Not out of malice?! She worries?! Do you even hear yourself, Andrey?! What the hell kind of worry is that?! That’s madness! That’s not normal! Normal people call on the phone if they worry! They don’t burst into someone’s home at dawn and stand over sleeping people’s beds! You were sleeping like the dead after your shift, and I had to wake up terrified because your mother decided to check if you were breathing or not?!”
He tried to object, to say something, but she was unstoppable. She paced the kitchen corner to corner like a caged tigress, gesturing and spitting out words.
“And what was I supposed to do, in your opinion? Smile and say, ‘Good morning, Zoya Pavlovna, come in, sit on our bed, maybe we’ll have some tea right here’? I silently showed her the door. Took her by the elbow and led her out. And she looked at me like I was crazy and kept whispering behind your back: ‘Andryushenka, sleep, sleep, mommy just came to check.’”
Andrey ran his hand over his face, trying to wipe away not only sleep but this sticky, unpleasant feeling. He was caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side — Irina, whose rage was absolutely justified. On the other — his mother, whose actions, wild as they were, came not from ill intent but from her own twisted form of love and anxiety. And he, tired and worn out, had to choose a side now.
“You’re exaggerating, Ir. She just stood there and left. Nothing terrible happened.”
He said it quietly, almost conciliatory, but to Irina those words sounded louder than an explosion. She froze mid-step. Her restless pacing stopped. She slowly turned her head toward him, and Andrey felt a chill run down his spine, unrelated to the morning chill. It was a look of absolute, crystal-clear contempt.
“Exaggerating?” she whispered, a whisper more terrifying than any scream. She took a step toward him. Then another. She wasn’t walking — she was advancing. “So, you think it’s normal? That it’s okay when someone enters your home, your fortress, your most intimate place where you sleep defenseless, without permission, and stands over you?”
Andrey was silent, knowing any word would be a mistake.
“Imagine it, Andrey. Just close your eyes for a second and imagine. You’re sleeping. You’re vulnerable. And someone is breathing over you. You don’t know who it is. You don’t know what’s on their mind. The first thought — danger. Threat. It’s an animal fear that awakens before the brain does. And when in this horror you open your eyes, you don’t see a robber with a knife, but your mother, who came to ‘check.’ What’s worse, Andrey? Sudden fear of a stranger or this long, sticky, humiliating horror that the person closest to you thinks it’s okay to treat you like that?”
She was standing very close now. He could feel her body heat, but it wasn’t the tender warmth he was used to. It was the heat of a machine running at its limit.
“And what do you suggest? What do you want from me?”
“I want you to stop defending her!” Her voice broke but immediately hardened again like steel. “I want you to admit at least once in your life that your mother behaves inadequately! That this is not care, but control! Not love, but selfishness! She comes not because she worries about you, but because she needs to stroke her ego, to be sure she’s still the main woman in your life who has the right to enter anywhere, anytime!”
“You always hated her,” he said, and that was his last, stupidest mistake. He tried to shift the blame, make her feel guilty.
Irina smirked — a terrible smirk, without a hint of amusement.
“Hated? No. I didn’t understand her. Now I do. And I understand you too. You’ll never change. You’ll always be her ‘Andryushenka,’ the little boy who needs to be checked on at night. Well, fine.”
She stepped right up to him so he had to look up to meet her eyes. Her face was centimeters from his. She was no longer shouting. She spoke quietly, distinctly, hammering each word directly into his brain.
“Then listen here, ‘Andryushenka.’ Carefully. Because I won’t repeat myself.”
“What else?”
“If your mother shows up at our home again at seven in the morning and comes into our bedroom to check on how you’re sleeping, she’ll fall off the balcony or the stairs — and you’ll follow her! Got it?!”
Andrey recoiled. Not far, just half a step, but it was an instinctive movement of someone dodging a blow. He looked at her and didn’t recognize her. This was not his Ira, not his wife. This was a strange, harsh, merciless woman. He opened his mouth to say something — to protest, to yell, to put her in her place — but no sound came out. He just stared, stunned by this wild, primal cruelty that suddenly burst out.
The shock was physical. It felt like a punch to the gut that knocked the air out and stopped the heart for a moment. Andrey looked at his wife, her face distorted with rage but absolutely resolute, and his mind refused to accept what he’d heard. Balcony, stairs, “and you’ll follow her.” This was not just rudeness. It was something from another, wild world, completely unrelated to their quiet apartment, the smell of morning coffee, and vacation plans.
Irina didn’t wait for him to recover, digest her words, or try to argue. She walked around him like an inanimate object and with firm, confident steps headed down the hall to the bedroom. Andrey heard her palm on the door handle. He jolted as if waking up.
“Ira, you… what are you saying? Are you in your right mind?”
She didn’t answer. She just opened the bedroom door and went inside, leaving it wide open. Light from the room spilled onto the worn linoleum of the hallway. This rectangle of light looked like a portal to her newly declared reality, one into which he apparently was forbidden entry. He stepped in after her but stopped on the threshold.
She didn’t pace the room or gather things. She calmly approached the bed, his side, pulled off his pillow and yanked off the folded blanket at the foot of the bed. Her movements were terrifyingly mundane, as if she was simply changing the bed linen. With this bundle in her hands, she turned and walked straight toward him. He had to step back into the hallway to avoid bumping into her.
Silent, with the same icy expression, she went to the kitchen and threw the pillow and blanket onto the old, sunken sofa where they sometimes watched TV. The springs creaked dully. Dust disturbed by the falling blanket rose into the air and danced in the beam of morning sunlight.
“You love and defend her so much? Fine,” she said without looking at him. Her voice was even again, devoid of any emotion. “Tonight you sleep on the sofa. And tomorrow. And until the door to our bedroom has a lock, the key to which only I will have.”
Andrey stared at her, then at the pitiful pile of linen on the sofa. Fatigue, anger, hurt, and shock mixed into one tight, suffocating lump in his throat.
“Are you serious? Because of my mother, you’re kicking me out of our bed? It’s our bedroom, Ira!”
She finally turned to him. There was no regret in her eyes. Only cold, burnt-out emptiness.
“It was ours. Until this morning. Now it’s my room. A territory where no one enters without knocking. No one. And especially not your relatives with their own keys.”
He stepped toward her, instinctively trying to close the distance, to regain at least an appearance of control.
“I’ll talk to her. I’ll fix everything. Take the key back.”
“Too late,” she cut him off. “You already ‘fixed’ everything when you said I was exaggerating. You won’t fix anything else. I’ll talk to her myself tomorrow. And believe me, she won’t like it.”
She took the cold coffee pot from the stove, poured out the remainder into the sink, and started washing it. She did it with exaggerated care; every gesture said this conversation was over for her. She built a wall of mundane actions between them. She was here, two meters away, but felt infinitely distant.
Andrey remained standing in the middle of the kitchen. The sound of water running from the tap seemed deafening. He looked at his wife’s back, her tense shoulders, the sofa with its new bedding, and slowly, like pain after a hard blow, the realization began to dawn. This was not just a quarrel. Not another scandal that would blow over by evening. Something was broken. Irreparably. His cozy, predictable, understandable life where he was the master, where was his bed and his wife, had just ended. He was banished. And the sentence was passed not by his mother with her wild care, but by his own wife, who just showed him what happens when her patience really runs out.
The night on the sofa was torture. Andrey didn’t so much sleep as fall into short, heavy dreams, pulled out by the creak of a spring or the hum of the refrigerator. He felt like a stranger in his own home. Every sound from the bedroom — the rustle of a blanket, Irina’s quiet cough — echoed in his head as reproach. He was an exile sitting by the walls of his own fortress. In the morning, Irina came out of the bedroom already dressed. She wore strict jeans and a dark T-shirt. She looked as if she were going to war, not work. She silently made coffee for herself without offering him any. The air in the kitchen was thick and cold, like a morgue.
At half past nine, she took out her phone. Andrey, who had been staring into a cup of cold tea, tensed. He watched as her finger hovered over the screen and then confidently pressed call.
“Zoya Pavlovna, good morning,” Irina’s voice was calm and businesslike, without a trace of yesterday’s rage. “I need you to come over. Now. We need to talk. No, this isn’t a discussion for the phone. We’re waiting.”
She put the phone on the table. Andrey jumped up.
“Ira, don’t. Let me handle it. I’ll settle everything, I swear.”
She looked at him as if he were an annoying insect.
“Sit down, Andrey. You already said your piece. Now listen to mine.”
Fifteen minutes later, a key turned in the lock. The door opened and Zoya Pavlovna appeared in the doorway. She was in her best “caring” guise: holding a shopping bag with a loaf of bread and a carton of kefir sticking out, a worried but righteous smile on her face.
“Andryushenka, Irochka, what happened? I got so worried when you called, Ira. Here, I brought you some fresh bread…”
Irina stepped forward to block her way into the kitchen. She held out her hand, palm up.
“Hello, Zoya Pavlovna. Give this back. It’s ours.”
Zoya Pavlovna stared puzzled first at the key, then at her daughter-in-law’s face. The smile slowly slipped off her face.
“I don’t understand.”
“This is your key to our apartment,” Irina calmly explained. “You won’t need it anymore. And today, I’m changing the locks.”
The shopping bag dropped to the floor with a dull thud. The kefir inside gurgled.
“What?.. Andryusha, what is she saying?” Zoya Pavlovna turned a confused look to her son, seeking support. “What’s going on here?”
Andrey stood pressed against the kitchen unit. He was trapped. He opened his mouth to say something, to intervene, to smooth things over, but Irina cut him off.
“I’m saying your uninvited visits at seven in the morning are over,” her voice didn’t waver for a second. “You will no longer enter this home without our invitation. And there likely won’t be any invitations.”
“How dare you…” Zoya Pavlovna began, her face reddening. “This is my son’s apartment! I have the right…”
“You have no rights,” Irina interrupted in an icy tone. “This is his and my apartment. And I set the rules here. Because your son, as it turns out, is incapable of that. He can only bury his head in the sand and babble something about ‘worry.’”
Zoya Pavlovna stepped forward, trying to get around Irina and reach her son as if he were a hostage.
“Andryushenka, tell her! Tell this… Tell her to shut up! Will you let her talk to your mother like that?”
All eyes turned to Andrey. He felt like a defendant expected to deliver the decisive word. But there were no words. His head was empty and ringing. He looked alternately at his mother’s anger-distorted face and his wife’s cold, mask-like face. He had to do something, say something, but any sound felt like betrayal to one or the other.
“Mom… Ira… let’s not…”
That was the worst thing he could say. It was an admission of his own powerlessness. Irina slowly turned her head to him. There was no hatred in her eyes. There was something worse — a mixture of pity and contempt. She looked at him as one looks at a broken thing that cannot be fixed.
Then she turned back to her mother-in-law, who was already tugging Andrey by the sleeve, whispering something hot and broken. Irina took a short, almost imperceptible step back as if yielding ground.
“You wanted to know how your boy is doing, Zoya Pavlovna?” Her voice sounded surprisingly quiet in the ensuing silence. “Look at him. Here he is. Standing and unable to string two words together to defend his wife or put his own mother in her place. Is that what you wanted? Congratulations. You won. You can take him. He’s damaged goods, and no family will be built with him anymore. Sadly, but you alone are to blame for that.”
The mother-in-law didn’t understand exactly what her daughter-in-law was trying to convey, but she caught the essence: her “Andryushenka,” her little boy, would live with her again and not be shared with anyone. This thought enveloped her entire being, and without further discussion but with an indignant look, she took her son’s hand and led him to the front door. Andrey didn’t resist.
This silent scene was more than enough for Irina to be finally sure it was time to file for divorce…
