“Shoes off and straight to the bathroom. Don’t drag that street grime into my kitchen.”
Irina’s voice—flat and cold, like the ceramic tile underfoot—met Andrei right at the threshold. He’d just finished a twelve-hour night shift; his body hummed with exhaustion, and his head still held the monotonous drone of the shop machines. All he’d dreamed of 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 reheated food, he was met by the sterile reek of bleach and a tension you could cut with a knife.
He silently tugged off his heavy work boots, set them on the mat, and, without lifting his head, went to the bathroom. Irina didn’t budge, still standing in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed. Andrei could see her reflection in the dark screen of the switched-off TV in the hallway—a frozen, taut figure, the perfect illustration of the word “conflict.”
When he came back to the kitchen, his worst suspicions were confirmed. Irina wasn’t just angry; she was in a state of cold fury. She was wiping an already spotless countertop with such force it looked as if she were trying to erase an invisible stain—and the memory of it too. Her movements were sharp, economical, not a single wasted gesture. A cooled coffee pot stood on the stove.
“Did something happen?” he asked, though he already knew the answer. This ritual repeated itself with frightening regularity.
Irina tossed the rag into the sink and turned to him. Her face was pale, and her eyes looked darker than usual.
“We had company today. Early. If you’ve forgotten.”
Andrei closed his eyes wearily. He knew who that “early guest” could be. There was only one possibility.
“You mean Mom came by?”
“She didn’t come by, Andrei,” Irina enunciated, metal ringing in her voice. “She materialized. Right in our bedroom. At seven in the morning.”
He sat on a stool, feeling a leaden fatigue fill not only his muscles but his thoughts. He had no strength to argue. He just wanted to sink into sleep and wake to find out it had all been a dream.
“Ira, I asked her not to…”
“You asked? What did you ask? Not to come so early? She wasn’t noisy. She’s a master of disguise. She’s learned to open the lock without making a sound. She takes off her shoes in the hallway without turning on the light. She moves around the apartment like a ghost, like… like a predator stalking its prey.”
She said it without shouting, but every word pierced him like a shard of glass. She stepped to the window and stared into the courtyard as if searching for her mother-in-law there.
“Do you know what that’s like, Andrei? To wake not from an alarm but from the feeling that someone is watching you. I open my eyes and there’s a figure standing over me. Just a dark silhouette in the morning half-light. For a few seconds I didn’t even understand where I was or what was happening. I thought it was a burglar. And then the silhouette leans closer to get a better look at how her little boy is sleeping, and I realize it’s your mother. She’s just standing there and staring. At me. At you. At our bed.”
She turned sharply, her gaze bristling.
“Do you like being stared at while you’re asleep? Having someone barge into your personal space, your bedroom, your bed, without being asked or invited?”
Andrei rubbed the bridge of his nose. His head was splitting. He understood her anger, but a part of him still rose to defend his mother. He knew her. Knew that all-consuming, suffocating anxiety she herself called “care.”
“Ira, she’s just worried, she means no harm.”
That phrase, spoken almost automatically, was the detonator. Irina’s calm burst like an overheated bulb. She stepped toward him, her face twisting.
“No harm?! Worried?! Do you hear yourself, Andrei?! What worry, for God’s sake?! It’s deranged! It’s not normal! Normal people call on the phone if they’re worried! They don’t break into someone else’s home at dawn and stand over sleeping people! You were out cold after your shift, and I was supposed to wake in terror because your mother decided to check whether you’re breathing or not?!”
He tried to object, to get a word in, but by then she couldn’t be stopped. She paced the kitchen from corner to corner like a tigress in a cage, gesturing and spitting out words.
“And what was I supposed to do, in your opinion? Smile and say, ‘Good morning, Zoya Pavlovna, come on in, have a seat on our bed, maybe a cup of tea right here?’ I showed her out. Without a word. Took her by the elbow and led her to the door. And she looked at me like I was insane and kept babbling to your back: ‘Andryusha, sleep, sleep, Mommy just came to look.’”
Andrei ran a hand over his face, trying to wipe away not just sleep but that sticky, unpleasant feeling. He was caught between hammer and anvil. On one side—Irina, whose rage was entirely justified. On the other—his mother, whose actions, however wild, sprang not from malice but from her own warped form of love and anxiety. And he, tired and wrung out, was supposed to choose a side now.
“You’re exaggerating, Ira. She stood there and left. Nothing terrible happened.”
He said it quietly, almost conciliatorily, but to Irina those words sounded louder than an explosion. She froze mid-step. The fidgety pacing stopped. She slowly turned her head toward him, and Andrei felt a chill run down his spine that had nothing to do with the morning cool. It was the look of absolute, crystal-clear contempt.
“Exaggerating?” she repeated in a whisper more frightening than any scream. She took a step toward him. Then another. She wasn’t walking—she was advancing. “So, in your opinion, this is normal? It’s acceptable for someone to enter your home, your fortress, the most intimate place where you sleep defenseless, without permission, and stand over you?”
Andrei kept silent, knowing any word would be a mistake.
“Just imagine it, Andrei. Close your eyes for one second and imagine. You’re asleep. 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 wakes before your brain does. And when, in that terror, you open your eyes, you don’t see a burglar with a knife—you see your mother, who came to ‘check.’ Which is worse, Andrei? The sudden fear of a stranger or that long, sticky, humiliating horror of realizing that the person closest to you thinks it’s acceptable to treat you that way?”
She was standing very close now. He felt the heat of her body, but it wasn’t the gentle warmth he was used to. It was the burn of a mechanism working at its limit.
“So what do you propose? What do you want from me?”
“I want you to stop defending her!” Her voice cracked, then immediately turned firm again, hard as steel. “I want you, for once in your life, to admit that your mother is behaving inappropriately! That this isn’t care, it’s control! Not love, but selfishness! She doesn’t come because she worries about you—she comes to stroke her own ego, to make sure she’s still the main woman in your life, entitled to walk in wherever and whenever she wants!”
“You’ve always hated her,” he threw out—and that was his last, dumbest mistake. He tried to shift the blame, make her the guilty one.
Irina smiled. It was a terrible, joyless smile.
“Hated? No. I didn’t understand her. And now I do. And I understand you, too. You’ll never change. You’ll always be her ‘Andryusha,’ the little boy who needs to be checked on at night. Well then, fine.”
She stepped right up to him, so close he had to lift his head to meet her eyes. Her face was inches from his. She wasn’t shouting anymore. She spoke quietly, distinctly, hammering each word straight into his brain.
“Then listen up, ‘Andryusha.’ Carefully. Because I won’t repeat myself.”
“What else?”
“If your mommy shows up at our home at seven in the morning one more time and walks into our bedroom to check how you’re sleeping, she’s going off the balcony or down the stairs—and you right after her! Got it?!”
Andrei recoiled. Not much, just half a step, but it was the instinctive movement of someone dodging a blow. He stared at her and didn’t recognize her. Standing before him wasn’t his Ira, not his wife. She was a stranger—hard, merciless. He opened his mouth to say something—protest, snap at her, shut her down—but no sound came out. He just looked at her, stunned by the wild, primal brutality that had broken to the surface.
The shock was physical. It felt like a punch to the solar plexus, knocking the air out of him and stopping his heart for a moment. Andrei looked at his wife, at her face twisted by anger yet absolutely resolute, and his brain refused to accept what he’d heard. The balcony, the stairs, “and you right after her.” It wasn’t just rudeness. It was something from another, savage world, one that had nothing to do with their quiet apartment, the smell of morning coffee, and their vacation plans.
Irina didn’t wait for him to come to his senses, to process her words, or try to argue. She walked around him the way one walks around an inanimate object and strode down the hall toward the bedroom. Andrei heard her palm touch the doorknob. He jerked, as if waking up.
“Ira, what are you… what are you even saying? Are you in your right mind?”
She didn’t answer. She just opened the bedroom door and went in, leaving it wide open. Light spilled from the room onto the scuffed linoleum of the hallway. That rectangle of light looked like a portal into her newly declared reality—a place he, it seemed, was no longer allowed to enter. He stepped after her, then stopped on the threshold.
She didn’t rush around the room or start packing a bag. Calmly, she went to the bed—to his side—pulled off his pillow and yanked the folded blanket from the footboard. Her movements were terrifyingly matter-of-fact, as if she were merely changing the sheets. With that armful, she turned and walked straight at him. He had to back into the hall to avoid bumping into her.
Silently, with the same icy expression, she went to the kitchen and dumped the pillow and blanket on the old, sagging couch where they sometimes watched TV. The springs groaned dully. Dust motes, shaken up by the fall of the blanket, rose into the air and danced in the beam of the morning sun.
“You love her so much and keep defending her? Wonderful,” she said without looking at him. Her voice had gone even again, stripped of all emotion. “You’re sleeping on the couch tonight. And tomorrow. And until there’s a lock on our bedroom door with a key that only I have.”
Andrei stared at her, then at the sorry heap of bedding on the couch. Fatigue, anger, hurt, and shock tangled into a tight, choking lump in his throat.
“Seriously? You’re kicking me out of our bed because of my mother? It’s our bedroom, Ira!”
She finally turned to him. There wasn’t a drop of regret in her eyes. Only a cold, scorched emptiness.
“It was ours. Until this morning. Now it’s my room. Territory you don’t enter without knocking. No one does. Especially not your relatives with their own keys.”
He took a step toward her, instinctively trying to close the distance, to regain at least the appearance of control.
“I’ll talk to her. I’ll fix it. I’ll take the key.”
“Too late,” she cut him off. “You already ‘fixed’ everything when you said I was exaggerating. You won’t be fixing anything else. I’ll talk to her myself tomorrow. And believe me, she won’t like our conversation.”
She picked up the cooled coffee pot from the stove, poured the remains into the sink, and began to wash it. She did it with exaggerated care; every gesture said the discussion was over for her. She had built a wall between them out of household chores. She was there, two meters away, yet felt infinitely far.
Andrei remained standing in the middle of the kitchen. The noise of water running from the tap sounded deafening. He looked at his wife’s back, at her tense shoulders, at the couch with his new bedding, and slowly—like pain that arrives a beat after a heavy blow—understanding began to dawn. This wasn’t just a quarrel. Not another blow-up that would blow over by evening. Something had broken. Irreversibly. His cozy, predictable, comprehensible life, where he was the master, where there was his bed and his wife, had just ended. He’d been cast out. And the verdict had been delivered not by his mother with her feral “care,” but by his own wife, who had just shown him what happens when her patience truly runs out.
The night on the couch was torture. Andrei didn’t so much sleep as drop into short, heavy dozes, yanked out of them by the squeak 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 the blanket, Irina’s quiet cough—echoed in his head like a reproach. He was an exile sitting against the walls of his own fortress. In the morning Irina came out of the bedroom already dressed. She wore severe jeans and a dark T-shirt. She looked as if she were headed not to work but to war. She brewed herself coffee without offering him any. The air in the kitchen was thick and cold, like in a morgue.
At half past nine she took out her phone. Andrei, who had been sitting staring into a cup of cold tea, tensed. He watched her finger hover over the screen and then confidently press “call.”
“Good morning, Zoya Pavlovna,” Irina said, her voice even and businesslike, without a trace of last night’s fury. “I need you to come over. Now. We need to talk. No, this isn’t something to discuss over the phone. We’ll be waiting.”
She set the phone on the table. Andrei jumped up.
“Ira, don’t. Let me handle it. I’ll smooth things over, I swear.”
She looked at him as if he were an annoying insect.
“Sit down, Andrei. You’ve already said your piece. Now you’ll listen to mine.”
Fifteen minutes later a key turned in the lock. The door opened, and there stood Zoya Pavlovna. She wore her best “caring” look: a string bag in her hands with a loaf of bread and a carton of kefir sticking out, and an anxious yet righteous smile on her face.
“Andryusha, Irochka, what’s happened? I got so worried after your call, Ira. I brought you some fresh bread…”
Irina stepped toward her, blocking the way to the kitchen. She held out her hand, palm up.
“Hello, Zoya Pavlovna. Hand that over. It’s ours.”
Zoya Pavlovna stared, puzzled, first at the key, then at her daughter-in-law’s face. The smile slowly slid off.
“I don’t understand.”
“That’s your key to our apartment,” Irina explained calmly. “You won’t be needing it anymore. And today I’m changing the locks.”
The string bag thumped to the floor. The kefir sloshed inside.
“What?.. Andryusha, what is she saying?” Zoya Pavlovna turned a bewildered look to her son, seeking support. “What is going on here?”
Andrei stood pinned to the kitchen cabinets. He was trapped. He opened his mouth to say something, to step in, soften it, but Irina was quicker.
“I’m saying your uninvited visits at seven in the morning are over,” she said, her voice not wavering for a second. “You will no longer enter this home without our invitation. And there likely won’t be any invitations.”
“How dare you…” began Zoya Pavlovna, her face purpling. “This is my son’s apartment! I have a right—”
“You have no right,” Irina cut in, ice-cold. “It’s our apartment—his and mine. And I set the rules here. Because your son, as it turns out, is incapable of doing it. He can only stick his head in the sand and babble something about ‘worry.’”
Zoya Pavlovna took a step forward, trying to go around Irina and push through to her son as if he were a hostage.
“Andryusha, tell her! Tell this… tell her to be quiet! Will you let her talk to your mother like that?”
All eyes fixed on Andrei. He felt like a defendant expected to deliver the decisive word. But there were no words. His head was empty and buzzing. He looked from his mother’s rage-contorted face to his wife’s masklike, cold one. He had to do something, say something, but any sound felt like a betrayal of one of them.
“Mom… Ira… let’s not…”
It was the worst thing he could have said. It was an admission of his own helplessness. Irina turned her head toward him slowly. There was no hatred in her gaze. Something worse—a mix of pity and contempt. She looked at him as you look at a broken thing that can’t be fixed.
Then she turned back to her mother-in-law, who was already tugging at Andrei’s sleeve, whispering hotly and incoherently to him. Irina took a short, almost imperceptible step back, as if yielding her the space.
“You wanted to know how your little boy is doing, Zoya Pavlovna?” her voice sounded surprisingly quiet in the ensuing silence. “Then look at him. There he is. Standing there 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’ve won. You can take him. He’s damaged goods, and you won’t build any kind of family with him. Alas, and for that you have only yourself to thank.”
The mother-in-law didn’t grasp everything Irina was trying to say, but she caught the essence: her “Andryusha,” her little boy, would be living with her again and there would be no more sharing him with anyone. That thought wrapped around her whole being, and without further discussion, though with an indignant air, she took her son by the hand and led him to the front door. And Andrei did not resist.
That silent scene was more than enough for Irina to be finally convinced it was time to file for divorce.
