The evening air over the industrial district was thick and heavy, saturated with the acrid fumes of fuel oil and the damp dust from asphalt being torn up nearby. Anna walked out through the factory gate, merging with a stream of equally tired women. Their shoulders were bent under the weight not only of the shift, but of the life waiting beyond the doorstep—cooking, laundry, helping with homework. She took a few steps toward the bus stop, clutching a string bag with a loaf of bread and a carton of milk.
“Anna, wait, please.”
The voice came from behind, and it was painfully familiar. It seared her hearing, making her freeze as if her feet had suddenly grown into the paving stones. Slowly, reluctantly, she turned. She knew—knew with her whole being—that this meeting was inevitable, like the change of seasons, but that didn’t make it easier. He stood under the dim, flickering streetlamp, whose light mercilessly pulled from the twilight every detail of his present appearance. A rumpled jacket, clearly out of season, a three-day stubble that made him look unkempt, and eyes that couldn’t catch hers. Sergei. The father of her children. A ghost come back from nowhere at the worst possible moment.
A trickle of workers from the shift flowed past them—women in headscarves and worn coats, gray with fatigue. Slowing their steps, they glanced back with curiosity, trying to catch snatches of a stranger’s conversation, to inhale the scent of someone else’s drama. Anna stood motionless, like a statue carved from ice. Her fingers did not tighten on the handle of the bag, betraying no inner turmoil. Her whole body was the embodiment of a cold, almost tangible calm.
“I… I know this is unexpected… but I really wanted to talk,” he began, shifting from foot to foot like a teenager caught misbehaving. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately. About everything. About what I did… about our kids. How are they, my darlings? Andryusha, Lidochka? I’ve missed them so much it’s unbearable.”
He tried to stretch his lips into something like a smile—a warm, fatherly smile—but managed only a pathetic, crooked grimace that wouldn’t fool even a child. Anna kept silent. She looked not at him, but through him—at the buses humming at the stop, at the dark, low sky. Her silence was more frightening than any scream, louder than any scene. It was like airless space, where his pre-planned, phony words suffocated and died. He couldn’t withstand the crushing quiet.
“Anya, I know perfectly well what I’ve done. I was a fool—young, hot-headed, with wind in my skull…” His voice grew ever more wheedling, acquiring unpleasant, whining notes. “But a person can change, can rethink his life. I’ve realized it all, understood it to the core. I want… I dream of putting things right. To fix what can still be fixed.”
He took a timid, uncertain step toward her but froze at once, colliding with her gaze. There was no hatred in her eyes. There was nothing at all. Absolute, all-consuming emptiness. Scorched, dead earth where the flowering garden once called love had stood. And it was that ringing emptiness that set his knees trembling with a small, treacherous shake. Realizing that lyricism and repentance weren’t having the desired effect, he got to the point, the real purpose of his visit. His voice dropped to a pitiful, conspiratorial whisper.
“To put it bluntly… she threw me out. Just stuffed all my things into an old battered sack and put me out the door. Said she didn’t need me anymore. Anna, I literally have nowhere to go right now. My parents wouldn’t even open the door; I knocked, rang… I’ve tried friends, but it’s only ever for a night or two. I don’t have a penny to my name. Let me spend the night—at least on the mat in the hallway, I swear you won’t even notice I’m there, I won’t bother you.”
And there, in Anna’s stone-still calm, something cracked. The icy armor in her eyes split, but what poured from the fissures was not water—it was molten, searing lava. Her features sharpened, grew hard and unyielding. At last she truly looked at him—directly, not through him. He involuntarily recoiled from that gaze, so alien and implacable.
“Nowhere to go?” she repeated. Her voice was quiet, but each word was struck with such inhuman force that it seemed the drivers at the far end of the square could hear it. “And where were the very same money I begged you to pass along for winter boots for Andryusha? He spent last winter in fall half-boots, catching cold again and again. Where were you when Lidochka lay with a fever near forty, and I was running between her and the pharmacy, not knowing which mattered more? And your own son’s birthday—do you even remember it? He waited for you until midnight, sitting by the window and staring into the dark. He wouldn’t leave the cake, he kept waiting. You didn’t even call. Not a line.”
Her voice strengthened with every phrase, gathering power and fury. She no longer whispered. She spoke so all could hear. So that every one of those women trudging from the factory would become not just a witness but a judge at this improvised tribunal.
“You abandoned us—left me alone with two small children—and now you’ve crawled back for me to let you in just because your new flame tossed you out like trash and you’ve got nowhere to sleep?! Don’t you think you’ve come to the wrong door?! Neither I nor our children need you anymore! Do you understand that?!”
She was shouting the last words. It wasn’t a hysterical woman’s shriek, but the fierce, powerful roar of a wounded yet unbroken she-wolf defending her den.
Sergei opened his mouth to insert some excuse, to find the right words, but she cut him off sharply, taking a step forward.
“You ceased to exist for us the very day you left. Go sleep at the station; your fate is of absolutely no concern to me.”
She turned abruptly, barely looking at him, and walked to the bus stop with a firm, steady stride—the stride of a woman who had just burned the last flimsy bridge connecting her to the past. She merged with the crowd, became part of it, while he remained standing under the flickering streetlamp—stunned, humiliated—beneath the muffled snickers and condemning, contempt-filled glances of unfamiliar women.
The humiliation he suffered at the gate did not cool his ardor. On the contrary, it stoked an inner fire. The miserable, shriveled grievance quickly transformed into a cold, calculating, venomous malice. He sat on a cold bench in an unfamiliar courtyard, staring at the dark, blind-looking windows of the apartment blocks, while in his head, like mycelium, a new, more elaborate plan spread. A frontal assault had failed completely. Anna had built around herself an impregnable fortress of steel and concrete, which could not be taken by storm with pleas and repentance. Therefore he had to find a roundabout way, strike from the rear—at the most vulnerable, unprotected point of her defenses. And that point, that Achilles’ heel, was her own mother—Galina Stepanovna.
An hour later he was already standing at a familiar, leatherette-covered door on the seventh floor of an old Khrushchev-era building. He had deliberately not called ahead, wanting to catch her off guard, to give her not a second to think or consult her daughter. He pressed the doorbell, feeling the actor’s mode click on inside him—the lead role of his life: the penitent, unfortunate prodigal son-in-law.
A short, plump woman in a faded, overwashed housecoat opened the door. Seeing him on the threshold, Galina Stepanovna froze; her kind, gentle face instantly grew stern and wary. The air held a familiar, once-beloved smell—fried onions, boiled potatoes, and bay leaf—the smell of her home, which Sergei had once, it seemed forever, considered his own as well.
“What do you want, Sergei?” she asked without any greetings, making not the slightest move to let him in.
He didn’t try to force his way in. He dropped his shoulders, slouched, shrinking visually from a grown man into a guilty, pitiful teenager.
“Just to talk, Galina Stepanovna. Five minutes of your time. I won’t leave until you hear me out. I’m frozen through, like a stray dog.”
It was a subtle, calculated manipulation—counting on her inborn, indestructible kindness. She might have driven the impudent fellow away, but she couldn’t leave a “frozen dog” on the landing—one who, after all, remained the father of her beloved grandchildren. With a heavy, torn sigh, she silently stepped aside, letting him into the narrow hallway cluttered with boxes.
“Go to the kitchen. Only, please, be quick. If Anna finds out… I’ll be in for it.”
The kitchen was warm and homely. On the stove, a sofrito danced and hissed cheerfully in an old cast-iron skillet. On the table, beneath a lace doily, stood a little vase with cheap hard candies. Sergei sat on a stool where he had sat hundreds of times over the years with Anna and laid his big, helpless hands on the table. He stared at his palms, not daring to raise his eyes to his mother-in-law. The performance was beginning.
“Anna drove me out,” he began hoarsely, with a catch in his voice. “And she was absolutely right. I deserved every word, every letter. I wasn’t a husband. I wasn’t a father… I was nobody. I was a blank spot. I see that now—I feel it in every cell.”
Galina Stepanovna stirred the pan in silence without turning around; her back was unnaturally tense and straight. She didn’t interrupt, letting him speak, weighing each word.
“I didn’t come for myself,” Sergei went on, and his voice deliberately broke into a cracked whisper full of sincere grief. “I don’t care anymore where I sleep—even on cold ground under a bridge. I think only of them, the children. How are they growing without a father’s shoulder? You know yourself what it is to raise children without a strong male shoulder. Andryusha needs an example, a real man before his eyes. Lidochka needs a father’s protection, her confidence in tomorrow. And Anna… she’s wearing herself down, and them, little by little, too. Pride is a terrible, destructive thing, Galina Stepanovna. It’s a veil over her eyes. She truly believes she can handle everything alone, but in fact she’s unwittingly breaking lives—hers and our children’s.”
He finally raised his eyes to her. In them stood what looked like boundless grief, which he had so carefully rehearsed.
“She will never forgive me. I don’t blame her for that—not a bit. But you… you’re a mother. A wise woman who’s seen life. You can see what’s really happening. She’s hacking away from the shoulder, not thinking about what comes next. Someone has to stop her, bring her to her senses. Not for me, a forgotten man. For Andryusha and Lidochka. They need a father—even one as worthless and bad as I am. I’m ready for anything, do you understand? Anything! I’ll crawl on my knees, bring every kopeck I earn into the house… If only she’d allow me to be near them, simply to share the same space.”
He fell silent, having made his main, decisive move. Now it all depended on her, on her mother’s heart. Galina Stepanovna turned off the flame under the pan and slowly, reluctantly turned to him. She looked at him for a long time, and in her gaze a relentless struggle raged—anger at him for all he’d made her daughter suffer, and pity, endless pity for the grandchildren growing up without a father. She went to the old sideboard and took out a deep bowl with a floral pattern.
“There’s soup left from yesterday. Will you have some?” she asked in an even voice that betrayed nothing.
From that simple, everyday question Sergei understood with delight that he had won. He had broken a breach in the impregnable wall. He had acquired an unexpected but precious ally. He had planted a powerful time bomb right in the enemy camp’s heart.
“I will,” he answered quietly, with ostentatious meekness. “Thank you very much, Galina Stepanovna.”
Yielding to his polished, well-honed entreaties, Galina Stepanovna did something she considered, deep down, an act of supreme worldly wisdom and care for the grandchildren’s future. In fact, without realizing it, she simply opened a hidden wicket gate in the very fortress Anna had built around her new, hard-won life. Sergei, of course, didn’t wait. He didn’t call, didn’t ask permission. He simply used the key that had so kindly been placed in his hand.
Just two days later he was already waiting for them at the school gate. He didn’t look like a miserable, beaten dog. On the contrary, he had transformed: he had shaved, procured from an old buddy a clean, almost new jacket, and somehow even found a bit of money. Leaning casually against the trunk of an old maple, he looked almost like the ideal, caring father who’d come to meet his beloved children after class. When Galina Stepanovna came out through the gate holding tightly to Andryusha and Lida, he strode toward them with quick, confident steps.
“Good afternoon, Galina Stepanovna! My dear children!”
For a moment Andryusha and Lida froze, then, with piercing cries of “Papa!” they rushed to him, forgetting everything else. He scooped them both up, lifted them into the air, spun them around, hugging them tightly as if afraid to let go. He covered them with kisses, whispering something quick, merry, and jumbled in their ears. Galina Stepanovna stood a few steps away, smiling uncertainly at the idyllic scene. She saw the genuine, unfeigned joy on the children’s faces, and that light drowned out the quiet but insistent voice of conscience in her soul, whispering of betrayal.
“Sergei, what are you doing here? Anna strictly forbade—” she began, but he gently, firmly cut her off.
“I didn’t come to her. I came to them, to my children,” he said, without putting them down. “I just couldn’t stand it any longer; I missed them till my heart ached. Don’t I have the right to see them? Just look how happy they are! Isn’t that what matters most?”
And they truly were wildly happy. They hugged his neck and talked over one another about tests, friends, and school events. Then Sergei, like a real magician, set them down and with a theatrical flourish pulled from behind the tree two huge boxes, shining with multicolored cellophane. One—bearing the image of a monstrous radio-controlled jeep—he handed to the beaming Andryusha. The other—containing a doll nearly as tall as a first-grader, with luxurious golden hair and a ball gown trimmed in lace—he gave to delighted Lida.
The children gasped; their eyes blazed with real fire. These weren’t just toys from the nearest shop. These were their cherished, secret dreams. It was that very car Andryusha gazed at every day in the “Children’s World” window on the way to school. It was that very doll Lidochka whispered about at night, making her wish before sleep. For those toys, Anna had always, with pain in her heart, answered the same: “We don’t have the money right now, son. Let’s wait a bit, sweetheart—maybe by the holiday.”
“These are for you, my darlings,” Sergei proclaimed with a broad, generous, triumphant smile. “Because your papa loves you very, very much and always, always remembers you, wherever he is.”
Galina Stepanovna tried to object—murmured that it wasn’t necessary, that it was too expensive—but her voice drowned in the children’s shouts of delight. Clutching their incredible new treasures, they hopped around their father with overflowing joy. Sergei hugged them once more, said he had to run on an errand, but that he’d be back very, very soon, and vanished as swiftly as he had appeared, leaving behind a wake of rapture and pricey gifts.
The entire walk home felt like a triumphal procession. Struggling to carry the huge, unwieldy boxes, the children chattered nonstop, talking over each other as they told their grandmother how wonderful their papa was—how kind, generous, and how very much he loved them. Galina Stepanovna walked beside them, her heart squeezed by a growing, dark foreboding of the coming storm.
When the apartment door flew open and the children, without taking off their shoes, burst into the narrow hallway with excited cries—“Mama, Mama, look what Papa gave us!”—Anna froze in the kitchen doorway with a rag in her hands. Her gaze slid over their shining faces, over the gigantic, bright boxes that seemed even bigger in their modest flat, and finally stopped on her mother’s face. In an instant—in a single second—she understood everything. To the last, bitter drop.
“Mom, what does this mean?” she asked, surprisingly quietly, but that quiet rang with shards of broken glass.
“He… he just happened to meet us at the school gate,” Galina Stepanovna began hastily, stumbling over her words and looking away. “I couldn’t do anything; he simply came over, and the children were so happy…”
“‘Happened to’?—” Anna took a slow, heavy step forward. Her voice did not rise, but with each word it became firmer and sharper, like a honed razor. “With two enormous, outrageously expensive boxes under his arms, he just happened to be strolling by the school? You brought him to my children. You yourself allowed him to do this. You let him back into our lives.”
Sensing the growing tension, the children fell suddenly quiet and involuntarily pressed themselves to the wall, hugging their gifts tighter—as if they were their last hope of happiness.
“But just look how they’re glowing!” Galina Stepanovna pleaded, tears in her voice. “He’s their father, Anna; he has the right to see them! Yes, he stumbled—badly—but he wants to fix everything, to make it right! He’s repenting!”
Anna’s patience snapped. The dam burst.
“Fix it?! Buy their favor and love for a couple of thousand rubles so they’ll then throw it in my face that papa is good and mama is bad and never buys them anything?! Where was this ‘loving father’ when I borrowed from everyone I knew to buy their school uniforms and textbooks? Where was he when Andryusha’s old boots fell apart in the winter and he froze his feet? He’s not fixing anything, Mom! He’s using—using you, using them as tools to worm his way back into my life because his new woman pitched him into the cold and he has nowhere to live!”
“You’re thinking only of yourself—of your old grudge!” Galina Stepanovna couldn’t stand it; her voice rose to a shout. “Because of your boundless, proud arrogance you’re ready to deprive them of their father! He’s asking for forgiveness; he repents!”
Anna looked at her mother with a long, heavy, bottomless gaze. Then she slowly turned it on the children, who stared at her wide-eyed, clutching those garish symbols of their father’s so-called “love.” In that moment she realized with crystal clarity that this battle—this particular battle—she had lost. But not the war. She understood that half-measures, persuasion, and attempts to negotiate no longer worked. To tear out the poisonous weed that had taken root, she would have to burn the ground around it to ash. And if, to save her little world, she had to hurt everyone—including her own mother and her children—so be it. A cold, steely, ringing resolve filled her, pushing out all other feelings. She made her final, irrevocable, and ruthless decision.
She didn’t go on shouting. She didn’t weep. This quarrel with the closest person—her mother—had dried up all tears inside her, leaving only a cold, resonant emptiness and a crystalline, almost prophetic clarity of thought. She looked at the frightened children hugging the boxes like shields from her anger. She looked at her distraught, weeping mother, who still didn’t grasp the monstrous mistake she had made. In such a total, merciless battle, nothing could be saved intact. To save your home from an invader, sometimes you have to set it on fire so it burns to the ground—but remains yours.
Anna walked slowly to the old landline telephone on the hall table. Her movements were deliberate, almost ritual. She lifted the heavy plastic receiver and dialed a number she knew by heart—the number of the friend whose rented room Sergei was now haunting. She was certain he would be there. Sitting and waiting. Waiting for the treacherous seeds he’d sown to sprout in poisonous abundance.
“Put Sergei on,” she said without preface when a man’s voice answered.
A brief pause, then his breathing in the receiver, that same cloying, wheedling timbre. “Anya, is that you? I knew you’d come to your senses, that you’d call…”
“You have exactly thirty minutes to be here,” she cut him off, hard. “If you truly want to come back to the family, I’m giving you one single chance. Thirty minutes. If you don’t show up, you’ll never see me or the children again. Ever. Decide.”
She hung up before he could answer. Then she turned just as slowly to her mother.
“And you’re staying. You wanted to take part in this story—now you’ll see it through to the end.”
The next twenty minutes were filled with an oppressive, unbearable silence that felt thick enough to cut. Galina Stepanovna cried quietly in the kitchen, her face buried in her work apron. The children sat on the floor, no longer rejoicing over the gifts, sneaking wary glances at their mother. They didn’t fully understand, but with a child’s intuition they felt the air growing denser and heavier. The huge, bright boxes stood in the middle of the room like two gaudy, ridiculous headstones on the grave of their brief, momentary joy.
The sharp, shrill doorbell sounded like the cue for the final act of a tragedy. Anna went and opened the door. Sergei stood on the threshold, flushed from hurrying and excitement, his eyes full of triumphant, almost victorious hope. Seeing the children and the tear-streaked Galina Stepanovna, he couldn’t help a broad, self-satisfied smile. He was a hundred percent sure that his brilliant, multi-step plan had succeeded spectacularly.
“Come in,” Anna said in a flat, lifeless voice, stepping aside. “Come in, our returned head of the family.”
He entered, radiating victory and confidence. In his mind he was already putting his modest belongings on the shelves, reclaiming his spot on the couch. He went to the children and ruffled Andryusha’s freshly cut hair, as usual.
“Well, my warriors? How do you like papa’s presents? Do you like them?”
But the children were silent, as if water had filled their mouths. They were looking not at him but at their mother, awaiting her reaction. Anna locked the front door and stood before him, arms crossed.
“You were so eager to come back to us. All right—I’m giving you that chance. Here and now. But only on my pre-stated terms.”
“I agree to everything, Anya—absolutely everything!” he blurted, rubbing his hands.
“Excellent,” she said, barely moving her lips. “Then listen closely; I’ll say this once. First condition: tomorrow morning you go with me to my factory. I’ll talk to management; they’ll take you on as a simple loader in the shop. It’s very hard, dirty work, but they pay on time, every week. Second: every ruble you earn, to the last kopeck, you hand directly to me. I’ll give you a strictly set amount for cigarettes and a transit pass. Third: no friends, no hangouts, no drinking after shifts. From work—straight home. Help with homework, wash dishes, take out the trash, fix the leaky tap. You’ll live here, but you’ll sleep on the old folding bed in the kitchen, and you will live like that until, by your behavior, your labor, and your attitude, you prove you’ve earned the right to be called a husband and a father again. And the last, most important thing: no, do you hear me, absolutely no contact with your past carefree life. No calls, no meetings, no letters. You start from a clean, absolute zero. Do you accept these terms?”
The confident smile slid from his face like a mask. He stared at her with undisguised amazement, as if she were insane. His darting, crafty eyes finally stilled, and in them sloshed a mix of total bewilderment and rising black rage.
“Are you out of your mind? A loader? At the factory? For peanuts? So you can boss me around like a slave and dole out alms for tobacco? What do you take me for, a complete loser? I thought we’d talk like civilized people, discuss everything…”
“We are talking like civilized people,” she replied, her voice cold as January ice. “You wanted a family—here it is, in all its glory. Family isn’t just being fed, given drinks, having your clothes washed, and kept comfortable. Family is first and foremost work. Daily, heavy, routine work. With no weekends or holidays. It’s enormous responsibility. It’s duty. I’m offering you the chance to finally start fulfilling that duty.”
He realized at last that he’d fallen into a cleverly set trap. This wasn’t capitulation; it was a hard ultimatum. His patience snapped. His true inner nature burst out.
“So that’s it—you cooked this up just to humiliate me once and for all! So I’ll slave away for you like a draft horse! To hell with your stupid terms! I’m a man, a person—not your property, not some henpecked fool!”
At that very moment Andryusha, who had been silent and listening, slowly rose from the floor, walked to the big, beautiful box with the coveted jeep, and kicked it hard toward his father.
“Take your car back. My sister and I don’t need it.”
It sounded more terrible than any adult’s shout or accusation. That quiet, firm child’s voice, full of bitter disappointment and the sting of hurt. Lidochka, seeing her brother’s brave act, gave a small sob and turned to the wall, hiding her face. The mask fell away completely. Before them stood not a kind, generous, loving papa, but an angry, yelling, unpleasant stranger who hurt their mother—who didn’t need them at all, but only a roof over his head and a servant.
Sergei broke off mid-sentence, looked at the children, at unyielding Anna, at Galina Stepanovna shrinking in the doorway. In their eyes he saw a final, irrevocable verdict pronounced by the whole world. There was no place for him here anymore—not on the mat on the floor, not in their thoughts, not in their hearts.
“Fine—rot together in your stuffy prison!” he shouted with hatred, spun on his heel, and slammed the door so hard the sideboard glass rang—and he disappeared from their lives forever.
A deafening, all-consuming silence fell over the apartment, as after a powerful explosion. Galina Stepanovna sank slowly onto a stool at the table and covered her face with her hands, her shoulders trembling. At last she understood everything—to the very end. Lidochka wept softly, like a child. Anna went to the children. She didn’t say anything, offered no empty comfort. She simply sank down onto the floor beside them—onto the same floor where the now-unwanted gifts lay—and hugged them both tightly. She pulled them close, inhaling the familiar smell of their hair, and felt heavy, salty tears finally roll slowly down her cheeks. They were tears of pain and loss, but also of long-awaited release. The war that had dragged on so long was finally, definitively over. She had won that war. She stood utterly alone on ground burned to black ash—but she stood, proud and unbroken. And beside her were the two for whom she would have burned the rest of the world to cinders, if only to keep their souls clean and safe.
