“You do realize this is the beginning of the end, don’t you?” Nina asked quietly, without lifting her eyes from the cup of tea that had already gone cold. “She called again?”
“She did,” Maxim replied dully. He was sitting across from her, hunched over as if someone had dropped a sack of wet sand onto his shoulders. “Said she’s already packing.”
“Packing what exactly? Suitcases?”
“Boxes, Nin. Huge cardboard boxes. She said she’s putting the Madonna china set in her carry-on so the movers won’t break it.”
Nina slowly looked up at her husband.
“And you just sat there?” Her voice was level, professionally detached — the same tone she used when questioning witnesses — but Maxim knew there was a blaze raging underneath it.
“I tried,” he said, dragging a hand across his face. “I told her the renovation isn’t even finished yet. That you need peace. And honestly, that there simply isn’t enough room.”
“And what did she say?”
“She said, ‘People can manage in close quarters.’ And then added that if we didn’t like it, then…” Maxim faltered.
“Then what? Say it.”
“‘…your wife can move out of the apartment,’” he exhaled.
Nina gave a bitter little laugh.
“How charming. So now I’m the expendable one in this house.”
That conversation was the point of no return, but the roots of the problem ran much deeper — into the rich black soil of the village where Maxim’s parents’ sturdy brick house stood.
Maxim worked as a fire inspector. His job was to walk into buildings, spot violations, expired extinguishers, blocked emergency exits, and issue orders for correction. He was good at seeing danger where others saw nothing more than a pile of old furniture or a door painted shut with thick oil paint. But like so many professionals, he had failed in his own life. The threat inside his own family had either escaped him — or, more likely, he had chosen not to see it, hoping things would somehow sort themselves out.
Nina came from a different world altogether. The narcotics control division was no place for softness. She worked in analytics, following supply chains and fitting facts together. She didn’t have to kick down doors with a gun in her hand; her weapon was logic, and the ability to recognize the architecture of a lie. And in the words of her mother-in-law, Tamara Pavlovna, she could sense deceit from miles away, the way a trained dog catches the scent of contraband hidden in a suitcase’s false bottom.
The apartment they lived in — that same two-room flat in a quiet residential district — legally belonged to Tamara Pavlovna. Maxim’s father, Uncle Vitya as Nina called him, had been a gentle, hardworking man who always looked exhausted to the bone. He had spent his entire life building the house in the village, what he proudly called “the family nest.” The apartment in the city had come from the factory back in Soviet times, and he had privatized it later, but he never wanted to live there. He was always drawn to the land.
Five years earlier, when Maxim and Nina got married, Uncle Vitya handed his son the keys and said, “Live here, son. Your mother and I have no need for the city. We’d rather stay out where the air is good.” He died six months ago. Heart failure. Just collapsed in the vegetable garden, still gripping the handle of a shovel. The doctors called it exhaustion of the body. Nina believed it wasn’t work that killed him, but the endless, grinding, toothache-like nagging of his wife.
Tamara Pavlovna was a heavyset, loud, domineering woman. She didn’t speak — she pronounced judgments. She didn’t ask — she demanded. After her husband died, she stayed alone in the house. Nina and Maxim visited on weekends, helped around the place, brought groceries. It seemed like life had settled into a routine.
And then came the phone call.
“Listen, Max,” Nina said, standing up and walking over to the window. Dusk was settling over the city. “We just finished the nursery. We spent two days hanging that wallpaper. I spent a month picking out the crib. Everything is ready for the baby. Where exactly are we supposed to put it now? On a mat in the hallway?”
“She says she’s lonely there by herself,” Maxim said, coming up behind her, though he didn’t dare hug her. “Says the village is unbearably dull, that she has no one to talk to. Says she has every right to spend her old age ‘living for herself’ in the city apartment with all the comforts.”
“She’s sixty-two, Maxim! What old age? She could still haul buckets of water if she had to. And the house… it’s a perfectly good house. It has gas, running water, internet — we set all of that up for her. What is she missing?”
“Attention,” Maxim muttered. “She needs an audience.”
Nina turned sharply.
“No, darling. Not an audience. Victims.”
At that moment, Maxim’s phone on the table started vibrating again. The screen lit up: MOM. Maxim stared at it as though it were a detonator counting down.
“Answer it,” Nina said coldly. “And put her on speaker. I want to hear the performance.”
Maxim pressed the button.
“Yes, Mom.”
“Maximka!” Tamara Pavlovna’s voice filled the small kitchen even through the speaker. There was not a trace of frailty in it — only the force of an icebreaker plowing through frozen water. “I was talking things over with Lyudka, and she says we can get a truck for Wednesday. So be ready. And tell your wife to clear out the wardrobe in the big room. All of it. I’ve got enough clothes to fill a wagon.”
“Mom, wait,” Maxim said, frowning as he looked at his pale wife. “What wardrobe? We sleep in the big room.”
“Well then move your bed into the small one. Problem solved.”
“The small room is the nursery, Mom! The crib’s in there, the dresser’s in there — there’s no room!”
“Oh, stop making me laugh!” the phone snorted. “Your baby isn’t even born yet and you’ve already set aside palace chambers for it. Put the crib in the corner and that’s that. I’m the owner of that apartment, aren’t I? Who are the papers in the name of? Have you forgotten, son?”
Maxim tightened his grip on the phone.
“We renovated the place for ourselves. You said you weren’t moving back to the city.”
“So what if I said that a year ago? Circumstances change. That’s enough, Maxim, stop getting on my nerves. My blood pressure is acting up. Wednesday morning. And make sure there are meat-filled pancakes ready. Lyudka will send the recipe if your wife doesn’t know how to make them.”
The line went dead.
Nina sat back down in silence.
“Lyudka,” she said slowly. “Your aunt. Your mother’s sister.”
“Yes. Aunt Lyuda. She lives in the next village over.”
“So that’s where the wind is coming from,” Nina said, narrowing her eyes. For a second, that familiar expression crossed her face — the one that appeared when she caught an inconsistency in a dealer’s statement. “Your mother never made decisions on her own. Uncle Vitya used to absorb the pressure, but now he’s gone. And now your aunt is thinking for her.”
“Why would Aunt Lyuda want this?”
“I don’t know. But we’ll find out. And in the meantime…” Nina laid a hand over her still barely visible belly. “I will not let this place turn into a madhouse. MAXIM, you have to stop her.”
Trying to stop Tamara Pavlovna was like trying to put out a forest fire with a toy watering can. Maxim drove out to the village twice. Both times he came back gray-faced, carrying the smell of corvalol and the cheap perfume his mother drenched herself in.
The conversations went nowhere.
“Try to understand, Mom,” Maxim said one afternoon, sitting on the veranda of his parents’ house. “We live in a two-room apartment. The rooms connect. The baby will cry. No one’s going to sleep at night.”
Tamara Pavlovna sat in a wicker chair like a merchant’s wife in a Kustodiev painting, cracking sunflower seeds and spitting the husks directly onto the freshly washed floor.
“What, do you think I’m deaf? I’ll wear earplugs. Stop feeding me nonsense. I’m bored here. My neighbor Galka died, God rest her soul. Who am I supposed to chat with now? The chickens?”
“Find a hobby. Join some club.”
“Listen to you, smart guy,” his mother snapped, narrowing her eyes. “Is that how you talk to your mother? I gave you an apartment, didn’t I? Your father broke his back for it, and now you live like some little lord and won’t even let your mother through the door? Shameful. Lyudka was right — you’re whipped. That fancy wife of yours from the police must’ve put this in your head.”
“This has nothing to do with Nina. It’s common sense. It’ll be cramped. For everyone.”
“I’m giving you an ultimatum, Maxim,” Tamara Pavlovna said, brushing seed husks off her hands as she stood up. Her large frame blocked out the sun. “Either you welcome me properly, with respect, give me the big room, and we all live together as one happy family… or your Nina can pack her things and get out. And if you’ve got any brains at all, you’ll stay with your mother. Look at you, multiplying like occupiers.”
“What are you even saying? She’s my wife! She’s carrying your grandchild!”
“That remains to be seen,” his mother spat viciously. “Who knows whose kid that is? Maybe she picked it up during one of her assignments. We know what those police women are like.”
That was the moment Maxim simply stood up and left without saying goodbye. It had gone too far. The filth his mother was pouring out crossed every line.
From the car, he called his aunt, Lyudmila Pavlovna.
“Aunt Lyuda, why are you winding Mom up like this? Why does she need to move to the city? She has a house here, a garden, clean air!”
