The relatives arrived with duffel bags and the attitude of owners. Too bad they thought no one would ever present them with the bill.
Tanya and Roma got their one-room Khrushchev-era apartment on the outskirts of the capital at the cost of tectonic shifts in both families.
Their parents pooled their money, emptied their savings, sold Grandpa’s old Zhiguli, and solemnly handed the young couple the keys to their own personal, independent happiness.
That happiness smelled of old parquet flooring, mice, and hopelessness, but Tanya looked at the peeling walls with the tenderness of a fanatic.
It was their own territory. Their own sink, their own toilet, their own sagging sofa.
Naive Tanya, like a girl from the Chukchi tundra, failed to consider one thing. In the eyes of Roma’s numerous village relatives, the fact that their nephew had an apartment in the city automatically meant the opening of a branch of a free sanatorium.
Aunt Zina was the first swallow to arrive. Aunt Zina had a stabbing pain in her side, and the local doctors did not inspire confidence.
“We’re family, village people, we won’t take up much room,” Aunt Zina boomed, dragging three huge bags into the tiny hallway, with jars of pickles sticking out of them.
The pickles were apparently meant as payment for lodging, food, and Tanya’s services as nurse and laundress.
Aunt Zina slept on the sofa.
Tanya and Roma slept on an inflatable mattress in the kitchen, accompanied by the steady dripping of the faucet and Aunt Zina’s snoring.
Aunt Zina left behind a persistent smell of Corvalol, not a single kopeck toward utilities, and the firm conviction that Tanya had been born to be her free servant.
After that, the relatives started arriving in a steady stream, like salmon swimming upstream to spawn.
Second cousin Vovka urgently needed to apply to university: he lived with them for three weeks, failed his exams, ate a month’s supply of buckwheat, left behind a mountain of unwashed socks, and broke the toilet tank.
Uncle Kolya came “just to see how you’re settled in,” and while he was at it, bought a gearbox at the auto market. For a week, it smelled of grease in the middle of their only room while Tanya tripped over it at night.
Roma’s sister, Svetochka, brought her children for the holidays — “to go to the zoo” — and then disappeared on her mysterious womanly errands, leaving Tanya to separate fighting nephews and scrub marker stains off the wallpaper.
The apartment was rapidly turning into the waiting hall of Kazansky railway station.
Naturally, no one helped with the renovations. After work, Tanya and Roma stripped wallpaper, breathed cement dust, and counted every penny.
Or rather, Tanya counted. Because whenever Roma’s own blood relatives were present, he mutated.
From an ordinary guy who had washed dishes himself just the day before, he turned into a condescending master of the house and an accomplice in this domestic terror.
“Tanya, put something substantial on the table! People have come from the road!” he proclaimed from the only intact stool.
And when Tanya, exhausted after work, tried to protest in the kitchen in the evening, Roma hissed:
“Just be patient, Tanya, they’re my family! Don’t embarrass me in front of my relatives, Mom will be offended. Where else are they supposed to stay in Moscow?”
Tanya was not weak. She simply disliked marketplace-style scandals.
She stayed silent, washed the floors after the guests, cooked thick, scalding cabbage soup with pork ribs so dense the spoon stood upright in it.
She made homemade dumplings until two in the morning because “the guests don’t eat store-bought ones, there’s soy in them.”
She roasted pork stuffed with garlic and carrots, sliced herring under homemade mayonnaise.
Tanya spun around the stove like a squirrel in a meat grinder, remembering everything and methodically balancing debit and credit in her head.
She waited.
The cup overflowed in October. Tanya took a week of unpaid vacation to level the hallway floor and lay laminate flooring.
On Saturday morning, her mother-in-law, Marya Ilyinichna, appeared on the doorstep with two of Roma’s uncles.
“We’ve come for spare parts! We’ll stay until Wednesday. Oh, what’s all this mess? Never mind, daughter-in-law, set the table!”
The vacation was ruined. All week, Tanya served three healthy grown men and her mother-in-law.
Potatoes generously covered with homemade clarified butter steamed constantly on the table. Chicken baked in foil oozed with juices, and a deep bowl was piled high with salted milk mushrooms and onions.
Roma beamed, boasting about what a good housewife his wife was, while Tanya silently tripped over the untouched packages of laminate flooring.
Her husband guiltily avoided her eyes, but kept repeating the same thing: “Tanya, it would be awkward to throw them out. They’re family.”
The reckoning came a month later, during the November holidays, when Tanya and Roma went to the village for her father-in-law’s anniversary.
The whole honorable company had gathered around a huge table: Aunt Zina, Uncle Kolya, Svetochka, and the spare-parts-loving uncles.
They drank homemade berry liqueur and crunched on pickles. The conversation flowed smoothly until Marya Ilyinichna, flushed and pleased with her authority over the feast, looked at Tanya with feigned pity.
“Our Romka has grown into such an eagle — an apartment in the capital, a car… But still no children,” the mother-in-law drawled loudly enough for the other end of the table to hear. “Tanya, maybe something is wrong with you as a woman? Just say so, we’ll chip in for doctors. Romka needs an heir. The years are passing, and before you know it, he may have to look for another wife — a healthy one…”
Everything at the table went silent at once. The relatives froze with their forks in their hands, waiting for the city daughter-in-law to blush, cry, or jump up from the table as if scalded.
Roma pulled his head down into his shoulders.
Tanya calmly finished chewing a piece of roast pork. She dabbed her lips with a napkin. There was neither hysteria nor hurt in her eyes.
Only the icy calculation of an experienced commander and the absolute certainty of a woman who had been pushed to the very limit.
“Marya Ilyinichna,” Tanya’s voice was smooth and ringing, like crystal. “What grandchildren are you even talking about?”
She looked around the now-silent table.
“When your relatives have been living in crowds at our place for the third year?”
“Aunt Zina sleeps on our sofa for a month at a time. Vovka lives there for weeks and breaks our toilet. Svetochka dumps her children on us and disappears. Uncle Kolya puts a gearbox in the middle of our only room.
“All of you eat from my pots, sleep on our sheets, and at night walk past the bed Roma and I sleep in to get to the toilet.
“Where exactly are we supposed to make grandchildren for you? On the kitchen table between your duffel bags? Or standing on the balcony?”
Her mother-in-law began coughing loudly, spilling her liqueur.
“How dare you… We were doing it as family!” Uncle Kolya protested.
“As family,” Tanya nodded and took a notebook out of her purse. “I calculated it. Over the past year, your ‘family,’ Marya Ilyinichna, has eaten almost seventy thousand rubles’ worth of food in our home.
“That’s not counting water, electricity, broken plumbing, a ruined vacation, and my nerves. During all that time, not one of you even bought a ring-shaped roll for the table.”
Tanya rose from the table. Roma, pale as a sheet, tried to tug her sleeve. “Tanya, stop…”
“Be quiet, Roma,” she cut him off so sharply that he instantly pulled his hand away. “You said your piece when you asked me to ‘be patient’ and ‘not embarrass you.’ Now I’m speaking.”
She looked again at her mother-in-law, who sat with her mouth open, one hand pressed heavily to her chest.
“So here it is. The free hotel called ‘At the Daughter-in-Law’s’ is officially closed. From today on, no one else spends the night in our apartment.
“We don’t give keys to anyone. Guests are allowed only by prior invitation and for no more than three hours. And anyone who arrives uninvited with duffel bags will not get past the threshold.”
“Well, we didn’t want to anyway!” Svetochka shrieked. “Some palace you have there! We’ll never set foot on your doorstep again!”
“Excellent. Recorded,” Tanya smiled. Completely sincerely and calmly. “Roma, I’m going to the station. The train leaves in forty minutes. If you want to live as a family, catch up with me. If you want to keep being a convenient son for every relative, stay.”
She turned and walked away from the table, feeling the indignant whispering of the relatives boiling behind her back.
Roma caught up with her already on the platform. They rode back to Moscow in silence the whole way. He expected that once they got home, she would start packing her suitcases.
But when they stepped over the threshold of their cold, half-renovated Khrushchev apartment, Tanya simply changed into old sweatpants and dragged a bag of construction mix into the center of the room.
She methodically placed two spatulas, a bucket, and a roll of underlayment beside it.
“Tanya…” Roma shifted awkwardly in the doorway, no longer speaking in his former master-of-the-house tone. After that feast, all his lordly spirit had remained somewhere between the bowl of pickles and his mother’s wailing. “They really won’t come anymore. Mom cried there… I told them you were right.”
“I know I’m right,” Tanya answered calmly. “Take the bucket and go get water. We’re going to level the floor.”
No one else ever lived in their one-room apartment again. The relatives declared a boycott, the mother-in-law did not call for six months, but Tanya did not care in the slightest.
She walked across the smooth laminate flooring she had laid with her own hands, ate a golden-brown rasstegai for breakfast in silence, no longer tripping over anyone’s duffel bags, and knew for certain: sometimes, to gain real family comfort and return your husband’s brain to its proper place, you simply need to publicly present the bill once.
And hand everyone a spatula at the right moment.
