“Have you forgotten? We’re divorced! Which means your complaints are your mistress’s problems, not mine.”
Other People’s Problems
The air in the coffee shop was thick and sweet, smelling of freshly ground coffee, vanilla, and the damp wool of passersby coming in from the street, where the October rain tapped out a slow, melancholic rhythm on the asphalt. Katerina sat by the window, holding a warm porcelain cup in her hands, and watched as the raindrops merged into strange streams, winding down the glass and drawing unrecognizable maps of nonexistent continents.
It was her ritual — to come here every Saturday, order a cappuccino with cinnamon, and allow herself an hour of complete, blissful idleness, a moment of disconnect from the noise, from obligations, from the past.
The past, however, had an annoying habit of showing up uninvited.
The door of the coffee shop swung open, letting in a gust of cold, damp air — and him.
Sergei.
He stood in the doorway, scanning the room, and his gaze, familiar to the point of pain and nausea, found her almost immediately. He was without a coat, wearing a wrinkled sweater, his hair wet from the rain, and his face frozen in an expression that, once upon a time, in another life, she might have mistaken for despair. Now it seemed to her like nothing more than bad theater.
He headed toward her table, and with every step he took, Katerina felt the walls of her secluded little world closing in, dragging her back into that suffocating reality from which she had escaped with such difficulty.
“Katia,” he said, and his voice, hoarse from emotion or from a cold, sounded like the creak of a rusty door breaking into her carefully guarded peace.
She did not invite him to sit. She did not take her eyes off the window. She simply waited, holding the cup in her hands like a shield.
“I need to talk,” he said, sitting down across from her without being invited. He placed his clasped hands on the table. His fingers were red from the cold, his knuckles pale. “It’s urgent.”
“We have no urgent matters, Sergei,” she said, surprised by the icy steadiness of her own voice. “And we have no common topics to discuss.”
“Don’t pretend we’re strangers!” A familiar, irritating note of demand rang in his tone — the very same one that had accompanied all their conversations during the last two years of their marriage. “This is about the apartment. The one on Tverskaya. You know I put everything into it! And now that damned developer has gone bankrupt, and construction is frozen. My money… our money is hanging in the air.”
Katerina slowly set her cup down on its saucer. The light, ringing sound struck her like the snap of a trap closing.
“First of all,” she said, finally looking at him, her gaze as cold as the glass she had just been staring through, “it is your money. You always emphasized that finances were your territory, and that my opinion on the matter carried no weight. Remember? ‘Stop sticking your nose into men’s business.’”
He winced as if from a toothache.
“This isn’t the time for reproaches, Katia! We’re talking about serious things! You could suffer losses too, we—”
“We?” she interrupted him, and for the first time steel sounded in her voice. “What do you mean, ‘we’? We stopped being ‘we’ exactly four months and seventeen days ago, when the judge stamped our passports. Have you forgotten?”
He stared at her, genuine astonishment in his eyes. Apparently, he had truly believed that all he had to do was appear, slap his forehead, and say “our money,” and everything would return to the way it had been. As if there had been no leaving her for that other woman. As if there had been no tears, no humiliations, no long and painful recovery.
“But the apartment…” he tried to begin again, but she stopped him.
“The apartment you invested money in so you could live there with your mistress,” she said, pronouncing every word with merciless clarity, “is your problem. Yours and your new passion’s. You wanted so badly to be together, to build a future together. Well then, build it. Deal with the developers, go to court, lose money. These are now your shared difficulties.”
He turned pale. Clearly, the scene was not unfolding according to his plan. He had expected hysteria, tears, perhaps even attempts to help — after all, she had always helped, always pulled him out of financial holes, always found solutions while he played the role of the great provider.
“You don’t understand!” His voice broke into a shout, and several people in the coffee shop turned to look at them. “I could lose everything! I’ll have nothing to live on!”
Katerina leaned back in her chair. She looked at this man, with whom she had lived for eleven years, and felt nothing but faint disgust and exhaustion. Exhaustion from his endless “I,” from his selfishness, from his inability to acknowledge his mistakes and take responsibility for them.
“And what does that have to do with me?” she asked with sincere bewilderment. “You made the decision to leave. You made the decision to invest everything in that miserable apartment. You chose a woman as your companion who, I assume, is in no hurry to share financial risks with you. This is your life, Sergei. Your choices. And your problems.”
He said nothing, breathing heavily and staring down at the table. He looked like a boy whose toy had been taken away and who could not understand by what right.
“But you won’t leave me in trouble, will you? We’re family… we were once…”
That word, spoken by him, sounded so blasphemous, so out of place, that Katerina almost laughed.
“Family?” She raised an eyebrow. “Family members don’t abandon each other for young secretaries. Family members don’t humiliate each other, don’t count every penny, don’t call your career ‘a silly hobby’ and your interests ‘nonsense.’ We didn’t have a family, Sergei. We had an illusion — and you destroyed it yourself.”
She picked up her bag, took out her wallet, and placed several bills on the table for her unfinished coffee.
“So, no,” she concluded, standing up. “I will not leave you in trouble. Because your trouble no longer concerns me. Have you forgotten? We’re divorced. Which means your complaints are your mistress’s problems, not mine!”
She said that last sentence quietly, but each word struck him like a nail. He sat there with his head lowered, and his back, once so straight and confident, hunched over, revealing the full depth of his collapse.
Katerina threw on her raincoat and headed toward the exit. She did not look back.
Outside the window, the rain continued to beat against the pavement, but now its sound no longer seemed melancholic to her. It felt cleansing, washing away the last traces of the past.
She stepped out onto the street, and the damp, cold air burned her face. She walked without paying attention to where she was going, feeling an invisible but unbearably heavy burden slipping from her shoulders. The burden of his problems, his ambitions, his eternal “you must.”
She was free.
Truly free.
And his pathetic attempts to place his difficulties back on her shoulders shattered against her newly gained independence — firm as a diamond.
He remained there, in the coffee shop, with his ruined plans and empty wallet, while she walked away into her own life — difficult, lonely, but hers.
And in that life, there was no place for other people’s debts or other people’s complaints.
