“Go ahead and drag your own mother through the mud, but say one more thing about mine that I don’t like, and you’ll be thrown out of my apartment immediately! I’m not going to stand on ceremony with you, darling!”
“Igor, please forgive me if I’m disturbing you,” Tatyana Yevgenyevna said quietly, almost apologetically, as though she were asking not for a small favor but for some enormous, unimaginable sacrifice.
She stood in the kitchen doorway, clasping her dry, age-spotted hands in front of her.
“The door to my room… it squeaks terribly. I got up for some water during the night and nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard it. Perhaps you could oil it when you have time? Only if it isn’t too much trouble, of course.”
Igor did not even look up from his phone. He was lying on the sofa in the living room, which opened directly into the kitchen, lazily scrolling through a news feed with his thumb.
In response to his mother-in-law’s request, he made an indistinct sound in his throat, something between “uh-huh” and “leave me alone.”
It was enough for Tatyana Yevgenyevna to understand that he had heard her. She immediately retreated to her room, carefully closing the very door she had mentioned.
A long, drawn-out shriek came from the hinges, sounding almost like a groan.
Yulia, who was wiping down the kitchen counter, tensed.
She felt the atmosphere in the apartment, already far from welcoming, become even heavier, as though someone had sucked part of the air out of the room.
Throughout the entire week her mother had been staying with them, Igor had walked around with the expression of a man forced to listen to a jackhammer operating beneath his window without pause.
He did not openly start arguments. No, he simply radiated waves of thick, silent irritation.
Everything annoyed him: the quiet rustling of the newspaper her mother read in the evenings, the faint medicinal smell of heart drops in the hallway, and even the fact that, in his opinion, she spent too long in the bathroom in the mornings.
He said nothing, but his silence was louder than any shouting.
He tossed his phone onto the sofa as though he were throwing a stone.
“Now your old woman is going to tell me what to do in my own house,” he said quietly, but there was so much venom in his voice that Yulia flinched.
He stared at the wall in front of him, as though he were speaking not to her but to some invisible companion who would certainly understand and support him.
“She only asked you, Igor,” Yulia said, trying to keep her voice as calm as possible.
She put down the cloth and turned toward him.
“The door really does squeak loudly enough to wake someone at night. I was going to ask you myself, but I forgot.”
“She only asked,” he mimicked, twisting his lips into an unpleasant smirk. “Of course she did. She’s living here with everything provided, as though she’s staying at a health resort. She arrived, made herself comfortable, and now she’s giving orders. Oil the door for her. What comes next? Turn the television down whenever she decides to rest? Walk around on tiptoe?”
It was unfair and petty.
Tatyana Yevgenyevna behaved as quietly and unobtrusively as possible. She left her room only to eat or visit the clinic. She spent most of her time shut away so that, God forbid, she would not disturb “the young couple.”
She was afraid of becoming a burden, and it showed in every movement she made and every softly spoken word.
“Please stop. She came for one week because she needs medical examinations. It isn’t forever,” Yulia said, approaching the sofa, still hoping to steer the conversation back toward peace. “She already feels uncomfortable because she thinks she’s inconveniencing us.”
“Inconveniencing us?”
He finally turned his head toward her, and she saw cold, long-standing irritation in his eyes.
“Her presence inconveniences me! I can’t relax in my own home. I constantly have to think about someone sitting behind a wall, listening and waiting for something. There’s always that smell of medicine. Always that dissatisfied expression. Nothing is ever good enough for her.”
He stood up and walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, stared pointlessly inside, and then slammed the door shut.
“Exactly. An entire week of this performance. And the door can keep squeaking. Perhaps then she’ll come out of her den less often.”
With that, he took a pair of headphones from the shelf, deliberately placed them over his ears, and dropped back onto the sofa, burying himself in his phone.
It was worse than an argument.
It was an ultimatum disguised as complete indifference.
Yulia remained standing alone in the middle of the kitchen.
A quiet, pitiful squeak sounded from the hallway again. Her mother had gone to the bathroom.
At that moment, the sound cut through Yulia’s ears more painfully than any insult.
The evening thickened into something resembling dark ink.
Dinner passed in almost complete silence, broken only by the delicate clinking of forks against plates.
Tatyana Yevgenyevna ate her buckwheat and chicken cutlet with a guilty haste, thanked Yulia, and practically fled back to her room.
The piercing squeal of the door sounded like the final note of a funeral march.
Yulia and Igor remained alone at the table.
He continued eating, chewing with exaggerated appetite and making a point of demonstrating that nothing bothered him.
Yulia merely pushed the cold cutlet around her plate with her fork.
“Igor, we need to talk,” she began, setting the fork down.
Her voice was steady, almost pleading. She had decided to make one last attempt to appeal to his reason.
“About what?” He did not raise his head. “I believe I explained everything perfectly clearly this afternoon. My position hasn’t changed.”
“Your position?” She barely managed to suppress a bitter laugh. “Your position is to torment an elderly person with silence and passive aggression when she came into someone else’s home because she had no choice? That isn’t a position, Igor. It’s pettiness.”
He suddenly threw his fork onto the plate.
The sound was loud and unpleasant.
“Pettiness? Pettiness is bringing her here for an entire week and pretending that nothing is happening! She walks around with an expression as though we owe her something for the rest of our lives. She’s always sighing, always dissatisfied with something. Today it’s the door. Tomorrow she’ll decide I’m breathing too loudly. It will never end!”
“She hasn’t said a single word to you! She’s afraid to leave her room unnecessarily!”
“Exactly! She does everything silently! That’s even worse. She looks at me as though I’m a pile of garbage standing in the way of her precious daughter’s happiness. That’s her favorite trick. I can recognize it from a mile away. Always suffering, always playing the victim so that everyone around her feels guilty. My mother is exactly the same. Identical. Always dissatisfied, always reproaching everyone with nothing more than the look on her face. And you know what, Yulia? The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree—”
He did not finish.
Yulia slowly rose from the table.
Something in her face changed so suddenly and completely that Igor instinctively fell silent in the middle of the sentence.
All warmth vanished from her eyes, leaving behind two dark, bottomless wells.
The calmness she had struggled so hard to maintain crumbled into dust. In its place appeared something cold, sharp, and extremely dangerous.
“What did you say?” she asked in a whisper more frightening than any scream.
Igor, not yet fully understanding the extent of the change, smirked, although somewhere deep inside him a sticky, unpleasant chill had already begun to stir.
He decided he had finally broken through her defenses and that he needed to press his advantage.
“I said what I said. You’re becoming an exact copy of her. The same constant dissatisfaction disguised as—”
He failed to finish again.
Yulia took one step, walked around the table, and stopped directly in front of him.
She stood so close that he could see the tiny scar near her eyebrow.
Her face looked like a mask carved from pale marble.
“Go ahead and drag your own mother through the mud, but say one more thing about mine that I don’t like, and you’ll be thrown out of my apartment immediately! I’m not going to stand on ceremony with you, darling!”
She leaned even closer, her eyes boring into his.
“You live here. In MY apartment. You eat the food I cook. You sleep in the bed I bought. You enjoy my hospitality. Until this moment, I considered you my husband. But now you’re nothing more than a tenant. A tenant who has forgotten his place. So let me remind you. One more cruel remark or one more hostile look toward my mother, and your belongings will be left outside in the stairwell. Do you understand me?”
Igor stared at her, unable to utter a word.
His mind refused to process what he had just heard.
The woman who had been pleading with him to make peace only five minutes earlier had disappeared. In her place stood a stranger, a merciless person who had just calmly announced the terms of his continued existence.
He instinctively recoiled until his back pressed against the wall.
The balance of power in the apartment had just changed.
Completely and permanently.
Igor did not answer.
He could not have answered even if he had wanted to.
The words she had thrown into his face were not merely a threat. They were a statement of fact, a cold and final verdict.
All his arrogance and affected authority fell away from him like cheap gilding, revealing a confused and humiliated man beneath.
He looked at Yulia, but there was nothing in her eyes he could grasp onto. There was no anger, no hurt, not even hatred.
There was only emptiness.
The icy, practical emptiness of a person who had just erased him from her life and was now dealing only with the technical details of his continued presence.
Moving slowly like an old man, he backed away from her and sank into the chair from which he had just jumped.
Without giving him another glance, Yulia turned away.
She returned to the table, silently picked up his plate and her own, and carried them to the sink.
Her movements were precise and economical, as though she were completing a task she had performed hundreds of times.
She turned on the faucet.
Hot water hissed over the dirty dishes.
She took the sponge, squeezed a drop of dishwashing liquid onto it, and began methodically washing the plates in circular motions.
The scrape of the sponge against ceramic and the rushing water became deafening in the silence.
Those ordinary household noises were a declaration.
A declaration that the incident was over.
The conversation had ended.
Her life would continue according to her rules.
Igor sat motionless, staring at his wife’s back.
He felt hollowed out.
His entire sense of himself as a man and the head of the household had been crushed and ground into the kitchen linoleum.
He had always considered the apartment his own.
Yes, Yulia had inherited it from her grandmother, but he lived there. He slept in that bed. After all, he was her husband.
It turned out that all of it had been an illusion.
He was not a husband.
He was a guest.
A guest whose right to remain had just been called into question.
Yulia washed the dishes, carefully placed them in the drying rack, and wiped her hands.
Then she walked past him without looking at him and disappeared into the bedroom.
A few minutes later, she emerged carrying a blanket and a pillow and silently threw them onto the living-room sofa.
She did it without anger or open defiance.
It was the way someone might toss bedding to a dog after deciding where it would sleep for the night.
Then she silently returned to the bedroom and closed the door behind her.
The click of the lock sounded like a gunshot in the quiet apartment.
The night was long.
Igor did not sleep.
He lay on the sofa, which suddenly seemed unfamiliar and uncomfortable, staring at the ceiling.
Humiliation burned inside him like a cold flame, preventing him from forgetting what had happened for even a second.
He repeatedly replayed her words, her stare, and her calm, merciless actions.
The more he thought about them, the more a dark, powerless rage began to boil inside him.
Morning brought no relief.
It brought a new reality woven from silence and deliberate disregard.
Yulia came out of the bedroom already dressed and ready to leave.
She walked into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and took yogurt and cottage cheese from the refrigerator.
She moved around her territory with calm confidence.
Igor rose from the sofa, feeling crumpled and exhausted.
He also went into the kitchen, hoping for a cup of coffee and some return to an appearance of normality.
Yulia poured boiling water into two cups.
She placed a chamomile tea bag in one and added sugar to the other.
Then she picked up both cups and, without saying a word, carried them into her mother’s room.
The door closed behind her without squeaking. Apparently, she had held it carefully from the inside so that she would not disturb the peace of the apartment.
Igor remained standing beside the empty table.
There was no coffee for him.
He was not part of that morning.
He was furniture.
An object in the room.
Ten minutes later, Yulia came out with her mother.
Tatyana Yevgenyevna was pale and looked as though she had not slept all night.
She did not look toward Igor. Her gaze remained fixed on the floor.
“Mom, are you ready? We need to leave for the clinic soon,” Yulia said in an even, colorless voice.
She spoke to her mother as though Igor did not exist in the room.
They got dressed in the hallway.
Yulia helped her mother button her coat and adjusted the scarf around her neck.
That display of silent, tender care was another blow to Igor.
To him, it felt like a demonstration.
This is the person she loves.
This is the person who matters to her.
And you are nothing.
When the front door closed behind them, Igor was left alone in the deafeningly quiet apartment.
He slowly walked into the kitchen and looked at the door to his mother-in-law’s room.
The door that had started everything.
Something ugly and malicious stirred inside him, promising that this was far from over.
They returned closer to lunchtime, exhausted and silent.
Igor heard the key turning in the lock and tensed while sitting on the sofa.
He had spent the entire day in the silent apartment, which had transformed into a torture chamber.
Every piece of furniture seemed to mock him and remind him of his humiliating position.
He had not turned on the television or listened to music.
He had simply sat there feeding his rage until it burned white-hot.
He waited.
He did not know exactly what he was waiting for, but he sensed that an explosion was inevitable.
Yulia and Tatyana Yevgenyevna entered, bringing with them the faint, sterile smell of the clinic.
Yulia went straight to the kitchen to put down her bag, while her mother slowly and cautiously removed her coat in the hallway.
She saw Igor, and fear appeared on her face.
She quickly looked away and tried to slip into her room unnoticed.
“Mom, come and have lunch. I’ll heat everything up,” Yulia called from the kitchen in a calm, businesslike voice.
She was still pretending Igor did not exist.
Lunch, like dinner the previous evening, passed in oppressive silence.
Yulia placed bowls of soup on the table.
One for herself.
One for her mother.
Then, after a second’s hesitation, one for Igor.
It was not a gesture of reconciliation.
It was a mechanical action, as though she were feeding a cat.
Igor ate in silence, feeling every mouthful stick in his throat.
He watched his mother-in-law.
She ate with her head lowered, trying to make herself as invisible as possible, and her meek, intimidated posture irritated him even more.
When they had finished the soup, Tatyana Yevgenyevna stood and walked over to the kettle.
She prepared tea in her own cup.
Then, gathering her courage, she took another cup, placed a herbal tea bag inside it, and poured in boiling water.
She approached the table and placed the cup in front of Igor with a hand trembling from anxiety.
“This… this is good for the nerves, Igor. It’s a calming herbal mixture,” she whispered, not daring to raise her eyes toward him. “Drink some. You must be having a difficult time…”
That was the final straw.
Her pity.
Her attempt to show concern, which he interpreted as the height of hypocrisy and mockery.
A sick, helpless old woman was pitying him.
Teaching him how to live.
Igor slowly raised his head.
His face twisted into an ugly, malicious grin.
“A difficult time? I’m having a difficult time?” he said quietly, but with such icy hatred that Tatyana Yevgenyevna recoiled.
“Yes, I’m having a difficult time. It’s difficult for me to breathe the same air as you, you old hag. Did you come here to die? Did you come for examinations so they could tell you how much longer you have left to pollute this world and poison everyone else’s lives?”
Yulia froze with a plate in her hands.
But she remained silent.
She allowed him to continue.
“A calming herbal mixture?”
He pushed the cup away from himself in disgust.
“You should make it for yourself. A double dose. Make sure it works. Then you won’t creak your bones around here anymore or ask people to oil your door hinges. Do you think you’re a guest here? You’re not a guest. You’re mold. A burden your precious daughter dragged into MY house so that I would have to bow and scrape before you!”
He stood up, looming over the table, and turned directly toward Tatyana Yevgenyevna, who was petrified with horror.
“You’ve been nobody your entire life, and you’ll die as nobody. A pathetic, sick old woman who causes nothing but problems for everyone. The sooner it happens, the better it will be for everyone. Especially for your daughter, who is forced to drag you from hospital to hospital instead of living a normal life.”
He finished.
Absolute, deathly silence filled the kitchen.
He breathed heavily, expecting screams, tears, and a scandal.
But none came.
Yulia slowly placed the plate on the table.
Her face was completely calm and unreadable.
She looked at him the way someone looks at an insect just before crushing it.
Then she silently stood, walked past him, and went into the hallway.
Igor waited with a triumphant smirk, expecting the argument to continue.
She did not go into the bedroom.
She walked to the front door, turned the key, and pulled it wide open.
Then she returned to the kitchen doorway and looked at Igor.
“Get out,” she said.
Her voice was quiet, but it left no room for argument.
Igor stared at her in confusion.
“What?”
“I said get out. Right now. Wearing whatever you have on.”
His face fell.
He could not believe it.
She was not bluffing.
“You… are you serious? You’re throwing me out?”
“I warned you,” she replied in the same even voice. “One more word against my mother and you would be gone. You said your words. Now it is your turn to leave. The door is open.”
She stood and waited without moving.
Her calmness was more frightening than any fury.
Igor looked around the kitchen.
At his bowl.
At his petrified mother-in-law.
At Yulia standing in the doorway like a guard.
He saw nothing in her eyes.
No opportunity.
No regret.
No chance to fix anything.
Only emptiness.
He understood that he had lost.
Completely.
Moving slowly, as though in a dream, he stood up, walked around the table, and headed toward the exit.
He passed Yulia, feeling her cold, dismissive stare following him.
Then he stepped over the threshold.
“I’ll come back, and both of you will regret this!”
Without saying another word, Yulia closed the door behind him.
One lock clicked.
Then the second.
She turned and looked at her mother, who was sitting with her face buried in her hands.
Yulia immediately took out her phone and called a locksmith, asking him to come first thing the following morning and replace both locks on the front door.
Silence settled over the apartment.
But it was a completely different kind of silence now.
It was the silence of scorched earth.
