The key turned in the lock, and Kristina pushed the shopping bags into the hallway, followed by Ksenia, who had spent the entire walk from the bus stop complaining about glucose syrup and a customer who wanted lollipops “shaped like her cat.”
Ruslan was sitting in an armchair, and from the speed with which his palm covered his phone, it was obvious he had not been watching cartoons. The screen disappeared under a cushion with the dexterity of a man who checked roller-coaster fastenings every day and knew how to act quickly.
“Secrets,” Kristina drawled with a laugh as she pulled off one boot. “Ruslan, you’re thirty-six. You look like a schoolboy hiding his report card in the freezer.”
image
“I didn’t hide anything anywhere,” he muttered.
“Of course not. The phone crawled away by itself. It’s alive. I’ve suspected that for a long time.”
Ksenia snorted, took off her jacket, and hung it on a hook, trying not to look at the owner of the apartment. Ruslan ostentatiously took a workplace safety magazine from the shelf, although he knew it by heart, down to the last footnote. His short fingers were nervous, crumpling the page as though he were trying to squeeze juice out of it.
“What’s with the mood?” Kristina asked, pulling a packet of coffee from one of the bags. “You look like someone whose loan application was rejected.”
“I look like someone who spent all day climbing around ‘Surprise.’ Do you know how many nuts weren’t tightened properly? Twenty-three. Twenty-three nuts, and they let children ride that thing.”
“And naturally, you saved everybody.”
“I saved everybody,” he confirmed gloomily.
The phone under the cushion vibrated. Ruslan jerked, pulled it out, glanced at the screen, and suddenly spread into a broad smile—far too broad. He stood up and handed the phone to his wife with the gesture of a magician pulling a dead pigeon from a hat and hoping the audience would not notice.
“It’s Yegor. He wants you.”
“Me?” Kristina took the phone. “Hello?”
“Kristin, hi!” Yegor shouted so loudly that her ear rang. “Let Ruslan out for the evening, will you? We’ll hang out. I’ve got something to celebrate—they installed a new cable for me, so we have to christen it with a drink.”
“Yegor, are you seriously asking my permission like a first-grader talking to his homeroom teacher?”
“Well, what else am I supposed to do? You’re the boss in your house.”
“Fine. Permission granted. Return him in working condition. He has carousels tomorrow.”
She handed the phone back to her husband and laughed—genuinely, loudly, throwing her head back. There was something faintly contemptuous in the laughter, but only faintly, harmlessly, domestically so.
Ruslan listened with a stone face and, for some reason, was turning pale.
“All right,” Kristina said, folding her arms. “Avoid puddles. Don’t talk to strangers. If anybody bothers you, we’ve got an uncle who’s a policeman. He’ll come and arrest everyone.”
“We don’t have an uncle who’s a policeman.”
“We do. You just haven’t met him yet. Home by eleven.”
“I’m thirty-six years old,” Ruslan hissed through his teeth as he pulled on his sweater.
“Exactly. Eleven. Otherwise you’ll stand in the corner and think about your behavior.”
He cursed under his breath, something about a “traveling circus,” but his eyes were shining, and in the hallway he buttoned himself up with the haste of someone who had just been released from quarantine.
The door slammed.
Ksenia waited five seconds and raised an eyebrow.
“Listen, he’s acting kind of strange.”
“Strange,” Kristina agreed. “He’s been like that since our last fight.”
“What happened?”
“We were supposed to go to his mother’s. He got worked up over some nonsense first thing in the morning, shouted that I didn’t respect him, slammed the door, and stormed off into the sunset. I went alone. Sat with his mother, ate her pies, listened to stories about the neighbor with two cats, and pretended Ruslan was on duty.”
“And did he apologize afterward?”
“He bought me a blender. My husband’s apologies come in the form of household appliances.”
Kristina gave a crooked smile.
“Ever since then he’s been like this. Tiptoeing around, asking permission, reporting where he’s going. You know, like someone who got a fine and is paying it in installments.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“It amuses me.”
Ksenia said nothing. She took a box of lollipops from her bag, put it on the table, and looked at her friend the way people look at someone standing with their back to an open manhole.
Two days later, on Saturday morning, Kristina’s phone rang. The screen showed “Lyudmila Arkadyevna,” and Kristina mentally put a checkmark next to the thought: there goes the day.
“Kristinochka, hello,” her mother-in-law said softly, as always, as though apologizing for the very fact of her existence. “I’m expecting you and Ruslan today at six.”
“What’s the occasion, Lyudmila Arkadyevna?”
“Raisa has come to visit. My sister, from Tula. She wants to see Ruslan. She hasn’t seen him since he was sixteen and keeps asking whether he’s grown up.”
“He has,” Kristina said. “Sideways.”
Her mother-in-law gave a quiet laugh.
Kristina listened to her and thought about the fact that this woman had never raised her voice at anyone in her life—and that was precisely why she was left with a thirty-one-square-meter studio apartment.
She had sold her three-room apartment and given the money to her daughter Alyona. Alyona’s in-laws added more, and now Alyona had a two-room apartment with a balcony and a kitchen island.
Meanwhile, Lyudmila Arkadyevna lived in a studio and said it was easier to clean that way.
“Well, wonderful,” her mother-in-law said. “Raisa is baking a pie. Apple.”
“Let me check the timing with my husband. One second.”
Kristina did not move the phone away from her ear.
She turned toward Ruslan, who was wandering around the apartment in his underwear and T-shirt looking for a charger, and asked in the same calm, everyday tone one might use to ask about taking out the trash:
“Listen, what time are you meeting your mistress today? Will we make it to your mother’s? Aunt Raya is here and wants to look at you.”
The room became very quiet.
Ruslan froze on all fours beside an electrical outlet and slowly turned his head like a tank turret.
For a second, he searched her face for a trap, found one—or rather, decided he had—and bared his teeth.
“I’ve got a meeting tonight. At nine. So yes, we’ll make it.”
“Well, look at you. You’ve even made yourself a schedule.”
“Be jealous in silence,” Ruslan said, yanking the charger cord.
Kristina snorted and brought the phone back to her ear to confirm the time, but there were already disconnected beeps.
Lyudmila Arkadyevna held the phone at arm’s length and stared at it as though it had suddenly spoken in somebody else’s voice.
Raisa, who was wiping her hands with a towel, walked closer.
“Lyuda, why are you frozen like that? Are they coming?”
“They’re coming,” her sister-in-law said uncertainly. “Rayechka… I think Ruslan has another woman.”
“What woman?”
“Another one. Kristina just asked him, right in front of me, what time he was meeting his mistress. Calmly. And he answered that it was at nine.”
Raisa dropped into a chair. The towel fell across her lap.
She was the kind of person in whom news went from the ears directly to the tongue, bypassing every other organ.
“So she knows?”
“Apparently.”
“And she doesn’t mind?”
“Looks like she doesn’t,” Lyudmila Arkadyevna said in bewilderment. “She was laughing, Raya. As though he’d said he was going fishing.”
“What a disgrace,” Raisa breathed, pressing the towel to her chest. “Lyuda, it’s a disgrace. In the family, with his wife alive and everything. You and I were raised so strictly, and now—appointments on a schedule.”
“Just don’t tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell?” Raisa said, offended. “I’m a very discreet person.”
Twenty minutes later, she announced she was going to the store “for sour cream because the dough is too runny.”
She did not need sour cream.
Raisa went out into the stairwell, walked down to the landing between floors where the signal was better, and called her daughter.
“Polya, are you sitting down? Sit down. Ruslan, your cousin, has a mistress.”
“No way!” Polina squealed. “Quiet little Ruslan?”
“Quiet little Ruslan. And apparently there’s a child too.”
“A child?!”
“Well, maybe not a child,” Raisa corrected herself quickly, “but there’s definitely a woman. And his wife Kristina knows everything and puts up with it. Won’t let him go and just tolerates it. Keeps him beside her and suffers. Can you imagine?”
“Mom, this is like a movie,” Polina said with delight. “An actual soap opera. All right, I’ve got to run. I’m hosting a wedding at four, and the bride’s hysterical.”
Raisa bought sour cream so that she would not have technically lied to herself, then went home almost happy.
Polina worked as a wedding host and knew how to hold a room’s attention.
The news burned a hole in her pocket all the way home, and the moment she entered the hallway, she spilled it out to her husband without even taking off her scarf.
“Timur, listen to this story! My cousin Ruslan—you remember him? Quiet, boring, always talking about bolts and nuts? He’s having an affair!”
“Really?” Timur did not look up from his bow case.
“It only came out a couple of days ago. Everyone’s shocked. His mother’s shocked, his aunt’s shocked, I’m shocked. Who would have thought? Still waters run deep.”
“Happens.”
“By the way,” Polina said playfully, bumping him on the shoulder, “when are you going to leave yours?”
The joke did not land.
Timur slowly put down the case, straightened up, and his face turned gray like a stairwell wall.
“What’s wrong with you?” Polina took half a step back. “I was joking.”
“Your jokes are as flat as the games you run at weddings,” he said quietly and angrily. “Deal with your own affairs before worrying about mine. I’m tired of it, honestly. People call asking when you’ve got a free window.”
“Who calls?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Okay, stop.” Polina tore off her scarf. “What exactly are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m telling you directly. You decide what it means.”
“Timur!”
“Polina.”
They stood opposite each other for another ten seconds.
Then Timur went into the other room and turned up the television—not because he wanted to watch it, but because he did not want to hear her.
Polina grabbed her coat and rushed into the stairwell, trembling with anger and something else, something heavy and sticky.
Outside, she called her mother.
“Mom, listen. I think Timur has someone too.”
“What do you mean, too?” Raisa practically collapsed onto a bench outside her building.
“Exactly that. I told him about Ruslan and joked, ‘So when are you leaving yours?’ and he went pale and started saying weird things about calls and free time slots. Mom, he went pale, do you understand?”
“Polinochka, what about you yourself…” Raisa began cautiously. “Forgive me, I’m your mother, I have the right to ask. You don’t have anything like that going on, do you?”
“What?!” Polina gasped. “What is wrong with all of you? First he hints at something, now you! What a wonderful family. Thanks for the support!”
“I was just…”
“That’s it. Bye.”
The line went dead.
Raisa returned to the apartment looking darker than a storm cloud, forgetting the bag of sour cream in the stairwell.
Lyudmila Arkadyevna was taking the pie out of the oven and turned around.
“What happened? You look terrible.”
“Lyuda.” Raisa sat down. “I think Polina’s husband is cheating on her.”
“Good Lord. Timur?”
“Timur. He went pale and started talking nonsense about calls. He was such a respectable young man. Does archery, teaches children…”
“What is happening to men?” Lyudmila Arkadyevna said, placing the pie on a stand. “It’s like some kind of epidemic. One after another.”
The sisters sat in silence.
Behind the wall, the neighbors’ child started screaming, and both women felt better.
Someone else’s trouble is always medicinal.
Kristina and Ruslan arrived at six.
The pie had turned out well. Raisa kept piling slices onto her nephew’s plate, marveling at how grown-up he had become and how much he resembled his late grandfather. Three times she asked him about nuts and bolts because it was the only aspect of his life she understood.
Kristina ate, smiled, and was polite to precisely the degree that made it impossible to reproach her.
“And what do you do for work, Kristinochka?” Raisa asked.
“I’m a lighting designer. At a theater.”
“What does that mean?”
“I decide who the audience sees and who they don’t. I can erase a person from the stage entirely. One button, and they cease to exist.”
“Oh,” Raisa said. “Scary job.”
“Normal job,” Kristina said.
After the pie, Lyudmila Arkadyevna touched her son’s elbow and led him into the only secluded corner of her studio, behind a wardrobe where her sewing machine stood.
She lowered her voice almost to a whisper.
“Ruslanchik. I’m going to tell you something as your mother, and you listen without interrupting.”
“All right.”
“You be careful with that little sweetheart you’ve got on the side.”
Ruslan straightened so quickly that his shoulder struck a shelf.
He stared down at his mother and said nothing, while inside his head everything was assembling itself into one picture, and it was a bad picture.
Vlada was the daughter-in-law of his mother’s friend. Married. She lived three bus stops away.
“What are you talking about?” he began.
“I’m not talking about anything. I’m saying Kristina is a strange woman. She laughs and jokes, but she could explode. People like that save everything up quietly, and then one day…”
“Mom.”
“Don’t ‘Mom’ me. Either end this business of yours, or talk to your wife honestly. Enough with these modern games, going back and forth and making fools of everybody.”
“What games?” Ruslan forced out.
“Those games. When you go to your mistress.”
She waved a hand and stepped out from behind the wardrobe, leaving him alone.
He stood there with sweaty palms.
One thought hammered inside his head: Mother knows.
And if Mother knew, that meant Mother’s friend knew.
And Mother’s friend was Vlada’s mother-in-law.
Kristina peeked around the wardrobe.
“What are you hiding back here for? Aunt Raya is waiting for the next chapter about nuts and bolts.”
“Just don’t start with that mistress joke again,” Ruslan said angrily and quickly, without looking at her. “My mother took your joke seriously, can you imagine? She swallowed it whole.”
Kristina did not answer.
She looked at her husband very carefully—at the way his voice had dropped half a tone, at the blotches on his cheekbones, at the way he held his hands.
She had spent fifteen years designing stage lighting and could tell at a glance where the fake scenery was.
“All right,” she finally said. “Deal with it yourself.”
The word “it” dropped between them like a weight.
Ruslan swallowed.
“It” meant there was an “it.”
Which meant she knew.
Which meant somewhere he had run a red light and the camera had already taken his picture.
That evening at home, he paced from room to room like a visitor in a museum where touching anything was forbidden.
Twice he reached for his phone and twice jerked his hand away as if it were red-hot.
Kristina sat in an armchair with her laptop, never raising her eyes, but seeing everything.
“Ruslan.”
“What?”
“Come here. Sit down. Let’s talk honestly. I won’t bite.”
He sat on the edge of the sofa, fingers clasped together.
His mother’s words echoed in his head: either stop it or come clean.
He thought they were modern adults.
He thought about how Kristina had gone to nude beaches when she was young and told him about it with a laugh, and he had never made a scandal.
He thought that if he told her himself, it would be noble.
If she dragged the truth out of him, it would be humiliating.
And so he told her everything.
“Her name is Vlada. It’s been a year and a half.”
“A year and a half,” Kristina repeated.
“She’s… basically, she’s the daughter-in-law of Zinaida Pavlovna, Mom’s friend. She’s married. Her husband works away on rotation, two months at a time.”
“How convenient.”
“We meet at her place when he’s gone. Sometimes at the hotel on Traktornaya Street. Yegor covered for me. I told him to say we were together.”
“Yegor,” Kristina said. “I see.”
“She works as a makeup artist at the circus,” Ruslan added for no apparent reason. “Her shift ends at eight.”
“Why don’t you bring me her entire schedule? I’ll frame it.”
He fell silent.
Kristina closed her laptop, placed it on the floor, then carefully moved her cup aside as though clearing a table before surgery.
Her voice was almost gentle, and that made Ruslan cold.
“There’s one thing I don’t understand. Why did you decide to confess? I didn’t know anything.”
The silence lasted a long time.
Ruslan felt like a man who had dismantled a ride’s safety barrier himself and then stood beneath the carriage.
“Mom advised me today,” he said quietly. “She took me behind the wardrobe and told me to tell you everything honestly.”
“Your mother.”
“Yes.”
Kristina leaned back in the chair.
So her mother-in-law had known.
Known and stayed silent.
Fed Kristina pies and asked her about the theater.
Then the old woman’s conscience had started eating at her from the inside, so she sent her son to confess in order to keep her own hands clean.
Beautiful.
Neat.
Everyone dressed in white.
“And what exactly am I supposed to do with this now?” Kristina said, not really asking him, more speaking toward the ceiling. “I honestly don’t know. I have absolutely no idea.”
Ruslan’s phone rang.
He looked at the screen, flinched, and, as always, handed the phone to his wife—the gesture so practiced it was automatic, like a dog bringing back a stick.
“It’s Yegor.”
Kristina took the phone, and at that moment everything finally clicked into place.
Yegor, calling her to ask permission for a grown man to go out.
Yegor, celebrating a “new cable.”
Yegor—the living screen behind which Ruslan hid.
“Hello.”
“Kristin, hi!” Yegor yelled cheerfully. “Listen, let him come over tonight, okay? I’ve got…”
“Yegor,” she interrupted. “Next time, call me directly and say, ‘Kristina, your husband is at his mistress’s place, don’t expect him home before morning.’ We’ll save each other some time.”
The silence on the line was thick as tar.
“I… well…” Yegor said.
Kristina hung up.
“What the hell are you doing?!” Ruslan jumped to his feet. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Be quiet.”
“Do you understand what you just did?”
“Me?” Kristina stood. “You dragged your friend into your little hiding game. A grown man with a wife and two children. I wonder whether Oksana knows that her husband works as a dispatcher not only at the cableway but for you too.”
Ruslan opened his mouth but made no sound.
A scandal involving Yegor’s wife was the last thing he wanted now.
He could see the first domino had already hit the second, and the second was falling.
“Kristina. Don’t.”
“I’m not going to wage war with you,” she said, raising both hands. “Truly. But right now, you’re going to pack a bag and go to your mother’s. I need to think.”
“Think about what?”
“About how to destroy you,” Kristina said calmly. “I need time. I want to do it beautifully.”
“I told you everything!” Ruslan shouted. “Myself! Voluntarily! I could have kept quiet, I could have carried on with all of this, but I came and told you!”
“Right. You confessed, and ten minutes later your friend calls asking permission for you to go out—which means you were planning to see her tonight too. You were giving me a speech about honesty while keeping the taxi meter running.”
“That’s not true.”
“You’re a complete idiot,” Kristina said. “Go. To your mother, your mistress, Yegor—I don’t care right now. Just go.”
Author: Vika Trel © 5630
He did not go to Vlada.
He went to Yegor, because there was nowhere else to go, and he could not sit in the car—his hands were shaking.
Yegor met him in sweatpants with a towel over his shoulder and immediately dragged him into the stairwell.
“What have you done?”
“She knows everything.”
“What do you mean, she knows?!” Yegor grabbed his head with both hands. “What do you mean? You told her?”
“I told her myself. Mom advised me to.”
“Your mother?!” Yegor started breathing rapidly. “Okay. Stop. Do you understand what happens if Vlada’s husband finds out? He gets back from his rotation in three weeks. He’s a simple man. Walks around with a thirty-six-millimeter wrench.”
“I understand.”
“And if my wife finds out I was covering for you? Oksana will unscrew my head and put it on a shelf.”
“Yegor.”
“And your mother. How did your mother even know? She talks to Zinaida Pavlovna almost every day.”
Ruslan pressed his forehead against the cold wall.
“I think Mom knows.”
Yegor was silent.
Then, in a perfectly ordinary tone, without anger, like a dispatcher announcing the cancellation of a ride, he said:
“Well, that’s it. The avalanche has started. Prepare to die.”
“Thanks. Very comforting.”
“I’m not supposed to comfort you. I spent a year trying to talk you out of this. A year, Ruslan! I told you: you’re not Casanova, you’re an amusement-ride inspector. You can’t even lie properly. Your face looks like an official certificate.”
Ruslan went outside and called his mother.
“Ruslanchik?” she answered anxiously.
“Mom, when is Aunt Raya leaving?”
“In about a week. Why?” Lyudmila Arkadyevna paused, then continued in a completely different tone. “Why are you asking? Planning to sleep here?”
“I just…”
“I have a studio apartment, Ruslan. Thirty-one square meters, one room, and Raya is sleeping on the sofa. Stop being ridiculous and go home to your wife.”
The line went dead.
He returned home at ten.
Kristina opened the door and stood in the doorway. Her face was angry, her eyes red, but dry.
“Why the hell are you back?”
“I live here, actually.”
“You used to.”
He squeezed past her into the room and sat on the arm of an armchair without removing his jacket, deliberately keeping furniture between them.
“Kristina. We need to decide what we’re doing. I’m ready to forget her. Right now, in front of you, I’ll delete her number. Just don’t call anyone else and tell them about this. Anyone. Do you hear me?”
“About this,” she repeated slowly. “Wait. You think I told somebody?”
“Then who did? How did Mom find out? How did Aunt Raya find out? Polina already texted me three question marks today.”
“I didn’t tell anyone a single word.”
And then Ruslan did what everyone does when they are terribly frightened and deeply ashamed:
He attacked.
“You know whose fault all this is? Yours. You talked to me like a child for months. ‘Avoid puddles.’ ‘Be home by eleven.’ ‘Uncle Policeman.’ You turned me into an accessory to your apartment.”
Kristina did not let him finish.
She stepped forward and slapped him across the face with an open hand, putting everything that had built up inside her that evening into the blow.
The sound was short and sharp.
Ruslan tumbled off the armchair, went over the side, and landed on the floor between the wall and the floor lamp.
“You…” He grabbed his cheek. “Are you insane?”
“You climbed into another woman’s bed yourself,” Kristina said, standing over him. “For a year and a half. A hotel on Traktornaya Street. Work rotation schedules. And somehow I’m to blame. Genius. An absolute genius.”
He got up, backed behind the armchair, and continued from behind the barricade because retreating completely would now have been humiliating.
“Yes, you! You’re cold. In an entire year, you never once asked how I was doing. Your theater matters more to you. You come home at midnight and collapse into bed. What am I supposed to be here, furniture?”
“Fine.” Kristina clasped her hands behind her back so she would not hit him a second time. “Let’s assume I’m terrible. Then explain something to me. Why did you live with me?”
“What?”
“Why did you stay? Eat my food? Sleep in my bed? Take my car when yours was being repaired? Go to Abkhazia with me using my bonus money? If I’m so unbearable, what kept you here?”
Ruslan said nothing.
“Well?” Kristina stepped closer. “I’m waiting. One reason.”
Silence.
“You’re a coward,” she said. “You’re a bastard, and do you know what hurts the most? You’re not even an interesting bastard. You’re gray. For a year and a half, you lied according to a timetable, like a bus.”
“Kristina…”
“And here’s the thing: I don’t care anymore. While you were gone today, I was searching for a reason to forgive you. I really was. I went through everything in my head. He was good to me here. He drove me home from the hospital there. He made me laugh that time. And then you walked through the door and explained that this was my fault. And I ran out of reasons.”
He rubbed his cheek, lowered his head stubbornly, and announced what he had been rehearsing all the way back from Yegor’s place:
“I’m not leaving. This is my apartment too.”
Kristina gave him the finger.
Calmly, almost elegantly, like displaying the key to a dressing room.
“You’re leaving tonight.”
Without taking her eyes off him, she dialed a number.
“Lyudmila Arkadyevna? Good evening. Come get your son. He’s standing here explaining that I personally gave him a mistress, and apparently he expects me to thank him.”
Somebody gasped at the other end.
Ruslan lunged forward, but the phone was already lowered.
“You’ve lost your mind…” he whispered.
“Pack.”
He rushed around the room, grabbing things and stuffing them into a sports bag, muttering that she would regret this, that she had destroyed everything herself, that “people don’t behave like this.”
Kristina stood against the wall and said nothing.
The avalanche, just as Yegor had promised, was already moving, rumbling as it gathered stones.
The door slammed.
By nine the following evening, he came back.
His key would not turn in the lock.
Kristina had called a locksmith that morning, and the locksmith had been efficient.
Ruslan knocked.
Then again.
Then he slid into a crouch and leaned his back against the door.
On the other side, Kristina did the same.
She sat on the hallway floor and leaned against the door panel.
Six centimeters of wood and insulation separated them.
“Kristin. Open the door.”
“No.”
“Then just listen.”
“I’m listening.”
“I don’t know how it happened,” he said.
“You do.”
“All right. I do.” He rubbed his knees. “I’m guilty. I’m not arguing. I’m an idiot.”
“You’re not an idiot,” Kristina said evenly. “An idiot has a diagnosis and isn’t held responsible. You’re a person who made a choice. Every evening. For a year and a half. Three hundred times, you chose someone other than me.”
“You’re guilty too.”
“Yes. Maybe I didn’t give you enough time. I lived inside my rehearsals, my lights, my premieres. I admit we were both responsible for the problems in the marriage. But I didn’t go to another man and create a second relationship with a timetable.”
“Kristin, remember…” he rushed on. “Remember when we drove to Rostov in my old wreck of a car and it broke down and we spent the night at a gas station? You laughed the whole night. And remember what you did for my thirtieth birthday? You staged a performance in the theater basement for one audience member. Remember?”
She was silent.
She remembered.
That was the worst part.
She remembered everything.
“Let’s forget it,” Ruslan said. “Just erase it. Pretend it never happened.”
And that was when Kristina began to cry.
Silently, with clenched teeth, because the moment he said “forget it,” she saw the circus dressing room in her mind, the rotation schedule, the hotel on Traktornaya Street, and heard his voice saying, “Be jealous in silence.”
“No,” she said, and her voice did not tremble even though tears were streaming down her cheeks. “You could have come to me and said, ‘Kristina, I’m unhappy. We’re growing apart. Let’s do something about it.’ You could have shouted. You could have packed a suitcase. You could have divorced me honestly. You chose the easiest option.”
“Kristina.”
“You ruined my life. You ruined Vlada’s, although she’s responsible too. You ruined her husband’s life, and he’s away at work right now and knows nothing. You dragged Yegor into it, and now his wife looks at him suspiciously. Ruslan, you’re a parasite. You feed off other people’s families and don’t even say thank you.”
For a long time, there was nothing on the other side of the door.
Then his jacket rustled.
Footsteps moved away.
Someone walked heavily down the stairs, stopping on each landing.
Lyudmila Arkadyevna’s studio was cramped and bright and smelled of vinegar from freshly washed floors.
Raisa had gone back to Tula a day earlier than planned.
Things had exploded with Polina.
“They tore each other apart,” Raisa told her sister over the phone, and Ruslan could hear every word because a studio apartment was only one room. “Polinochka is screaming that he’s cheating on her. Timur is screaming that she’s the one cheating. At this point, I don’t even know who’s accusing whom, Lyuda. It’s one huge tangled mess. And remember what started all this? Your Ruslan. She blurted out the story about him to her husband, and he went crazy.”
“Oh, Raya…”
“So tell your son this: if he hadn’t gotten himself that woman, my daughter would be sleeping in her own bed right now instead of sitting around in stairwells. Scoundrel. They’re all scoundrels, and women are always the ones who have to clean up the mess.”
His mother ended the call and looked at her son.
“Did you hear?”
“I heard.”
“You played your little modern-relationship games too long,” Lyudmila Arkadyevna said, grinding her teeth loudly enough to hear. “How did I teach you? Live quietly. Don’t get clever.”
“You’re the one who told me to talk honestly with her.”
“I told you to stop the affair! First you stop it, then you confess!”
“Wonderful. Thank you. Very helpful.”
“Don’t take that tone with me.” She put down her cup. “You can stay here for two weeks. That’s all. I have one room. I’m on the sofa, you’re on the floor. In two weeks, find somewhere else.”
Ruslan lay on a camping mat on the floor and stared at a crack in the ceiling.
He started calculating.
Rent—thirty-five thousand minimum. With his salary, that was half of everything.
His mother looked at him like an enemy.
Yegor had not answered his messages for two days.
Vlada had sent one word:
“Don’t.”
Polina was telling the entire family that he was “the quiet one with a double life.”
In three weeks, Vlada’s husband would return from his work rotation.
And all of this, he thought, was because of Kristina.
She could have forgiven him.
She could have left the subject alone.
She could have pretended nothing was happening.
She had laughed.
She had joked about Uncle Policeman.
She had always been easygoing.
She could simply have waited until the whole thing fizzled out on its own.
It would have fizzled out.
He would have left Vlada by spring.
Honestly.
He would have.
He rolled from side to side and grew angrier, and the anger was comfortable and warm like a blanket.
It was possible to fall asleep beneath it.
Kristina sat on the floor in front of the open wardrobe.
Her clothes hung on the left.
His on the right.
Sweaters, two dress shirts, his uniform jacket with the amusement park logo, belts rolled into circles.
She sat there understanding that all of it had to be removed and that she had absolutely no strength to do it.
She stayed like that for perhaps forty minutes.
Then she stood up.
An hour later, four bags and a sports bag stood in the hallway, neatly packed and secured.
His jackets were on top.
She had placed his shoes in a separate bag and tied it shut.
Kristina looked at everything and said aloud in surprise:
“One hour. Just one hour.”
A year and a half.
The hotel on Traktornaya Street.
Work rotation schedules.
A friend used as a cover story.
A mother-in-law giving advice behind a wardrobe.
An aunt buying sour cream.
And it had taken one hour to pack him away.
The wardrobe was now half empty.
And it was not frightening.
She sat at the table, opened her laptop, and found the government services website.
She filled in the fields, checked the information against her passport, verified the date of the marriage.
Twelve years and four months.
Her finger hovered over the button for only one second.
Then she clicked.
Lyudmila Arkadyevna’s studio was dark.
Ruslan lay on the camping mat with his eyes closed, angry, and had almost fallen asleep when the phone on the windowsill beeped.
He reached for it, picked it up, and squinted against the light.
The notification was brief, official, without a single unnecessary word.
Divorce application submitted.
He read it and sat up.
Then read it again.
Behind the wardrobe, his mother turned over on the sofa and asked sleepily:
“Ruslanchik? Why aren’t you sleeping?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“I left one nut loose.”
THE END
