“Why are the curtains still drawn in here? It’s almost nine, the sun is already high, and you’re sitting here like moles underground,” Tamara Petrovna’s voice sounded not like a question, but like the roar of a cement mixer bursting into a quiet morning sleep.
The bedroom door flew wide open, the handle slamming against the wall. No knock, no warning — just an invasion, as if this were not a married couple’s bedroom but a public storage room. Alisa, standing in the middle of the room in nothing but lace underwear and holding one stocking in her hand, froze. She had been about to pull on a narrow pencil skirt, but from the shock she dropped it on the floor.
“Tamara Petrovna!” Alisa barked, instinctively covering herself with the crumpled blouse she had managed to grab from the bed. “Do you even know what knocking means? We are changing clothes here, in case you hadn’t noticed!”
Her mother-in-law did not even slow down. She walked over to the window, drew the heavy curtains apart with the confidence of a homeowner, letting harsh, unpleasant sunlight into the room. The light immediately revealed dust particles floating in the air. Dmitry, lying on the bed with his face turned toward the wall, only burrowed deeper under the blanket, pretending to be a rag. He could hear perfectly well that his mother had entered, but he chose the dead-possum tactic.
“Oh, please, what haven’t I seen before?” Tamara Petrovna snorted, turning toward her daughter-in-law and running a sharp, appraising gaze over her figure. “It’s all the same as everyone else’s. Except your ribs are sticking out — frightening to look at. You need to be fed better, otherwise poor Dimka probably has nothing to hold on to. Skin and bones. And that black underwear only makes you look older.”
Alisa felt a hot lump rise in her throat. It was not embarrassment, no. Embarrassment had vanished six months ago, when her mother-in-law had first walked into the bathroom while Alisa was brushing her teeth to check whether she was using too much water. Now it was pure, concentrated rage.
“Please leave,” Alisa said through clenched teeth, trying not to break into a scream. “I’m late for work, and I need to get dressed without an audience.”
“Get dressed, who’s stopping you? I’ll just water the ficus and wipe the dust off the windowsill, otherwise you’ll soon be growing moss in here,” Tamara Petrovna ran a finger along the windowsill and demonstratively examined her fingertip, as if looking for anthrax. “And anyway, I came to ask what you’re having for dinner. I’ve got chicken defrosting, but if you’re planning to chew those weeds of yours again, then cook for yourself separately.”
Spitting on decency, Alisa turned away and began quickly pulling on her skirt. Her hands were trembling; the zipper got stuck. Her mother-in-law, noticing a receipt and the packaging from new tights on the nightstand, instantly changed the direction of her attack. Her hand swooped down on the paper like a hawk.
“Well, well,” she drawled, squinting at the numbers. “Two thousand eight hundred rubles? For what? For this little spiderweb?”
“It’s not a spiderweb, it’s compression hosiery. My legs swell from sitting at work all day,” Alisa snapped, finally fastening the skirt. “Give me the receipt.”
“Two thousand eight hundred…” Tamara Petrovna shook her head, looking at her daughter-in-law as if she were mentally ill. “Dimka, are you asleep over there or have you gone deaf? Did you see how much your wife spends on rags? Our rent is five thousand, and she buys underwear and socks at the price of gold.”
The blanket on the bed stirred. Dmitry’s disheveled head appeared from under it. His eyes darted around, avoiding his wife’s gaze.
“Mom, why are you starting this so early in the morning?” he mumbled, yawning. “She bought it, so what? It’s her money, she works. Let me sleep ten more minutes.”
“Her money?” Tamara Petrovna threw up her hands theatrically, still clutching the receipt. “You are one family! The budget should be shared! And you live like neighbors. Today she buys tights for three thousand, tomorrow she’ll want a fur coat, and then you’ll come to me asking for money to fix the car? I see how you throw money around. Yesterday I saw sushi delivery packaging in the trash. A thousand rubles straight into the garbage! And for that money, I could have fed you soup for a whole week.”
Alisa had already put on her blouse and was now frantically searching for her jacket. She wanted only one thing — to run out of this stuffy room, out of this apartment saturated with someone else’s control.
“Tamara Petrovna, put the receipt back and leave the room,” she said in an icy tone, staring directly at the bridge of her mother-in-law’s nose. “We will handle our finances ourselves. We don’t ask you for a single kopeck.”
“Not yet,” her mother-in-law shot back, not moving an inch. “But when things get tight, it’ll be ‘Mom, help us.’ I want what’s best for you, foolish children. Money loves counting, not wastefulness. When I was your age, I saved every kopeck, and that’s why we have an apartment and a dacha. And you? Not a pot to your name, everything goes to rags and down the toilet.”
She walked over to the dresser where Alisa’s cosmetics were lying and picked up a bottle of perfume.
“And this probably costs five thousand too? The smell is sharp, cheap somehow,” she grimaced and put the bottle back with a loud knock. “So here’s what, Dima. Get up. Enough lying around. Since you two don’t know how to plan, tonight we’ll sit down and calculate everything. I’m not tolerating this anymore. I won’t allow money to be thrown to the wind in my house.”
Tamara Petrovna finally headed toward the exit, but stopped in the doorway and threw over her shoulder:
“And put your underwear away from the chair, Alisa. You’ve scattered it around like in a brothel. There should be order here, not an exhibition of textile industry achievements.”
The door did not close behind her. Her mother-in-law deliberately left it wide open to control the process of getting ready. Alisa stood there, gripping the edge of the table so hard her knuckles turned white. She looked at her husband. Dmitry pulled the blanket back up to his chin and closed his eyes.
“Don’t you want to say anything to her?” Alisa asked quietly.
“Lis, she’s an old woman,” Dmitry replied dully from under the pillow. “She’s used to saving money. Don’t pay attention. She’s just worried about us. She’ll blow off steam and calm down. Let’s not make a scandal out of nothing.”
Alisa silently picked up her bag. Something inside her clicked, as if an important spring had snapped in a complicated mechanism. She realized that “nothing” had ended a very long time ago, and now they were sliding down an inclined plane straight into the abyss.
The evening was supposed to be salvation, but it turned into the second episode of the nightmare. Returning from work, Alisa dreamed of only one thing: to wash off the sticky fatigue of that endless day and forget the morning incident. She locked herself in the bathroom, turned the latch with pleasure, and switched on the hot water. The noise of the streams created an illusion of safety, a tiny island of personal space where no one could reach her.
She was soaping the washcloth when, through the sound of the water, she heard a strange metallic scraping. The sound came from the door. Alisa froze, listening. The scraping repeated, then came a dry click, and the door handle slowly began to move down.
“Occupied!” she shouted, pressing the washcloth to her chest. “I’m washing!”
But the latch, which had always seemed reliable, treacherously gave way. The door opened, letting in clouds of cool air and an unbothered Tamara Petrovna. Her mother-in-law entered the bathroom as casually as if she were walking into an empty hallway. She was holding some dirty rag.
“Tamara Petrovna!” Alisa squealed, shrinking into the far corner of the shower stall and trying to cover herself with the curtain, which clung to her wet body. “What are you doing?! I locked the door! What did you open it with?”
“Oh, don’t scream like that, it makes my ears ring,” her mother-in-law grimaced, not even looking at her cowering daughter-in-law. She bent over the sink and began soaking the rag. “Your lock here is flimsy. Any knitting needle can open it. I need to wipe the hallway floor; Dimka tracked dirt in with his boots. And you keep washing, keep washing. What haven’t I seen? We’re both women, same anatomy.”
Alisa stood under the shower, feeling the hot water stop warming her. She was shaking from humiliation. Her mother-in-law calmly rinsed the rag, wrung it out, critically inspected the shelf with shampoos, snorted, and left, leaving the door slightly open.
“Close the door!” Alisa shouted after her, feeling angry tears rise in her eyes.
“You’re creating humidity. It needs airing out, otherwise mold will start,” came the voice from the hallway.
Alisa turned off the water. She no longer wanted to wash. She quickly dried herself, dressed right there in the bathroom in her house clothes, buttoning every button as if it were armor, and walked out.
The second act was waiting for her in the kitchen. Dmitry was already sitting at the table, his nose buried in a plate of macaroni. In front of him, instead of the usual sugar bowl or napkin holder, receipts were spread out. Long, crumpled strips of cash register receipts that Alisa usually emptied from her pockets at the end of the week. Tamara Petrovna sat opposite her son, armed with a calculator and glasses sliding down the tip of her nose. She looked like a prosecutor preparing an indictment.
“Sit down, Alisa, we’ll have dinner,” she said without looking up from the papers. “And at the same time, we’ll talk about your wastefulness.”
Alisa sat down. She had no appetite, but she forced herself to pick up a fork. Dmitry did not even raise his head, diligently chewing macaroni as if his life depended on it.
“I calculated your grocery expenses for the week,” Tamara Petrovna began, tapping the calculator keys with her finger. “And my hair stands on end. Here’s a receipt from the supermarket near the house. Alisa, explain to me why you buy milk in bottles for ninety rubles?”
“Because it tastes good and doesn’t go sour on the second day,” Alisa answered tiredly.
“Milk in soft plastic bags costs fifty!” her mother-in-law snapped. “You pour it into a jar, and there’s no difference. Forty rubles overpaid for nothing. Next. Cherry tomatoes. Two hundred rubles for a box! What are you buying them for, an exhibition? Regular tomatoes cost half as much.”
“I like cherry tomatoes. They’re sweet,” Alisa felt irritation boiling inside her again. “Tamara Petrovna, it’s our money. We earn it, so we decide what to eat.”
“You are eating up your future!” her mother-in-law’s voice rose. “Dimka, look at this! Cheese — Swiss. Sausage — dry-cured. Bread — some whole-grain thing, apparently made of gold at that price. You are living beyond your means. I spend in a month on food what you flush down the toilet in a week.”
Dmitry finally raised his eyes, but he looked not at his wife, but at his mother. His gaze begged her to stop, but aloud he said something entirely different:
“Mom, well, it is tasty. Alisa cooks well…”
“Tasty, he says!” Tamara Petrovna mocked him. “And when you need dental work or want to save for vacation, will you come running to me? ‘Mom, give me money’? Potatoes and herring can be tasty too. In short, I can’t watch this circus anymore. My heart bleeds seeing how you squander your budget.”
She gathered the receipts into a pile and pushed them aside as if they were trash. Then she folded her arms across her chest and looked at the young couple with a heavy, unblinking stare.
“Starting this month, we are introducing new rules. Since you don’t know how to manage money, I will manage it. I’m an experienced person, I’ve lived a life, I know where and what to buy on sale, where to save.”
Alisa dropped her fork. The clang of metal against the plate sounded like a gong.
“What do you mean — you will manage it?” she asked quietly.
“That’s exactly what I mean. You get your salary — you bring it to me. I give you money for transportation, for lunches, I make the grocery list, I buy everything myself. I’ll pay the utilities too, since you always forget to submit the meter readings. The rest goes into savings, for your own future. We’ll save for a down payment on a mortgage, since you feel so cramped in my apartment.”
“Are you joking?” Alisa looked around the kitchen, hoping to see a hidden camera. “I am not giving you my salary. I am not a child. I’m twenty-six years old!”
“And you behave like a five-year-old!” Tamara Petrovna barked. “Dimka agrees. We already talked while you were in there washing yourself for half an hour, wasting state water. Right, Dima?”
Alisa sharply turned to her husband. Dmitry shrank, visually becoming half his size. He fiddled with the edge of the tablecloth and stared somewhere near the baseboard.
“Dim?” Alisa’s voice trembled. “Are you serious? You agreed to give her our money?”
“Lis, well… Mom has a point,” he muttered without raising his eyes. “We really do spend a lot. Last month we ended at zero. And Mom knows how to save, she’ll put money aside… Let’s try it for a couple of months, what’s the big deal? It’s for us. So we can buy our own apartment.”
“You are betraying me right now, do you understand that?” Alisa whispered. “You want me to beg your mother for money for sanitary pads? To report every chocolate bar?”
“Don’t exaggerate!” Tamara Petrovna cut in. “I’ll always give money for necessities. And chocolate is harmful. For your teeth and your figure. Look, you’ve already put on fat at the sides.”
“This is not a discussion, Alisa,” her mother-in-law added harshly, seeing that her daughter-in-law was about to object. “This is a condition of living in my apartment. Don’t like it — find another place to live. But Dimka isn’t going anywhere; he’s fine here. And if you want to be with your husband, you’ll live by the family’s rules. In our family, it has always been this way: the elders manage the budget because they are wiser.”
Alisa stood up from the table. She physically felt short of breath. The kitchen walls, covered in old washable floral wallpaper, seemed to be closing in to crush her.
“I’m not eating anything,” she said dully. “Thank you for dinner.”
“Oh, look how proud she is!” Tamara Petrovna shouted after her. “She’s declaring a hunger strike! Nothing, when you get hungry, you’ll come. You’ll eat potatoes and drink milk from a bag. Life will force you to bend much lower.”
Alisa walked into the hallway, feeling a cold, calculating determination ripening inside her. She understood: this was the end. But before the final break, she still had to survive several more days. The days before payday.
D-Day came on Friday. It was payday, strengthened by a quarterly bonus that Alisa had been waiting for for half a year. On purpose, she withdrew the entire sum from an ATM on the way home. The heavy bundle of cash in an envelope, hidden in the inner pocket of her bag, burned against her side but gave her a strange confidence. It was her ticket to freedom, her resource, her armor.
The moment she stepped over the threshold of the apartment, she understood: the ambush had been planned in advance. In the narrow hallway, she was met not by the smell of dinner, but by Tamara Petrovna. Her mother-in-law stood with her arms crossed over her chest, like a dormitory watchwoman guarding against someone sneaking a man inside. Behind her, shifting from foot to foot and guiltily staring at the floor, loomed Dmitry.
“Well, welcome home, breadwinner,” her mother-in-law’s voice oozed poison. “Dima said the text message came at lunchtime. Did they give you the bonus?”
Alisa slowly took off her shoes without letting go of her bag. She straightened up, looking her husband’s mother in the eyes.
“They did. Good evening.”
“Good, good,” Tamara Petrovna nodded and demanding held out her hand, palm up. “Come on, hand it over. No need to hide it in your pockets. I’ve already started a notebook, we’ll write everything down: how much came in, how much we’ll set aside for food, how much for savings. Dima has already handed over his part. Not much, really, but every kopeck counts.”
Alisa shifted her gaze to her husband. He had drawn his head into his shoulders, trying to become invisible against the wallpaper.
“You gave her your salary? All of it?” Alisa asked quietly, but steel rang in her voice.
“Lis, well, we agreed… Mom knows better how to distribute it…” he muttered.
“We did not agree, Dima! You decided this behind my back!” Alisa turned to her mother-in-law. “I will not give you the money. This is my salary, my labor, and my bonus. I am not going to report to you for every kopeck.”
Tamara Petrovna’s face flushed with red blotches. She took a step forward, violating Alisa’s personal space, and grabbed the strap of her bag.
“Are you deaf?” she hissed. “In my house — my rules! I won’t allow you to waste the family budget on lipsticks and rags while my son walks around in holey socks! Give it here nicely, girl, or I’ll take it myself! I’m doing this for your own good, you complete fool!”
“Take your hands off!” Alisa shouted, yanking the bag toward herself.
But Tamara Petrovna’s grip was iron. A humiliating, disgusting struggle began in the cramped hallway. Her mother-in-law, puffing, pulled the bag toward herself; Alisa braced her back against the front door. Dmitry stood a meter away from them and simply watched. He did not try to separate the women, did not try to protect his wife. He simply stood and watched as his mother tried to rob his wife.
“Dima!” Alisa screamed when her mother-in-law’s nail painfully scratched her wrist. “Are you just going to stand there and watch?! Do something!”
“Mom, maybe not by force…” Dmitry timidly spoke up.
“Shut up!” his mother barked at him without loosening her fingers. “I’ll teach her respect right now! Look at this little princess, hiding money! And living off everything ready-made suits you, does it? Give me the envelope, I know it’s in there!”
At that moment, Alisa pushed her mother-in-law with all her strength. She did not hit her, but pushed her to free herself. Tamara Petrovna, not expecting resistance, staggered back and hit her hip against the cabinet. The bag remained with Alisa.
A silence hung in the hallway, heavy as a tombstone. Her mother-in-law gasped for air, preparing to burst into curses, but Alisa got ahead of her. She looked at her husband, and there was so much contempt in her eyes that Dmitry involuntarily stepped back.
“That’s it,” she said loudly and clearly. “Enough.”
“What do you think you’re doing?!” Tamara Petrovna shrieked. “You raised your hand against a mother?!”
Alisa ignored her. She looked only at Dmitry, pointing toward the bedroom where, that very morning, the shameful inspection had taken place.
“Your mother enters our bedroom without knocking while we are changing clothes! And then she demands that I hand over my entire salary to her ‘for safekeeping’ so we don’t spend it on nonsense! I am not in a concentration camp. I am married! We are leaving!”
“Where do you think you’re going at night?” her mother-in-law sneered maliciously, rubbing her bruised hip. “Who needs you with that arrogance? Dimka isn’t going anywhere! Right, son? Tell her! Let her roll away if she’s so smart!”
Alisa did not wait for the answer. She flew into the bedroom like a fury. She threw open the wardrobe. She pulled a large suitcase down from the top shelf and flung it onto the bed, open mouth upward.
“Dima!” she shouted from the room. “You have exactly five minutes! If you don’t start packing right now, I’m leaving alone. And you will never see me again. Choose: either you live with your wife, or you stay with Mommy, who counts your underwear and your money!”
Dmitry entered the bedroom, pale as a sheet. Tamara Petrovna rushed in after him.
“Don’t you dare!” she screamed, trying to close the wardrobe door in front of Alisa’s face. “Don’t you dare touch those things! I bought that! I knitted that sweater! Put it back!”
Alisa swept clothes from the shelves in armfuls without looking — hers, her husband’s, winter, summer. Everything flew into the suitcase in a shapeless pile. Jeans, shirts, underwear.
“I said step away!” Alisa pushed her mother-in-law’s hand aside and began throwing her husband’s socks into the suitcase. “Dima, time is running! Are you a man or a floor rag? Do you want to spend your whole life reporting for a can of beer? Do you want her telling us how to make children?”
Dmitry stood in the middle of the room, torn between two fires. He looked at his enraged mother, then at his wife, who was furiously packing their life into a suitcase.
“Mom,” Dmitry’s voice trembled, but for the first time there were firm notes in it. “Mom, move.
”
“What?!” Tamara Petrovna froze, unable to believe her ears. “You… you choose her? This hysteric? Against your own mother? She’ll leave you in a month! She’s using you!”
“I said move,” Dmitry walked to the wardrobe and, with shaking hands, took his jacket off the hanger. “We’re leaving. Alisa is right. You can’t live like this. This isn’t a family, it’s a madhouse.”
“Oh, so that’s how it is…” Tamara Petrovna whispered, and her face twisted with such hatred that it resembled a terrifying mask. “Then go! Go, both of you! But remember: you won’t get a single kopeck from me! I’ll sign the apartment over to a cat shelter! I won’t let you cross the threshold when you crawl back!”
Alisa zipped up the suitcase. She was breathing heavily, her hair had come loose from her hairstyle, but she felt like a victor. She grabbed Dmitry by the hand, as if afraid he would change his mind at the last moment.
“Take the backpack with the laptop. Quickly!” she commanded.
“I’ll curse you!” her mother-in-law would not stop, blocking the way to the exit. “You’ll never be happy! Happiness cannot be built on another person’s tears! Thieves! Ungrateful swine!”
“We are not thieves, Tamara Petrovna,” Alisa said coldly, pushing the suitcase toward the exit. “We are just adults who want to breathe, not suffocate. Out of the way!”
She moved straight ahead like an icebreaker, pushing the suitcase in front of her and dragging her husband behind her. He kept looking back at his mother with horror and guilt on his face. But Alisa did not let him stop. The scandal had reached its peak, and there was no way back. The bridges were not just burning — they were exploding.
Leaving the apartment turned into a combat operation. The hallway, cluttered with wardrobes and coat racks, became an obstacle course. At the end of it, standing in the doorway with her arms spread wide, was Tamara Petrovna. She no longer resembled a caring mother or strict housekeeper. Now she was a fury losing control of her property. Her face was covered in crimson blotches, her mouth twisted, exposing an uneven row of teeth.
“I won’t let you!” she roared when Alisa tried to squeeze the suitcase past her. “You’ll leave here only over my dead body! Dimka, wake up! She’s dragging you into some homeless shelter!”
Alisa did not engage in discussion. There was no time left for diplomacy. She acted like a robot programmed for evacuation. Grabbing her husband by the shoulder, she sharply pulled him toward the shoe rack.
“Put your shoes on,” she commanded in an icy tone that allowed no objections. “You have thirty seconds. Don’t tie the laces, tuck them inside.”
Dmitry, white as chalk, tried with trembling hands to get his foot into a sneaker. His fingers would not obey him; his heel crushed the back of the shoe. Every now and then he threw frightened glances at his mother, who continued spewing curses but no longer dared to approach her daughter-in-law, remembering the recent shove.
“You tramp!” Tamara Petrovna spat words. “You ruined my son! He was a normal boy until you latched onto him! What, is the money in your pocket burning your thigh? Decided to go live it up? You’ll crawl back to me hungry in three days, scratching at the door like mangy dogs!”
“The keys,” Alisa ignored the insults, addressing only her husband. “Get the apartment keys. Now.”
Dmitry patted his pockets and took out the keyring. Tamara Petrovna, seeing the flash of metal, swooped forward like a hawk.
“Give them here!” she tore the keys from her son’s hands with such force that the keychain painfully whipped his fingers. “They’re mine! Everything here is mine! I don’t want your spirit in this place! May you die under a fence!”
Taking advantage of the moment while her mother-in-law was distracted by seizing the keys, Alisa rammed the front door with her shoulder, throwing it wide open. The cold air of the stairwell burst into the stuffy apartment saturated with hatred.
“Forward,” Alisa pushed Dmitry in the back, shoving him onto the landing. Then she grabbed the suitcase handle and dragged it over the threshold with one jerk. The wheels thudded loudly against the concrete floor.
They were on the landing. The elevator hummed somewhere on the upper floors; waiting for it was pointless. Alisa dragged the suitcase toward the stairs.
“Stop!” Tamara Petrovna’s shriek seemed capable of cutting glass. “Stop, I said!”
Her mother-in-law sprang onto the threshold. In her hand she clutched Dmitry’s heavy winter boot, which he had not managed to put away in the wardrobe. Swinging it back, she hurled it after them. The boot flew a centimeter from Dmitry’s head and struck the stairwell wall with a dull thud, leaving a dirty mark on the whitewash.
“Don’t you ever set foot here again, traitor!” she screamed, leaning over the railing while the young couple hurried down the stairs. “I’ll cut you out of the will! I’ll put a curse on you! You are no longer my son! Do you hear me? You’re not my son, you’re a floor rag!”
Dmitry stumbled and nearly tumbled down the stairs, but Alisa grabbed him firmly by the jacket, keeping him balanced. She did not let him stop, did not let him look back.
“Don’t look back,” she hissed in his ear. “Go. Faster.”
The echo of the scandal rolled after them through the booming stairwells. Neighbors cracked their doors open, curious noses peered out, locks clicked, but no one came out. People preferred to listen to other people’s drama through the peephole.
“Go on, get out!” his mother’s voice came from above, already more muffled, but no less furious. “And take your whore with you! Let her feed you! Let her wipe your snot! Ungrateful creatures!”
They spilled out of the entrance into the dark, damp courtyard. The night wind hit their faces, cooling their burning cheeks. Alisa dragged the suitcase another ten meters, farther from the apartment windows, and only then stopped near a bench under a streetlamp.
Her chest rose and fell violently. The adrenaline that had driven her forward began to retreat, giving way to heavy trembling. Dmitry stood beside her, arms lowered. On one foot he wore a sneaker, its laces dragging along the asphalt; a button was missing from his jacket. He stared at the dark windows of the third floor, where the light still burned and, perhaps, his mother’s shadow was still moving.
“Lis…” his voice was hoarse, as if he had been shouting for a long time. “Did we really leave? Just like that? For good?”
Alisa looked at him. In the dim light of the streetlamp, he looked like a lost child whose favorite toy had been taken away and who had been thrown out into the cold. But she felt no pity. Only disgust at what they had tolerated for so long.
“Yes, Dima. For good,” she answered firmly, taking out her phone to call a taxi. “There is no way back. Your mother just tried to smash your head in with a boot. Do you realize that?”
Dmitry ran a hand over his face, as if wiping away an invisible web.
“I have nowhere to go,” he said quietly. “I don’t even have keys.”
“We have money. We’ll rent a hotel for a couple of days, then find an apartment,” Alisa spoke clearly, businesslike, cutting off any whining. “You work, I work. We won’t starve. But I will not return to that hell. And I won’t let you either.”
She came close to him and took him by the chin, forcing him to look her in the eyes.
“You have to make your final choice now, Dima. Right here, on this asphalt. Either you get into the taxi with me and we build our own life, without underwear inspections and yogurt reports. Or you go back upstairs to Mommy, ask for forgiveness, and hand over your salary to her for the rest of your days. Decide.”
Dmitry looked at the dark entrance they had just escaped from. He remembered his mother’s twisted face, her grasping fingers, the humiliating inspections in the bathroom. Then he looked at his wife — disheveled, angry, but alive and real.
“Call the taxi,” he exhaled, turning away from the building. “I’m not going back there.”
A yellow car pulled up to the entrance. Alisa silently nodded, threw the suitcase into the trunk, and opened the rear door. They sat in the cabin, which smelled of a cheap pine-tree air freshener.
“Where to?” the taxi driver asked indifferently, without turning around.
“Far away from here,” Alisa said, watching the illuminated entrance recede — the place where, perhaps, a woman still stood on the threshold, believing that love meant control and family meant a concentration camp.
The car turned the corner, and the house disappeared from view. Dmitry covered Alisa’s hand with his cold palm. She did not pull away, but she did not squeeze it back either. The scandal was over, but the war for a normal life was only just beginning. And in this war, no prisoners would be taken.
