“Why are there some bundles in the hallway, and why is someone washing in the bathroom?! Did your distant aunts come to ‘visit’ with the whole caravan?! Are you out of your mind?!”
“Tanyusha, let’s just do this without any sudden moves or shouting, all right? The main thing is, don’t make noise. Take off your shoes right here, on the edge, on the mat. My distant aunts have just come off the train. They spent two days shaking around in a stuffy third-class sleeper car, they’re terribly worn out, and right now they need to rest after the trip.”
“Why are there some bundles in the hallway, and why is someone washing in the bathroom?! Did your distant aunts come to ‘visit’ with the whole caravan?! Are you out of your mind?! We have a two-room apartment, not a train station! I am not going to step over mattresses and cook by the bucket for this crowd! Let them go to a hotel!” the wife shouted at her husband.
Mikhail fussily waved his hands, trying to physically push Tatyana back toward the stairwell so her ringing voice, full of open outrage, would not reach the depths of the apartment. He smiled stupidly and guiltily, glancing around like a hunted man, and kept pressing a damp index finger to his lips, urging his wife into obedient silence.
Tatyana stood on the threshold of her own home and physically could not take a single normal step forward. The entire narrow hallway of their standard two-room apartment was completely barricaded with enormous checked shuttle bags. Between those monstrous bags were cardboard boxes wrapped in brown tape, with plastic handles, pieces of polyethylene, and synthetic blankets rolled up inside sticking out of them. On the light-colored, recently washed tile lay a real mountain of dirty shoes in all sizes: worn-out sneakers, huge men’s slippers thickly covered in gray road dust, and shapeless women’s shoes.
A thick, nauseating cocktail of completely foreign smells instantly hit Tatyana’s nose. The apartment, which she had left ventilated and smelling fresh that very morning, now stank of stale sweat, heavy suffocating floral perfume, and the acrid odor of overfried onions with garlic. From the half-open bathroom door, through a dense veil of steam, came the powerful noise of running water, accompanied by loud, guttural male grunting, splashing, and disgusting sounds of someone blowing his nose.
“Tanya, stop it, it’s terribly embarrassing in front of people!” Mikhail hissed, grabbing his wife by the sleeve of her expensive autumn coat. “This is Aunt Zina from Krasnodar, her son Vitalik with his wife, and their youngest daughter. They’re on vacation and decided to see the capital. You know perfectly well how insane housing prices are right now. If they rent a hotel, they’ll blow all their vacation money in three days. They’re relatives, blood ties! Not strangers off the street. They’ll stay with us for a couple of weeks, we’ll make them beds on the living room floor, you won’t even have to strain yourself!”
Tatyana roughly and sharply pulled her sleeve out of her husband’s sweaty fingers. Her face instantly turned to stone, and inside her chest a tight flywheel of cold, calculating rage began spinning faster and faster. She looked at the huge, greasy checked bag blocking her path to the wall coat rack, then shifted her heavy gaze toward the closed kitchen door, from behind which came the clinking of her formal ceramic plates and loud, shameless female laughter.
“A couple of weeks? On the living room floor?” she said through clenched teeth, deliberately not lowering her voice. “Misha, do you even realize what you’re saying right now? You dragged four adults into our home, people who are complete strangers to me, without asking my opinion, without making a single warning call! You turned my clean apartment into a cheap flophouse for your Krasnodar relatives, whom I have seen exactly once in my life, at our wedding ten years ago!”
“For God’s sake, keep your voice down!” Mikhail swallowed nervously, his eyes darting anxiously along the walls. He tried to block the passage into the living room with his body, as if his figure could somehow conceal the scale of the disaster. “I wanted to call you at work, honestly, but I got caught up with reports, and they arrived out of nowhere! They said they wanted to surprise both of us. I couldn’t just leave my own aunt with suitcases on the platform! We’ll squeeze in, nothing deadly. Lenochka, Vitalik’s wife, will cook, they’ll buy their own groceries, and we’ll socialize, strengthen family ties. Be human, Tanya, don’t disgrace me in front of them!”
“A surprise?” Tatyana kicked a dirty, worn-out men’s slipper aside with the toe of her leather boot, knocking it toward the wall in disgust. “I work as a financial director. I come home at eight in the evening, exhausted to the limit. I need a shower, my hot dinner in a normal setting, and my bed. Instead, I’m supposed to stand in a traffic jam of strangers’ dirty underwear in my own hallway and listen to some Vitalik hawking in my bathroom?”
From behind the bathroom door came the deafening sound of a plastic basin falling, followed by a rolling, juicy curse with a strong southern accent. At that same moment, the white interior kitchen door creaked open slightly, and Aunt Zina’s massive face, flushed from the kitchen heat, appeared in the hallway. Tatyana’s favorite linen apron sat tightly across the woman’s enormous chest, already marked by a large fresh dark stain from sunflower oil. The woman was actively chewing a piece of black bread, looking at the apartment’s frozen owner with frank curiosity.
“Oh, Tanyukha’s come home from work!” Aunt Zina loudly announced to the whole apartment, working her jaws and not even thinking of apologizing for her appearance. “We did a bit of housekeeping here; after the road, our stomachs were giving us trouble. There’s practically nothing in your fridge, just yogurts and some foreign grass in plastic. I found a decent piece of pork in the freezer, now we’ll fry up some potatoes in lard and eat like normal people. Mishka, why are you keeping your wife in the doorway like she’s not family? Let her come in and sit at the table. Vitalik will be done soaking in the foam soon, and then we’ll get properly acquainted!”
Tatyana stared without blinking at the insolent face of the uninvited guest, shiny with kitchen grease. She watched Aunt Zina casually wipe her thick, oil-smeared fingers on the snow-white fabric of her expensive Italian apron. Inside Tatyana, not a single drop of doubt remained, nor the slightest desire to be a polite, hospitable hostess. All the urban refinement she usually displayed in society evaporated without a trace, burned away by the concentrated insolence of these people.
“Misha,” Tatyana said in an absolutely calm, even voice, looking straight into her husband’s darting eyes, full of animal fear. “I will not take off my shoes here. I will not step over this road trash. And I most certainly am not going to sit at the table with these people.”
“Tanya, don’t wind yourself up,” Mikhail whined, making a pitiful attempt to take her hand. “It’s awkward, they can all hear everything. Let’s talk privately later, okay? Let’s at least have dinner together, and tomorrow morning I’ll discuss everything with them. We’ll definitely think of something.”
“There’s nothing to think up,” Tatyana cut him off harshly, pulling her hand away in disgust. “I am now going to walk into the kitchen in my outdoor boots. And if this village circus does not pack up within one minute, I will start acting in a way that will make all of you very uncomfortable.”
She stepped forward decisively, deliberately planting the sharp heel of her boot right onto someone’s dirty sneaker, mercilessly crushing it down to the parquet. Mikhail jerked after her as if to stop her, but Tatyana shoved him aside with her shoulder so sharply and forcefully that he flew into the wall and painfully hit his elbow on the hooks of the coat rack. Ignoring her husband’s indignant huffing behind her and Aunt Zina’s eyes widening in surprise in the doorway, Tatyana walked with a confident, heavy stride straight into the occupied kitchen.
“Look at this, Lenka, their burners are like toys, they don’t heat worth a damn. I’ve been messing with these potatoes for half an hour, and they’re still raw inside!” Aunt Zina grumbled, furiously scraping an ordinary table fork along the bottom of an expensive French nonstick frying pan. “And the extractor hood screams like a wounded animal, but does nothing. All the smoke goes into the apartment. Back in our village, even the stoves draw better.”
Tatyana silently crossed the kitchen threshold without taking off her outdoor boots. The soles left clear dirty prints on the light porcelain stoneware. Before her eyes appeared a picture of absolute, total devastation, which these people had managed to create in no more than an hour. The perfectly clean artificial-stone countertop was covered with potato peels, onion skins, and wet plastic bags of some kind. The door of the built-in refrigerator stood wide open, giving off an unpleasant warning beep that no one paid the slightest attention to.
At the dining table, sprawled carelessly on a velvet-upholstered chair with her bare feet tucked under her, sat a young, plump woman in stretched-out leopard leggings. This was that same Lenochka. She was methodically, piece by piece, destroying the farm goat cheese that Tatyana bought exclusively for herself at a specialty shop for an outrageous price. The woman washed the delicacy down with peach juice straight from the carton, leaving greasy lip marks on the spout.
“Oh, hello. Why are you barging in with your shoes on?” Lenochka stopped chewing and stared at Tatyana with open contempt. “Where we’re from in the south, people don’t enter a house like that, spreading dirt everywhere. You’re supposed to take your shoes off in the hallway. And your kitchen faucet is stiff somehow. While we figured out how to turn the water on, we splashed everything around.”
Tatyana did not even honor the woman with a glance. She looked straight at Aunt Zina’s huge, sweaty back as the woman continued butchering potatoes at the stove, mercilessly ruining the expensive cookware. The kitchen air was thick and bluish from the smoke of burning cheap lard, which the guests had apparently brought with them and were now rendering in abundance.
“Turn off the stove. And put down the fork,” Tatyana said in an even, steel-like tone. There was not a drop of hysteria in it, but it would have sent an icy chill down the spine of any normal person.
Aunt Zina slowly turned around. Her red, steamed face expressed an extreme degree of sincere incomprehension. She wiped her sweaty forehead with the back of her hand, smearing a greasy stain across her skin.
“Tanyukh, why are you so jumpy after work?” Zina laughed in a deep voice, shamelessly looking the apartment owner up and down. “Relax, we’re your own people! We decided to feed you and Mishka some normal food. I looked in the freezer and saw a piece of meat, some marbled thing with streaks in it. So I used it for frying. Why should it just lie there drying out? The potatoes will be ready soon, we’ll sit down, have a hundred grams after the road, and get acquainted.”
“You used my ribeye steak, which costs three thousand rubles per piece, for frying, and right now you are destroying a fifteen-thousand-ruble frying pan by scraping it with a metal fork,” Tatyana took a step forward, her voice sounding like a working mechanism methodically grinding stones. “You put on my apron. Your daughter-in-law is devouring my cheese and wiping her greasy feet on my chair.”
“Tanya, stop it right now!” pale, sweaty Mikhail squeezed into the kitchen. He fussily waved his hands, trying to stand between his wife and his aunt. “It’s just meat! We’ll buy new meat tomorrow! Zin, don’t pay attention, she’s just hungry and tired. Tanyusha, go into the room, change your clothes, I’ll clean everything up myself. You can’t fight with guests over a piece of metal and some food!”
“Shut your mouth, Mikhail, and step aside,” Tatyana did not raise her voice, but her gaze made her husband fall silent and draw his head into his shoulders. She shifted her eyes to Aunt Zina, who began slowly turning crimson, realizing she was being scolded like a misbehaving servant.
“Well, would you look at that!” Zina slammed the fork onto the stove with a crash, and splashes of hot fat flew onto the glass surface. “We came to them with all our hearts, dragged ourselves halfway across the country, and she’s throwing a piece of meat in our faces! Take off your crown, dear! We are your husband’s relatives! We came to his home! We have every right to be here and eat what’s in the fridge. You won’t go broke!”
“You came to my apartment,” every word Tatyana spoke fell into the smoky kitchen air like a heavy lead weight. “You did not go to a hotel because you are ordinary freeloaders who decided to save money at someone else’s expense. You barged in here without warning, filled the hallway with your filthy bags, ruined my things, and destroyed my groceries. In my home, you have no rights. You are nobody here.”
“How dare you speak to your elders like that, you rude woman?!” Lenochka shrieked from her seat, dropping the juice carton onto the table. An orange sticky puddle slowly began crawling toward the edge of the tabletop. “Misha, are you even a man or what?! Why is your woman opening her mouth at your relatives like that?! We brought you homemade treats, and she’s reproaching us over a piece of cheese!”
“I don’t need your treats even for free,” Tatyana took another step, coming right up to the table. She sharply swept the juice carton into the trash can, ignoring the girl’s indignant huffing. “I do not intend to tolerate rudeness, filth, and insolence in my home. Your cheap performance about poor relatives is over. From this moment on, I set the rules here.”
Mikhail clutched his head in panic. He understood that the situation had completely spun out of control, and his plan to quietly sit out the conflict had collapsed. He tried to grab Tatyana by the shoulders to forcibly turn her around and push her out of the kitchen, but she instantly caught his wrist and threw his hand away with such fury that Mikhail lost his balance and heavily leaned back against the refrigerator. At that moment, loud, slapping footsteps of bare feet came from the hallway. Someone huge and heavy was moving toward the kitchen, leaving wet footprints behind him.
“Pah, what kind of water pressure do you have in that shower? Nothing but the name,” a thick, booming bass voice rumbled from the hallway. Through the noise of the working extractor hood came the heavy, slapping steps of wet bare feet on the laminate.
A monumental figure appeared in the kitchen doorway. It was Vitalik — a heavy, flabby man of about thirty-five with a red face steamed from hot water. On his enormous body, thickly covered with black hair, a natural silk robe of pearl color barely met at the front. It was Tatyana’s favorite, incredibly expensive robe, brought back from a business trip to Milan. The thinnest delicate fabric strained threateningly across the uninvited guest’s broad shoulders, and the short hem barely covered his massive pale thighs. Large drops of water ran from Vitalik’s wet, uncombed hair straight onto the floor, forming a cloudy, dirty puddle around his flattened feet. He reeked of a nuclear mixture of cheap pine soap and stale sweat that even hot water had failed to wash away.
Tatyana felt a dense lump of unbearable physical nausea rise in her throat. She watched Vitalik’s coarse, sausage-like fingers casually fiddle with the silk belt, leaving damp, dark creases on the delicate fabric. This insolent, self-assured primate had not merely invaded her home with his bags; he had climbed into her personal bathroom, used her towels, and pulled her most intimate item onto his enormous body.
“So why aren’t we eating? Mom, you were frying meat, it smells through the whole building, I’m drooling already,” Vitalik sniffed noisily, completely ignoring the tense atmosphere frozen in the air. He shamelessly scratched his hairy chest right through the thin silk robe and stared at Tatyana, who stood frozen in her boots. “Oh, the hostess has appeared. We decided to visit you, make a surprise. Only your bathroom faucet is kind of complicated. While I was turning all those fancy levers, I think I poured quite a bit onto the floor. Wipe it up with a mop later, it’s slippery.”
Tatyana slowly shifted her gaze from the dirty puddle on the floor to her husband’s face. Mikhail stood pressed with his shoulder blades against the refrigerator door, his face the color of old, dried plaster. He bit his lips and darted his eyes between his brother and his wife like a trapped animal, realizing that a biblical-scale catastrophe was unfolding right before his eyes.
“Take. It. Off. Immediately,” Tatyana said, hammering out every syllable. Her voice had no hysterical notes whatsoever. It sounded dull, monotonous, and terrifying, like nails being driven into a coffin lid. “Take off my robe and throw it into the trash can with the potato peels. Right now.”
Vitalik raised his thick eyebrows in surprise, his mouth falling open to reveal yellowish teeth. He shifted his uncomprehending gaze to his mother, then to his wife, as though trying to understand what language had just been spoken to him.
“Hey, why are you being so rude out of nowhere?!” Aunt Zina instantly exploded, aggressively planting her plump hands on her enormous hips. All her sticky, affected goodwill vanished in an instant, revealing her true scandalous nature. “So he put on some rag, big deal! Was he supposed to flash himself naked in someone else’s apartment in front of you? In our village, people run out of the bathhouse into the yard in nothing but their underwear, and nobody has died from it yet! A man washed up after a long road, and you’re starting a market scandal over some piece of Chinese silk! You stingy city woman, you wouldn’t give snow in winter!”
“The Orion Hotel is in the next block, exactly five hundred meters from this entrance, right around the corner,” Tatyana ignored the screams of the red-faced aunt, addressing everyone present at once. She stood in the middle of the smoky kitchen with a perfectly straight back. “I am giving you exactly sixty minutes. In that time, you will gather your stinking checked bags, wipe up the puddles in my bathroom, get dressed, and leave my apartment forever. If in one hour even one of your boxes or dirty sneakers remains in my hallway, I will throw it out the window. Time starts now.”
Absolute, uncontrollable chaos broke out in the kitchen. Lenochka jumped up from her seat so sharply that she knocked the heavy chair onto the porcelain stoneware with a crash and began screeching, spraying saliva in every direction.
“Who do you think you are, you crazy hag?! We came to visit our brother! We spent thirty thousand on tickets just to huddle on the floor in this cramped kennel, and you’re throwing us out into the street?! Misha, are you really going to stand there silently watching while this bitch humiliates your own blood?!”
Vitalik stepped forward threateningly, clenching his huge fists. The expensive silk robe on his broad back split loudly and treacherously along the seam, tearing open from his shoulder blades to his waist.
“Listen here, you fancy little sausage,” he growled, looming over Tatyana with all his mass. “Don’t set your rules here. We came to Mishan, not to you. He’s the man here, he invited us. And you shut your mouth and go finish frying the lard while I’m still being nice and haven’t gotten truly angry.”
Mikhail, as if awakening from paralyzing fear, abruptly pushed himself away from the refrigerator. Apparently, the physical presence of his big aggressive brother and the loud screams of his enraged female relatives gave him false, animal courage. Crimson patches spread across his face, and a thin vein on his neck bulged threateningly. He decided that right now, in this very second, he had to demonstrate his boundless male authority and firmly put his presumptuous wife in her place in front of his relatives.
“All right, Tatyana!” Mikhail roared hysterically, slamming his fist onto the countertop with all his strength so that the ceramic plates jumped and rang pitifully. “My relatives are not going anywhere! They will live in this apartment as long as they need for a proper vacation! This is my home too, and I have every right to invite whoever I want here! And if you don’t like my family, if you’re so squeamish and important, then pack your own rags and go to a hotel yourself!”
Aunt Zina smiled victoriously and predaciously, revealing a gold crown, and crossed her massive arms over her chest, demonstrating her superiority with her whole appearance. Lenochka snorted loudly and maliciously, slowly lifting the fallen chair. Vitalik squared his shoulders, proudly displaying the torn robe and his own importance. They had won. The man had spoken his weighty word and put the woman in her place
.
Tatyana looked at her husband without blinking. There was absolutely nothing in her cold gaze: no hurt, no pain, no disappointment. Only crystal-clear, absolute emptiness and endless disgust toward the pathetic, cowardly creature she had mistakenly called her man that very morning. She slowly shifted her gaze to the round wall clock above the kitchen hood. The second hand was inexorably counting down time.
“All right,” Tatyana said incredibly quietly, but with piercing clarity, and the smile on Aunt Zina’s face began to slowly wither from that icy tone. “I am not going to wait a whole hour. You are getting out of here right now.”
Tatyana sharply turned on her heels. She did not spend a single second on empty arguing with the crowd of occupiers. With a quick, springy stride, she left the smoky kitchen, crossed the short hall, and approached the metal front door. Two quick turns of the lock, one press of the handle — and the heavy door swung wide open, letting the cool draft of the stairwell into the stuffy apartment.
Immediately after that, she stepped toward the nearest obstacle. It was that same giant, shapeless checked bag made of cheap plastic, packed to the top with heavy things. Tatyana grabbed its stiff handles, which cut into the skin, with a dead grip. The bag turned out to be incredibly heavy, but adrenaline and pure, concentrated rage gave her strength. With a low, savage growl, she dragged the mass across the threshold. The bag scraped hideously over the light hallway tile and collapsed onto the concrete landing with a powerful thud, tipping onto its side. After it, a cardboard box tied with string flew through the doorway. It flipped in the air, hit the concrete steps, and faded terry towels, a stack of wool socks, and old plastic containers spilled out onto the dirty floor.
“What are you doing, you lunatic?! My property! The cans of stew will get dented!” Aunt Zina screamed wildly, flying out of the kitchen with a speed completely unnatural for her impressive size.
Behind her, loudly stomping with wide feet and cursing filthily, rushed Vitalik, red as a boiled lobster and holding the silk robe together on his back as it fell apart. Tatyana did not stop for even a fraction of a second. She kicked the mountain of worn-out strangers’ shoes over the threshold, ruthlessly working the toes of her hard outdoor boots. Dirty sneakers, huge rubber slippers, and shapeless shoes flew across the stairwell in a fan, striking the metal railings and painted walls with a crash. Lenochka shrieked piercingly and rushed to save her little leopard-print wheeled suitcase, but Tatyana was faster. She grabbed the bag by its telescoping metal handle and flung it down the stairs with all her strength. The suitcase bounced down the steps with a horrible crash, collecting years of stairwell dust.
“Hey, stop, I said!” Vitalik tried to block Tatyana’s path, thrusting out his massive, hairy arm and looming over her threateningly with his whole sweaty, heated body.
Tatyana did not even slow down. With furious force, she brought her hard heel down directly onto Vitalik’s bare, wet foot. He howled in a stupid voice, instinctively yanked his leg back, and recoiled, losing his balance. Tatyana immediately planted both hands against his broad chest and shoved the hundred-kilogram man out the open door with force. Vitalik clumsily waved his arms, tripped over the abandoned checked bag, and fell backward right onto the pile of his own junk.
At that very moment, Mikhail, finally realizing the scale of the disaster unfolding, rushed toward his wife. His face twisted into an ugly grimace of genuine rage. He roughly grabbed Tatyana by the forearm, trying to physically drag her away from the doorway.
“Have you completely lost your mind?! What are you doing to my relatives?! Stop right now, you psycho!” he yelled, spraying saliva straight into her face.
Tatyana sharply leaned forward, using his own momentum, and twisted her arm away with such force that Mikhail gasped from the sudden sharp pain and released his fingers. She did not step back. Moving right up to her husband, she fixed him with a heavy, unblinking stare that would have frozen the blood of any normal person.
“You dragged filth into this home and allowed these people to wipe their feet on me,” Tatyana said in an absolutely even, icy tone, easily cutting through the screams of the relatives scrambling on the stairs. “You betrayed me for a pack of insolent parasites so you could look like a good man in their eyes. You are a pathetic, worthless coward, Misha. You are not a man. And right now, you are going out into the street after your beloved caravan.”
Mikhail opened his mouth to shout another round of insults, but Tatyana did not give him a single chance. She lightning-fast grabbed his car keys and light autumn jacket from the hallway cabinet and roughly threw them straight into his chest. The key ring struck Mikhail painfully and fell onto the tile with a jingle. While he instinctively tried to catch the thrown jacket, Tatyana planted her palms against his shoulders and, with a powerful, precise shove, sent him over the threshold. Mikhail flew out onto the landing, nearly knocking down Aunt Zinaida, who was trying to stuff the fallen things back into the torn cardboard box.
“Hey! You have no right! This is my home too! I’m not going anywhere!” Mikhail screamed hysterically, floundering among the scattered bags and trying to get to his feet.
“You can pick up your things tomorrow. If you try to force your way in, I’ll break your fingers,” Tatyana answered coldly, hammering out the words as she looked at the crowd squirming in the stairwell dust.
Aunt Zina showered her with choice curses, generously seasoning them with obscene language. Lenochka cursed loudly and shrilly, trying to wipe dirty stains off her leopard suitcase. Vitalik sat on the cold steps, rubbing his bruised foot and baring his yellow teeth in anger. Mikhail stood there red and disheveled, his face distorted with ferocious rage and unbearable humiliation, realizing that his familiar, comfortable life had just shattered to pieces right before the eyes of his own family. None of them intended to apologize or look for a compromise. Between them, a deaf, impenetrable wall of absolute, pure hatred instantly rose.
Tatyana did not listen to their screams. She took a calm step back into her cleansed apartment. No unnecessary gestures. No theatrical effects. She smoothly, unhurriedly pulled the heavy metal door toward herself. A real hurricane of curses continued raging in the stairwell, but Tatyana merely turned the handle with confidence. The door closed with a soft, barely audible click, cutting her off from those people forever…
