“Natah, you can’t just throw him out onto the street,” Galina Vasilyevna said over the phone in that broken, strained voice of hers, the one she used to squeeze guilt out of a person even for the weather. “You’re not strangers. Just a month. Two at most. Until he comes to his senses, until he sorts out his money.”
Natalya stood by the window with the phone, looking down into the courtyard, where some boy was kicking a ball between the cars. In the kitchen, tea was growing cold. Behind the wall, in the bedroom, Igor was closing the dresser drawers, rattling hangers, folding T-shirts with the air of a man whose life had just collapsed — as if it was his life that had fallen apart, not their marriage because of him.
“Galina Vasilyevna, we’re divorced,” Natalya said tiredly. “What do you mean, ‘not strangers’?”
“Well, all the more reason to part like decent people.”
“Parting like decent people is when a man finds somewhere to go in advance.”
“He’s having a hard time right now.”
A hard time.
As if it had been easy for her to live with him these past months, when conversations no longer worked, dinners passed in silence, and he kept staying out God knew where, coming home irritated and answering through clenched teeth over every little thing. As if she had not sat afterward with trembling hands, signing the divorce papers as though she were cutting off a piece of her own life. But Galina Vasilyevna only spoke about her son. For her, there had always only been her son.
“Natashechka,” her former mother-in-law softened her voice, “where is he supposed to go now? He has no money for rent, he needs a deposit, everything has come crashing down at once. Let him live there quietly. Don’t torment each other. You were planning to go to your mother’s for vacation anyway, so that’s good. You’ll come back, and maybe by then he’ll have sorted something out.”
Back then, Natasha sat down on a stool and squeezed her eyes shut. Pretending not to hear was easier than going through all those explanations again. She had already discussed it with Igor, with his mother, and with herself. And every time it came down to the same thing: yes, of course, he was guilty, but they weren’t monsters, were they, to throw a person out immediately…
That was how that month began. First it was until the May holidays, then until June. Igor was always almost there. Almost found something. Almost moved out. Almost made an arrangement with a friend, almost saved enough money. Almost left.
After the divorce, Natalya could not live under the same roof with him. It was too strange in the morning to go into the kitchen and see her ex-husband in his underwear by the coffee machine, as if nothing had happened.
She packed a bag and went to her mother’s in Yaroslavl for two weeks. Then she stayed a few more days because she herself did not want to return to that sticky, humiliating situation where her ex-husband was still hanging around in her apartment like a dismantled wardrobe.
Igor wrote in exactly the manner that had confused her for years.
“Everything’s fine. Don’t worry.”
“I’m looking for an option.”
“Thanks for being understanding for now.”
Natalya did not reply to the last message. Even then, she was beginning to get angry at that “being understanding.” As if he were not living in someone else’s apartment after the divorce, and as if she were still obligated to feel like a decent woman.
On the train back, she looked out the window for a long time at the gray fields, the dachas, the rare stations. The last message from Igor, sent during the night, hung on her phone:
“Tomorrow, in case anything happens, I’ll be home.”
In case anything happens. As if she were not returning to her own apartment, but warning him about a visit.
The entrance smelled of wet leaves and dampness. Natalya climbed to the fourth floor without an elevator, dragging her suitcase, feeling only exhaustion. From the road, from conversations with her mother about how “maybe the two of you will still come to your senses,” from this apartment, which she was no longer approaching as home, but as a dismantling site.
She opened the door with her own key, but for some reason it felt as though someone was holding the door from inside. She had to push harder. And then a woman appeared in front of her. A stranger. A little over thirty, in home shorts and a long T-shirt, barefoot, with a wet dish sponge in her hand. Fresh pink polish on her nails, slight irritation on her face, like someone who had been interrupted at the wrong moment.
“Come in,” she said, stepping half a pace back. “Just take your shoes off there. We’re going to live here now.”
Natalya remained standing on the threshold with her suitcase.
For a second, her face was simply empty. No anger, no words, nothing. Only emptiness and a ringing in her ears.
Then her eyes moved through the hallway on their own. Someone else’s women’s slippers. A red jacket on the hook where her raincoat had always hung. A makeup bag on the shelf by the mirror. Another cup on the key cabinet. A box with women’s boots stood on the floor. By the mat were two pairs of sneakers — one men’s, one small, white, with a gold stripe. The air smelled of her laundry detergent and someone else’s sweet perfume.
Someone had already touched everything here with their hands, placed things around, and arranged their belongings…
“Excuse me?” Natalya said, and her own voice sounded unfamiliar to her.
The woman shrugged.
“Igor said you were coming today. We still haven’t finished unpacking, of course. It’s a bit tight in the corridor, but I think if we clear your boxes off the mezzanine, there’ll be space…”
Igor came out of the room.
He was wearing a home undershirt, sweatpants, and was barefoot. And in the first second, there was no guilt on his face. There was that stupid expression people have when they had counted on getting away with something, and suddenly they did not. Only afterward did it begin sliding into something guilty, nervous, sticky.
“Natash…”
“Did you tell her whose apartment this is?” she asked immediately.
The woman beside them fell silent. Igor looked away, then looked back at Natalya.
“Let’s not make a scene.”
“Did you tell her whose apartment this is?” she repeated.
“I wanted to explain everything later.”
That “let’s not make a scene” and “I’ll explain later” became the match.
Natalya was not trembling at first. On the contrary, everything inside her gathered into one hot point somewhere under her ribs. She slowly placed the suitcase against the wall and straightened up.
“So you sat here on my pity for more than a month,” she said quietly, “and brought a woman here?”
“Natash, don’t start.”
“Don’t start?” she repeated, louder now. “Don’t start?”
The woman looked from one to the other in confusion.
“Igor, what is this…”
Natalya turned to her.
“And you keep quiet for a second. I’m even curious what fairy tale he told you.”
“Don’t talk to her like that,” Igor said, taking a step closer.
“How should I talk to her? Should I pour her tea too? She tells me on my own doorstep, ‘We’re going to live here now.’”
The woman turned pale.
“Wait. This is your apartment?”
“Yes, mine. Bought before the marriage. This man was supposed to stay here for a month after the divorce. One month, do you understand?”
“Natalya…”
“Shut up!”
She was already shouting so loudly that it frightened her to hear her own voice.
“I let you stay like a human being! You sat here on pity! Your mother cried to me over the phone that I couldn’t just throw you out onto the street! And what did you do? You turned my apartment into proof that you’re a man with a place to live?”
“Calm down.”
“Take your hands off me!” she barked when he tried to grab her by the elbow.
He pulled his hand back. Vika — now Natalya remembered the name from fragments of the past, when he had once said on the phone, “Vik, I’ll call you back later,” and stepped out onto the balcony — stood there like a person who had suddenly been placed in the middle of a fight without being warned.
“Igor, you said the apartment was yours,” she breathed.
“I didn’t say it like that…”
“How, then?” Natalya spread her arms. “That you’re living here on sufferance in your ex-wife’s apartment? That your mother ran around to everyone she knew so they would pity you? Like that?”
Igor grimaced.
“You’re deliberately humiliating me now. Don’t disgrace yourself!”
“I’m not the disgrace here! The disgrace is a man who lives in his ex-wife’s apartment and pretends to be the owner in front of his new woman! How low, Igor!”
Vika stepped back toward the wall and quickly, as if in a bad dream, looked around the hallway, as though seeing all those hooks, someone else’s boxes, Natalya’s umbrella, her key holder, the framed photo of the sea that Igor had never removed from the cabinet, for the first time.
“I didn’t know,” she said quietly.
“Well, congratulations,” Natalya snapped. “You’ve been beautifully moved into someone else’s life.”
Suddenly Igor roared:
“Enough! Why are you throwing a tantrum for the whole building to hear?”
“You brought another woman into my apartment and you’re talking to me about a tantrum?”
Natalya stepped into the room and saw even more. A woman’s cardigan lay on the sofa. A jar of cream stood on the windowsill. On the kitchen table were two mugs, one with a mark of pink lipstick. On a chair was a shopping bag with women’s shampoo. Someone had already tried her home on for size — not as a guest, but almost as the mistress of the house.
And then she truly snapped.
She grabbed the first bag she saw — Vika’s, soft and beige — and threw it into the corridor.
“Get out of here!”
“Natalya, stop it!” Igor shouted.
“Both of you, out!”
Vika rushed after the bag.
“I’ll leave now…”
“Now?” Natalya was already dragging a second bag out of the room, a sports bag stuffed with things. “You’re already living here, I see. Slippers, creams, planning to clear shelves?”
She yanked a bag of women’s bottles from the bathroom and threw it toward the door too. She did not break anything of her own. But their things flew into the corridor so fast that both of them only had time to flinch.
“Have you lost your mind?” Igor shouted.
“No. I was normal for too long.”
He stepped toward her again, now angrily, like a man, towering over her.
“Natalya, calm down right now.”
“Who are you here to give me orders?” she shouted in his face. “A temporary tenant I foolishly pitied!”
The word tenant seemed to hit him harder than a slap. He flinched, as though he wanted to say something harsh, but could not find the words.
Vika was already standing by the door, gathering her slippers and bag, looking at Igor with a face that said he had turned into a little boy before her eyes. Not only had he lied — he had gone limp and deflated.
“Is it true? Tell me honestly,” she asked him. “You were living with your ex-wife all this time, and you brought me here too?”
“Vika, I’ll explain everything now.”
“You’ve already explained it,” Natalya cut in. “Very clearly.”
She rushed into the kitchen because there was not enough air. Her hands were shaking so badly she could barely hit the screen. She called Larisa, the friend who had been the only one more than a month ago to say: don’t let him stay. Later you’ll give up, and he’ll put down roots there.
“Hello?” Larisa answered.
“Lara, he…” Natalya could not even start coherently. “He brought a woman here. Into my apartment. She opened the door to me and said they were going to live here now.”
Larisa was silent for exactly one second.
“Why are you still listening to them?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean exactly that. Call the police and let them clear out. Immediately.”
“I…”
“Natalya, wake up. This is your apartment. They’ve basically seized it. If you spend one more minute talking, they’ll start telling you you’re hysterical.”
And after that phrase, it was as if Natalya’s back straightened because someone, for the first time, did not suggest that she calm down, be above it, not stoop to their level, think about other people. Her friend simply called it what it was.
Natalya returned to the corridor almost without shouting. And that made it more frightening.
“You have five minutes,” she told Igor. “Take what you need most and get out. I’ll put everything else on the landing.”
“You have no right.”
“Want to check?” She was already taking out her phone. “I’ll call the police now and very calmly remind them who owns this apartment. And at the same time I’ll tell them that you were living here after the divorce without a lease and decided to move your new woman in.”
“Don’t disgrace me,” he hissed.
“You’ve already disgraced yourself. In front of me, in front of her, and in front of your mother, to whom you’ll explain all this yourself.”
At the word mother, strangely enough, he deflated completely. Apparently, he imagined that conversation.
“Natash, where am I supposed to go right now?”
“Wherever you were going with her.”
“Give me until evening at least.”
“No.”
“I have things…”
“Five minutes. Then I start carrying them out into the stairwell and call the district officer.”
Vika had already zipped up her jacket and was holding her bags. She no longer looked at Natalya defiantly. Only once did she raise her eyes and say:
“I really didn’t know.”
“I don’t care,” Natalya replied. And it was true. She was no longer interested in Vika’s excuses or her hurt feelings. Only the exit mattered.
Igor rushed around the apartment, grabbing a backpack, a charger, some T-shirts from the drying rack. All his movements had become jerky, useless. No longer the owner. No longer the man who had everything under control. Just an adult with bags, being thrown out of someone else’s home.
“Take this,” Natalya snapped, shoving his own razor at him.
“Don’t touch my things.”
“Your things?” She even laughed. “Are you really going to talk to me about things in my apartment?”
From the bathroom, she brought out his shower gel; from the table, a laptop charger; from the hallway, a winter hat he for some reason still had not taken. All of it flew into his bags without ceremony.
Vika was the first to open the door.
“Igor, I’ll wait downstairs,” she said dryly.
He jerked toward her.
“Vika, wait.”
“I’ve had enough.”
And she left without even slamming the door. That, perhaps, was the most humiliating thing for Igor: the woman in front of whom he had spent so long playing the man with an apartment now looked at him like a vile deceiver.
He remained standing in the middle of the hallway with two bags and a backpack.
“Natash…”
“That’s it.”
“Can I come later for the rest?”
“By message, when I’m not home. And at the door — not by living here further.”
“You’ve become completely savage.”
“Leave.”
He stood there a little longer, as if waiting for her to change her mind.
“Out.”
Igor left.
She slammed the door and immediately turned the key. Then the second lock. From the other side, she still heard something like, “Natalya, let’s do this normally,” but she did not answer.
The apartment became quiet. Very quiet. In the hallway, someone’s forgotten hair clip lay on the floor. In the kitchen sink was the sponge Vika had apparently used to wash her dishes. A stranger’s scarf still hung on the hook. Natalya slowly removed it with two fingers and threw it onto the floor by the door.
Then she sat right down on the entry mat beside the suitcase she had never moved away from the threshold, and sobbed. With that ragged breathing that makes your chest hurt, because only now did everything hit her at once. Not the new woman, not only his lie itself. But all that time of “Natash, just a little longer.” Those “Mom is asking.” Her concessions, delays, swallowed anger, trips to her mother’s just to avoid running into him, the messages saying “I’m looking for an option.” They had not been asking her to be humane. They had simply been eating her away piece by piece.
About twenty minutes later, she got up, wiped her face with a kitchen towel, and walked through the apartment. She opened the windows and collected the stranger’s little things into one bag: the hair clip, cream, two hair ties, a sock, lipstick, a toothbrush from the cup. From the refrigerator, she pulled out a container with some salad she had not made. She threw it away. On the bathroom shelf, she saw a second towel — new, bright green. She tore it down too and hurled it into the bag by the door.
The phone vibrated. Of course, Galina Vasilyevna.
Natalya looked at the screen and at first did not want to answer. Then she did.
“What have you done?!” her former mother-in-law immediately screamed. “Igor is standing outside like a homeless man with bags!”
“Let him get used to it.”
“Natalya, aren’t you ashamed?”
“Me?” She even sat down on the edge of a stool from the sheer audacity. “I’m supposed to be ashamed?”
“Well, he brought a woman over. You could have handled it like a decent person…”
“Decency ended the moment your son decided to settle her in my apartment.”
“He wanted what was best.”
“For whom?”
“You’ve become bitter.”
“Everything has a limit…”
Silence hung on the other end. Then Galina Vasilyevna said in a different, dry voice:
“So that’s how it is.”
“Yes. That’s how it is.”
“Well then, live alone.”
“It’s my apartment. At least that much will work out.”
Natalya ended the call and turned the sound off completely.
That evening, Larisa arrived without warning with a bag of food and a bottle of mineral water. She came in, looked around the hallway, where the stranger’s little things were still packed in a garbage bag by the door, and only gave a low whistle.
“You should have done this long ago.”
“Don’t say it.”
“I’m not saying it. I told you that long ago.”
Natalya was sitting in the kitchen in an old T-shirt, with swollen eyes and wet hair after a shower. Her cup stood on the table — the one Vika had probably also held earlier that day, and that still made her shudder.
“Did he really lie to her that the apartment was his?” Larisa asked.
“How else could she have opened the door to me and said, ‘We’re going to live here now’?”
“My God.”
“Yes.”
Larisa placed a container of cutlets in front of her.
“Eat.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Eat anyway.”
Natalya broke off a piece of bread and suddenly said almost calmly:
“I kept thinking it couldn’t get worse after the divorce.”
“It happens.”
“It’s not even about her.”
“Then what is it about?”
“The fact that I persuaded myself. That I had to be decent, that I couldn’t throw him out onto the street. That I wasn’t that kind of person. And meanwhile, he was simply living however suited him and whispering lies into that woman’s ears.”
Larisa nodded.
“Now you’ll live however suits you too.”
“We’ll see.”
Natalya did not sleep that night. She walked barefoot through the apartment, opened closets, put her things back in place. She reclaimed the little details. She put her raincoat back where it belonged, removed the stranger’s cup from the cabinet, moved the boxes back in the storage room, threw the second toothbrush cup out of the bathroom. As if the home had to be assembled anew from her own traces.
In the morning, there were eight missed calls from Igor on her phone and two messages.
“I need to pick up the rest.”
“Let’s not turn this into a circus.”
Natalya looked at them and answered for the first time briefly, without explanations:
“You’ll pick it up when I decide. Alone, without your mother and without women.”
Then she took the folder with the apartment documents out of the desk drawer, placed it on the top shelf of the hallway closet, and called a locksmith to change the lock just in case.
Because from that day on, there had to be one simple rule in the house: pity no longer opens the door.
