“Clear the veranda! We’ll be there in twenty minutes! Ella wants the hammock in the shade, the grill lit, and the sauna heated up!” the voice of my husband’s older brother, Vladislav, boomed cheerfully from the phone speaker, like a general taking a city without a fight.
He spoke with such confidence, as though our country house had long since been officially registered as a branch of his private countryside club.
I froze.
The call was on speakerphone, and every word echoed loudly against the log walls of our summer kitchen.
Just an hour before that call, Vlad had sent Roma a list of demands that looked like the rider of a visiting celebrity:
“Heat the sauna, buy charcoal, don’t occupy the hammock, Ella doesn’t eat fatty meat, but there should still be shashlik. Karina needs high-speed internet because she’s going to livestream.”
I had read the message over my husband’s shoulder and immediately understood: these people weren’t coming as guests.
A mobile inspection team for free vacations was on its way.
I don’t like hysterics. My main weapons are cold logic and a complete absence of guilt whenever someone tries to take advantage of me.
On the stove, in a heavy cast-iron pot, a hearty meat solyanka was slowly simmering.
Thick, rich, glistening with amber droplets of fat. Four kinds of smoked meat floated happily in the broth, infusing it with a deep oak-and-smoke aroma.
Crunchy barrel pickles nestled inside, lemon slices released their golden juice, and black olives gleamed like the eyes of a cunning Eastern merchant.
The smell hanging over our property was so intoxicatingly delicious that the neighbors’ cats by the fence looked ready to cross themselves and beg for seconds.
I had made this masterpiece for my husband and me to celebrate finishing the renovation of our veranda.
But my husband’s relatives, equipped with some mystical radar for other people’s comfort, had decided otherwise.
Their visits always resembled a plague of locusts dressed in the most expensive clothes.
They belonged to that special category of relatives who fly to foreign resorts three times a year but make it a point of principle to arrive at other people’s homes empty-handed.
Watching them unload from the car always looked like a minor disaster.
The last time, they brought nothing but their ambitions and a single half-dead avocado, which Eleonora ceremoniously handed to me with the words:
“This is for the salad. We’re on a trendy diet.”
Then that same “diet” demolished two kilograms of farm-raised pork.
All while commenting that I had overcooked the meat and that the decor of our country house was “cute, but far too proletarian.”
Vladislav had lounged lazily in the hammock that Roma had woven with his own hands and condescendingly declared that we lived “like commoners in the nineteenth century” because we grew our own herbs.
And after their previous visit, two brand-new bath towels mysteriously disappeared. Roma’s favorite garden mug got cracked.
And for three days afterward, Eleonora kept sending me links to “proper throws for a country house,” as though our property desperately required her designer absolution.
You know, some people are so rich they can’t afford to buy even a bread ring for the table. They prefer to invest their refined appetites exclusively in other people’s refrigerators.
Exactly twenty minutes later, tires crunched over the gravel.
A huge black SUV belonging to Vlad rolled majestically up to our gate, raising clouds of country dust like an armored railway carriage.
I put down the wooden spoon I had been using to stir the solyanka, wiped my hands on a towel, and leisurely walked toward the gate.
Roma followed me with a frown.
Car doors slammed.
Twenty-year-old Karina, Vlad and Ella’s daughter, fluttered out of the vehicle. She didn’t even look in my direction.
In one hand she held an enormous beach bag, and in the other, a phone mounted on a holder. She was already livestreaming to her followers.
“Guys, we’ve arrived at our family countryside villa!” Karina chirped, sweeping the camera over our neatly maintained property from outside the fence. “We’re going to have a sauna, shashlik, total relaxation! I absolutely love weekends in the countryside!”
She didn’t immediately realize that the livestream was already fully underway and that her viewers could see the actual situation.
Comments were already racing across the bottom of the screen:
“Is that really your villa?”
“Why are they keeping you outside the fence?”
“Elite family with an empty bag—is that a new trend?”
Eleonora floated out after her daughter in a snow-white linen suit, stepping disdainfully over fallen apples.
And finally Vladislav himself climbed out, carrying a portable speaker already pounding out heavy bass.
Not one bag of groceries.
Not even a bunch of bananas.
Nothing.
Only the rock-solid confidence that they were entitled to first-class service.
I walked up to the gate.
And instead of opening the latch with my usual hospitality, I calmly leaned against it from the inside.
“Well then, peasants, receive your noble lords!” Vlad guffawed, reaching his free hand toward the gate handle.
The handle didn’t move.
I looked down at them, which was easy enough since our property stood on a slight rise.
“Was the noble caravan robbed somewhere along the road?” I asked in an even, almost gentle tone, pointedly examining their hands, which held not a single bag of food. “Or is it fashionable these days to visit people armed only with a speaker and an inflated sense of self-importance?”
Vlad faltered.
The smile slid off his face like cheap paint after the first heavy rain.
“Nina, what are you starting now?” Eleonora protested, adjusting sunglasses worth as much as my greenhouse. “We’re exhausted from the road. Open up already. What smells so good in there? We haven’t eaten anything since morning.”
“It’s solyanka, Ella. Thick and hot, with smoked ribs.”
I paused, enjoying the slow and irreversible way their faces fell.
“But there’s one little detail. It was made for exactly two people. You’re not included in the budget.”
“I don’t understand. What kind of stunt is this?” Vlad yanked harder on the gate, his face beginning to turn crimson. “Roma! Tell your wife to stop this ridiculous performance! We came to relax with my own brother!”
Roma stepped forward.
He stood shoulder to shoulder with me, big, completely calm, and unyielding.
“My wife said everything correctly, Vlad,” my husband said, his voice like metal cutting through glass. “You didn’t come to see your brother. You came to a free resort. You just got the sign wrong.”
He paused, then added:
“This country house is the result of Nina’s work and mine. You haven’t driven a single nail here or brought so much as one loaf of bread. Anyone who arrives uninvited and with a mouth full of mockery about the way we live will never set foot on this property again.”
Looking his brother straight in the eyes, Roma delivered the final blow:
“You only remember we’re brothers when you’re standing beside our grill, Vlad. The rest of the time, you’re just a man with a big car, loud music, and empty pockets.”
The silence became so dense that we could hear bees buzzing above the apple tree.
Even Vlad’s speaker seemed to start playing more quietly.
It was like a malfunction in a perfectly tuned machine: their flawless plan for consuming someone else’s resources had crashed headfirst into a reinforced-concrete no.
“You… you’ve completely gone wild living in this village!” Eleonora shrieked. “Misers! Too stingy to spare a piece of meat for family!”
“Respect isn’t something you pay for, Ella. And rudeness isn’t something we sponsor,” I replied coldly.
Then Karina finally spoke.
She had been standing there the whole time with her phone, blinking her eyelash extensions in confusion as she stared at the flood of comments racing across the screen.
“But I… I already started the livestream saying we were relaxing at the villa… What am I supposed to do now, delete it?!”
I looked at her with a genuinely icy smile.
“Why delete it? Keep filming, Karinochka. Call the episode: ‘Elite Family Comes for Free Shashlik and Fails the Gate Inspection.’ Show your viewers the sensational footage.”
That was the knockout.
Eleonora convulsively grabbed her daughter by the arm and forced her to lower the phone.
Then, with a hiss worthy of a king cobra, she said through clenched teeth:
“Get in the car!”
Vladislav, breathing heavily and unable to find a single argument against his own brother’s stone-cold expression, kicked the tire of his SUV in frustration.
They loaded themselves back into the vehicle in silence.
Quickly and fussily, like petty thieves caught red-handed.
Roma and I stood by the gate, watching as the enormous black vehicle awkwardly reversed down the narrow country lane, brushing against bushes and raising thick clouds of dust.
They were losing face.
They were losing their free shashlik.
And most importantly, they were losing their power over us forever.
Ten minutes later, Karina finally deleted the video.
But the internet, like an intrusive old neighbor sitting on a bench outside the building, had already seen everything.
Under Karina’s latest photo, someone had sarcastically commented:
“So, how was the villa? Did they open the gate?”
And that evening, someone sent us a magnificent screenshot from Karina’s new video: the entire elite delegation was sitting at a plastic table at a gas station.
Eleonora, still wearing her snow-white linen suit, held a half-eaten hot dog with an expression suggesting that fate itself had personally dipped her in mustard.
My husband wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me close.
“Well then, mistress of the house,” he said with a grin. “Shall we go taste the solyanka?”
“Let’s go,” I exhaled, feeling a pleasant, absolute calm spread through me. “It should have developed its full flavor by now.”
Because you can come to a country house as a guest.
Or you can arrive uninvited, with an empty bag and the voice of a feudal lord.
In the second case, the only thing you’re served is a U-turn at the gate.
