Tamara Vitalyevna entered her son’s apartment the way a health inspector walks into a railway-station cafeteria — back straight, lips already pressed into a disapproving line.
In the hallway, she was greeted by a mountain of shoes: children’s boots, sneakers, someone’s out-of-season sandals, and one slipper turned inside out. She nudged a stray sole aside with the toe of her shoe and placed her own boots separately, the way respectable people are seated away from a drunken crowd.
“Artyom! I’m here!” she shouted down the hallway. “Although judging by this burial mound, somebody died here back in autumn and you covered the body with shoes.”
“Hello, Tamara Vitalyevna,” Polina said, coming out and wiping her hands on her apron. “We were expecting you at six.”
“And I came at five. I’m his mother, not a guest with an appointment.”
Her mother-in-law squeezed past an ironing board standing in the corridor like a monument to unfinished business.
“Does this contraption live here permanently? Has it been issued a passport?”
Polina silently folded the board and leaned it against the wall.
Six-year-old Miron rolled out of the room holding a wooden giraffe, hugged his grandmother around the knee, and immediately ran off again.
There were three cups, a bowl, and an open jar on the kitchen table.
“Son, you live like you’re in military barracks,” Tamara Vitalyevna announced loudly enough for both rooms to hear. “A home should sparkle. In my apartment, you could eat off the floor.”
“Mom, don’t start,” Artyom said, coming out in a stretched-out T-shirt. “You always walk in and immediately start talking about the floors.”
“I’m not talking about floors. I’m talking about the fact that a man comes home from work and wants to see a home, not a warehouse.”
“I happen to have twelve dolls in progress at the workshop,” Polina said evenly. “Heads drying, hands mounted on wire, fabric that has nowhere to be cut. Marionettes don’t sew themselves.”
“Dolls,” her mother-in-law repeated as though spitting out a fish bone. “A grown woman playing around with little rag people while a living human being walks around in wrinkled clothes.”
Polina worked at a puppet theater. She sewed and assembled marionettes, carved their faces, and glued in their eyes. Half the apartment was filled with boxes of fittings, spools of thread, scraps of velvet, and various materials.
Artyom was a maintenance technician for amusement rides in the city park — carousels, chains, the Surprise ride, the Ferris wheel. He came home with grease on his hands and dropped his clothes wherever they happened to fall.
“Tamara Vitalyevna, have you ever once asked what time I get up?” Polina said. “Six in the morning. At eight I take the child to kindergarten, then I go to the workshop. In the evening it’s the child again, dinner, laundry.”
“Everyone gets up. I spent thirty years standing as an inspector at the mirror factory, examining every sheet with my own eyes, and my home still shone.”
“You had one room and a husband who hammered in nails.”
“I had order,” her mother-in-law snapped. “And this place is the Tower of Babel, only dirtier.”
Artyom sighed theatrically and sat down on the sofa, pushing aside a stack of laundry. His sigh was long, sorrowful, and clearly perfected over the years — the sigh of a misunderstood martyr.
“You see, Mom? This is how I live,” he said to the ceiling. “And I keep quiet.”
“You keep quiet, and I look at it and my heart aches,” Tamara Vitalyevna immediately joined in. “Son, you spend all day working with machinery. At least at home you should be able to rest.”
“He works with machinery, and apparently I sit around on a cloud all day,” Polina said.
“You sit among scraps of fabric. That’s not work. That’s playing around.”
The explosion came on Tuesday at seven twenty in the morning.
Artyom had been called in early. A bearing had failed on the Daisy ride, and they were supposed to open it to children by ten.
He tore open the wardrobe and couldn’t find a single clean shirt.
“Polina!” he yelled through the apartment. “Where are my shirts?!”
“In the laundry! I spent the whole evening yesterday gluing scenery for the premiere!”
“I have to be on site in twenty minutes! What am I supposed to do, go before the inspection committee in a T-shirt?”
“To inspect a bearing? Were you planning to wear a tuxedo?”
He yanked open a dresser drawer, dumped the contents onto the bed, then started searching through the pockets of his jacket.
“And the keys! Where are the car keys?! I put them right here yesterday!”
“You put them ‘right here’ in a different ‘right here’ every single day!”
“You can’t find anything in this house! It’s a pigsty!” Artyom roared. “We live inside a sack full of junk!”
“A sack?” Polina appeared in the doorway, her voice suddenly thin and furious. “And who fills that sack? In four years, have you washed a single plate? Hammered in one nail? The bathroom shelf has been hanging there by sheer faith for three years!”
“I bring home money!”
“So do I. And I do the laundry, cook, take care of the child, and sew commissions at night so we can afford a vacation.”
“Every other wife manages. You’re the only special one!”
“Who exactly is ‘every other wife’? Your mother? Her husband came home from work at six for twenty years and washed the floors every Saturday. She told me that herself. Did your memory suddenly disappear?”
Artyom found the keys in the pocket of his own windbreaker hanging over a chair.
That was the final blow.
His face turned crimson. He grabbed yesterday’s shirt and stormed out, slamming the door so hard that a scarf slid off the coat rack.
That evening, Polina packed a bag, took Miron by the hand, and went to stay with her mother, Raisa Yegorovna, in a two-room apartment on the other side of town.
At the time, Artyom was sitting in his car outside the building pretending to talk on the phone.
An hour later, Tamara Vitalyevna arrived.
She made a victorious inspection round of the apartment, looked into the children’s room and bathroom, touched the empty coat hook, and finally sat at the table with the expression of a person who had lived long enough to see justice done.
“You were right to throw your wife out. Absolutely right,” she said, triumph ringing in her voice. “You’ll find yourself a tidy woman instead of that slob.”
“I didn’t throw her out, Mom. She left.”
“Left, thrown out — what difference does it make? The important thing is that she’s gone. Let her think for a while, and you can rest.”
“I should probably pick up Miron before the premiere…”
“Don’t pick up anyone. Let her sit at her mother’s and remember who used to feed her.”
For three days, Artyom enjoyed his freedom.
He ate whatever he wanted, left his cup wherever he pleased, turned the television as loud as he liked, and slept diagonally across the bed.
On the fourth day, he discovered an unpleasant detail: clean dishes do not reproduce spontaneously inside kitchen cabinets.
The sink filled up in two layers.
A frying pan developed a brown crust.
The trash can swelled until the lid no longer closed, and when Artyom tried to force another bag into it with his foot, the bag split.
“Nonsense,” he told himself aloud. “I’ll deal with it.”
He did not deal with it.
By the end of the week, the apartment looked as though it was inhabited not by a human being but by a natural disaster with a salary.
Trails of crumbs stretched across the floor.
A wet heap of towels lay in the bathroom.
A gray film covered the kitchen, and something that had once been instant soup had dried onto the stove.
Tamara Vitalyevna came over, looked around, and pursed her lips.
“What is this?”
“Mom, it’s peak season. Rides, inspections. I get home at ten.”
“It used to be clean.”
“It used to…” Artyom stopped. “It somehow used to happen by itself.”
“By itself!” his mother snorted. “Nothing happens by itself. Some people know how to keep a home, and others play with scraps of fabric.”
She washed the dishes, wiped down the stove, took out the garbage, and left, proudly carrying the title of the only woman on earth who knew how people were supposed to live.
Two days later, the sink was full again.
A month passed.
Artyom lost weight and became irritable. He yelled at his workers over a loose chain on the Birdies ride and lost his voice during an inspection.
He saw Miron on Saturdays for an hour and a half in the park, under the supervision of Raisa Yegorovna, who refused to speak to him at all. She only nodded and took her grandson away at exactly the agreed time.
“Polina, maybe we could talk?” he asked one Saturday.
“About what? About how I’m a slob?”
“I was stressed.”
“You were stressed for four years, Artyom. Stress is basically your lifestyle.”
She took their son and walked away, leaving him standing beside the cotton-candy stall, furious with the whole world.
He met Zhanna at the end of May during a ridiculous event — the opening of a family entertainment park inside a new shopping center, where he had been sent as a safety specialist.
She was inspecting the indoor microclimate.
She was a clean-room engineer who certified sterile areas at pharmaceutical production facilities.
“Your air curtain at the entrance isn’t working,” she said instead of hello. “And the dust load is three times above the allowable limit.”
“You have beautiful eyes,” Artyom blurted out.
“That has nothing to do with the dust load.”
“It affects mine.”
She smirked.
A week later, he was at her apartment.
Zhanna’s apartment shook him to his core.
White walls. Snow-white curtains. A glass table without a single mark. Shelves where every object was arranged according to height.
On the windowsill stood three pots of lavender, trimmed evenly like soldiers standing in formation.
“Your place looks like a magazine,” he breathed.
“My place looks like the home of a normal adult,” Zhanna replied. “Slippers are in the cabinet. Top shelf.”
“I’m only staying for a minute.”
“Slippers. Top shelf.”
He moved in with her in June, bringing two bags of belongings.
When Tamara Vitalyevna heard the news, she almost danced beside the telephone.
“Son! Finally! A real homemaker!”
“Mom, you haven’t even met her.”
“I don’t need to. You said it’s clean, which means she’s a decent person. A sloppy woman has a sloppy soul. I’ve always said that.”
“What about Miron?”
“Nothing! You’ll visit him. Once the boy grows up, he’ll come running to his father himself when he realizes who was trying to knock sense into his mother.”
She gave her short, dry laugh.
“And that one of yours can keep dressing her dolls. Rag woman.”
The euphoria lasted eleven days.
Artyom later counted them precisely on the calendar and was astonished himself.
Eleven days.
It ended because of a pair of jeans.
He came home from a work site, pulled off his jeans, and laid them on the bed over the white bedspread, intending to put them away a minute later.
He never got that minute.
“Are you serious?” Zhanna appeared in the doorway. “Outdoor fabric. On the bed.”
“I’m putting them away now.”
“Do you understand that those jeans were in contact with a bus seat, a bench, a staircase, and the workshop floor? Do you understand what contamination transfer is?”
“Zhanna, they’re pants.”
“They are a carrier,” she said coldly. “The bedspread goes into the wash. Immediately.”
Two days later came the lecture about the sink.
“Artyom, come here.”
“What?”
“Look. Do you see it?”
“I see a sink.”
“You see a limescale mark. The water evaporated, the mineral salts remained. After a month of this ‘I don’t see anything,’ we’ll have a dull deposit that no chemical will remove. Then we’ll need abrasive cleaner, and abrasives scratch.”
“I shaved and left. My shift starts at seven.”
“You wipe up after yourself. It’s no more difficult than fastening your jacket.”
Then came the ban on drinking tea in front of the television.
“We don’t eat or drink in the living room.”
“I’m not eating. I’m holding a mug.”
“The mug sweats, it leaves a ring on the table, crumbs get into the sofa, mites live in the sofa. The kitchen is for eating. The living room is for resting. Zones must not overlap.”
“They always overlapped in my home.”
“I can tell,” Zhanna said sharply.
Saturdays became the beginning of what she called “purification rituals.”
She used the phrase without irony, in a completely serious voice.
Wake-up at eight.
Division of duties.
Two colors of gloves: yellow for the bathroom, blue for the kitchen, never to be mixed under any circumstances.
“Here,” she said, handing him a list. “Number four — baseboards. Number seven — tile grout. The brush is in the container.”
“Zhanna, it’s my day off.”
“Exactly. We don’t have time during the week.”
“I wanted to spend time with my son.”
“You can go after four. We’ll be done by four if you stop standing around discussing it.”
He crawled around on her white floor with a grout brush, getting so angry his vision darkened.
He remembered Saturdays with Polina kneading dough while Miron made ugly little people from the scraps.
Flour had been everywhere — on the table, on the floor, in their hair.
And it had been wonderful.
“You’re slow today,” Zhanna said as she walked past.
“I spent fourteen hours outside in the sun yesterday. The Ferris wheel stopped with people trapped at the top.”
“That doesn’t cancel the grout.”
“You know, you’d look great as a prison guard. With a clipboard.”
“I look like someone who refuses to live in filth,” she replied without turning around. “And don’t touch the blue gloves. You used them to scrub the toilet.”
Things escalated from there.
He was forbidden from leaving his tool bag in the hallway.
Then he was forbidden from entering the living room in his work clothes.
Then he was informed that he didn’t know how to arrange clothes properly in the wardrobe and should simply stop touching things.
“I moved your T-shirts to the bottom shelf.”
“Why the bottom?”
“Because they’re shapeless and spoil the appearance of the section.”
“They’re my clothes, Zhanna.”
“It’s our wardrobe.”
In August, Tamara Vitalyevna came to see how her son was living.
She entered, gasped, toured the apartment, and perched on the very edge of a chair.
“My goodness, it’s beautiful!” she exclaimed. “Now this is what I call a home. This is what I call a woman.”
“Thank you,” Zhanna said with gracious approval. “But please don’t put your handbag on the table. The table is a work surface.”
“Of course, of course!”
Tamara Vitalyevna immediately moved her bag to the floor, then caught herself and hung it over the back of the chair instead.
“Not on the floor either. Suitcase wheels, shoes…”
“Forgive me, dear. I didn’t think.”
Artyom watched his mother — the same woman who had spent thirty years shoving her shining floors into everyone else’s face — apologizing and fussing nervously.
Something both angry and amused rose inside him.
“Mom, why are you shrinking?”
“I’m not shrinking.”
“You’re sitting on one quarter of the chair.”
“Be quiet,” she hissed.
Then she turned toward Zhanna with a honeyed smile.
“His ex-wife, you know, couldn’t do anything properly. She used to leave the ironing board right in the hallway like a birch tree.”
“Mom.”
“What do you mean, ‘Mom’? I’m telling the truth.”
After his mother left, Zhanna washed the chair she had been sitting on.
Then she washed the door handle.
Artyom watched in silence.
“What?” she asked.
“She’s my mother.”
“She came in from the street. Outside is outside.”
“Do you wash me like that too? In your head?”
“I tolerate you,” Zhanna said without smiling. “Quite a lot, actually.”
Author: Vika Trel © 5624
He felt as though he were suffocating.
In that white apartment, you couldn’t sit down without putting something underneath you, stand up without straightening something, eat without accounting for it afterward.
He caught himself deliberately staying late at work so he could arrive after Zhanna had already gone to the bedroom.
One day, he took a book from a shelf and couldn’t put it back perfectly. The spine stuck out by two millimeters.
He stood there moving the book forward and backward.
Then suddenly he realized he was afraid.
A grown man who climbed twenty meters up the structure of a Ferris wheel was standing there afraid of a bookshelf.
“What a circus,” he said aloud.
That night he dreamed about their old mess.
Boxes of velvet.
The ironing board.
Miron scattering building blocks everywhere.
Polina with her hair pinned up using a pencil.
And her eternal:
“Artyomka, the dough has risen. Come cut it.”
He woke up, sat upright in the snow-white bed, and understood something simple.
Comfort is not the absence of dust.
Comfort is when being at home feels good.
He lived with Zhanna for three months.
In September, on a Thursday, he packed his two bags while she was out, left his keys on the glass table, and walked away.
He called her from the car.
“I left.”
“Where did you go?”
“Home.”
“You don’t have a home,” Zhanna said evenly. “You have a warehouse with a woman who sews little rag people.”
“At least you can live there,” he replied and ended the call.
Polina agreed to meet him in the park beside the very same Ferris wheel he had been maintaining for five years.
Miron was sent for a ride on the little train under the supervision of one of the attendants.
“Well?” Polina asked. “You called. I came. Talk.”
“I missed you.”
“Wonderful. Continue.”
“Polin, don’t be like that.”
“How should I be?” She gave a bitter smile. “You called me a pig in front of our child. For six months, you played the suffering martyr in front of your mother while I was the servant who simply wasn’t trying hard enough.”
“I understand everything now.”
“Exactly what do you understand?”
“That I expected you to do things I didn’t want to do myself,” Artyom said, staring at the toes of his boots. “I screamed about shirts. I didn’t turn on a washing machine myself until June. And even then I didn’t know which setting to use.”
“Well, look at that. Progress.”
“Polina.”
“What do you mean, ‘Polina’? I asked you for four years to do your share. Not to ‘help me.’ Just to do your part. You sighed.”
He didn’t say a single word about Zhanna.
Not where he had lived, not who he had lived with, not that he had crawled around scrubbing grout with a toothbrush.
He only said:
“I was working.”
He lied calmly because he understood that if he told her the truth, the conversation might end forever.
“Fine,” Polina said. “And what exactly are you proposing? You come back and we start shouting about socks and keys again?”
“I’m proposing that we handle it like adults. You know you have a weak point too.”
“Oh really?”
“You hoard things. Boxes, scraps, coffee tins, ‘maybe I’ll need this someday.’ You have forty of them, Polin. Your workshop has spread through the entire apartment.”
She almost flared up, then restrained herself and nodded.
“Fine. Fair enough. I’m definitely a hoarder.”
“Then let’s agree on this. Materials stay on two shelving units only. Anything that doesn’t fit goes. No arguments, no excuses. It just goes.”
“I’ll agree to that on one condition.”
“What?”
“Cleaning stops being my personal obligation. Either you take half of it, or we pay someone.”
Artyom took out his phone and calculated something in an app.
“I worked it out yesterday. I spend twelve thousand a month on subscriptions, takeaway coffee, and pointless stuff for my wheels and machines. If I cut half of it, that’s enough for a cleaner twice a week.”
“You? Give up your mechanical toys?”
“I already did. Canceled an order.”
“You’re lying.”
“Look.”
He turned the screen toward her.
Polina stared at it for a long time.
Then she turned toward the little train, where Miron was waving both hands at them, and said:
“I agree. But if you ever make that suffering sigh of yours in front of your mother again, I’m leaving and I’m never coming back. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“One more thing. She will come over and insult me. You stop her. Not me. You.”
“I promise.”
Two weeks later, the three of them were living together again.
A woman named Inga came to the apartment. She was about forty-five, businesslike, quiet, and arrived with a cleaning trolley. She had previously worked for an airport cleaning service.
She inspected the place, named her price, then added:
“Twice a week, three hours each time. Deep cleaning once every quarter is separate.”
“We’ll take it,” Artyom said.
Inga dug piles of old bottles out from beneath the bathtub, scrubbed the tiles until they squeaked, cleaned the stove, organized the hallway, and sorted the shoes by season.
Within a month, the apartment looked so orderly that even Miron started hanging his jacket on its hook simply out of respect for the result.
Polina set up two shelving units in her workshop corner, threw away seven boxes, and gave two more to the theater.
Artyom finally installed the bathroom shelf, reinforced the curtain rail, and learned how to load the dishwasher.
It took him thirty-four years of life, but it happened.
Tamara Vitalyevna arrived at the end of October without warning, as usual.
She had prepared herself for battle and had already pursed her lips inside the elevator.
The door opened.
There was a neat shoe cabinet in the hallway.
The floor gleamed.
The ironing board had ceased to exist as a species.
“Oh,” her mother-in-law said, suddenly confused.
She walked into the kitchen, ran her finger along the top of the refrigerator, and inspected it.
The finger was clean.
“Well, well,” she said slowly. “Polinochka! Finally came to your senses!”
“Hello, Tamara Vitalyevna,” Polina replied coolly.
“You see? I told you! All it took was a month at your mother’s and you became a proper human being! A woman has to keep her home!”
“Mom,” Artyom said.
“What, ‘Mom’? I’m complimenting her! I hardly ever compliment anyone!”
“This wasn’t Polina,” Artyom said calmly and loudly. “It was the cleaner.”
Silence lasted for about three seconds.
Then his mother sat down.
“The what?”
“The cleaner. Inga. She comes on Tuesdays and Fridays for three hours. I pay her.”
“You… pay… another woman… to clean your toilet?”
“Exactly.”
“Have you lost your mind?!” Tamara Vitalyevna raised her voice. “A stranger inside your home! She’ll go through your wardrobes! She’ll sniff around everything!”
“Let her. There are socks and thread in our wardrobes.”
“Then what is the wife for?!”
“A wife isn’t ‘for’ anything, Mom. A wife isn’t a mop with a human face.”
“In my day…”
“In your day, Dad had forty-eight days of vacation and finished work at five,” Artyom cut her off. “And you yourself told us that he washed the floors on Saturdays. Now tell me I’m lying.”
She gasped.
“I raised you! I lost sleep over you! I gave you everything…”
“You raised me very well,” he said. “But don’t demand repayment for it twenty years later.”
“She turned you against me!” his mother shouted, jabbing a finger toward Polina. “That doll woman of yours! She filled your head with nonsense!”
“Mom, I’m a grown man. I supervise nine employees and twenty-three pieces of equipment. I’m not that easy to brainwash.”
“Artyom, I’m telling you this as your mother: a woman who doesn’t clean her own home does not respect her husband!”
“A woman who sews twelve dolls for a premiere and brings money into the family respects her family considerably more than some people respect other people’s peace.”
He paused.
“I need a wife so I can be happy. And I’m happy now. The subject is closed.”
“It is not closed!”
“It is,” Artyom repeated.
Tamara Vitalyevna stood up, grabbed her handbag, reached the hallway — and suddenly stopped as if someone had shoved her.
Her face turned gray.
Her lips went blue.
She grabbed the doorframe.
“Oh…” she breathed. “Something…”
“Mom!”
Artyom caught her before she fell.
Polina was already calling an ambulance with one hand while using the other to loosen her mother-in-law’s collar.
The heart attack was not massive, but the doctor was direct.
“She is sixty-two. She has had angina for years. She absolutely must not get worked up. Otherwise the next attack may be the last.”
Three weeks in the hospital followed.
Artyom went there every day after work, bringing broth in a thermos, oranges, and clean clothes.
Polina cooked the broth silently and never asked whether Tamara Vitalyevna had sent her greetings.
“Did she at least say thank you?” Polina asked once.
“She said the broth needed more salt.”
“That means she’s recovering.”
Tamara Vitalyevna was discharged in November with a piece of paper stating: “Physical exertion restrictions.”
To her, it sounded like: “Restrictions on life.”
She was forbidden from carrying buckets, climbing stepladders, bending over, scrubbing, or scouring.
For the first few days, she managed.
Then the apartment began quietly losing ground.
First came a film on the stove.
Then dust appeared on the chandelier, which she used to wipe twice a month.
Then yellow streaks appeared in the bathroom.
Sticky spots formed on the kitchen floor.
And she saw every single one of them.
Artyom came every other day.
He washed dishes, took out the garbage, and vacuumed as best he could — meaning the center of the room.
“You missed the baseboard,” his mother would say from the sofa.
“Mom, I just got off work.”
“The baseboard.”
“Tomorrow.”
“‘Tomorrow,’” she mimicked. “Everything is always tomorrow with you. Soon I’ll have moss growing in here.”
One Saturday, he brought Miron.
The boy walked down the hallway, looked at the carpet, and asked loudly with the brutal honesty of a child:
“Grandma, why are there crumbs here?”
Tamara Vitalyevna flushed so violently that Artyom became afraid for her heart.
“Take the child and leave!”
“Mom!”
“Go! I said leave!”
In December, Polina came.
She came on her own, without warning.
She brought soup in a jar, pies, and a pair of rubber gloves in a bag.
“Tamara Vitalyevna, I’m here for two hours. Bathroom and kitchen.”
“No.”
“Yes. I can see that you need it.”
“Don’t you dare touch my apartment!”
Polina went into the bathroom anyway and turned on the water.
A minute later, her mother-in-law appeared in the doorway, gripping the frame, her voice ringing with anger.
“Get out! Did you come here to gloat? To see me sitting here in filth?!”
“I came to help.”
“You came to show me who the mistress of the house is now! Are you enjoying this? Is this what you were waiting for?!”
“I cooked broth for you for three weeks,” Polina said.
“Out of pity! I don’t need your pity! Get out!”
Polina removed the gloves, placed them on the washing machine, picked up her bag, and left.
Inside the elevator, she clenched her jaw so hard it hurt.
But she refused to cry out of principle.
Artyom found out that evening.
He sat on a stool, his hands covered in grease, and stayed silent for nearly two minutes.
“She threw you out?”
“She did.”
“I see,” he said, and there was something unpleasant in his expression. “You’re not going there again.”
“She’s a sick woman.”
“She’s a sick woman with the personality of an iron door. I’ll go myself.”
He went on Sunday and found a scene that made his skin burn.
His mother was on all fours in the middle of the room with a rag, trying to reach beneath a cabinet.
She was breathing heavily, quickly, with a faint whistle.
Nearby lay a mop handle with a rag taped to it. It had been too thick to fit underneath.
“What are you doing?!”
“Move.”
“You’re not allowed to bend over! What did the doctor tell you?!”
“There’s dust,” Tamara Vitalyevna wheezed. “You don’t understand. There’s dust.”
Artyom lifted her by the elbows, sat her on the sofa, poured her some water, and waited until her face no longer looked so frightening.
“Mom. This can’t continue.”
“I can’t live like this,” she suddenly said quietly. “I kept my home for forty years. I washed my floors until they shone. And now I sit here watching everything become filthy, and I can’t do anything about it.”
“Polina wanted to help.”
“She’s an outsider.”
“She’s the mother of your grandson.”
“She came here and saw me like this.”
“So it isn’t about the dirt,” Artyom realized. “It’s about someone seeing it.”
“Don’t get clever.”
“I’m bringing Inga.”
“Who?”
“The cleaner. The same one.”
“Don’t you dare.” Tamara Vitalyevna straightened. “A strange woman with a bucket in my home? Looking at my towels, my pots, my bathroom?”
“She cleans ten apartments a week. Your bathroom isn’t going to shock her.”
“Won’t shock her?!” his mother gasped. “My home has sparkled my whole life!”
“Exactly,” Artyom said. “And it can keep sparkling. Just not at the expense of your knees.”
He brought Inga on Tuesday at ten.
Tamara Vitalyevna met her with a stone face, pointed toward the bathroom door, and went into the living room.
She sat in an armchair.
Turned toward the wall.
“Three hours,” Artyom said. “Mom, just sit.”
“Don’t talk to me.”
“Fine.”
“And tell her not to touch the china cabinet.”
“We won’t touch the china cabinet,” Inga calmly repeated.
For three hours, Tamara Vitalyevna sat with her back to the room, staring into the corner like an offended child.
She heard the vacuum cleaner humming, water running, furniture being moved.
Every sound felt like a personal insult.
“Do you hear that? The faucet is running. She’ll flood the place,” she threw over her shoulder.
“She won’t.”
“The chandelier is crystal. She’ll break it.”
“She won’t.”
“You’ve destroyed me,” his mother said. “Do you understand what you’ve done? You brought hired servants into my house. Like some aristocrat from the old days.”
“I brought in a professional,” Artyom replied. “She gets paid for her work. Quite well, actually.”
Inga finished at one, packed her trolley, said goodbye, and left.
The door clicked shut.
Tamara Vitalyevna remained sitting in the chair for another three minutes purely out of principle.
Then she slowly stood up, holding onto the armrest, and walked into the hallway.
She stopped.
The hallway floor shone in a way it hadn’t for almost a year.
The baseboards were white — genuinely white, not “close enough.”
The shoes stood in a neat row.
The mirror reflected her without a single cloudy smear.
Without thinking, she adjusted her hair.
She went into the bathroom.
The tiles squeaked beneath her finger.
The yellow streaks were gone.
The faucet reflected the lamp.
She looked into the kitchen.
The stove looked brand new.
The top of the refrigerator was clean.
Even the hood grille, which she hadn’t been able to reach for a year and a half, had been washed.
“Well, would you look at that,” she said aloud to the empty apartment.
Artyom stood in the doorway with his arms folded.
“Well?”
“What do you mean, ‘well’?”
“Say something.”
“How much did you pay her?” Tamara Vitalyevna muttered.
“Less than an ambulance.”
“Cheap.”
“Mom.”
“Fine.” She ran her palm over the countertop as if checking whether the cleanliness was real. “Fine. She can come. Once a week. But I’ll dust the china cabinet myself.”
“You can dust the china cabinet yourself,” he agreed.
They were silent for a while.
Then, without looking at her son, she said:
“That one of yours… came here with soup.”
“She did. You threw her out.”
“I wasn’t feeling well that day.”
“You were yourself that day, Mom.”
“What do you know?” She pursed her lips. “Tell her to bring the boy on Sunday. Her pies… aren’t the worst.”
When Polina heard, she remained silent for a long time.
Then she said:
“I’ll go. But once I cross the threshold of her apartment, my apologies stop there.”
“No apologies. You did nothing wrong.”
“Artyom.” She looked directly at him. “If she starts calling me a slob again, I’ll stand up and leave. I don’t care what condition her heart is in.”
“I’ll stand up and leave with you.”
“Remember that. This is the second time you’ve promised me.”
“And the second time, I’ll keep the promise.”
Sunday passed on thin ice.
Twice, Tamara Vitalyevna inhaled as if preparing to deliver a cutting remark.
Twice, she changed her mind because Miron happened to be climbing onto her lap at that very moment.
Polina didn’t smile, but she wasn’t rude either.
Artyom sat between them like a traffic officer at a dangerous intersection.
The peace was hanging by a thread, and all three adults knew it.
“The pie is dry,” his mother-in-law said as they were leaving.
“Then next time I’ll bake one with cottage cheese,” Polina replied evenly.
“Cottage cheese is terrible these days.”
“Then apples.”
Tamara Vitalyevna opened her mouth and — for the first time in her life — said nothing.
That night, Artyom lay in their bedroom.
A shirt hung over the back of a chair.
A plastic box of doll eyes sat on the shelf.
An unfinished wooden marionette leg rested on the bedside table.
Polina slept with her forehead pressed against his shoulder.
From the children’s room came the quiet sound of Miron breathing.
Artyom remembered the white apartment.
The lavender plants arranged by height.
The blue and yellow gloves.
The nine-point cleaning list.
The spine of the book sticking out by two millimeters.
He shuddered.
Not everyone is meant to keep a house.
Not everyone knows how to create a home.
Some people sew dolls.
Some repair Ferris wheels.
And some arrive on Tuesdays with a cleaning trolley and, in three hours, give people their lives back.
Artyom closed his eyes and fell asleep in the mess where he felt completely at home.
THE END
