“For three years my mother-in-law kept saying in front of my husband: ‘She’s nobody here.’ In the fourth year, I said one sentence to my husband. He asked her to leave himself.
‘Nonka, did you fall asleep in there or what?’ Antonina Pavlovna’s voice came flying in from the kitchen, rattling and sharp like a serrated knife. ‘Andrey’s home, it’s time to feed him. Or do you think he can fill up on your infusoria from the sewage plant?’
Nonna exhaled slowly. The ‘infusoria’ were her job. Eight hours a day, she made sure the city’s wastewater turned into water instead of an environmental disaster. It was hard work—damp, reeking of chemicals and mildew—but it was exactly those forty-five thousand rubles they all lived on.
She stepped out of the pantry, tucking back a loose strand of hair as she went. Andrey was sitting at the table without even taking off his jacket, absorbed in scrolling through his phone. On the stove, on the old Mechta electric hotplate with only one working burner, over-salted soup was boiling over the edge. The smell of scorching instantly filled the kitchen.
‘Mom, why are you yelling?’ Andrey didn’t even look up. ‘She’ll do it now. Non, pour me a bowl, yeah? I’m tired as a dog, been messing around in the garage all day.’
Antonina Pavlovna threw up her hands theatrically and lowered herself onto her throne—a stool by the window covered with an old sheepskin coat.
‘Oh, Andryusha, don’t even say it! What kind of creature did she turn out to be—no hands, no brains. You have to understand, son, she’s nobody here. Just some stray girl with a biology degree. At her age I was already washing and ironing for the whole family, and this one… Ugh. Makes me sick to look at her. You’re only keeping her around for the registration, I know that.’
Andrey grunted. That was his standard response. Not, ‘Mom, be quiet,’ not, ‘She’s my wife,’ just that short, indifferent sound. In three years of marriage, Nonna had learned every shade of that grunt. It meant: ‘I can’t be bothered to argue, do whatever you want, just don’t involve me.’”
“Nonka, did you fall asleep in there or what?” Antonina Pavlovna’s voice came drifting in from the kitchen, rattling and sharp as a serrated knife. “Andrey’s home, it’s time to feed him. Or do you think he’s going to fill up on your little infusoria from the treatment plant?”
Nonna exhaled slowly. The “infusoria” was her job. Eight hours a day, she made sure the city’s sewage turned into water instead of an ecological disaster. It was hard, damp work that smelled of chemicals and mildew, but it was also the source of the forty-five thousand rubles the three of them lived on.
She stepped out of the pantry, tucking back a loose strand of hair as she went. Andrey was sitting at the table without taking off his jacket, absorbed in scrolling through his phone. On the stove, on the old Mechta electric cooker with only one working burner, over-salted soup was boiling over the edge. The smell of something burning instantly filled the kitchen.
“Mom, why are you yelling?” Andrey didn’t even look up. “She’ll do it now. Non, pour me a bowl, will you? I’m dog-tired, spent the whole day messing around in the garage.”
Antonina Pavlovna threw up her hands theatrically as she settled herself onto her throne — the stool by the window covered with an old sheepskin coat.
“Oh, Andryusha, don’t even mention it! And what kind of creature did she turn out to be — no hands, no brains. You have to understand, son, she’s nobody here. Just some stray girl with a biology degree. At her age, I was already washing and ironing for the whole family, and this one… Ugh, it makes me sick just to look at her. You’re only keeping her around because of the residence permit, I know it.”
Andrey grunted. It was his standard response. Not “Mom, shut up,” not “She’s my wife,” just that short, indifferent sound. In three years of marriage, Nonna had learned all the shades of that grunt. This one meant: I’m too lazy to argue, do whatever you want, just don’t bother me.
Silently, Nonna took a rag and wiped down the stove. The heat burned her fingers, but she didn’t even flinch. Inside her, instead of the usual hurt, some new, cold curiosity began to grow. As if she were looking at her own life through a microscope, studying a particularly nasty bacterium.
“Antonina Pavlovna,” she said, ladling out the soup, “if I’m ‘nobody’ here, then why am I the one serving dinner? Why am I the one paying for the apartment? And why do the electricity bills — the ones inflated by your heating pad — come in my name?”
Her mother-in-law choked. For a second Andrey looked up from his phone and stared at his wife as if she were a piece of furniture that had suddenly started talking.
“Oh, just look at her!” his mother-in-law cried, instantly switching into wounded-victim mode again. “She’s talking back! Do you hear that, Andrey? She’s throwing money in my face! At me — your mother, who gave you her whole life! And she… nobody! A shadow in the corner!”
“Mom, calm down,” Andrey muttered, already back to staring at the screen. “Non, don’t start. You know what she’s like. Bring some bread.”
Nonna looked at her husband. At his unshaven cheek, at the greasy stains on the jacket she was supposed to have washed the day before yesterday, but her back had hurt so much she had simply collapsed onto the couch. And in that moment she understood: her “activity,” her endless “everything’s on me” routine — that was her prison. She had built these walls herself so everyone else could be comfortable. And now her mother-in-law was merely stating the obvious: in this house, there was no person named Nonna. There was only service staff with the functions of a bank machine and a cook.
Her back gave another sharp stab of pain. Nonna realized she had reached the limit. Beyond this lay either disability, or…
“All right,” she said quietly.
“What do you mean, ‘all right’?” Andrey asked through a mouthful of bread.
“It’s good that I’m nobody here. That frees me from a great many responsibilities.”
She turned and walked into the bedroom. Behind her, Antonina Pavlovna was already starting up again: “See? She’s offended! Showing me her temper now!”
Nonna lay down on the bed, still in her house robe. The bedroom ceiling was full of tiny cracks. She counted them like stars. One, two, three… For the first time in three years, she felt no shame about the dirty kitchen. She simply did not care.
She knew Andrey would not go wash the dishes. His mother certainly wouldn’t. That meant tomorrow morning the kitchen would be full of dirty plates and the smell of sour soup. And that would be wonderful.
She closed her eyes and fell asleep to the monotonous muttering of the television from the living room. She dreamed of infusoria. They were enormous, transparent, and completely free.
A week passed. Nonna lived in “nobody mode.” She came home from work, bought herself a single yogurt, ate it in her room, and lay down to read. She stopped washing anyone else’s clothes, stopped going near the stove. Chaos took over the house. Andrey got angry, her mother-in-law moved from yelling to threats of “dying right here of hunger,” but Nonna only smiled ironically.
And on the eighth day, something happened that no one had expected.
The eighth day of “nobody mode” began in Apatity with the apartment running out of clean mugs. Every single one. They were all standing in the sink, coated with a gray film of tea residue and dried semolina porridge that Antonina Pavlovna had tried to make on Monday. The attempt had ended with the porridge burning onto the bottom of the pot, and the offended mother-in-law, mortally insulted in her culinary pride, had simply thrown the dishes into the water: “Let them soak, since the daughter-in-law’s hands grow out of the wrong place.”
Nonna walked into the kitchen. Grease streaks decorated the Mechta stove. The smell of damp wool from her mother-in-law’s old sheepskin coat mixed with the odor of sour soup. It was a perfect still life of domestic decay. Nonna took out her personal mug — the one she now washed immediately after using and hid in the pantry behind the jars of pickles — and poured herself some boiling water.
A crash sounded in the hallway. Andrey was trying to find his work trousers in the mountain of unwashed laundry.
“Nonna!” he burst into the kitchen, tousled and furious. “Are you kidding me? I’ve got an inspection from the regional office today, a commission on the line! Where are my blue trousers? And why is my shirt stained?”
Nonna took a sip of tea. The hot liquid warmed her throat pleasantly. She looked at her husband with the same scientific curiosity with which she usually studied activated sludge under a microscope.
“I don’t know, Andryush,” she answered in an even tone. “Ask the mistress of the house. You remember — I’m ‘nobody’ here. A shadow in the corner. Shadows don’t wash trousers. They only exist silently.”
“She’s no mistress!” Andrey shouted, then stopped himself as soon as he heard the shuffle of his mother’s slippers.
Antonina Pavlovna appeared in the kitchen in full battle dress — a greasy robe and the face of a martyr.
“Why are you shouting at your mother, Andryusha?” she said, pressing a hand to her heart as usual. “I tried to wash your trousers yesterday, but we ran out of soap. And this one…” — she jabbed a finger at Nonna — “won’t even buy a bar of хозяйственное soap for the house. She spends everything on her ointments.”
Nonna smirked. The “ointments” were hand cream, without which her skin at work would crack open and bleed.
“Antonina Pavlovna,” Nonna said, setting her mug on the table, “the soap ran out on Thursday. Along with the toilet paper and the tea. I said it three times. But since I’m nobody, my words are just wind rattling through the vent. You said it yourself: Andrey keeps me only because of my residence permit. So I’m exercising the rights of a registered resident — I live here, I breathe, I take up space. But service? Service is not included in the cost of registration.”
“Andrey! Do you hear this?!” her mother-in-law shrieked. “She’s insolent! In front of me, in front of your living mother, she’s making a fool of you! Throw her out into the street, let her sleep at her treatment plant!”
Andrey looked at his mother. Then at the pile of dirty dishes. Then at Nonna, who looked astonishingly fresh and calm. For the first time in three years, a thought flickered through his eyes. Not a very deep one, but a painful one: he realized that the comfort he had always taken for granted rested not on “motherly love,” but on this silent woman whom the two of them had been methodically grinding into dust.
“Mom, shut up, will you?” he muttered. “Seriously, where are the trousers? My shift bus leaves in twenty minutes.”
“I… I soaked them in the bathroom,” Antonina Pavlovna stammered, losing momentum. “In the basin. Only… they’ve been there since yesterday.”
Andrey rushed into the bathroom. A desperate howl came from behind the door:
“They stink! Mom, they smell sour! What did you soak them in?!”
“In vinegar, son… to keep the color…” Antonina Pavlovna shrank on her stool.
Nonna finished her tea. The irony was that Antonina Pavlovna, in all her life, had never learned to use the automatic washing machine, considering it a “devil’s contraption that ruins fabric.” All that time, Nonna had done the washing for her while her mother-in-law stood over her shoulder lecturing her on how to scrub collars properly.
Andrey came out of the bathroom holding a wet blue lump. The despair written across his face made Nonna feel almost sorry for him for a second. Like for an infusoria accidentally crushed under a cover slip.
“Non…” He looked at her with the eyes of a beaten spaniel. “Please. Just iron them quickly. We’ll dry them with a hairdryer… Mom messed up, she’s old already. Do something.”
Nonna rose slowly. She went to the wardrobe and took out her jacket.
“You know, Andrey,” she said, looking him straight in the eye, “at the treatment plant we have a rule: if the system is overloaded, you have to release the pressure. Otherwise it bursts. I waited seven days for you to notice that the system no longer exists. That I’m not your mother’s free add-on.”
“What do rules have to do with anything?!” he almost cried. “I’ve got an inspection!”
“I’m going to work now,” Nonna continued, putting on her jacket. “I’ll be looking at my infusoria. Unlike you, they know their place in the ecosystem. And you… today you can go in wet trousers. Tell the commission that at home you live with ‘nobody.’ I think they’ll appreciate your honesty.”
She left the apartment without waiting for a reply. Behind her came the shrieks of her mother-in-law: “Andryushenka, don’t go, you’ll catch cold! Put on my long johns under your pants!”
All day at work, Nonna felt a strange lightness. Her back barely hurt — apparently, when you stop bracing for the next shout behind you, your spine straightens on its own. Her coworkers watched her with curiosity.
“Nonka, why are you glowing?” Lena from the lab asked. “Did you win alimony or something?”
“No, Len. Even better. I found out I don’t exist.”
That evening she came home slowly. She knew what awaited her. Either suitcases by the door, or…
She opened the door with her key. The apartment was quiet. It smelled not of food, but of something chemical — apparently Andrey had tried to clean the trousers with gasoline. The kitchen light was on. Andrey was sitting alone at the table. In front of him stood an empty can of тушенка.
“Mom’s in the room,” he said without turning around. “Crying. Says you nearly gave her a heart attack.”
“And you?” Nonna asked, taking off her boots.
Andrey turned around. His eyes were red. He looked as though he had spent the whole day unloading coal wagons.
“And I… today I stood in front of the commission wearing Petrovich’s jeans. Borrowed. Two sizes too big. The shop foreman asked what was wrong with my uniform. I said my wife was sick. And he… he looked at me like this, Non. He said, ‘Watch it, Andryukha — lose your woman and you’ll be diving into the treatment pit yourself.’”
He fell silent, picking at the edge of the oilcloth.
“She talked all day about how bad you are,” he continued softly. “And I looked at those dishes… at those stains… and I thought. Why didn’t I ever see it before?”
Nonna went over to the window. Outside, a fine Apatity snowstorm was sweeping past the glass.
“Because it was convenient for you, Andrey. It was convenient for everyone except me. But the convenience limit is exhausted.”
“Non…” He stood up and came to her. “Tell me… what do I have to do? So everything can go back to the way it was?”
Nonna turned to face him. That same ironic smile, the one that frightened Antonina Pavlovna more than anything else, touched her lips.
“It will never be like it was,” she said. “But if you want someone besides your mother to keep living here… you need to hear one thing.”
She paused, watching the shadow of her mother-in-law appear in the kitchen doorway. Antonina Pavlovna froze, listening.
Nonna drew in a breath.
“Andrey,” she said clearly and loudly, “I have some news for you. Short news. But after it, your mother will either leave for her sister’s place in Polyarnye Zori tonight, or…”
Such silence fell over the kitchen that one could hear water dripping in the hallway from the wet blue lump that had once been Andrey’s trousers. Antonina Pavlovna froze in the doorway, craning her neck, and Andrey stopped picking at the oilcloth and slowly lifted his eyes to his wife. In his look, the remnants of yesterday’s arrogance mingled with today’s primitive terror at the prospect of tomorrow’s breakfast cooked by his mother.
Nonna carefully set her empty mug on the table. She felt strangely light, as if the shooting pain in her back had suddenly turned to weightlessness. She looked at her mother-in-law, then at her husband, and said the phrase she had rehearsed in her head all the way home from work:
“Andrey, today I rented myself a room in the factory dormitory,” Nonna paused, savoring the way her husband’s face slowly collapsed. “Since I’m ‘nobody’ here, that’s where I belong. You and your mother can live however you like. I’m taking the utility bills with me — if I’m nobody, then there’s no reason for me to pay them. Enjoy your status as хозяева.”
Antonina Pavlovna was the first to recover. She clutched the doorframe theatrically, letting out a sound like an old kettle whistling.
“Oh, did you hear that? Did you hear that, Andryushenka?!” she shrieked. “She’s blackmailing us! Threatening us! Let her go then, good riddance! We’ll manage without her… we…”
But Andrey wasn’t listening. He was staring at the pile of dishes, the dirty Mechta stove, the empty can of тушенка, and his own hands, which had somehow turned gray in just a week. At last the pieces clicked together in his head: “nobody” had not just been a phrase — it had been the foundation holding up his clean clothes, his hot dinners, and the forty-five thousand rubles that allowed him not to think about the price of gasoline.
“Mom, be quiet,” he said. Softly, but with such force that Antonina Pavlovna choked on her next outcry.
“What did you say, son?” she asked, not believing her ears.
“Be quiet. Right now.” Andrey stood up, and the stool crashed against the wall. “For three years you hammered into me that she was nobody here. For three years I listened to your nonsense like an idiot. And now look at this pigsty! Look at my trousers! You can’t even buy soap, Mom! All you know how to do is wag your tongue!”
His mother sank to the floor, right onto her sheepskin coat. Her eyes filled with real, not theatrical, tears of hurt.
“Andryusha… how can you… I’m your mother…”
“You’re a mother who turned my life into hell in one week,” Andrey said, then turned to Nonna. His voice shook. “Non… wait. Don’t go. I understand everything now. I swear, I understand everything.”
Nonna calmly zipped up her jacket. The irony of the situation gave her almost physical pleasure. She didn’t need to scream or smash plates. All she had to do was stop existing in their domestic world, and they devoured themselves.
“Andrey, it’s too late,” she said. “I’m tired of being invisible. I want to be somebody in my own home. And here I’m a shadow. You confirmed that yourself with your silence.”
“No!” Andrey nearly shouted. He rushed into the hallway, grabbed his mother’s old suitcase — the one she had brought with her three years earlier and which had been gathering dust under the coat rack ever since. “Mom, pack your things.”
Antonina Pavlovna froze, staring at the suitcase as if it were a venomous snake.
“Where to? Andryushenka, are you throwing your own mother out into the cold?”
“To Aunt Lyuba’s in Polyarnye Zori. I’ll call a taxi right now. She was waiting for you last year already.” Andrey began frantically stuffing her things into the suitcase: old robes, balls of yarn, some newspapers. “Enough. I want to live normally. I want peace in my house, not your poisonous whining.”
The scene was almost comical. His mother was sobbing aloud, Andrey was furious and flinging things around, and Nonna stood in the kitchen doorway with one shoulder against the frame. She watched the chaos and felt… relief. Deep, warm relief spreading through her body, easing the tension in her neck and the pain in her shoulder blade.
Forty minutes later a taxi flashed its headlights downstairs. Wrapped in her sheepskin coat, Antonina Pavlovna left the apartment without looking back. On her face was the expression of an empire collapsing. She never understood at what point “nobody” had acquired such destructive power.
Andrey closed the door and leaned heavily against it. The apartment became astonishingly quiet. Only the old Mechta stove gave a small click as it cooled.
“Non…” He looked at his wife. “Did you… did you really rent a room?”
Nonna smirked.
“No, Andrey. I just checked the rates. But if you don’t start washing that mountain of dishes right now, I will. And this time for real.”
Andrey didn’t argue. He trudged into the kitchen, rolled up his sleeves, and for the first time in three years turned on the hot water to do something for the house. Nonna looked at his hunched back and thought that tomorrow at work she would definitely buy herself that Indian tea. And brew it here, in this kitchen. In silence.
She went into the room and lay down on the sofa. Her back still hurt, but it was a different pain now — dull, healing. Outside, the Apatity snowstorm swept on. The wall calendar with kittens, the one she herself had hung last year, rustled softly in the draft.
“Good,” Nonna whispered.
