Katya unlocked the door with her key and immediately heard the sound of a hair dryer coming from the bedroom. In seven years, Ivan had never once used a hair dryer—he’d always dry his hair with a towel and called that whole business silly girly nonsense. Katya tossed her bag onto the console and strode down the hallway right in her boots, leaving wet footprints on the laminate floor.
Her husband was standing in front of the open wardrobe, wearing a home t-shirt, the back of his head damp and neatly combed. On the bed, on her side, a bulging pink makeup bag with a gold zipper lay across the pale bedspread. For twenty years, all of Katya’s makeup fit in a small see-through pouch on the bathroom shelf—she’d have been embarrassed to even touch an item like that pink bag in a store.
Ivan turned off the hair dryer, caught her reflection in the wardrobe mirror, and didn’t even turn around to face her.
“Why are you home so early?”
“We submitted the report ahead of schedule. Whose is this?”
She nodded towards the bed without taking off her boots. Ivan glanced there with the kind of lazy annoyance you’d give to crumbs that someone forgot to brush off the table.
“Ira stopped by after work to drop off a contract. She forgot her stuff—I’ll give it back to her tomorrow.”
“She needed to bring the contract into our bedroom?”
“Katya, don’t start.”
“I haven’t even started yet. I’m just asking why her makeup bag is on my pillow.”
He shoved the hair dryer onto a shelf, yanked a shirt off its hanger, and slammed the wardrobe door so hard the mirror rattled in its fittings.
“Are you really going to interrogate me about every little thing? I’ve had a rough day and I do not have to report every step I take to you!”
He stepped toward the lamp, and Katya saw a blurry mark the color of overripe cherries just under his ear, at the edge of his collar. She’d never worn lipstick like that—not even at her own wedding. She walked over, ran her finger along his neck, and brought it up close to his face, so close he pulled back.
“Is this part of the contract too? With a seal?”
Ivan slapped her hand away and marched into the bathroom. She could hear him turn the water on full blast and drop something in the sink, cursing under his breath. Katya stood by the bed, staring at the golden zipper and the tiny heart-shaped charm dangling from it.
When he came back, he was a different person—calm, almost content, with a towel draped over his shoulder.
“Alright, since you’re so sharp-eyed,” he said and tossed the towel onto the chair. “Yes, it’s Ira. Yes, it’s been going on for months, since spring. Happy now?”
He said it with the same tone he’d used last fall to announce that he’d bought a new car on credit and that there was nothing to discuss. Katya expected him to at least look away, but Ivan stared straight at her, almost with relief.
“I’m tired, Katya, you get it? Seven years of the same thing: your reports, your Sunday soup, the annual trip to Seliger every August. I want to live for myself—I’m turning fifty soon, and here I am living like I’m in a retirement home.”
“Then go live your own life! Why do you keep coming here every night?!”
“And where would I go? Have you seen the rent prices? Forty-five thousand for a one-bedroom in the middle of nowhere. Why should I be an idiot and give that kind of money to strangers?”
Katya grabbed her makeup bag and threw it at him. He dodged, and the bag hit the wall above the dresser. The zipper split open, and tubes, a tiny bottle of perfume, and a round powder compact went bouncing across the floor. The compact popped open, sending a beige puff of powder settling on the laminate.
“Get out! Do you hear me? Get out of my apartment!”
Ivan stepped over the spilled powder, stretched out on the bed on her side right on top of the cover, and put his hands behind his head.
“If you want to leave, go ahead,” he muttered, making himself comfortable and stretching out his socked feet. “I’m not stopping you.”
“This is my parents’ apartment! You’re not even registered here!”
“So what? I’ve lived here for seven years, did the renovations myself, built the kitchen with my own hands. You were the one who wanted a quiet family life, well, now you have it—quiet. So why be surprised I got bored?”
He stayed on the bed a bit longer, then got up and started picking out a shirt for tomorrow, holding up first the blue one, then a white one with thin stripes. Katya had ironed the white shirt for him on Sunday and spent half an hour fiddling with the cuffs. Ivan hung it on the wardrobe door, picked up a cherry lipstick from the floor and carefully put it on her nightstand next to her reading glasses.
Katya pulled her blanket out from under him so sharply he slid to the edge of the bed, then carried it into the living room. Until 2 a.m. she kept scrubbing the powder off the laminate with a damp cloth, even though she’d already cleaned it in the first five minutes, while from the bedroom came the steady, content snoring of her husband.
The next evening, there were unfamiliar shoes in the hallway, and laughter coming from the kitchen. Ivan had invited Gena and Slava, the guys he’d started out in sales with, ordered two large pizzas and a platter of sushi rolls, and put beer on the table. When Katya walked in, he spread his arms wide like the perfect host.
“Oh, and here’s our queen! Katya, come sit with us—we saved you some with pineapple.”
“Vanya, come out for a minute. We need to talk in private, without guests.”
“Hear that?” Ivan turned to his friends and burst out laughing. “Without guests, she says! Guys, you should have seen the scene she put on yesterday. She almost knocked me out with a makeup bag a colleague left behind. There’s still powder everywhere.”
Slava stared at his plate, carefully peeling the crust off his pizza slice. Gena, face flushed from the beer, winked at Katya in a friendly way.
“Katya, come on, he’s a grown man. Don’t keep him on a short leash—a man turns wild that way.”
“Exactly!” Ivan pointed at Gena. “Right on. It’s like I’m under surveillance in my own home—where were you, who were you with, why so late. She’s always demanding attention, but where am I supposed to get it from if I’m working from nine to eight?”
Katya silently gathered the dirty plates and started scraping off pizza crusts and lumps of wasabi into the trash. Ivan leaned back in his chair and, without looking, waved an empty beer bottle over his head.
“Katya, bring us another beer from the fridge. And cut up some lemon—Gena likes it with lemon.”
She grabbed two bottles, walked to the table, and set them down in front of her husband with such force that the foam squirted right onto Gena’s pants. Gena jumped to his feet, Slava rushed for napkins, but Ivan just smirked and said looks like the lemon’s canceled tonight.
As soon as the door closed behind the guests, Ivan wandered into the kitchen, picking his teeth with a toothpick.
“Not bad, you did well as the hostess,” he said. “If you remembered your duties more often, maybe I’d actually want to come home.”
Katya grabbed the tray with half-eaten sushi from the table and flipped it over the floor. Rice, cucumber, and pink slices of fish landed with a splat at Ivan’s feet, and one chopstick bounced onto his shoe. He brushed it off with disgust, stepped over the mess, and walked off to the bedroom, tossing over his shoulder that of course, she would be cleaning it up. She scrubbed until midnight, angrily scraping the sticky rice off the tiles with her fingernail.
On Wednesday, Ivan was working from home, and Katya rushed over on her lunch break to grab a USB drive she’d forgotten in her desk drawer. She quietly opened the door and froze in the hallway, because from the balcony came her husband’s loud voice, answered via speakerphone by a tall woman’s voice.
“Vanya, I’ve been hearing the same thing for three months! End of the month, after the quarterly report, after her birthday! I’m thirty-eight, I’m not a little girl to keep running around rental apartments with you!”
“Ira, I’ve explained this, she’s hysterical, she won’t let me leave peacefully, she was throwing things at me just yesterday…”
“Then don’t leave peacefully! Grab your suitcase and go, what’s the problem?!”
“Don’t pressure me! I’ll handle my family myself, got it? Myself!”
He hung up and kicked the empty bucket that had been sitting on the balcony since summer. Katya grabbed her USB drive, closed the door as quietly as she had opened it, and tiptoed to the elevator, somehow hiding from someone in her own apartment building.
That evening, Ivan came home with two grocery bags, cheerful and rosy-cheeked, as if he hadn’t yelled at anyone earlier. He laid out a pork neck, a tub of sour cream, a bunch of dill, and a sack of potatoes on the table.
“Katya, make French-style meat, like you did for New Year’s. I’ve been craving it all morning.”
Katya sat at the table over the electricity bills and didn’t even look up.
“Make it yourself, you’re a grown man. Gena explained everything to me yesterday.”
“What do you mean, make it myself? Are you still sulking? I bought the groceries, you know, with my own money!”
“Then cook it with your own money. The stove is right where it was yesterday.”
Ivan grabbed the meat in its plastic wrap and slammed it down on the table, right on top of the bills. The wrap burst, and pink juice started to seep into the papers with her neatly written numbers.
“What are you trying to prove?! Who am I to you, some roommate in a shared apartment?!”
“You told me yourself who you are, yesterday, in front of Gena and Slava.”
She pulled the wet bills out from under the meat, shook them off over the sink, and left for the living room. An hour later, the smoke detector screeched in the kitchen, and Ivan, swearing, spent ages waving a towel under it, then loudly ordered shawarma over the phone.
On the fifth day, near the elevator, Lyudmila Petrovna from the third floor stopped her, wearing a coat over her bathrobe and clutching a bag of garbage. She looked around, even though no one else was on the landing, and lowered her voice.
“Katenka, sorry to pry. Is it true you and Vanya are getting a divorce?”
“Where did you get that idea?”
“He told me himself! And to the folks in apartment five, and the guys outside by the entrance. He says you’ve become impossible, checking his every move, reading his phone, threatening to throw him out. I told him, ‘Vanya, come on, Katya’s always so quiet.’ And he said, ‘She’s only quiet in public, Lyudmila Petrovna—you haven’t seen her at home.'”
The neighbor was watching with a mix of hunger and sympathy, her trash bag gently swaying in her hand. Katya jabbed the elevator button so hard her finger ached, then pressed it again, and again.
“And did he ever mention whose place he stays at when he’s out late?”
“No,” the neighbor said, her mouth slightly open. “Whose?”
The elevator doors slid open and Katya stepped inside, leaving Lyudmila Petrovna on the landing with her bag and her question.
That evening, Katya waited until Ivan came out of the shower, then stood in the bedroom doorway.
“Why are you telling the neighbors that I’m throwing you out and checking your phone?”
“Is it not true?” He was pulling on socks, sitting on her side of the bed. “I have the right to talk about my life however I want. It’s my life too, not just yours.”
“And did you tell them about Ira? About what you confessed to me just last week?”
“Oh Katya, will you stop with the fidelity talk already?” Ivan smirked and leaned back on the pillow. “This isn’t the nineteenth century. Faithfulness isn’t required for a normal marriage anymore. Everyone lives like this—it’s just not everyone is as honest as I am.”
Katya yanked his jacket off the hallway hook and threw it in his face. Ivan caught the jacket, smoothed it out, hung it on the chair back, and laughed up at her from below.
“Come on, throw something else. Lyudmila Petrovna lives right below us—she’ll love this.”
Katya didn’t say another word to him that evening. She went to the living room, climbed onto a stool, and took down from the top shelf a blue plastic folder with the apartment papers. She spread out the inheritance certificate, a registry statement, and her mother’s old privatization contract on the kitchen table—still stained from meat juice—and switched the overhead light on above them. Ivan peeked into the kitchen, saw the papers, grunted, and left, but that night he never turned the TV on in the bedroom.
***
On Friday morning, Ivan sat at the kitchen table in that same white striped shirt, buttering his bread without taking his eyes off his phone. Katya stood at the stove flipping syrniki, while the blue folder of documents rested on the windowsill, where she had put it the night before.
“Katya, listen,” Ivan said in the same voice he used when asking her to pick up his suit from the cleaners. “Ira’s coming by after work tomorrow, we want to have a proper dinner. Can you clear out the bedroom ahead of time? It’s uncomfortable for her to sit in the kitchen, these stools, and the vent is loud.”
Katya turned to him, spatula in hand. A syrnik began to burn on one side in the skillet, but she didn’t notice.
“Repeat that.”
“What’s there to repeat? You heard me.” He finally looked up and shrugged. “You could spend the evening at Svetka’s—you two haven’t seen each other in ages. Chat, catch up, and be home by midnight, after we’re done. I’ll pay for your taxi.”
He said it so calmly, just like when he used to assign shifts between the managers at work. Katya turned off the burner, took the frying pan off, and set it on the cold stove.
“I’m not leaving my apartment. Not to Svetka’s, not to anyone else’s.”
“You will,” Ivan said, taking a bite of his bread.
“I won’t! And your Ira is not coming in here—I won’t open the door for her myself!”
Ivan threw his sandwich onto the plate and jumped up so suddenly that the stool toppled over and banged against the radiator. For the first time all week, he really exploded, his face purple and a vein bulging at his temple.
“What are you going to do?! Huh, what can you really do to me? You care so much about your reputation, like it’s a crystal vase! You’re afraid to even raise your voice around the neighbors, you lied to your late mother right to the end that everything was great with us! You’ll never make a scene, Katya, you don’t have the guts!”
He grabbed a blue folder from the windowsill and waved it in front of her face. Katya clutched the folder with both hands, yanked it toward herself, and the button on the flap flew off somewhere under the fridge. Ivan let go first, spat in the direction of the sink, and walked out to the hallway, buttoning the cuffs she had ironed for him on Sunday along the way.
All day at work, Katya kept tallying up the same spreadsheet and made the same mistake in the same line three times. The chief accountant popped in after lunch, looked at her face, and silently placed a chocolate bar on her desk.
On Saturday morning, Katya went to the MFC for a fresh statement, telling Ivan she’d be back late. The line moved quickly and by four o’clock, she was already at her door with the key in her hand. Water was pounding in the bathroom, a new bottle of men’s cologne—still wrapped in plastic—sat on the hallway table, and Ivan had laid out a dark blue sweater and a pair of creased trousers on the bed in their bedroom.
Katya stood over the sweater for a moment, then went to the storage room and pulled out a roll of 120-liter construction bags leftover from the renovation. She tore off the first bag, shook it open, and started taking her husband’s shirts off the hangers, one by one, hangers and all.
Ivan stepped out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his hips and watched her for a minute, leaning against the doorframe.
“What’s this circus? Trying to scare me?” he laughed, wiping his ear with a finger. “Come on, pack it all up neatly. You’ll just end up hanging it all back—it’ll be good practice.”
Katya didn’t reply and dumped his box of socks and underwear into the bag. Next, in went his belts, laptop charger, and the box of cufflinks she had given him for their fifth anniversary. Ivan stopped laughing when she walked past him into the bathroom and, in one sweep, knocked his razor, shaving foam, aftershave, and electric toothbrush from the shelf into another bag.
“Have you completely lost your mind?! What are you doing with my stuff?!” he shouted, snatching the bag of shirts from her. “Those shirts cost six thousand each, you’re creasing them, you idiot!”
Katya grabbed the other end of the bag, and they both pulled, each struggling for possession in the middle of the hallway, until the plastic began to stretch and turn white. Ivan’s towel started to slip, so he caught it with one hand while still gripping the bag with the other.
“You told me yourself to leave if I wanted!” Katya yanked with all her strength, and the bag stayed in her hands. “And the apartment is mine, Vanya, all the documents prove it—look, here’s a fresh extract from today! So it’s you who’ll be leaving!”
“Without me you’ll be lost in a month!”
“Well, let’s see about that!”
She flung the front door open, dragged the bag out to the landing, and hauled it over toward the garbage chute. Ivan dashed after her in just a towel, then realized, rushed back inside, and when he returned in sweatpants and a T-shirt, there were three overstuffed bags by the chute, and Katya was pulling a fourth—this one full of shoes and sneakers clattering like firewood inside.
“Katya, stop! Katya, I said enough, I have to leave in an hour!”
He tried to toss one of the bags back into the entryway, but Katya blocked the door and shoved him in the chest with both hands. He stumbled backward and stepped barefoot onto the cold tile of the landing. That was all the time she needed—she slammed the door shut and turned both locks.
For ten minutes Ivan pounded on the door with his fist, then his foot, then his fist again. Then Katya heard him talking on the phone with someone, his voice rising to a shriek.
“Gena, you have to come here right now! Yes, right now! She kicked me out, my stuff’s out on the staircase! Who cares if you’re at your dacha, I’m standing here barefoot!”
Through the peephole, she could see him shove his phone in his pocket and start pulling on his sneakers, having to fish them out of the bag first. Just then, footsteps sounded from below and the familiar shuffling of slippers on the stairs.
Lyudmila Petrovna appeared on the landing, still wearing her coat over her house robe, and stopped by the railing. She eyed the bags as if she’d arrived at the opening of an exhibition.
“Vanechka, what’s going on here, are you moving out?”
“Lyudmila Petrovna, do you see this? Do you see what’s happening?!” Ivan jabbed a finger at the door. “She kicked me out! Threw me onto the street over a normal family argument, like a stray dog! I supported her for seven years, paid for the renovations, carried groceries home in bags, and this is the thanks I get!”
Katya stood in the hallway, pressing her shoulder against the door. The renovations had been done with her work bonus and with a loan she paid off herself, and for the past three years Ivan only bought groceries on holidays when they had guests. She bit her lip and said nothing through the door.
Lyudmila Petrovna nodded, adjusted the collar of her coat, and asked with the most innocent curiosity:
“Vanechka, if you were going to leave, why didn’t you pack up your things in advance? Just last week you told me yourself that you had another woman and were moving in together soon.”
Ivan opened his mouth to answer, but didn’t get the chance, because just then the elevator doors opened on the landing. Vadim from the neighboring apartment stepped out with his work bag over his shoulder, took two steps, and tripped over the bag of shoes, sending a shiny dress shoe clattering noisily onto the floor.
“Hey, Vadim, good thing you’re here.” Ivan rushed to him as if to his last ally. “Tell me, man to man, is this normal? She made me a laughingstock in front of the entire building, did it on purpose! Just to make me a joke!”
Vadim picked up the shoe, turned it over in his hand, set it on top of the bag, and only then looked at Ivan. He held his gaze calm and steady, the way someone stares at a meter reading that just doesn’t add up.
“Vanya, is it true you invited your mistress over for dinner here?” he asked quietly. “My kitchen is right next door—yesterday morning, the whole building could hear it. You sent your wife off to a friend’s so you could have the bedroom—her own apartment! Did that really happen?”
Lyudmila Petrovna gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. Ivan turned red up to the collar of his t-shirt and started waving his hands.
“What does that have to do with anything?! You don’t even know her! You have no idea how much she tormented me!”
He rushed back to the door and started pounding on it with his open palm.
“Katya, open up! Open the door right now, I said! You have no right, I’ve lived here for seven years! Oleg is a lawyer I know, he’ll drag you through the courts! I’ll take half the furniture, I’ll take the kitchen, I built it with my own hands, I remember every screw!”
Katya put the chain on and opened the door just a crack. Ivan immediately stuck his face in the gap, and she saw that his eyes were wet from anger and his chin was trembling.
“Send me a list,” she said, her voice steady. “Write down which things you think are yours. The kitchen, the screws, the furniture—write it all. I’ll look for the receipts and let you know.”
“What list?! Are you sitting in your Accounting Department or something?! I’m trying to talk to you like a human being!”
“And I’m talking to you like an accountant. I’ll only discuss property and the utilities until the end of the month. We already talked everything else through—with Gena and Slava as witnesses.”
Ivan stepped away from the door, and his face suddenly fell, like a man who’s reached into his pocket for his wallet and found it missing.
“You’ll regret doing this to me, Katya. Do you hear me? You’ll come crawling back.”
“I’ll leave the mailbox key for you, too,” Katya replied, and shut the door.
From behind the door, you could hear him dialing a number and waiting through the rings. Then his phone chimed, and Ivan read a message out loud, sounding puzzled, almost like he needed someone to check if he was seeing it right.
“What do you mean you can’t today? Ira! What do you mean your mom’s here?! What mom, you didn’t say anything about your mom yesterday!”
He called again, but nobody picked up this time. Judging by his second call, Gena didn’t show up either, because Ivan was yelling into the phone that Gena had no heart if he thought his summer house was more important than his buddy.
An hour passed, and Ivan was still standing by the trash chute. In that time, Katya managed to mop the bedroom floor, change the bedsheets, and move his beanbag chair—from which he’d watched football—out onto the balcony. When she peeked through the peephole again, Ivan was begging Lyudmila Petrovna, who still hadn’t gone home.
“Lyudmila Petrovna, just until morning, please? Your entryway is huge, the bags won’t bother anyone. I’ll pick them up first thing, I swear.”
“Oh no, Vanya,” the neighbor shook her head and even stepped back toward the stairs. “I won’t keep other people’s family problems in my entryway—Katya would never be able to look me in the eye again. Call a taxi and take them to your buddy’s if he’s such a good friend.”
Vadim, who’d been smoking by the open window between the floors the whole time, stubbed out his cigarette on a can, came over, and silently picked up the two heaviest bags filled with shoes and winter clothes. Ivan grabbed the rest, and together they hauled everything to the elevator, banging the corners against the railing.
“Vadim, hey, thanks,” Ivan mumbled as he pressed the button. “Maybe we could grab a coffee downstairs somewhere? My treat, really.”
“No need, Vanya. I’m coming straight from work, the wife’s warming up dinner.” Vadim set the bags in the elevator cabin and stepped back out to the landing, brushing his hands off on his jeans.
The elevator doors closed, but a minute later, Katya’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She answered without saying a word and heard her husband’s hoarse voice against the backdrop of the intercom and street noise.
“Katya, can you bring my jacket out? It’s chilly here, and I’m just in a T-shirt. Please.”
She took his gray padded jacket off the hook, the one he’d been wearing since late September, and stepped out onto the landing. Ivan had already come back up the stairs, out of breath, phone in hand, and in his other hand Katya noticed a bundle of keys with the car fob and a separate long key for their top lock.
She handed him the jacket. As he grabbed it, Katya used her other hand to pull the apartment key from his fingers, took it off the ring, and returned the rest of the keys and the fob to him.
Ivan took a deep breath, about to say something, but just then the stairwell door creaked, and he saw Lyudmila Petrovna standing on her landing in a bathrobe with a towel over her shoulder, as if she’d just stepped out for a moment to check the mail. Ivan shut his mouth, pulled on his jacket, straightened the collar, and headed down the stairs, not waiting for the elevator.
Katya locked the door with both locks and returned to the kitchen. On the table next to a blue folder was a sheet of graph paper where, earlier that day while waiting at the government office, she’d started listing his things: winter tires on the balcony, fishing rods, bean bag chair, box of wires, exercise equipment under the bed. At the bottom, she added the coffee machine, paused, then crossed it out—she’d bought the coffee machine herself.
She reheated yesterday’s buckwheat and a cutlet in the microwave, sat down at the table, and managed to eat half when her phone buzzed again on the tablecloth. The screen showed a message from Ivan: “Do you even understand what you’ve done?”
Katya read the message, flipped her phone screen-down, and pulled her plate a little closer.