“Ilya’s mom and Lenka are coming on Friday. I’ve already bought their tickets,” Igor mentioned offhandedly, without taking his eyes off his phone as he lazily scrolled some feed. He was sitting at the kitchen table in a relaxed pose, one of those evenings when the world feels simple and predictable.
Veronika, who was wiping down the countertop at that moment, stopped. Her movements were always precise and measured, so that sudden pause was more noticeable than any loud noise. She slowly put the cloth into the sink.
“Okay. For long?” Her voice was even, without any emotion. Just a request for information.
“For a week. I was thinking,” he finally tore himself away from the screen and looked at her with the expression of someone bringing good news, “with Mom’s back, the couch will be torture for her. I remember how she complained last time. So we’ll give them our bedroom, and we’ll camp out in the living room for a while. The couch folds out, there’s enough room for everyone.”
He said it so easily and casually, as if he were suggesting they switch coffee brands. As if their bedroom, their bed, their only truly private space in this small apartment was nothing more than a piece of exchangeable furniture, a temporary resource for the comfort of visiting relatives. Veronika slowly turned to him. Her face, usually lively and expressive, froze, turning into a cold, impenetrable mask.
“I don’t get it. Why on earth should your sister and your mother live in our bedroom while you and I sleep on the couch in the living room? What kind of bed reshuffle is this supposed to be? No one but you and me is going to sleep in my bed, even if your mother’s spine crumbles into tiny pieces!”
Igor blinked in confusion. He’d been expecting anything – mild displeasure, maybe a request to buy a new mattress for the couch – but not this icy, direct refusal. He even smirked a little, taking it for a bad joke.
“Come on, what’s with you? It’s my mom. She’ll be uncomfortable…”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“Are you serious right now?” He put the phone down, his relaxed posture instantly snapping into tension. “Veronika, my mom has back problems. Be human. They’re my family. This is just basic hospitality.”
“Hospitality is the couch in the living room and the folding bed in the kitchen that you can bring in from the balcony,” her voice didn’t rise, but every word fell into the kitchen silence like a heavy stone. “Our bedroom is our bedroom. Not a hotel. Not a ward for all your relatives and their real or imaginary illnesses.”
He stared at her, confusion and rising anger mixing in his eyes. He was used to his “requests,” especially those concerning his family, always being fulfilled. He didn’t ask, he informed. And it always worked. But now he’d run into a dead wall he could neither bypass nor break through.
“What’s the big deal? We’ll sleep on the couch for a week, your crown won’t fall off,” he tried to turn it into a joke, but it came out strained and mean.
“Maybe yours won’t. I’m not going to sleep in a walkthrough room while your relatives lounge in my bed. Especially your sister. As far as I know, her back is in perfect working order. Or does she also need to be urgently laid on an orthopedic mattress for preventive care?”
Igor jumped up. His face flushed.
“I’ve already decided everything! They’re coming to me, to my home! And I’ll be the one to decide who sleeps where here!”
“Then decide,” Veronika replied calmly. She no longer looked at him. Her gaze was directed somewhere toward the hallway leading to the bedroom. “You’ve heard my decision.”
She turned and left the kitchen without another word. Igor was left standing alone in the middle of the room, stunned not by shouting, but by this cold, absolute disobedience. He heard the door to their bedroom close. Oh well, he thought, clenching his fists angrily. She’ll sulk and get over it. By Friday she’ll cool down. Where’s she going to go? He was absolutely sure the last word in this home had always been his. And he had never been so wrong.
The wall of silence Veronika built that evening turned out to be sturdier and thicker than Igor could have imagined. Thursday morning did not begin with reconciliatory hugs or even a tired truce, but with a viscous, icy quiet. She moved around the apartment like a shadow; her actions were precise and free of any fuss. She made breakfast for herself, poured coffee only into her own cup. When he tried to start a conversation, tossing a phrase at her back – “Come on, are you done sulking yet?” – she didn’t react at all, as if he were empty space, part of the furniture. It was worse than yelling. It was a complete, total annulment of his presence.
When the front door slammed behind him and the hum of the elevator died away in the stairwell, Veronika counted to a hundred. Slowly, methodically, giving him time to get far enough away. Then she went into the living room and opened her laptop. The air in the apartment seemed to change, becoming her territory alone. She was no longer a victim of circumstances; she was becoming their architect. Her fingers quickly ran across the keyboard. The search query was short and businesslike: “Urgent installation of mortise lock in interior door Moscow.”
She ignored the first few ads, looking for a company with good reviews and the note “technician within a few hours.” After choosing a number, she dialed it without the slightest hesitation.
“Good afternoon. I need a technician for today,” her voice sounded as if she were ordering grocery delivery. “Installation of a mortise lock in an interior door. Standard wooden door.”
On the other end they said something about possible time windows.
“The earliest one works for me,” she cut in. “Let’s say in three hours. And I need the technician to be on time.”
She gave the address, ended the call, and closed the laptop. No nerves, no remorse. She went to the window and looked out at the gray cityscape. She wasn’t thinking about what Igor would say. She wasn’t thinking about his mother. She was thinking about the sound a key makes when it turns in a lock. About the pleasant weight of that key in her palm. About that physical, indisputable boundary no one could cross without her permission.
Exactly two hours and fifty minutes later, the intercom buzzed. On the doorstep stood a sullen middle–aged man with a large toolbox. He nodded silently and stepped inside, giving the hallway a professional, assessing glance.
“Show me the door.”
Veronika led him to the bedroom. He opened his box, and the apartment filled with the smell of machine oil and cold metal. He laid out his tools on the floor with a surgeon’s precision: drill, bits of different sizes, chisels, measuring tape, square. The whole procedure was routine and therefore all the more irreversible. He held a template up to the door, made pencil marks. Then came the shrill, high-pitched screech of the drill biting into the wood. The air smelled of hot wood shavings.
Veronika didn’t leave. She stood leaning against the hallway wall, watching his every move. How he carefully chiselled out a niche for the lock, blew away the fine dust, tried on the shiny chrome mechanism. At that moment her phone vibrated. On the screen: “Igor.” The message was short: “Everything okay? Don’t sulk. We’ll talk tonight.” She didn’t even smirk. She just swiped the notification away.
The technician finished the job. He opened and closed the door several times, checking the latch, then slid the key into the new, shiny cylinder. A clear, muffled click sounded. The sound of absolute completion.
“Check it.”
Veronika came closer and took the key from his hand. It was still warm. She herself inserted it into the lock and turned it. The lock clicked obediently in response. She silently handed the man the bills she had counted out in advance. He took the money, packed his tools, and left just as silently. Veronika was left alone in the hallway, looking at her door – now truly hers. In her hand lay three identical keys in a small sealed packet. She had no intention of sharing.
Igor was in an excellent mood. He was bringing his family. He was a good, caring son and brother. He drove confidently, throwing satisfied glances in the rearview mirror at his mother, Lyudmila Pavlovna, and his sister Lenka in the back seat. Lyudmila Pavlovna spent the whole trip predictably moaning, complaining about the bumps in the road and how her back was stiff. Lenka stared silently out the window, her face showing a bored anticipation – she wasn’t going so much to visit her brother as for a free week of fun in the capital. Igor was deaf to these nuances. For him, everything was working out perfectly. Veronika, of course, had sulked, but he was sure that by their arrival she would pull herself together. She wouldn’t make a scene in front of his mother.
“Well, here we are, almost there,” he declared cheerfully as he turned into the courtyard. “We’ll bring the stuff up, Mom will lie down right away and rest from the road on a normal bed.”
He parked, jumped out of the car and, with exaggerated care, opened the back door. He helped his mother out and grabbed the heaviest suitcase. He felt like the head of the family, solving important problems, master of the situation. In the elevator, he chatted brightly about their plans for the evening, about how Veronika had surely cooked something tasty. All this fuss and chatter were his way of drowning out the tiny worm of doubt that still stirred deep inside after the morning conversation.
He opened the apartment door with his key, his face split in a wide, welcoming smile.
“Veronika, we’re here! Come greet our dear guests!” he announced loudly, stepping into the hallway and letting his relatives go in ahead of him.
And at once the smile slid off his face. Veronika was standing in the middle of the narrow hallway, exactly halfway between them and the bedroom. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t bustling around. She was just standing there, dressed in simple home clothes, her arms folded across her chest. Her posture was completely calm and completely unyielding. She looked less like a hostess greeting guests and more like a guard on duty. The air in the apartment, which Igor had expected to be warm and filled with the smell of dinner, was cool and completely neutral.
“Oh, finally,” sighed Lyudmila Pavlovna, taking a step forward and setting her bag on the floor. “Igoryusha, take me through, quick, I’ll at least lie down, my back is killing me.”
Still thrown off by his wife’s strange behavior, Igor nodded automatically and moved ahead, intending to go around Veronika and open the bedroom door. But she didn’t move. He ran into the invisible wall of her presence.
“Veronika, why are you standing here? Let us through,” he muttered, and at that moment his gaze, and then the gazes of his mother and sister, slid past her shoulder.
On the white door of their bedroom, just below the handle, a foreign, shiny “eye” of metal gleamed. A new mortise lock. Its chrome surface flashed predatory in the hallway light. Around it were fresh, barely noticeable scratches in the paint – mute witnesses of the recent, rough installation. It was so unexpected and so absurd that Igor’s brain refused for a second to accept reality. The hallway was filled with absolute silence, broken only by the humming of the refrigerator in the kitchen.
“What is this?” he breathed. The question wasn’t addressed to Veronika, but to the universe.
And then Veronika spoke. Her voice was as even and cold as the gleam of the new lock.
“Since you decided that our bedroom is a public thoroughfare, I was forced to take measures to protect my personal space.”
She slowly, with pointed deliberation, raised her hand. In her palm lay a single key.
“This is my key,” she said, looking straight into Igor’s stunned eyes. She demonstratively ignored the two women frozen behind him. “You don’t have one. There’s a folding bed in the kitchen, I brought it in from the balcony. There’s a couch in the living room. You can draw lots to see who gets which.”
She paused, letting each word soak into the air, become part of the new reality of this apartment. Then her lips curved in a barely noticeable, icy smirk.
“Welcome.”
Without waiting for an answer, Veronika smoothly turned, took a step toward the bedroom door, slid the key into the lock. The lock clicked obediently. She went inside and closed the door behind her. And immediately, from the other side, there came a second click, deafening in its finality. It was the sound of the inside bolt turning. The sound of a sprung trap. Igor, his mother, and his sister were left standing in the hallway among their bags and suitcases, staring at the smooth, impenetrable surface of the door that that very morning had still been shared.
The click of the lock sounded in the stunned silence of the hallway like a gunshot. For a few seconds the three of them – Igor, his mother, and his sister – just stood there, staring at the smooth white plane of the door that had turned into an impregnable fortress wall. The suitcase slipped from Igor’s weakening hand with a crash and hit the floor. That sound snapped everyone out of their stupor.
“Has she lost her mind?” hissed Lenka, staring with barely concealed glee at her brother’s reddening face.
Igor didn’t answer. He took two steps forward and yanked the doorknob hard. The knob turned, but the door didn’t move an inch. He pulled again, with such force the mechanism creaked. Useless. Then he pounded on the door with the heel of his fist. The blow sounded dull and pathetic.
“Veronika! Open this door right now! Do you hear me? Open it this second!”
There was no answer. Not a sound came from behind the door. As if the room behind it were empty. As if Veronika weren’t there at all. That silence was worse than any scream. It was absolute, all–consuming, and it was driving Igor mad.
“Igoryusha, what is this…” began to lament Lyudmila Pavlovna, clutching her hand to her heart. Her bafflement was giving way to righteous fury. “Why are you just standing there? Do something! She has no right! This is your home! Break that door down!”
“How am I supposed to break it down?” Igor snapped without turning toward her. All his confidence, all his fake bossiness was gone, leaving only humiliation and rage. He started pounding on the door again, no longer holding back. “Veronika! I’m telling you for the last time!”
Then a voice came from behind the door. Quiet, calm, devoid of any emotion. It sounded so close it was as if she were standing right there, pressed against the door with her ear.
“The folding bed is in the kitchen. Sheets are in the closet in the hallway.”
And silence again. That phrase, with its everyday practicality, became the last nail in the coffin of his authority. She wasn’t arguing, wasn’t yelling, wasn’t justifying herself. She was simply stating a fact, as if explaining things to unreasonable children. She had already moved on to the next stage, while they were still stuck at the threshold of the previous one.
Igor recoiled from the door as if from fire. He looked at his mother, then at his sister, and saw in their eyes what he feared most of all: a mixture of pity and contempt.
“Well, boss,” Lenka drawled mockingly, deliberately sitting down on her suitcase. “Lead the parade. Who gets the folding bed and who gets the couch? Or are you going to show us now who’s really in charge here?”
“Shut up!” exploded Igor, spinning around to her. His face twisted. “At least you, shut up!”
“What did I say that was wrong?” she kept going. “You spent the whole ride telling us how you arranged everything, how you worked it all out. Well, we’re watching. Mr. Arranger.”
“This is your fault! Yours!” he shouted, jabbing his finger first at his mother, then at his sister. “Nothing’s ever good enough for you! One’s back hurts, the other wants entertainment! You show up with everything ready for you!”
Lyudmila Pavlovna gasped. Her face, which had been showing hurt, turned to stone.
“You’re saying that to me?” she said slowly, each word heavy with menace. “To your own mother? Because I came to visit you? You’re no man if your wife is running rings around you and slamming doors in your face! You let her climb up on your neck!”
“Oh, so I’m not a man now?!” Igor almost choked with rage. He wanted so badly to hit that damned door, but instead his anger found another, more accessible target. “And who raised me this way? Who drummed it into me my whole life that I owe everybody? I owe you because you’re my mother! I owe her because she’s my sister! I owe all of you! And does anyone owe me anything in this life?!”
He stood in the middle of the hallway, breathing hard, his chest heaving. Lyudmila Pavlovna stared at him with cold, alien eyes. Lenka took out her phone and, with exaggerated interest, buried herself in the screen, walling herself off from them. The family visit that was supposed to be a demonstration of his status and care had turned into a grotesque scene of mutual accusations.
Igor flung his hand in a gesture of defeat and went into the living room. He dropped onto the couch that had been intended for him and Veronika and covered his face with his hands. Lyudmila Pavlovna, lips tightly pressed together, went into the kitchen and looked with distaste at the folding bed set up on the floor. Lenka stayed in the hallway, staring at her phone. They no longer spoke. Three strangers, hostile to one another, locked in the same apartment, full of dense, hopeless silence. And behind the impregnable bedroom door, where the soft light of a night lamp was shining, there reigned a complete, unshakable and triumphant quiet…