Enough! I’m sick of it! Pack your stuff and run back to your mommy!” Misha’s voice, breaking into a shriek, slammed against the walls and bounced back, filling the little entryway with the smell of ozone, like after a thunderstorm. He stood with his legs braced, jabbing a thick finger toward the front door, his face red, swollen with rage, like an overripe tomato ready to burst. “This is my apartment, got it? Mine!”
Svetlana, who had been leaning against the doorframe and silently listening to his half-hour tirade, slowly straightened up. The movement was smooth, almost lazy, but there was a newly awakened strength in it. Her back went straight as a taut string, her chin lifted a little, and her shoulders settled. The gaze that had been tired and indifferent focused on him, turned hard as tempered steel, and unpleasantly cold. Misha even faltered for a moment at the sudden stab of that chill.
“Sit down, Misha. And shut your mouth,” she enunciated. Her voice was even, without a single tremor, and that calm made his own fury suddenly feel cheap and market-stall.
“What? Who do you think you are?!” he tried to wind himself up again, but the fuse had already burned down. “Get out of here, I said!”
“Stand still, Misha. I’m not going anywhere from this apartment! Both your parents and mine paid for it, so we’ll split it fifty-fifty, no matter what story you’re inventing right now.”
She took a step forward, and Misha involuntarily backed up to the wall. The gap between them seemed to fill with ice.
“So listen carefully, because I won’t repeat myself,” Svetlana went on, looking him straight in the eye, and he suddenly felt not like the man in charge but like a teenager caught misbehaving. “From this minute we are not husband and wife. We are neighbors. Neighbors in a communal apartment forced to share the common space until it’s sold and the money is divided. And I strongly advise you not to touch my things. You don’t touch my half of the fridge. You don’t peek into my pots. And don’t you dare eat any of my food. Because from this second everything ‘ours’ is over. The division of property has begun. Clear?”
He blinked silently, at a loss for words. The script he’d prepared—in which she cried, begged, and he magnanimously threw her out—crumbled to dust. Standing before him was a completely different, unfamiliar person.
Svetlana walked past him without another glance and went to the kitchen. Misha heard the confident click of a cabinet door. She came back with an open packet of oatmeal cookies in her hand. Unhurriedly, she crossed to the couch where, five minutes earlier, he’d been sitting feeling like lord and master, and settled on its edge. With a characteristic click she turned on the TV. Some silly quiz show popped up on the screen.
She bit into a cookie. The loud, defiant crunch sliced through the tension in the room. Svetlana watched the screen, at the host’s dead smile, and her face showed nothing but mild boredom. She had completely, demonstratively erased him from her world.
Misha stood in the middle of the room like an idol. Air left his lungs with a rush. The war he’d so confidently started had just shifted into a new, cold, and incomprehensible phase. And he realized with horror that in this war he was unarmed.
A week passed. A week of thick, viscous silence that was louder than any shouting. The apartment, once a shared nest, turned into a demarcation zone, divided by invisible but absolutely real boundaries. They moved through it like two feuding ghosts accidentally locked in the same crypt. In the mornings in the kitchen they operated with the precision of sappers, trying not to cross paths, not to meet each other’s eyes, not to brush a hand against the other’s cup.
The refrigerator became a visible map of their split. The right side, Svetlana’s, was a model of order: containers of food labeled with marker, neatly wrapped vegetables, a bottle of good wine. The left, Misha’s, turned into a chaotic pileup: yesterday’s pizza in a box, a lone bag of dumplings, and an opened pack of sausages. For the first couple of days Misha, out of habit or petty malice, took her milk. She didn’t say a word. The next morning a new carton appeared on the shelf, with “SVETA” written on it in black marker. He snorted, but he didn’t touch it again.
The bathroom became another battlefield. He deliberately left splashes on the mirror and the toothpaste cap off. She, coming home from work, wiped everything down without a word and then set his towel out in the hallway as if it were something contagious. Small pricks, silent blows that irritated and unbalanced far more than open quarrels. He could feel himself losing control, his status as master of the house evaporating day by day. He tried to assert himself by turning the soccer match up full blast when she sat down to read in the living room. Svetlana simply got up, put on her headphones, and came back to the couch, disappearing into her own world and leaving him alone with the stadium’s roar, which now seemed stupid and out of place.
The breaking point came on Thursday. Misha came home from work angry and exhausted—he’d been dressed down at a meeting like a schoolboy. He walked into the apartment, tossed his keys on the console, and, by force of years-old habit, headed to the bedroom to change. His hand, moving on autopilot, closed around the cold brass of the doorknob.
It didn’t give. He pressed harder. Nothing. The door was locked. For a moment he froze, not believing it. Then he yanked again, hard enough to nearly wrench his wrist. The dull thud of wood against the frame confirmed the obvious. He looked closer and saw what he’d missed at first glance: where the old, wobbly lock had been there now gleamed a new, shiny cylinder.
A cold wave of rage rose from his gut, searing his insides. He spun around and stormed into the living room. Svetlana was sitting in an armchair with a laptop on her knees. She looked up at him, and there was no fear or surprise in her eyes. Only calm expectation.
“Have you completely lost it?” he hissed, trying to keep his voice down, though it trembled with anger. “You changed the lock? In our bedroom!”
“Yes, I did,” she said evenly and dropped her gaze back to the screen as if their conversation mattered less than an email.
“What the hell? On what grounds? This is my apartment too! I have the right to go into any room!”
She closed the laptop then. Slowly, with a soft click that sounded like a shot.
“First, it isn’t ‘our’ bedroom anymore. It’s my room. You chose yours yourself when you hauled your things to the couch. And second”—she paused, staring him down—“I don’t want a neighbor who thinks it’s normal to scream in the middle of the night and try to throw me out of my home to have access to my things while I’m asleep. Call it a safety measure. For peace of mind.”
He opened his mouth to bellow, to pour out everything boiling inside him, but the words stuck in his throat. She had disarmed him with her icy, impenetrable logic. To her he wasn’t a husband, not even an enemy—just… a potential threat. A stranger. And he stood in the living room, looking at the woman who, with one decision, had locked him out not only of her room but of their entire former life.
Misha paced the apartment like a lion shut in too small a cage. The couch, his forced domain, creaked under him every night, reminding him of his shameful banishment. The bedroom wall, behind which now lay foreign, inaccessible territory, felt like a monolith that mocked him with its silence. He tried everything: ignoring Svetlana, sniping at her, talking loudly on the phone with friends as he groused about “bitchy women,” but she was as impervious as bulletproof glass. His pitiful attempts to sting her simply bounced off without leaving a scratch.
Having lost every skirmish on the local level, he realized that he couldn’t take this fortress alone. He needed heavy artillery. A force no woman, he was sure, could withstand. And on Saturday morning that force materialized on their doorstep.
The doorbell rang long, insistent, proprietary. Svetlana, sipping coffee in the kitchen, didn’t even flinch. She knew who it was. Misha dashed to the door and flung it open. On the threshold stood his mother, Galina Semyonovna—a stout woman with a towering beehive of a hairdo and a face fixed in an expression of outraged virtue. She came in without taking off her shoes and swept her gaze around the entryway as if conducting a sanitary inspection.
“Well, hello, son. I take it things are lively here?” she said, looking over his shoulder straight toward the kitchen.
“Come in, Mom,” Misha muttered, feeling a surge of strength. Reinforcements had arrived.
Galina Semyonovna steamed into the kitchen like an icebreaker and stopped opposite Svetlana. The latter set her cup down and lifted a calm gaze to her mother-in-law.
“Hello, Galina Semyonovna.”
“Hello, Svetlana, hello. And how long is this circus going to go on?” the mother-in-law began without preamble, planting her hands on her hips. “Misha told me everything. Changing locks, are we. Not letting your husband into his own bedroom! Who do you think you are?”
“I don’t think I’m anyone special. I’m simply ensuring my own safety,” Svetlana replied in the same level tone.
“Safety? From whom? From your own husband?” Galina’s voice started climbing in decibels. “Did he lay a hand on you? No! Did he call you a bad name? Maybe he did, but you drove him to it! A normal wife smooths things over, shows some wisdom, and what have you done? Declared war!”
Misha stood in the doorway, watching with satisfaction. There it was! His mother would set everything straight. She knew how to press on guilt, on conscience, on public opinion. There was no way Svetlana could stand up to that.
“Galina Semyonovna, Misha’s and my relationship is between Misha and me. We’ll sort it out ourselves,” Svetlana said as if explaining a self-evident truth to a child.
“You two? You’ve already sorted it out!” the mother-in-law threw up her hands. “You just erased a person from your life! And have you forgotten that we, his parents, broke our backs to buy you this apartment? We put in our last kopeck, lost sleep at night—thought it was for a family, for grandchildren! And you? You’re wrecking the nest!”
She paused, waiting for an effect—tears, remorse, anything. But Svetlana only tilted her head slightly.
“No one has forgotten your contribution. Just as no one’s forgotten my parents’ contribution. Which, by the way, was exactly the same amount. So when the apartment is sold, you’ll get your share back. To the last kopeck. No one is claiming what’s yours.”
The cool, businesslike tone made Galina falter for a moment. Her time-tested manipulations were shattering against calm logic.
“Oh, so that’s your tune now! You’ve counted everything already! Planning to sell!” she fumed. “And what about my son? Where’s he supposed to go? Out on the street? You’re throwing him out!”
“I’m not throwing anyone out. I’m proposing a civilized division. Everyone gets what’s theirs and goes their own way,” Svetlana stood up, took her cup, and went to the sink. “And now, excuse me, I have things to do.”
That was the last straw. Galina flushed a dark red; her face contorted.
“You… you’re just ungrateful! We poured our souls into you, treated you like a daughter! And look what you are! Cold, calculating! Misha, do you see? Do you see who you married? She’ll drag you all through the mud without batting an eye!”
Seeing his trump card beaten and his mother driven to white heat, Misha felt a wave of sticky, helpless despair. The two of them stood there in the kitchen, yelling, accusing, while she simply washed her cup, and the sound of running water was the only answer to their hysteria. Svetlana turned off the tap, carefully dried her hands on a towel, and, without looking at them, left the kitchen.
The united front suffered a crushing defeat.
His mother’s visit brought Misha no relief. On the contrary, it only worsened his position. When Galina left, tossing a spiteful “Deal with your shrew yourself!” over her shoulder, he felt sticky, powerless panic. His last hope, his unquestioned authority, had been ground to dust against Svetlana’s calm indifference. He was left one-on-one with an enemy who didn’t fight by his rules. An enemy who won simply by existing.
He spent several days in apathy, wandering aimlessly from living room to kitchen and back. He watched her as she cooked her dinner and saw not a wife but a self-contained stranger. She sliced vegetables, and the knife in her hand moved sure and precise. She brought home delicacies from work, ate them alone while reading, and there was simply no place for him in her world. His anger burned out, leaving only a cold, heavy emptiness in which something new and ugly grew—the desire not just to win, but to destroy. To ruin what mattered to her since she had ruined his world.
More and more often his gaze stopped on the kitchen. Not the whole kitchen—the cabinetry. Pale solid-wood fronts, clever little drawers, a perfectly fitted countertop. Her father, a cabinetmaker, had built that kitchen. He’d tinkered with it for three months, coming over after his day job to draw, saw, and varnish. Svetlana had fluttered around him then, proud and happy. That kitchen wasn’t just furniture. It was a tangible piece of her former, happy life. A monument to her father’s love. And Misha knew it.
On Friday evening he waited until she went into the shower. The sound of running water became his signal. He took his pack of cigarettes from the shelf, went to the table, and lit one. For a few moments he stared at the smooth, polished surface. Then, slowly, with sadistic relish, he pressed the glowing tip to the wood. A acrid reek of scorched varnish and burnt wood hit his nose. He held the cigarette there until it went out, leaving an ugly black burn on the flawless surface. But that wasn’t enough.
He found a screwdriver in the tool drawer. He went to one of the upper cabinets, jammed the metal tip into the gap at the hinge, and leaned hard. The wood groaned in protest and the door, with a crack, dangled from a single hinge, crooked and pitiful. He stepped back, assessing the result. Better already. Then he pulled his keys from his pocket and dragged the bunch across the front of a lower drawer, leaving a deep, ragged scratch. He did it without shouting, without rage on his face. His actions were cold, methodical, and terrifying in their deliberateness.
When Svetlana came out of the bathroom, he was already sitting on the couch, staring dumbly at the TV. She walked into the kitchen to pour herself some water and froze. Misha heard her breath cut off. He waited. For screams, for crockery smashing. But the kitchen was silent. Thick, heavy silence, scarier than any scandal. A minute later she appeared in the living room doorway. Her face was white as a sheet, and her eyes, no longer cold but turned into two dark pits with icy fury sloshing at the bottom, fixed on him.
“What is that?” Her voice was quiet, but it sliced his nerves like a scalpel.
Misha shrugged without taking his eyes off the screen.
“What ‘what’? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Maybe it did it itself.”
She came up slowly and stood right in front of him, blocking the TV.
“I asked what that is in the kitchen?” she repeated, and new notes crept into her voice—metallic ones.
“Oh, that,” he drawled lazily, finally deigning to look at her. “Yeah, well. Opened a door the wrong way. Dropped a cigarette. It happens.”
He expected anything but what followed. She didn’t scream. She smirked. A terrible, crooked smirk.
“You’re pathetic, Misha. So pathetic and worthless you can’t even imagine. You thought you ruined my furniture? You missed the point. You just burned and broke with your own hands the last thing that tied you to the notion of ‘human.’ You’re no warrior, no man—you’re not even an enemy. You’re a petty mischief-maker. A vandal who can only spoil what he didn’t create. Because you don’t know how to create anything.”
She spoke evenly, stamping out each word. And he sat there realizing this was the end. Not a divorce, not a separation. A sentence.
“You can take everything right now,” she went on in the same lethally calm tone. “All your things. And leave. Because tomorrow I’m changing the lock on the front door. And if you try to come in, I won’t call the police. I’ll call my father. And I’ll just tell him what you did to his work. And he, unlike you, is a simple man. He won’t waste time explaining.”
She turned and went to her room. And Misha stayed on the couch, staring at the black screen of the TV she’d turned off. He stood in the middle of the apartment he himself had desecrated and, for the first time in all this time, realized with terrifying clarity that he had lost. Completely and irrevocably.