— Sveta, come on, don’t start right away. Mom just asked what we’re having for dinner,” Denis’s voice was coaxing, almost pleading. He could already feel the air thickening in their tiny kitchen, turning dense and viscous, like cooling kissel.
Sveta didn’t answer. In silence she stirred a saucepan of thick, dark ruby sauce where chunks of beef and wrinkled prunes—like big black pearls—were simmering. The aroma was heavy and spicy, promising something festive and almost otherworldly. She’d spent nearly three hours on the dish after work. Not because she expected praise—that hope had died long ago—but out of some stubborn need to prove to herself that she could. That she could be a good homemaker, a good wife, that she could create comfort where it was systematically scorched out with napalm made of “polite advice.”
The doorbell rang exactly on schedule, to the minute. Anna Petrovna was a creature of ritual. Her Wednesday visits were as immutable as the change of seasons. Denis hurried to the entryway, and Sveta turned off the heat under the saucepan and took a deep breath—so deep it almost made her dizzy. She braced herself.
Anna Petrovna didn’t enter the kitchen right away. First, as usual, she inspected the hallway, running a finger along the shoe rack. Then she went into the room to make sure her Denis wasn’t living in dust. Only then did she appear in the kitchen doorway, like an auditor arriving at a failing enterprise. Her gaze was quick and sharp, like a bird of prey. It swept over the countertop, paused at the sink, assessed the cleanliness of the stove, and finally settled on the pots.
“Good evening, Svetochka,” her voice was soft, almost affectionate—but that affection carried a draft. “Something smells unusual today. Not borscht?”
“Beef with prunes, Anna Petrovna,” Sveta answered evenly, setting plates on the table.
Her mother-in-law stepped up to the stove. This was the main act of her performance. She didn’t ask permission. She simply lifted the lid of the saucepan, peered inside, then took a clean knife from the stand and hooked a drop of sauce with the tip of the blade. She didn’t taste it so much as examine it—bringing it to her lips and then immediately wiping the knife with a napkin in disgust. Then she clicked her tongue—a quiet, barely audible sound that, to Sveta, was louder than a warning bell.
Dinner passed in near-total silence, broken only by the clink of forks on plates. Denis ate with appetite, trying with his whole demeanor to show that everything was fine, that this was just a normal family dinner. Anna Petrovna picked at the meat, cutting it into microscopic pieces, studying the cut surface carefully. Finally, chewing one such piece with the air of a martyr, she dabbed her lips with a napkin and delivered her verdict.
“The meat is a bit tough, Svetochka. You should’ve soaked it in kefir first, the way I did for Denis when he was little. He likes it tender. And the prunes… they add extra sweetness, drown out the flavor. Better to just stew it with carrots. Simpler and healthier.”
Sveta felt the food in her mouth turn into tasteless paper pulp. She looked at her husband. Denis was studying the pattern on his plate as if he’d never seen it before. He pretended not to have heard.
“Mom, why are you starting,” he finally forced out when the silence became unbearable. “It’s tasty.”
“I’m not starting—I’m advising,” Anna Petrovna replied with gentle reproach. “I’m trying for you. Experience is like that. Svetlana is still young, she’ll learn.”
Something inside Sveta—a thin string stretched taut—snapped with a dry little crack. Not with a clang, not a crash—exactly like that: quiet and final. She finished her portion without tasting it. She stood, gathered the plates, carried them to the sink. She moved like an automaton, while in her mind frantic, cold work was underway. A plan that had once seemed wild and impossible now crystallized with perfect clarity.
After they walked Anna Petrovna out and Denis shut the door behind her, he turned to his wife with that guilty, conciliatory smile she hated more than anything.
“Well, you know Mom… she doesn’t mean any harm.”
Sveta looked at him—at her husband—and for the first time truly saw him: not a loved one, but a stranger; a weak man who would never be her protection. He wasn’t a wall. He was a draft between her and his mother.
“Yes, Denis,” she said quietly, with no hurt or anger in her voice—only icy, absolute calm. “Now I do.”
A week passed in thinned-out air. Sveta and Denis moved around the apartment like two ghosts who’d accidentally ended up in the same space. They barely spoke. He felt guilty, but didn’t know how to fix it without rupturing his fragile alliance with his mother, so he tried to make meaningless small talk about the weather or coworkers. Sveta answered in monosyllables without lifting her eyes. She wasn’t sulking like an offended girl. She was working. Inside her, in the cold, quiet operating room of her soul, an amputation was underway. She was cutting away expectations, hopes, attachments. It was meticulous and painless work, because the organ being removed—her love and respect for her husband—had been dead for a long time and no longer bled.
The next Wednesday Denis came home with a heavy premonition. He hoped that Sveta, cooled down, would make something simple—something impossible to pick apart. Fried potatoes, pasta—anything, just to avoid a repeat. He stepped into the hallway and froze. On the kitchen table, like a monument to his collapsed hopes, stood a large flat cardboard box with the bright logo of a pizzeria. His gaze snagged on it instantly—foreign, wrong, like evidence left at a crime scene.
Sveta came out of the room. She was already in home clothes, calm and collected. She wasn’t making excuses. She wasn’t fussing. She simply took two large plates and two napkins from the cupboard, set them by the box, and looked at Denis.
“Do you want mushrooms and ham, or a different slice?”
He didn’t answer. He just stared at her, and in his eyes was a mix of confusion, anger, and fear of what was going to happen in half an hour. Then the familiar, methodical doorbell rang again.
The performance was short and expressive. Anna Petrovna completed her usual inspection route, entered the kitchen, and stopped dead. Her face didn’t twist with anger, as Denis expected. No—what appeared instead was cold, almost squeamish bewilderment, the look people give something disgusting and incomprehensible. She surveyed the table: two plates, two glasses of juice, and that vulgar box in the center. She said nothing. She simply pulled out a chair, sat down, and folded her hands in her lap, her whole posture declaring she was above this.
“Mom… maybe some tea?” Denis squeaked, feeling his face burn.
“No, thank you, Denis. I don’t drink tea with that… food,” Anna Petrovna enunciated, staring somewhere through the wall.
Sveta, perfectly composed, opened the box, put a big triangular slice on her plate, and began eating. With appetite, pinky slightly raised, as if she were in an expensive restaurant. After a painful hesitation, Denis took a slice too. The sound of his knife cutting through the crisp crust seemed deafening. They sat in complete silence: two eating, one performing offended virtue. Fifteen minutes later Anna Petrovna stood up.
“I should go, Denis. These smells are giving me a headache. Walk me out.”
When the front door closed behind her, Denis returned to the kitchen. He was pale now, no longer trying to sound gentle.
“What was that, Sveta?” he hissed, pointing at the box. “You decided to humiliate her? On purpose?”
Sveta carefully dabbed her lips with a napkin. She looked him straight in the eyes—clear and steady.
“Humiliate? No. I just wanted to eat.”
“Eat?! You couldn’t cook dinner like a normal wife? You knew she was coming! That was deliberate—it’s obvious! It’s disrespect!”
And then she laughed. Softly, almost soundlessly—but that laughter was scarier than shouting.
“Disrespect?” she repeated, getting up. She stepped close—now only half a step separated them. “Darling, I showed the highest respect for your mother’s culinary genius. I simply didn’t dare compete with her. I acknowledged her absolute, unquestionable superiority in the kitchen.”
He stared at her, stunned, not understanding where she was going. Sveta stepped back, looked around the kitchen as if saying goodbye, and delivered her verdict. Her voice was even, not a single note trembling—like she was reading a stock report.
“Yes, I ordered pizza. Because I came home from work and I want to eat, not listen to your mom tell me I boil potatoes wrong. If she’s such a culinary genius, then let her feed you. I’m not cooking for you anymore!”
“Sveta…”
“So starting tomorrow, you’ll have dinner at her place. Every day. And I’ll eat what I want, and where I want. And with no critical remarks on the side!”
Denis woke up to silence. Not the peaceful silence before the world stirs, but the ringing emptiness of an abandoned house. He expected the familiar morning rustle in the kitchen, the soft clink of cups, the smell of a kettle starting to boil. Nothing. Sveta had already left for work. On the table he found his mug and a jar of instant coffee. Beside it—a note: “I have an early meeting today.” No “good morning,” no little kiss at the end—just a statement of fact. He felt relieved. He thought she’d cool off during the day, that by evening the storm would pass and things would return to normal, if with a slight bitter aftertaste.
That evening he came home rehearsing reconciliation plans. Maybe buy her favorite pastries. Or just hug her and say she was wrong, but he forgave her. Yes—that’s the way. As a man he needed to be wiser. He unlocked the door with his key and immediately knew he was wrong. The apartment didn’t smell like food. At all. It smelled of dust, cold metal, and the faint, barely-there trace of women’s perfume left in the hallway from the morning.
He went into the kitchen. The table was pristinely clean. The stove—cold and dark. His heart dropped. He yanked open the fridge, hoping to see at least a pot of yesterday’s soup. There was no soup. But the fridge wasn’t empty. On the middle shelf, neatly arranged, were two small yogurt cups, a pack of cottage cheese, a sealed container of chopped vegetables, and a small piece of expensive cheese wrapped in wax paper. A dinner set. For one. For her. On the lower shelf lay his yesterday’s sausages, lonely in their cellophane. It said more than any argument, any shouting. It was a manifesto.
Sveta came out of the room. She wore a soft home set, hair damp from the shower and gathered into a bun. In her hands was a tray with that vegetable salad and cottage cheese. She walked past him to the coffee table in the living room, set the tray down, opened her laptop. She didn’t greet him. She didn’t ask how his day was. She simply continued living a life in which, it seemed, there was no longer a place for him at the dinner table.
“So what am I supposed to eat?” Denis’s voice was hoarse. He wanted it to sound threatening, but it came out pathetic.
Sveta didn’t turn around. She clicked the mouse, starting some series.
“There are sausages in the fridge,” she tossed over her shoulder without taking her eyes off the screen. “You can boil them.”
He stood in the middle of the kitchen, staring at her back, at the glowing laptop screen, listening to the foreign voices coming from it, and feeling a dull, helpless rage begin to boil inside him. He hadn’t just been deprived of dinner. He had been crossed out—humiliated by this methodical, cold self-care. He pulled out his phone, found “Mom” in his contacts, and hit call, feeling like a schoolboy complaining about a bully.
“Mom, hi. Do you have something to eat? I’m coming over.”
He dressed in silence. Sveta didn’t react to his words, as if they hadn’t been spoken. When he was already in the hallway, lacing his boots, she asked in the same even tone, eyes on the screen:
“Will you be late? Should I turn off the light?”
That’s how their new life began. Every evening, Denis went to his parents’ home as if by schedule. He came back late, saturated with the smells of his mother’s cooking—rich borscht, fried onion, cutlets. Those smells burst into their sterile apartment like reminders of a different, “right” life he’d been exiled from. Sveta met them with a slight wrinkle of her nose. She opened a window, aired the rooms out. They lived like neighbors sharing a rental by accident. She bought groceries for herself. He did the same for himself. In the mornings they collided silently at the coffee machine. In the evenings he watched TV in the living room while she sat with her laptop in the bedroom. The cold war was exhausting—and Denis was the one losing it. He’d lost comfort, coziness, the feeling of home. Sveta, on the contrary, seemed to bloom. She grew calmer, read more, started going to yoga on Saturdays. It infuriated him to the point of grinding his teeth. One day, coming back from his mother’s, he couldn’t hold it in.
“So—are you enjoying your freedom?” he asked with a caustic smirk, stopping in the bedroom doorway.
Sveta looked up from her book and studied him with a long, calm gaze. There wasn’t a drop of anger in it—only fatigue.
“Yes, Denis,” she answered simply. “I am.”
That fragile, hostile peace—built on silence and separate fridge shelves—couldn’t last long. It was too unnatural, too tense. And it collapsed on a Wednesday, as it should have. That evening Denis came home from work not alone. He entered like a triumphant commander, the face of someone carrying not just dinner but a final decision—an ultimatum wrapped in terry cloth. In his hands, carefully, as if it were a relic, he carried a large enamel pot bundled in two layers of towels to keep it warm. A thick, pervasive spirit rose from it—the aroma of rich borscht, the smell of his mother’s home, the smell of “normal life.”
He marched straight to the kitchen, set his burden down on the cold burner with a clatter, and looked at Sveta with defiance as she was taking her salad container from the fridge. There was no request or offer of peace in his eyes—only barely concealed glee at the thought of her capitulation.
“Mom sent you her signature borscht,” he announced loudly, as if to fill the whole kitchen with his words. “She said you should eat some normal food.”
“Normal food.” The phrase hit Sveta like a slap. This wasn’t just borscht. It was a flag planted on conquered territory. A declaration that her way of living—her salads, yogurts, her hard-won freedom from other people’s judgments—was “abnormal.” She slowly closed the fridge door. Looked at the pot bundled like a baby in those ridiculous towels. Then she looked at her husband’s shining face. He waited. Waited for her to break, to take a bowl, to accept the gift with gratitude.
She said nothing. For several seconds—which felt like an eternity to Denis—she simply stood and looked at him. There was no anger or hurt in her gaze. There was something else—terrifying in its calm: the cold curiosity of a surgeon examining a hopeless tumor before delivering the final verdict.
Then she stepped toward the stove. Her movements were smooth and precise. She took the pot in both hands, feeling its solid weight and the warmth seeping through the fabric. Denis spread into a satisfied smile, thinking she was carrying it to the table. But Sveta, without looking at him, turned and walked out of the kitchen. Not to the living room. She went down the hall and pushed open the bathroom door. Denis, not understanding, followed.
In the ringing silence of the small, white-tiled room, she walked to the toilet and lifted the lid. Then, with one short, deliberate motion, she tipped the pot. A thick, dark-red river of borscht—chunks of tender meat, potatoes, bright beet stains—poured into the white porcelain maw. The fragrant, steaming food—the symbol of maternal care and of Denis’s victory—vanished with a disgusting slurp into churning water. He watched, frozen, as Sveta pressed the flush button and a powerful stream carried away the last traces of his “normal food.”
She didn’t throw the pot. She carefully set it on the tile floor at his feet—empty, hollow, still warm. A drop of borscht slid down the white enamel side like a bloody tear.
“You… what did you do?” he managed, staring from the toilet to the empty vessel. His voice held not outrage but a genuine, childlike horror at the destruction of something sacred. “That was Mom’s…”
Sveta lifted her eyes to his. Her voice was quiet, even, and utterly lifeless.
“Take the pot back to her, Denis. Tell her her little boy is hungry again. And that he always will be—until he cuts the umbilical cord…