— This is for Stasik, this is for me, — Tamara Ilyinichna tore off a strip of masking tape and slapped it onto the vegetable drawer. — And this one is for you, Ulyana.
My name was written on the strip in black marker. In neat block letters, careful and precise, like a label on a pot of compote in a school cafeteria.
I froze in the middle of the kitchen with a grocery bag in my hand. In the space of one evening, my own refrigerator had turned into a warehouse with inventory numbers. The top two shelves were labeled “Stasik,” the middle shelf belonged to “Mom.” My mother-in-law had even labeled the butter dish in the door.
And I had been assigned the bottom drawer, where normal people kept carrots.
Tamara Ilyinichna was seventy-three. Before retiring, she had managed a school cafeteria, and ever since then she had kept track of everything that came within reach.
She arrived at our place on March first with two bags and a box of seedlings.
“For a month,” she had said. “Just while they replace the pipes in my bathroom.”
— Tamara Ilyinichna, why do we need labels? — I asked.
— So there’s order. I don’t touch yours, you don’t touch mine. Nobody takes anybody else’s things.
— Do I take your things?
— I didn’t say you do. — She pursed her lips. — I’m saying… there should be order.
Stas looked into the kitchen, saw the strips of tape, and burst out laughing.
— Oh, Mom’s done an inventory! Ulya, why are you making that face? It makes her feel calmer.
— It makes her calmer, — I repeated.
— We’ll put up with it for a month. Just one month, Ulya.
Nobody would ever call my husband a quiet man.
Quite the opposite. In one evening he talked more than I did in a week.
The problem was that he always said the same thing, just in different words.
Stas translated his mother into human language.
His mother said something rude, and Stas immediately turned it into a joke.
His mother got offended, and Stas explained that she was elderly and needed to be understood.
I had listened to that translator for fifteen years. By then, I knew every one of his phrases by heart.
The apartment belonged to Stas.
He had inherited the two-room apartment from his grandmother before we got married.
When we were planning the wedding, he said a sentence I remembered word for word:
“The home is on me. Everything else is on you.”
At twenty-five, I had thought that sounded fair. Almost romantic.
In reality, it was simply convenient.
For him.
He paid the utilities: 7,800 rubles a month.
Everything inside the apartment had been bought by me.
Including the refrigerator.
I had spent three months choosing it, comparing models and reading reviews late at night.
And now I had literally been allocated the carrot drawer.
By the way, I work at a dry cleaner’s reception desk.
I read the care label on a garment before I even greet the customer.
Fabric composition, washing instructions, restrictions—I see it all in two seconds.
I read the label “Ulyana” on that drawer just as quickly.
Its meaning was very simple:
In this house, my place was on the bottom shelf.
Only the floor was lower.
When my mother-in-law first arrived, Stas jokingly offered her his grandmother’s old folding bed from the balcony.
He had been promising to throw it away for eight years. By now, it had practically become part of the balcony, like the railing.
Tamara Ilyinichna didn’t even look at it.
She took the sofa in the small room.
And that ended the discussion about where she would sleep.
The next morning, I opened the refrigerator to get my cottage cheese.
It was in the vegetable drawer, between the carrots and a bunch of dill.
Meanwhile, the cheese I had bought the day before with my own money had already moved upstairs, beneath the “Stasik” label.
Under the new rules, it now belonged to my husband.
My fingers tightened around the refrigerator handle so hard my knuckles hurt.
I stood there staring at that cheese as if it were evidence.
Since when had my cheese become Stas’s?
One month, I reminded myself.
Just one month.
And I peeled off the first strip.
Then the second.
Then all the others, including the one on the butter dish.
Masking tape came off easily and cleanly—that was what it was designed for, to leave no trace.
I rolled the strips into a tight little ball and threw them into the trash.
The roll of tape and the marker my mother-in-law had left on the windowsill went into the top kitchen drawer.
Her jars of zucchini spread from the country house went down into the vegetable drawer.
And my cottage cheese returned to the middle shelf.
Tamara Ilyinichna entered the kitchen just as I was putting away the last jar.
— What is this?
— We don’t label shelves in this refrigerator, — I said. — I bought it. I’m not labeling anything inside it, and I suggest you don’t either.
— Well, look at you. — She folded her arms. — Acting like the lady of the house. In somebody else’s apartment.
— The apartment belongs to Stas. The refrigerator belongs to me.
My mother-in-law looked at me as if I had shortchanged someone on a cafeteria cutlet.
Then she turned around and walked into the small room, slamming the door a little harder than necessary.
I stayed behind alone.
The refrigerator hummed steadily, exactly as it had for years.
There wasn’t a single label on the shelves anymore.
Only my cottage cheese, her zucchini spread, and Stas’s beer in the door.
I stood there holding the handle and suddenly felt my shoulders relax.
It’s just a refrigerator, I thought.
But for some reason it mattered enormously to me that it had become simply a refrigerator again.
That evening, Stas and I were watching a TV series in the bedroom, half-lying on the bed.
He didn’t mention the morning once, and I thought the matter was over.
I was wrong.
My mother-in-law never came out of her room and skipped dinner.
Then, right before bed, Stas suddenly said while staring at the ceiling:
— Ulya. There’s something you should know. Mom rented out her apartment. Starting April tenth. For twenty-six thousand a month. We can’t exactly throw her out now.
— What about the bathroom? — I asked.
— The bathroom was finished a long time ago, — he said, turning toward the wall.
By June, one month had stretched into more than three.
I had stopped asking when my mother-in-law was going home.
She had tenants living there now.
They paid on the tenth.
I knew that for certain because every month at breakfast Tamara Ilyinichna read the bank notification aloud:
“Deposit: twenty-six thousand.”
She read it with expression, like a child reciting a poem at a school performance.
I was counting things too.
Only silently.
Before March, we spent around twenty-eight thousand rubles a month on groceries.
Now it was thirty-nine.
Eleven thousand extra every month, all of it coming from my card.
My mother-in-law contributed exactly zero rubles toward food.
Yet she knew very precisely that cottage cheese had to be five percent fat, the bread had to be Borodinsky with coriander, and the chicken had to be chilled.
“Not that frozen stuff of yours.”
Even her homemade zucchini spread never appeared on our table.
The zucchini spread was hers.
Her requests were also formatted like cafeteria supply orders.
In the mornings, strips of tape appeared on the refrigerator door:
“Out of kefir.”
“Buy Borodinsky.”
“Chilled chicken.”
Each time, she carefully returned the tape and marker to the upper drawer where I had put them.
Order was order.
One evening, I finally tried talking to Stas about the grocery expenses.
He waved his hands as if I had proposed renting his mother out along with her apartment.
— Ulya, what are you saying? Take money from Mom? She’s a pensioner!
— A pensioner who rents out an apartment, — I said.
— That’s her money. For emergencies. Don’t be petty.
I didn’t argue.
I simply kept counting.
The only time I got a break from all this counting was on weekends.
In May, the tenants moved out of the one-room apartment I had inherited from my aunt.
I decided to freshen it up and started going there to paint the walls.
It was empty and quiet.
Nobody read bank notifications aloud there.
One Saturday, I came home with paint under my fingernails and immediately noticed the drying rack on the balcony.
Something small and gray was hanging from it, about the size of something made for a teenager.
I stepped closer.
It was my coat.
I had bought that wool coat two winters earlier for 23,400 rubles.
I had taken care of it the way you take care of something you denied yourself for a long time before finally buying.
The care label clearly said: hand wash only, thirty degrees.
I had explained labels to her.
Back in April, when she wanted to boil-wash one of Stas’s sweaters, I had shown her every symbol and explained what each one meant.
— I freshened it up, — Tamara Ilyinichna said behind me. — Who puts dirty clothes away for the summer? It smelled like the street. I washed it at sixty degrees, with a spin cycle, just to be sure.
— Well, you certainly made sure, — I said.
— What’s wrong?
I took the coat off the drying rack.
It was still damp, heavy and stiff like a felt insole.
I held the sleeve against my arm.
It ended halfway up my forearm.
My hands gripped the matted wool so tightly I couldn’t unclench them.
How could she possibly have missed the care label sewn right into the collar?
Every day at work I explained to customers why wool could not be washed in hot water.
And now my own coat had been boiled like a packet of dumplings.
— It shrank, — I said.
— Only a little. You’ll stretch it out by wearing it.
Wool didn’t work like that.
I knew it as surely as the multiplication table.
In reality, the coat had become unsalvageable the moment she pressed the start button.
My mother-in-law didn’t even apologize.
She shrugged and went off to watch her TV show.
I opened the top kitchen drawer.
The tape and marker were lying exactly where I had left them in March.
I tore off a strip and wrote in large numbers:
“23,400.”
I stuck it to the collar.
Then I carefully folded the coat the way I folded customers’ clothes at work and placed it on my mother-in-law’s pillow.
That evening during dinner, Tamara Ilyinichna brought it into the kitchen, holding it at arm’s length like a wet floor rag.
— What is this supposed to mean?
— It’s not supposed to mean anything. That’s the price, — I said. — Your tenants will pay you on the tenth. Transfer it to me.
— Over some rag! — She turned toward her son. — Stasik, do you hear this? She’s demanding money from a pensioner!
— Ulya, come on… — Stas began.
— The coat cost twenty-three thousand four hundred, — I repeated. — Your mother ruined it. I want the money back.
— I’m not paying, — my mother-in-law snapped. — I don’t have that kind of money for rags.
Stas sighed as though the entire building, entrance and all, rested on his shoulders.
Then he pulled out his phone, tapped the screen, and my phone chimed.
A bank transfer from Stanislav.
Exactly the amount on the label.
— There. Done. Case closed, — he said. — Mom, don’t start. Ulya, you don’t start either.
Tamara Ilyinichna went to her room, throwing the coat over the back of a chair.
I sat alone in the kitchen, staring at my phone.
The money had arrived.
For once, I had actually said aloud something I normally swallowed together with my tea.
Inside, everything felt unusually level, like a room after a thorough cleaning.
But the satisfaction soured quickly.
It had been her son who paid.
Not her.
Her rental income would remain untouched that month, while Stas had simply paid for his mother’s laundry mistake out of our household finances.
That wasn’t justice, I thought.
It was just moving money from one hand to another.
The next morning, my mother-in-law spread butter on her Borodinsky bread and said casually:
— Stasik turns forty-eight in August. I’ve already invited Zhannochka and some people from his work. We’ll celebrate properly.
Nine people gathered around our table for Stas’s birthday.
I owned four chairs.
That morning I had borrowed five stools from our neighbor on the fifth floor.
She handed them over without questions, only asking whether we would return them by Monday.
I was used to counting.
It was practically a professional habit by then.
The guests were already seated.
Zhanna, Stas’s cousin, had come with her husband. Two of his colleagues were there with their wives.
My mother-in-law sat at the head of the table, in my usual place, with Stas beside her.
I sat on one of the neighbor’s stools at the edge, close to the kitchen so I could keep bringing food.
I had marinated the duck with apples the night before and watched the oven for half the day.
I had chopped the salads the previous evening, right after my shift.
During all that time, Tamara Ilyinichna had labeled her jars of homemade country-house pickles with tape so the guests wouldn’t confuse them with anything else.
Then she put them on the table as if they were the centerpiece.
To be fair, the pickles really were good.
I couldn’t take that away from her.
While the guests helped themselves to salad, my mother-in-law told Stas’s colleagues how she had raised him alone and supported them both on a single salary.
I had heard the story so many times I could have prompted her if she forgot a line.
Then she tasted my Olivier salad and announced to the whole table that it was a little dry and that one should never be stingy with mayonnaise.
Stas laughed and said his mother’s cafeteria Olivier had been legendary.
I said nothing.
I brought more bread.
— And what does Ulyana do? — one colleague’s wife asked politely.
— She sits at a dry cleaner’s, — Tamara Ilyinichna answered for me. — Takes in other people’s trousers.
The woman looked embarrassed and quickly complimented the pickles.
I thanked her as though nothing had happened, even though something unpleasant twisted inside me.
When the duck was carved, my mother-in-law tapped her fork against her glass and stood up.
— I want to make a toast to my son, — she said. — Forty-eight years old, and he hasn’t abandoned his mother. He took me into his apartment when I was having a hard time. Not everyone would do that, you know.
The guests nodded.
One of Stas’s colleagues raised his glass toward her.
— Some people, — Tamara Ilyinichna continued, looking directly at me, — have an empty one-room apartment of their own, yet they live with their husband and have everything handed to them. And they’re not even ashamed.
Zhanna had already started laughing behind her hand, although uncertainly, glancing between me and her aunt.
Her husband stared at his plate.
Someone coughed awkwardly into his fist.
— Mom, the things you say, — Stas chuckled and clinked glasses with her.
He didn’t even look at me.
Not one glance.
Not one word in my defense.
As always, he translated his mother’s insult into a joke.
But he didn’t translate me.
My cheeks immediately burned, hot blotches spreading all the way to my ears.
I sat on somebody else’s stool holding a fork.
A fork I had bought.
Everything handed to me?
Who exactly had bought everything that was being handed over?
The coat on the drying rack flashed before my eyes.
Eleven thousand extra every month.
My cottage cheese between the carrots and dill.
And the arrangement had been his idea.
He had invented it himself before the wedding and had even been proud of it.
I stood up.
The stool creaked.
The table went silent.
— Tamara Ilyinichna is right, — I said. — The apartment belongs to Stas. That’s true.
My mother-in-law nodded with satisfaction and raised her glass toward her lips.
— But the table you’re sitting at is mine, — I continued evenly. — And four of these nine chairs. The plates, the glasses, the forks. The refrigerator where this duck marinated overnight. The television you watched your show on yesterday. The home was Stas’s responsibility. Everything else was mine. That was our arrangement. Right, Stas?
Stas opened his mouth and immediately closed it again.
Zhanna choked back a laugh and buried her face in her napkin.
One of Stas’s colleagues suddenly became intensely interested in studying the jar of pickles with Tamara’s label on it.
— Enjoy your meal, — I said and sat down.
My mother-in-law turned pale and lowered her glass without taking a sip.
Stas cornered me in the kitchen while I was cutting the cake.
— You humiliated me. In front of the guys.
— No, Stas. I just explained who bought what.
— Mom was joking!
— So was I.
He stood near the refrigerator for a while, apparently searching for something to translate.
But he found nothing.
Then he waved a hand dismissively and returned to the guests.
I carried the cake out myself.
Stas blew out the candles looking as if the cake had been filled with mustard.
The guests left around eleven.
Stas went into the stairwell for some air.
My mother-in-law locked herself in her room.
I stood alone at the sink washing my plates one by one.
My hands were submerged in hot suds, yet inside I felt remarkably cool and calm.
I had said it aloud.
In front of everyone.
Exactly the way I thought it.
And nothing had happened.
The chandelier was still hanging exactly where it had always hung.
Around midnight, my messenger app chimed.
Zhanna had sent me a thumbs-up emoji and one word:
“Strong.”
I smiled at my phone.
But when Stas returned, he went to bed without a word and turned toward the wall.
I knew it wasn’t going to end there.
The next morning, my mother-in-law stopped in the kitchen doorway as she passed.
— Never mind, — she said. — We’ll see whose bed this really is.
On Monday, Stas delivered the news between soup and tea, like a weather forecast.
— Mom extended the tenants’ lease. Until next summer. Eleven more months. I mean, why should she sit there alone in an empty apartment?
— She wouldn’t be alone, — I said. — The tenants are there.
— Ulya, don’t nitpick. And on Saturday we’re going to the country house to dig potatoes. Are you coming?
— No.
— Fine. Mom and I will leave at seven in the morning. We’ll be back by evening.
On Wednesday, my mother-in-law spent the entire dinner holding her lower back.
Apparently the sofa in the small room had sagged, and her back was killing her.
Stas nodded sympathetically and gave her another cutlet.
Nobody asked me anything.
On Friday, I came home late after a long shift.
The door to our bedroom was wide open.
My mother-in-law was lying on the bed under my plaid blanket, looking at her phone.
The wardrobe door was open.
Her sweaters were already hanging in my section.
My things had been folded into a pile and moved onto a chair.
I went into the small room.
On the sagging sofa—the same one my mother-in-law had been sleeping on that morning—lay my pillow.
And on the pillowcase was a white strip of masking tape.
Written on it in black marker, in neat block letters:
“Ulyana.”
I stood there staring at the label.
My throat became dry and rough, as though I had swallowed the same felted wool from my ruined coat.
In spring, they had assigned me the carrot drawer.
Now they had labeled me and moved me to the bottom shelf.
Was I inventory now too?
— Ulya, don’t start, — Stas was already standing in the doorway. — Mom’s old. Her back hurts. We’re younger. We can put up with it for a year.
— A year, — I repeated.
— Eleven months. — He spread his hands. — And if you don’t like it, you’ve got your own one-room apartment.
I said nothing.
I counted.
It was the only thing I knew how to do anymore.
My mother-in-law had been living with us for six months.
Five rental payments.
One hundred and thirty thousand rubles deposited into her account.
Sixty-six thousand extra had gone toward food from my card.
Not one ruble from her.
And fifteen years of an arrangement under which everything else was my responsibility.
He had said it himself.
About my apartment.
His own words.
What else was there left to discuss?
— Fine, — I said calmly. — Live here together.
From the bedroom, from my bed, came my mother-in-law’s satisfied voice:
— Good girl. You should have done that ages ago.
Stas exhaled in relief and went to put the kettle on.
They both thought I had surrendered.
I was simply tired of always being the one who gave way.
That night, I barely slept on the sagging sofa.
I found a twenty-four-hour moving company on Avito and immediately booked them for Saturday at ten in the morning.
A Gazelle moving truck and two movers.
Then I sat down and made a list.
Some purchases appeared in my banking history.
Some were in my online store accounts.
The rest I remembered without help.
Refrigerator.
Bed and mattress.
Washing machine.
Sofa.
Television.
Table and chairs.
Microwave.
Total:
313,070 rubles.
Everything paid from my card.
Everything purchased for someone else’s apartment that I had honestly believed was our home.
At seven in the morning, the front door slammed.
Before leaving, Stas had spent a long time clattering buckets on the balcony, squeezing past his grandmother’s folding bed, while my mother-in-law stood in the hallway giving instructions about which gloves to take.
Then a car started outside.
The apartment became quiet.
The Gazelle was already downstairs at ten to ten.
The movers, two quiet men in blue jackets, worked quickly without asking unnecessary questions.
The refrigerator went first.
I had already put the food into our two insulated bags and placed them on the balcony. September was cool enough outside.
I stuck one of Tamara’s strips of masking tape onto one bag:
“Food. Stasik and Mom.”
I even remembered to include her zucchini spread.
Then the washing machine went.
The bed.
The sofa from the small room.
The television.
The table.
My chairs.
The microwave.
I had packed the plates, forks and pots into boxes myself before the movers arrived.
I had bought the kitchen cabinets too.
But they were permanently fixed to the wall, and ripping them out would no longer have been defending myself.
That would have been vandalism.
The gas stove stayed.
It had belonged to Stas’s grandmother and had been there long before me.
Stas’s armchair, which he had bought himself, remained beside the window.
And the folding bed.
I left his grandmother’s folding bed because it belonged to the apartment, not to me.
After all, they needed something to sleep on.
By one in the afternoon, the apartment was empty and echoing like a school gym after graduation.
Every footstep rang through the rooms.
Then I took Tamara’s roll of tape and marker again.
On the floor, where each missing item had once stood, I placed a label.
“Refrigerator. 2019. 64,990. Ulyana.”
“Bed and mattress. 2018. 58,000. Ulyana.”
“Washing machine. 2021. 41,500. Ulyana.”
I did the same where the sofa, table, television and microwave had been.
My handwriting came out neat and blocky.
My mother-in-law would have approved.
I transferred 9,800 rubles to the moving company.
Then I dropped the keys to Stas’s apartment into our mailbox downstairs.
And climbed into the cab of the Gazelle beside the driver.
We drove to my one-room apartment, where the walls still smelled of fresh paint.
Stas called shortly after eight that evening.
I was making the bed in my new place.
— What the hell have you done?! — He wasn’t speaking. He was shouting. — Mom is crying! The place is empty like a brand-new construction site! That’s marital property, by the way! I’m taking you to court!
— Go ahead, — I said. — I have records of everything, with dates and amounts. It’s more than three hundred thousand. The apartment was your responsibility. I didn’t touch it.
— What is Mom supposed to sleep on?!
— Your grandmother’s folding bed. You’ve been promising to throw it away for eight years. Now it finally has a purpose.
Somewhere beside him, my mother-in-law shrieked:
“Thief!”
I ended the call.
Then I opened the messenger app and blocked Tamara Ilyinichna without a second thought.
The phone fell silent.
I peeled the strip labeled “Ulyana” from the pillowcase and, for reasons I didn’t fully understand, stuck it onto the door of my refrigerator.
Then I lay down on my bed in my apartment.
For the first time in six months, I fell asleep without listening for footsteps behind the wall.
I was asleep almost instantly.
I slept dreamlessly until morning.
A month passed.
Stas bought a refrigerator on Avito for twelve thousand rubles.
It was old and hummed like a transformer station.
He sleeps on an inflatable mattress.
My mother-in-law sleeps on his grandmother’s folding bed.
I know this from Zhanna.
Aunt Toma calls her almost every day to complain.
The tenants are still living in her apartment.
Their lease runs until summer.
Zhanna called me on Tuesday.
— Ulyana, Aunt Toma is telling everybody that you even took the forks.
— I bought the forks too, — I said.
Zhanna paused, then gave a small amused snort into the phone.
I didn’t explain anything else.
Stas never went to court.
Once a week, every Sunday, he sends me the same message:
“Mom will move out by summer. Come back.”
Not once during that entire month has he asked me how I’m doing.
I don’t answer.
In the mornings, I drink coffee in my kitchen, at my table, sitting in one of my chairs.
The other three are still empty.
And strangely enough, I like it that way.
Nobody moves my cup.
Nobody checks what kind of cottage cheese I buy.
And the strip of masking tape with the word “Ulyana” is still stuck to the refrigerator door.
I keep meaning to remove it.
But somehow I never do.
Let it stay.
Now it’s true:
The refrigerator is mine.
And everything inside it is mine too.
Did I go too far by taking everything down to the last fork while they were out digging potatoes?
Or would they never have understood any other way who had actually bought what in that home?