Andrei slowly climbed the stairs to Yelizaveta Sergeyevna’s apartment. His mother’s friend had been calling for the third day in a row, insisting on a meeting. “A son’s duty”—those words had been etched into his memory since childhood.
“Come in, don’t stand on the threshold,” his mother’s voice sounded as imperious as ever. “See what you’ve done to your own mother?”
Andrei looked around the unfamiliar room, crowded with things salvaged from her former large apartment.
“Done to you?” He perched on the edge of the sofa. “I haven’t had anything to do with your life for eight years.”
“Don’t get smart with me!” his mother snapped, wheeling around. “If you’d married a decent girl from a good family, everything would be different! Your father wouldn’t have died from the distress!”
“Mom, you have a PhD,” Andrei tilted his head, studying her face. “Do you seriously think he had a heart attack because I got married? Or is it just easier for you to shift responsibility?”
“You… how dare you! I devoted my whole life to you, and you chose that… that worthless schoolteacher over your own mother!”
“I didn’t choose anyone over you, dear Mama. You gave me an ultimatum: either the bride you picked, or exile. Remember? Or has your memory already given out?”
As a child, Andrei was used to his mother’s commands. English three times a week, then swimming, then judo—Yelizaveta Sergeyevna copied the achievements of her friends’ children, forgetting the previous hobbies after a few months.
“Lizonka was made for love, not for work,” his father would explain when the boy wondered why his mother chatted on the phone all day while the housekeeper ran the household.
“Dad,” ten-year-old Andrei would ask, “why doesn’t Mom ever ask what I want?”
“Son, your mother knows better what you need. She’s an educated woman.”
“Then why doesn’t she work, if she’s educated?”
Pyotr Mikhailovich would only sigh and go back to his newspapers. He earned well at a construction corporation, providing his wife with a carefree life of beauty salons and restaurants.
Everything changed at university, when Andrei fell in love with Olya.
“That plain little fool from the teachers’ college?” Yelizaveta Sergeyevna grimaced as if she’d tasted something sour. “You’ve lost your mind! I forbid you to see her!”
“Mom, I love her.”
“Love!” she snorted. “I know better who suits you! That gray mouse doesn’t even know how to put on makeup! What will my friends think of us?”
“So now I’m supposed to marry a girl approved by your friends?” Andrei smirked. “Mom, I’m twenty-two, not twelve.”
“Until you come to your senses, you have no place in this house!”
“Wonderful. Just what I expected from a loving mother. Support and understanding.”
Andrei left and never returned. He and Olya married right after graduation, lived in a dorm, then rented apartments. His father quietly offered him money, but Andrei refused.
“Son, think it over,” Pyotr Mikhailovich pleaded during their rare café meetings. “Your mother is upset.”
“If she’s upset, she can meet Olya properly. Without sneers and cutting remarks.”
“You know how stubborn she is…”
“Dad, dear,” Andrei leaned toward him, “you’ve lived with this woman for thirty years. You still haven’t realized her ‘stubbornness’ is just egoism in a pretty wrapper?”
“Don’t talk that way about your mother…”
“How else should I talk about someone who won’t accept her adult son’s choices? Does she want to be picking my socks and my wife until old age?”
Only when the young couple decided to have a child did Andrei accept help. His father bought them a one-room apartment and got him a good job.
“Dad,” Andrei said as he took the keys, “I’m accepting this help only for the sake of our future child. But Mother won’t come to us until she learns to respect my choice.”
“When the baby is born, she’ll soften…”
“We’ll see. Though I don’t much believe in her capacity for metamorphosis.”
Over eight years Anyechka and Maksim were born, and they bought a three-room apartment on a mortgage. The children knew only their grandfather—the grandmother refused even to see them.
“Liza, stop being so stubborn,” Pyotr Mikhailovich would coax his wife. “The grandkids are growing and you don’t know them. Anya is already reading, and Maxim is so quick-witted…”
“Let that ungrateful wretch apologize and divorce that fool of his first! Then we’ll talk about grandkids!”
“Liza, they’re five and three already…”
“I don’t care! Until he comes to his senses, there are no grandchildren!”
When his father passed away, at the memorial service Yelizaveta Sergeyevna pounced on her son:
“You killed him! Drove him into the grave with your behavior! If you weren’t such an ungrateful brute, he’d still be alive!”
“Mom,” Andrei spoke quietly, each word distinct, “Dad died of a heart attack—of atherosclerosis, smoking, and stress at work. But if it’s easier for you to blame me—be my guest. You’ve always been good at burying the truth.”
“How dare you… At your father’s memorial!”
“At my father’s memorial, his widow is accusing his son of murder. That’s normal, right? Very Christian.”
They didn’t speak for two years. Then Andrei heard rumors about Roman—a suave man of about forty who was comforting the fifty-eight-year-old widow. No one quite understood what he had promised her, but first Yelizaveta Sergeyevna let him move into her apartment, then took out a loan for his “business.”
“Liza,” warned the neighbor, Aunt Valya, “there’s something I don’t like about your Roman. He talks too sweetly…”
“You’re just jealous!” Yelizaveta snapped. “Roman is an entrepreneur, he has his own business! Not like some losers!”
“I’m only saying it for your own good…”
“I’m a grown woman. I can judge people myself!”
When Roman disappeared with the money, the apartment went to cover the debts. And now his mother sat across from him in a stranger’s one-room place, surrounded by scraps of her former luxury.
“I raised you, fed you, set you on your feet!” Yelizaveta’s voice shook with rage. “Now it’s your turn to help! I’ve got nowhere to live!”
“You’ve got your friends. The very ones whose opinion mattered more than your own son’s happiness.”
“Friends aren’t obliged to support me! You are—my son! My only son!” She sprang to her feet. “I demand that you take me in!”
“Into the family you wanted nothing to do with for eight years?” Andrei stood up slowly. “Into the home where the grandchildren live—the ones you called ‘that fool’s kids’?”
“Don’t you dare talk to me like that! I’m your mother!”
“Being a mother isn’t a biological function, dear. A mother doesn’t disown her son over his choice. A mother doesn’t blame him for his father’s death. A mother doesn’t refuse to know her grandchildren. And you? You’re just the woman who gave birth to me. And that, I’m afraid, is where your motherhood ended.”
“You heartless egotist! Just like that wife of yours!”
“Olya? An egotist?” Andrei laughed. “A woman who’s worked at a school for eight years, raising children and running a household? Unlike someone who spent her whole life on her husband’s neck?”
That conversation led nowhere. Andrei flatly refused to register his mother at his address or—worse—let her move in.
“Andrei, dear,” Yelizaveta switched tactics, “I realize I was wrong. Maybe we could make peace? I’m ready to meet your… your Olya.”
“Mom, it’s late. Much too late. You’ve already insulted Olya in absentia hundreds of times. You deprived the children of a grandmother. Me—of a mother. Now you’re ready to do anything only because you’re without a roof over your head.”
“I’m truly remorseful!”
“Truly?” Andrei smirked. “And if someone gave you a house tomorrow, would you go right back to sincerely despising my family?”
She tried to prove in court that she had a claim to part of his apartment—the first purchase had used family money. It didn’t work. Andrei paid for a temporary place for three days, then arranged for her to stay, for a token fee, in an apartment belonging to an old woman who had moved to the countryside.
Walking into that flat, Yelizaveta all but cursed her son for the squalor.
“My God!” she moaned into the phone to a friend. “If only you could see the hole he’s dumped me in! Furniture from the last century, peeling wallpaper… I can’t live here!”
“Liza, what can you do? At least your son is giving you something…”
“Something?! He’s supposed to support me!”
A month later a summons arrived—his mother was demanding alimony of seventy thousand.
“Seventy thousand?” the judge raised an eyebrow. “On what grounds?”
“I’m used to a certain standard of living!” declared Yelizaveta. “My son earns well; he can afford it!”
“Ma’am,” the judge took off his glasses, “your son has two minor children and a mortgage. Fifteen thousand is what the law allows—his income won’t support more.”
“Fifteen?!” Yelizaveta screamed in the courthouse corridor. “I’ll starve to death on fifteen thousand! Do you want your mother to die like a dog?!”
“Then it’s time to look for a job,” Andrei replied evenly. “There’s this interesting thing—people get paid for it.”
“A job?! At my age?! You’re mocking me!”
“Olya has been teaching since she was twenty-two. At any age. And she’s the ‘gray mouse’ and ‘little fool,’ according to you. Don’t you think a PhD can handle what a ‘fool’ can?”
“You… you venomous snake! You’ve become just like your wife!”
“Thanks for the compliment. If I’m more like Olya, I’m lucky in my choice of wife.”
The court’s decision unexpectedly set Andrei free. He now paid the legal amount and bore no further obligations. But his mother’s visits—with demands for money, scenes, and accusations—poisoned the whole family’s life.
“Listen,” he said to Olya one evening, setting aside his work papers. “What if we move?”
“Where?” Olya looked up from the book she was reading to the children at bedtime.
“To Samara. They’re offering me a job there. Good terms, a solid salary.”
“And your mother?”
“My mother will get her fifteen thousand legally due in any city. Bank transfers work nationwide,” Andrei noted with a touch of irony. “But she won’t have a key to our apartment anymore.”
Olya embraced him. “I agree. It’ll be better for the children too. Anya will stop jumping every time the doorbell rings.”
“And Maxim won’t hide behind the couch at the sound of Grandma’s voice,” Andrei added. “Children shouldn’t be afraid in their own home.”
“When do we start packing?”
“I’ll submit my resignation in a week. I’ll settle everything within three months.”
Three months later, the apartment was sold and their things were packed. In Samara, a new job was waiting, a new school for Anya, a new kindergarten for Maxim. Above all, a life without constant fear of surprise visits and scenes awaited them.
As usual, Yelizaveta showed up without warning—with shouting and demands for extra money for treatment. She waved fresh doctor’s notes and pharmacy receipts.
“That little upstart won’t open the door again!” she muttered, mashing the doorbell. “That witch turned my son against me!”
A neighbor opened the door.
“Yelizaveta Sergeyevna? They moved two weeks ago.”
“Moved? Where?”
“Who knows. They didn’t leave an address. Just sold the apartment quickly and left.”
“What do you mean—didn’t leave it?! I’m his mother! I have a weak heart! I need money for medicine!”
“Well, the money is being transferred to you—that much I know,” the neighbor shrugged and shut her door. “Where they live, I don’t know.”
Yelizaveta rushed about the stairwell, calling her son’s former colleagues and Olya’s friends. No one knew anything—or pretended not to.
“How can you not know? You worked together!” she shouted into the phone at Andrei’s colleague.
“He quit and left. Where—he didn’t say. Maybe abroad, maybe another city.”
“He had no right! I’m his mother!”
“He had every right. He’s a grown man,” the colleague said calmly and hung up.
Meanwhile in Samara, Andrei was helping Maxim assemble a new construction set, Anya was doing homework at her desk, and Olya was preparing for tomorrow’s lessons at the new school, where she’d already been hired as a math teacher.
“Dad, will Grandma find us?” Anya asked, putting down her pen.
“No, sunshine. She won’t,” Andrei hugged his daughter. “We live too far away now.”
“And she won’t yell at Mom anymore?”
“She won’t. No one will yell in our home anymore.”
“And she won’t say I’m a bad student?”
“You’re doing great, smart girl. And no one has the right to tell you otherwise.”
Maxim ran up to his father with a newly built robot. “Dad, look! It can shoot!”
“Nice work. You’re turning into a real engineer.”
Olya came over, setting aside her notebooks. “It’s so good that we can just talk to one another.”
“Without having to account for every last kopeck,” Andrei added. “I transfer the fifteen thousand every month. The law is observed, and my conscience is clear.”
“Is it really clear?”
“Absolutely. I’m not obligated to tolerate rudeness and the humiliation of my family—even from my own mother.”
Yelizaveta was still searching for her son, calling various organizations, trying to find his address through acquaintances.
“Lyudmila Vasilyevna, you were friends with that Olya! Surely you know where they went?”
“We weren’t all that close, Yelizaveta Sergeyevna. And I don’t know where they moved.”
“How can that be?! A son ran away from his mother! It’s unheard of!”
“Maybe there was something to run from,” Lyudmila said quietly.
“What do you mean? Am I a bad mother? I gave my whole life to him!”
“I don’t mean anything. Goodbye.”
The line went dead again. Yelizaveta tossed the phone onto the sofa.
“Everyone’s against me! That witch turned them all against me!” she shouted into the empty apartment.
But her cry echoed off the walls and came back to her. There was no one left to blame—her son had disappeared, and no one knew his address.
Six months passed. Yelizaveta still couldn’t find her son. All her attempts to get the address through various offices came to nothing—Andrei had prudently arranged temporary registration away from his actual residence, and his job details weren’t listed anywhere.
The money continued to arrive punctually on her card on the fifteenth of each month. But it wasn’t enough—what she needed was control, the ability to influence, to demand, to reproach.
“He has no right to treat me like this!” she told a friend on the phone. “I’m his mother!”
“Maybe you should have treated him better while he was still nearby?”
“What do you mean—better? I gave my whole life to him! Raised him, taught him, worked!”
“You raised him, yes—but did you love him?”
“Of course I loved him! How can you say that?”
“Love is also respect, trust, acceptance.”
“Nonsense! I know better what’s good for him!”
“Apparently, he thinks otherwise.”
“That witch turned him!”
“Maybe it’s time to stop blaming everyone else? Maybe think about your own behavior?”
Silence again. The friend hung up, tired of the endless complaints and accusations.
And in Samara life flowed on. Andrei was promoted, Olya became head of the math department, Anya earned straight A’s, and Maxim was getting ready for school.
A year later, unable to find her son, Yelizaveta took a job as a grocery store clerk—the support payments barely covered utilities, and at sixty, pride no longer kept you warm. Standing behind the counter ringing up purchases, she sometimes thought about the grandchildren she didn’t know, the son she’d pushed away with her own hands, and that a “son’s duty” is a two-way street—but the understanding came too late, when the address no longer existed and the phone number had been blocked for good.