Many people thought Natasha was a bit simple. She had lived with her husband for sixteen years, raising two children: Tanya was fifteen, and Dima was eight. Her husband cheated on her openly—starting on the third day after their wedding, when he had a fling with a waitress at the restaurant. And that was only the beginning; the affairs became routine. Friends tried more than once to get through to her, but she would only nod silently and smile.
Natasha worked as an accountant at a toy factory. The pay was tiny, and the workload was through the roof. Sometimes she had to come in on weekends, and during reporting season she practically lived at the office, not coming home at night.
Even though her husband, Igor, earned decent money, he claimed Natasha didn’t know how to run a household. No matter how much cash passed through her hands, there was never enough—even for food. The fridge was always empty, except for pots of yesterday’s soup and pasta with patties.
“Foolish Natasha—why on earth does she put up with a cheater?” people gossiped.
On their son Dima’s tenth birthday, Igor came home and announced that he was filing for divorce. He said he had found a new love and no longer saw any point in the family.
“Natasha, I’m sorry, but I want a divorce. You’re cold and indifferent. If at least you were a good homemaker—but you aren’t.”
“Fine. A divorce it is,” she replied without emotion.
Igor was stunned. He had expected screams, tears, and reproaches, but Natasha’s calmness threw him.
“All right, pack your things. I’ll probably head out so I don’t get in your way. When you leave, leave your key under the mat.”
Natasha looked at Igor in silence, with a mysterious smile. “Something’s off here,” flashed through his mind, but he quickly brushed the thought aside, picturing a carefree future without kids and the wife who had tired him out.
In the morning he returned with his girlfriend Liza. He rummaged under the mat for his wife’s spare set of keys but didn’t find anything, which annoyed him.
“Fine, I’ll change the locks,” he thought, and tried his own key. It didn’t work. So he rang the bell.
The door opened, and a huge man in a bathrobe and house slippers stood on the threshold.
“What do you want?”
“I, uh, live here,” Igor bleated under the stranger’s stern gaze.
“There are lots like you—‘I live here, it’s my apartment.’ Prove it! I’ve got all my paperwork in order. What can you show me?”
Who carries property documents to a date? Of course Igor had nothing with him. Suddenly he remembered his passport. Surely it had the residence stamp. He dug through his pockets, then his bag, until he found it.
“Here, read it. It’s written in black and white.”
The burly man even hesitated for a moment, but took Igor’s passport. He looked at it and then exhaled with relief.
“I see you haven’t opened this little booklet in a while.”
Cold with fear, Igor flipped to the registration page—only on the second try. There were two blue stamps. One said he was registered at this address; the other said he had been deregistered. Two years ago.
What the hell? With no arguments left, he didn’t press the issue with the bruiser. He dialed his wife’s number and heard the polite recording that the number was unavailable.
That left the plant gate, where Igor lay in wait for several hours so as not to miss her. At the end of the workday he learned something dreadful: his wife had quit a year earlier.
“All right, if the daughter is studying abroad, then the son is still here.”
Soothed by that bright thought, Igor ran to the school. But there too he was met with bad news. A little over a year ago his son had transferred elsewhere. Where? They wouldn’t say. “Those who need to know, know.”
Exhausted, crushed, Igor made it to the nearest bench, collapsed, and dropped his head into his hands. This simply couldn’t have happened with his wife. A quiet mouse, a doormat, an amoeba—how had his spouse managed to pull this off? She had sold the apartment behind his back.
Court!
Buoyed by hope, Igor decided that the law and his native country would help him get his property back.
A week later, all his fury and zeal to expose the swindler fizzled out. The court did help to set the record straight, but not in the way he wanted. It turned out that he himself—these very hands—had signed a general power of attorney over to his wife. That happened two years earlier, when he met Liza. Candy, strolls, happiness—who pays attention to boring paperwork then?
And his wife had chosen her moment well. She kept whining that they needed to get a new passport, a certificate for their daughter, an exit permit so she could go study abroad. “Sign it, just sign it.” To get her off his back, he signed a sweeping power of attorney. And stripped himself of everything he had. No property, no family, no kids. Homeless.
As for Liza, she fluttered off into the sunset as soon as she found out her beloved had nothing.
One last thought warmed Igor’s heart: “She’ll want child support, and I’ll be like—fat chance.” He was wrong about that too. He was summoned to court, but not to set support—rather, to contest paternity. It turned out both children had been fathered by another man.