“Mom, maybe that’s enough for today? You already smell of mothballs—and the past.”
Irina wrinkled her nose with distaste, standing in the doorway of her father’s bedroom. Vera Koltsova didn’t even turn around.
Methodically, as if performing a ritual, she was folding his shirts into a cardboard box. One after another. Collar to collar.
“I just want to finish with this wardrobe.”
“You’ve been ‘finishing’ it for a week. He was a good man, Mom. Quiet, proper, calm. But he’s gone. And things are just things.”
Vera froze, holding his favorite chunky-knit sweater. Good. Quiet. Calm. Those words, like three nails, hammered down the lid on their marriage. Fifty years of deafening, viscous silence.
It wasn’t his death as such that she feared. She was terrified to the bone of the emptiness after it—the very emptiness that now seemed to ooze from the cracks of the old wardrobe along with the smell of dust, filling her lungs.
“I’ll handle it myself, Ira. Go on, your husband’s waiting. Don’t make him eat dinner alone.”
Her daughter sighed but didn’t argue. She left. Vera was alone. With a vehemence that surprised her, she yanked the wardrobe door; it creaked and gave.
She needed to pull it away and wipe the floor behind it. Leonid had been a stickler about cleanliness. Another of his quiet, proper quirks.
She braced her shoulder against the heavy, unyielding wood. The wardrobe grudgingly slid, leaving two deep, groaning grooves across the parquet.
On the wall behind it, at her eye level, beneath a peeling edge of old wallpaper, a thin, almost invisible line showed. Not a crack. Something else.
Vera ran a finger along it. The paper gave way, revealing the outline of a small door set into the wall—no handle. Her heart lurched, clumsy and painful.
Inside, pressed tightly together as if sharing warmth, lay several thick notebooks in stiff cloth bindings. Diaries.
Her fingers trembled as she took out the first one. Leonid? Diaries? The man from whom at dinner you had to pry, with pliers, how his day had gone—only to get the inevitable: “Fine. Did you eat?”
She opened at random. The familiar, slightly angular handwriting.
“March 14. Today I ran into Sofya Petrovna from the third entrance by the store. She was crying again; her pension is late and she can’t afford her meds. Told Vera I’d go for a walk, then ran to the pharmacy and left a bag at her door. Told the pharmacist it was a surprise from an old friend. The main thing is that Vera doesn’t find out. She’ll say we’re barely making ends meet as it is. She’s right, of course. But how can I not help?”
Vera clutched the page. March 14. She remembered that day perfectly. Leonid came back from his walk silent, withdrawn, refused dinner.
She’d taken offense then, that he’d once again shut himself up in that impregnable fortress of his.
She feverishly opened another notebook.
“May 2. The neighbors’ boy, Vitya, tangled himself up with a bad crowd again. Wrecked his motorcycle. His father nearly killed him. Gave him money from the stash at night, on the sly, for the repairs. Said it was a debt I was repaying him for his grandfather. He’s a good kid, just still stupid. Vera wouldn’t have understood. She thinks other people’s problems don’t concern us. She guards our home. And I… I can’t live in a fortress when the houses around it are collapsing.”
The stash. The very one they’d been saving for a new refrigerator—and that had one day simply “vanished.”
Leonid had spread his hands then and said he must have lost it somewhere. And she… she almost believed he’d drunk it away. And for weeks she had silently despised him for that imagined weakness.
Vera sat on the floor, amid dust and other people’s secrets. The air was thin. Every line in those notebooks screamed about a man she had not known at all.
A man who lived beside her, slept in the same bed, while his real life flowed somewhere in a parallel universe, hidden behind the dense curtain of his silence.
And in that moment, sorting through his things, she understood with blinding clarity: for fifty years she had lived with a complete stranger.
She read until the letters began to blur. An hour, two, three. Dusk filled the room, and Vera still sat on the floor, ringed by open notebooks like fragments of another, unfamiliar life.
Shame burned her cheeks—hot, acrid. She recalled every reproach. Every sigh about his “lack of initiative.”
All those evenings when she nagged him for his silence, never understanding that his silence wasn’t empty—it was full. Full of thoughts, feelings, deeds he simply hid from her like a smuggler.
“September 10. Today Vera talked again about how busy Zina’s life is. And me? Work-home. She must be bored with me. She’s like fire. And I’m water. I’m afraid I’ll hiss and evaporate next to her. Easier to keep quiet. Let her think everything’s fine with me. As long as she’s at peace.”
She hadn’t been at peace. She’d raged at that calm of his. She mistook his care for indifference.
The door opened again. Irina stood on the threshold with a supermarket bag.
“Mom, you’re still sitting there? I bought you some kefir.”
She switched on the light. The bright bulb yanked Vera—rumpled, on the floor—and the scattered diaries out of the twilight.
“Good Lord, what is all this waste paper? Decided to gather junk from the whole house now?”
“It’s not junk. It’s… your father’s.”
Irina came closer and skeptically picked up one of the notebooks. She skimmed a few lines. Her eyebrows shot up.
“‘Notes on Growing African Violets’? Seriously? Dad and violets? Mom, come on. He couldn’t stand flowers. He was always grumbling when you dragged home another pot.”
“He wasn’t grumbling,” Vera said quietly but firmly, lifting her eyes to her daughter. “He was pretending.”
“April 12. Gave Vera a violet. Said they tossed it in with my change at the store. In reality I went through three markets looking for that exact cultivar, ‘Blue Dragon.’ She was so happy. When she smiles, all I want is to buy out every market. The main thing is that she doesn’t guess how long I searched. She’ll say I’m wasting time.”
“Oh, Mom, stop,” Irina waved it off, putting the notebook down. “He found himself a retirement hobby—scribbling. Better get up; let’s go have dinner.”
“He didn’t write this in retirement. He wrote it all his life. About us. About you.”
Irina let out a heavy sigh—that very sigh that meant: “Mom’s at it again.”
“Mom, I get it, it’s hard for you. But don’t make things up. Dad was a simple, good guy. He wasn’t a writer or some secret hero. He just lived. Worked at the plant, watched TV, and kept quiet. That’s the way we loved him. Why reinvent him now?”
The words struck like slaps. “Simple guy.” “Watched TV and kept quiet.” It was so unfair. So monstrously untrue.
“You don’t understand anything.”
“No, you don’t understand!” Irina raised her voice. “You’re sitting in the dust reading some old scribbles instead of accepting reality. Stop turning him into someone he never was! It’s unhealthy!”
Vera rose slowly from the floor. Her knees were numb, but she didn’t feel it.
She looked at her daughter—so adult, so certain she was right—and with horror saw herself. The self who had stared at her husband for fifty years and seen nothing.
She said nothing in reply. She simply took up the last, thinnest notebook. Opened it. And went still.
Because it wasn’t written in his hand. The neat, almost calligraphic letters belonged to a woman. And on the first page it said: “For my Lyonya. In memory of our meetings.”
Irina stopped mid-sentence when she saw her mother’s face turn to stone. She followed her gaze and saw the unfamiliar handwriting.
“And what’s this?” She stepped forward and tried to take the notebook. “Give it here.”
Vera pulled back. The movement was sharp, almost hostile.
“Don’t touch it.”
“Well, here we go,” Irina said with a bitter smirk. “Secret admirers? Mom, I told you not to go rummaging in his things. Now you’ll just work yourself up.”
She said it almost with relief. As if this woman’s diary confirmed her point: her father had been an ordinary man with simple—possibly sordid—secrets.
That image she could handle. It was better than the saint her mother had started sculpting half an hour earlier.
Vera wasn’t listening. Her eyes were glued to the first lines.
“January 20. Lyonya brought me books today. Said they’d help me take my mind off things. He is so… attentive. He looks not at my illness, but at me. The only one who still sees a person and not a walking diagnosis. We talked about the stars. He knows the names of all the constellations. Who would have thought.”
Illness? Constellations? Vera remembered how he’d tried to tell her about Orion and the Big Dipper when they were young. And she had waved him off, saying her head was full of other things—diapers, pots, life.
“Mom, throw it away,” Irina insisted. “You’ll only make it worse for yourself.”
Vera turned the page.
“February 5. He came after work. So tired. Told me about his Vera. He loves her so much. Says she is his fortress, his earth. And he is just a quiet satellite revolving around her. He’s afraid to upset her, afraid to seem a weak, impractical dreamer. So he brings all his dreams to me. And I simply listen. I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid of anything anymore.”
This wasn’t a lover writing. It was the cry of another human being—one who was dying. And her husband had been there with her. Not as a man, but as… a friend. Her only friend.
“Where could he have met her?” Vera whispered, addressing no one in particular.
Irina snorted.
“Oh, anywhere. At work, a sanatorium—who knows. They’re all the same. First a hero who helps old ladies; then it turns out he has a second family on the side. Classic.”
“Be quiet,” Vera said. Her voice was so stripped of emotion that it sounded scarier than a shout. Irina recoiled.
Vera found the last entry. Dated three years before Leonid’s death.
“June 16. Today Lyonya told me how his Vera laughed at their neighbor, Uncle Kolya, when he spent his bonus on a huge telescope. She called him ‘a grown-up fool throwing money to the wind.’ Lyonya said that was the moment he knew he could never show her his poems.
He burned that notebook in the evening. Said his earth would never accept such seeds. My heart hurt for him. For both of them. For she, his fortress, has no idea what treasures she herself turns to ash.”
That was it—a click.
Vera closed the diary slowly. She remembered that incident. She remembered her laugh. The scornful line about the telescope.
And she remembered how Leonid sat by the window that evening, silently staring at the dark sky. She had thought he was displeased about something again.
He wasn’t displeased. He was saying goodbye to a dream. He was burying part of himself because he feared her mockery—hers, his “fortress.”
She raised her eyes to her daughter. Irina looked at her with irritation and pity. She expected tears. A scene. Accusations hurled at her dead father.
She expected a familiar, predictable reaction—the very one Vera had expected from herself all her life.
But something inside Vera had finally burned out. Shame, hurt, jealousy—all of it ebbed away, leaving a ringing, cold emptiness. And in that emptiness a new, unfamiliar feeling was born.
She was no longer a victim of deception. She was his accomplice. And her own daughter—flesh of her flesh—was now gleefully continuing the same game: the game of simplifying, devaluing, dumbing down.
“You don’t know anything,” Vera repeated, but now it sounded not like a defense, but like a sentence. “About him. Or about me. But I’ll tell you. Oh, believe me. I’ll tell you everything.”
And she told her.
She didn’t shout. She didn’t cry. She simply read—calmly, methodically, page after page.
She read about the medicines bought in secret for the old woman. About the money for the neighbor boy’s motorcycle repairs. About the sleepless nights when he wrote poems he later burned.
At first Irina listened with a smirk. Then the smirk slid off, replaced by puzzlement. And then by dismay.
“Wait—so he was the one who helped Vitya back then? And we thought he’d stolen the money somewhere…”
“He didn’t steal it. He received help from a man you and your father considered a useless weakling. From your father.”
Vera picked up another notebook.
“And remember when you were in tenth grade and dreamed of a class trip to Petersburg? We had no money. And I yelled at you to get your head out of the clouds.”
Irina nodded darkly. She remembered. It was her first big grievance against her parents.
“October 30. Ira is crying in her room. She wants to go to Petersburg. Vera’s right, there’s no money. But how can one not want to see the Hermitage?
I can’t let this be. Tomorrow I’ll take double shifts at the plant. I’ll tell Vera a friend asked me to cover him. She’ll grumble that I’m ruining my health, but it’s worth it. The main thing is that Ira doesn’t know where the money came from. Let her think it’s a bonus. Let her believe in miracles.”
Irina covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders shook.
“He… he came home barely alive for almost a month. I thought he was drinking. Mom, I thought he was drinking!”
“We both thought so,” Vera answered mercilessly. “It was easier for us that way. Easier to live with a quiet, spineless drunk than with a person a hundred times deeper and stronger than we were.”
She set the notebooks aside. Now she looked straight at her daughter.
“We didn’t live with him. We lived with a convenient version we’d invented for ourselves. We didn’t love him, Ira. We tolerated him.
And he loved us. So much—and so secretly—that he preferred to hide his whole self from us, just so our peace wouldn’t be disturbed. So his ‘fortress’ wouldn’t crack under the weight of his dreams.”
She spoke the last words almost in a whisper. And that whisper carried more pain than any scream.
Irina was silent, crushed. Her tidy, simple world—in which there was a good but boring father and a capable, perpetually dissatisfied mother—crumbled into dust. She had been mourning the wrong father. And pitying the wrong mother.
Vera went to the window. The streetlights were coming on. For fifty years she had feared being alone. Feared the emptiness of this apartment. What nonsense.
The emptiness hadn’t been outside. It had been inside. And her husband had tried all his life to fill that emptiness, secretly, unnoticed—like a night gardener planting flowers in someone else’s abandoned garden.
Vera turned to her daughter.
“I need to be alone.”
“Mom…”
“Go, Ira. And when you come back… try to remember your father. Not the one you tell your children about. The real one. Try to get to know him. I’m only just beginning.”
She was alone. But for the first time in many years, the solitude didn’t frighten her. It was filled with words, thoughts, poems, constellations—and African violets of the ‘Blue Dragon’ variety.
She gathered all the notebooks and set them neatly on his bedside table. It wasn’t a farewell. It was an introduction—late by a whole lifetime.
Epilogue
Half a year passed. The Koltsovs’ apartment had changed. The smell of mothballs and old grief was gone. In its place a light scent of earth and blooming plants hung in the air.
The living-room windowsill was crowded with pots of violets. In the center stood a lush plant with inky-blue flowers: “Blue Dragon.”
Vera no longer sorted through her husband’s things. She lived with them. The old chunky-knit sweater now lay on her armchair.
His astronomy books sat on her nightstand. And the diaries… the diaries had become her bedside reading.
She found Vitya—the neighbor boy. He had long since grown up, a solid man now, a mechanic in an auto shop.
When Vera went to him and, embarrassed, told him about the money for the motorcycle, he was quiet for a long time and then said softly, “I suspected as much. Uncle Lyonya said he was paying back an old debt.
But I knew we didn’t owe him anything. He saved my life back then, Vera Petrovna. Not from my father—from myself.”
She also tracked down the family of the woman whose diary she had found last. The woman’s name was Nadezhda. Her grown daughter listened to Vera with tears in her eyes.
“Mom used to say she had a guardian angel who brought her books and told her about the stars. She waited for him until the very end, but was too shy to give him her address. And he, it seems, was too shy to ask.”
Irina now came not with a bag of kefir but with two tickets to the planetarium.
They sat side by side in the dark beneath the great dome, pricked with artificial stars, and Vera quietly retold what she had learned from Leonid’s books.
“Look—that constellation there is Lyra. And the brightest star is Vega. He wrote she looked like you. Just as bright—and a little cold.”
Irina didn’t answer. She simply reached out and squeezed her mother’s hand. Her marriage had changed, too. She had begun to talk to her husband—not about bills and weekend plans, but about dreams. About fears. About what hides behind the tired silence after work. It turned out that her husband, whom she’d considered simple and predictable, had dreamed all his life of learning to play the saxophone.
And now, in their home, the evenings were filled with clumsy, funny, but utterly living sounds.
One evening, sitting in her armchair, Vera came across an entry of Leonid’s she had skipped before.
“September 1. Autumn again. Vera doesn’t like it. Says it’s nature dying. But I do. There’s no lie in it. Everything prepares for rest so it can be born anew in spring. Maybe it’s that way with people, too? Maybe you have to die in someone’s memory as ‘simple and quiet’ in order to be born your true self afterward?”
She closed the diary. It was raining outside. Autumn was dying beyond the window. But for the first time in her life, Vera felt no melancholy.
She took from the shelf a small, privately printed booklet in a thin cover: “The Quiet Satellite. Leonid Koltsov.”
She had gathered all his poems she could find—and the ones Nadezhda quoted in her diary.
She no longer feared the emptiness. Leonid had taught her that emptiness doesn’t exist. There is only our reluctance to look closely at those near us—our fear of disturbing them, and ourselves, with difficult questions.
She had lived with a stranger for fifty years. But now she had an entire eternity to get to know her own.
And that eternity began today—with a cup of hot tea, the soft rustle of rain at the window, and an open book of poems.