“Mom, we’re going to the seaside for two weeks! Here are the keys, can you keep an eye on the apartment?”
Anton stepped into his mother’s stuffy hallway, smelling of valocordin and old parquet, and it felt as if the sun itself walked in with him. He wore a light linen shirt, was a little tanned, smiling. Next to him his wife Irina, just as bright and happy, held a woven bag in her hands, the corner of a new beach towel peeking out from it. They brought with them the scent of expensive perfume and the anticipation of freedom—and that scent clashed sharply with the still, stagnant air of Galina Andreevna’s apartment.
He held out a shiny keychain, expecting the usual motherly instructions, maybe a touch of envy, but overall—joy for him. For them. But his mother’s face, which had just spread into a routine welcoming smile, changed before his eyes. The smile didn’t fade—it was as if someone had erased it with a rubber. The little wrinkles around her eyes turned from kind into harsh, prickly rays. She didn’t look at her son, but at the keys in his outstretched hand, as if he were offering her a dead rat.
“Seaside?” Her voice was low and absolutely even, stripped of any intonation. It was more frightening than a shout. She ignored the keys, and Anton’s hand hung awkwardly in the air, foolish and lost. “Are you out of your minds?”
Irina froze behind his back. Her smile solidified, turning into a strained mask. Anton lowered his hand, the keys clinking as they dropped.
“What do you mean? Mom, we’ve been planning this vacation for a year. We bought the vouchers back in January. What’s wrong?”
Galina Andreevna took a step forward, stepping out of the dim hallway into the light falling from the living room window. Now her face was clearly visible—ashen, with tightly pressed lips. She stared at Anton straight on, like at a stranger who’d come to bring bad news.
“Your brother Lyoshka is neck-deep in debt, he lost again. He needs money. Urgently. And you’re planning to lie on a beach?”
The air in the room grew dense, heavy. The joyful anticipation burst like a soap bubble, leaving behind a sticky feeling of embarrassment and irritation. Anton felt that familiar sense of helplessness beginning to boil up inside him—the one that always came with conversations about Lyoshka. He tried to stay calm.
“Mom, we’ve talked about this a thousand times. Lyosha is twenty-eight. He’s a grown man. I can’t spend my whole life pulling him out of the messes he creates for himself. Those are his problems, I’m not his sponsor.”
That phrase—logical, measured—became the last straw for his mother. She didn’t start shouting. She did something much worse. Slowly, with a kind of granite inevitability, she stepped sideways and blocked the narrow passage leading out of the hallway. She didn’t just stand in the way—she turned into a living wall. A short, plump woman in an old housecoat suddenly seemed like an unshakable barrier. Her arms hung down at her sides, but her whole figure radiated unbending will. She stared at him, and there was no motherly love in her gaze. Only the cold, heavy condemnation of a judge looking at a traitor. She wasn’t going to persuade him. She was pronouncing sentence.
“Okay,” Anton slowly, very slowly, set the keys down on the small shoe table. The sound of metal touching the lacquered surface was the only sound in the hallway. “Let’s try this another way. What happened?”
He tried to speak calmly, as if to an unstable patient. He could see his mother was on edge, and any sharp tone could trigger an explosion. Galina Andreevna didn’t move. She looked at him as if he had just asked the dumbest question in the world.
“What happened?” she echoed, and a note of bitter, mocking sarcasm slipped into her voice. “Your brother is disappearing, that’s what happened! He got involved with the wrong people, they shook him for everything he had and now they want more. They’ve put him ‘on the meter.’ Do you even understand what that means, or have you all forgotten in your nice clean office what life looks like on the street? He’s weaker than you, Anton. He’s always been weaker. Not as tough, not as lucky. You were always his protection, his wall. And now, when this wall is needed more than ever, you’re going to go roast your belly on the sand?”
Her speech wasn’t hysterical. It was precise, hitting exactly the sore spots, the childhood roles she herself had once assigned them. Anton—the strong, reliable older brother. Lyosha—the poor, always-in-trouble baby. And that script hadn’t changed in decades.
Anton took a deep breath. The air in the apartment felt stale, suffocating. The smell of his mother’s medications suddenly became almost unbearable, like the smell of quiet, domestic hopelessness.
“Mom, I was his ‘wall’ when he was fifteen and some older boys beat him up. I was his ‘wall’ when, at twenty, he crashed a car he’d bought on credit, and I paid off what was left. I was his ‘wall’ three years ago when I gave him money for a ‘foolproof business project’ that he burned through in two weeks. How much longer do I have to be that? I’m thirty-four. I work twelve hours a day so that Irina and I can afford this miserable vacation. We haven’t been to the sea in three years. I’m tired. Just humanly tired of dragging a grown man who doesn’t want to work, he wants easy money.”
He was speaking quietly but firmly, listing the facts like an accountant reading out a loss report. Each point was a nail he drove into the wall between himself and her motherly logic. He looked her straight in the eye, trying to reach not her emotions, but her common sense. But in response, he only saw her face grow even harder.
Galina Andreevna let his words slide past her, as if he were speaking a foreign language. Her gaze slipped over his shoulder and stopped on Irina, who until that moment had been standing motionless, like a statue. And at that moment his mother’s expression changed. The granite rigidity vanished, replaced by a cold, serpentine fury.
“You weren’t like this before,” she hissed, and now her words weren’t meant for him. She stared straight at Irina, ignoring Anton as if he didn’t exist. “You used to put family first. Your brother was first. This is all her. She’s washed your brain with her resorts and her rags. Turned you against your own blood. He’s ready to spit on his own brother for your sake.”
Anton stepped slightly to the side, almost shielding his wife with his body. His voice turned hard as steel.
“Leave Irina out of this. She has nothing to do with it. This is my decision. Mine. And I didn’t make it yesterday. I made it the day I paid off his card debts for the third time and then, a week later, saw him with a new phone that he’d obviously bought with the ‘money he’d saved.’”
Irina stepped forward, coming out from behind her husband’s shoulder. She didn’t raise her voice, but her calmness was more effective than any scream.
“Galina Andreevna, Anton and I decide everything together. This vacation, and how we handle our shared finances. I’m sorry, but your younger son is not included in our financial plans.”
That icy politeness enraged Galina Andreevna far more than any shouting would have. She didn’t even bother to look at her daughter-in-law, continuing to drill Anton with her eyes.
“Did you hear that? ‘Our money’! ‘Our plans’! Everything’s ‘ours’ now. And where is your family, Anton? Where is your brother, who’s too scared to step out of his own home because of those bastards? They’ll break his legs, do you get that? Or from up there, where you’ve climbed, you can’t see simple human misery anymore? They’ll take him out to the woods, and that’s it! And you’ll be posting beach photos with cocktails at that time?”
She painted the picture so convincingly, so frighteningly, that for a moment Anton really did feel uneasy. But then he remembered Lyosha’s face—not frightened, but smug, when he’d taken money from him the last time. He remembered his shifty eyes and his eternal promises to “pay it all back.”
“Enough,” his voice turned quiet and metallic. “I’ve seen this show. Many times. They won’t break his legs, because he knows that at the last moment big brother will come and fix everything. And you sent him here exactly for that. Only this time the show is canceled. The ticket office is closed. We’re leaving. In two days. If you don’t want the keys, I’ll leave them with the neighbors.”
Galina Andreevna twisted her lips in a crooked smirk, completely ignoring his last words. She stared into his face with an expression of ultimate, universal disappointment, as people look at the ruins of what was once a beautiful temple.
“I always knew a stranger in the family spells trouble. I just didn’t think my own son would forget so quickly who gave him life and who just came to stand nearby.”
Her sharp jab at Irina hung in the stale air of the hallway. Anton was about to answer, to pour out everything that had built up over the years of this humiliating sponsorship, when the lock in the front door scraped. The door opened slowly, almost apologetically.
Alexey stood on the threshold.
He looked exactly like someone whose legs were supposedly about to be broken. Only, he always looked like that. Rounded shoulders, head sunk into them, a wandering gaze that carefully avoided meeting anyone else’s—especially Anton’s eyes. He wore a not-quite-fresh T-shirt and jeans that seemed to hang from him like a sack. He didn’t smell of fear. He smelled of cheap cigarettes and the sour odor of a multi-day hangover or prolonged stress. He didn’t look like a victim of circumstance; he looked like a man who had long ago settled in comfortably at rock bottom.
Seeing Anton and Irina, he froze for a second, like a cat caught in the act. But then his eyes found his mother, and his face assumed an expression of cosmic sorrow. He slipped past his older brother without a word and went straight to Galina Andreevna, like a child seeking protection.
“Mom, it’s bad,” he croaked, and that hoarse whisper was carefully calculated so that everyone would hear it.
In the same instant, Galina Andreevna transformed. All the cold fury she’d directed at Anton and Irina evaporated. Her figure, which had just been solid and blocking the way, softened. She turned toward her younger son, her hands reaching out instinctively to embrace him, stroke his shoulder, shield him from the entire world.
“Lyoshenka, son, what is it? They called again?”
She took him by the arm and led him deeper into the apartment, toward the kitchen, demonstratively fencing him off from the “outsiders”—from her older son and his wife. It was a performance, flawlessly played. Anton and Irina were left in the hallway, no longer participants in the conflict but unwanted spectators of a family drama. Anton felt nausea rise to his throat. He looked at his mother’s back as she fussed around this thirty-year-old lug and understood the complete futility of his words, his logic, his arguments. In front of him was not a mother. In front of him was a she-animal protecting her weak, good-for-nothing, yet most beloved cub.
Snatches of phrases drifted from the kitchen—Alexey’s whining mumble and his mother’s soothing cooing. “…They’re not human, mom…”, “…I just wanted to make it right, win it back…”, “…they won’t let me go…”
Irina touched Anton’s elbow lightly. He flinched.
“Let’s get out of here,” she whispered almost soundlessly.
He nodded. Enough. This was no longer just humiliating—it was disgusting. He took a step toward the door, deciding that the conversation was over for good. And at that moment, hearing the movement, Galina Andreevna rushed out of the kitchen. Lyoshka peered over her shoulder, his face showing cowardly curiosity.
Her face was contorted with righteous anger. She saw that Anton was about to leave, and for her that became the final proof of his betrayal. She again planted herself in his way, but now there was no cold resolve in her. She was boiling with rage.
“Where are you going?!” she shouted. “Can’t you see what’s happening to your brother?! He’s asking you for help—his own blood—and you’re turning your back on him?!”
Anton stopped. He looked at his mother, then at Lyoshka peeking from behind her back, and a cold, vicious smirk twisted his lips.
“Help? This show doesn’t work anymore, Mom.”
He turned to Irina, took her by the hand, deliberately making it clear whose side he was on, and headed for the exit, intending to simply push his mother out of the way. That gesture—this final choice in favor of his wife—became, for Galina Andreevna, a signal for total war. She jerked her hand up, pointing at him like at a criminal.
“You’re not going anywhere, I said! Your vacation cannot be more important than your brother’s financial problems! So your little wifey will have to wait for her sea until you help your brother pay off his debts!”
Her voice thundered in the small hallway, turning the apartment into a battlefield where there could be no winners. This was an ultimatum. An order. A point of no return, after which nothing could ever be glued back together.
Her words didn’t crash like thunder. They fell into the silence of the hallway like a drop of poison into a glass of water—soundless, but poisoning everything around. An ultimatum. Not a plea, not a request, but a command, given with the confidence of a field marshal sending someone else’s regiment to its death. “Your little wifey will wait.” That phrase, flung with contempt, as if Irina were not his wife but some random trinket, became that final line for Anton.
A dead silence fell. Anton didn’t explode. He didn’t shout back. Something far worse happened. All the hot, boiling anger inside him suddenly cooled, shrank into a small lump—cold and sharp as a splinter of glass. Slowly, very slowly, he released Irina’s hand. Then he looked at his mother. And in his eyes there was no longer hurt, no anger, no attempt to prove anything. There was only emptiness. Emptiness and the cold, detached curiosity of a surgeon studying a hopeless pathology.
And then he laughed.
It wasn’t a cheerful laugh. Short, dry, like the crack of breaking ice. The sound broke from his chest and died away, leaving behind a ringing, bewildered silence. Galina Andreevna was taken aback. She’d expected anything—shouting, arguments, pleas—but not this. That laugh devalued all her tragic pathos, all her maternal power.
“Will wait?” Anton repeated so quietly that his mother had to strain to hear. He took a step forward, and for the first time during this entire argument, she instinctively stepped back, feeling she was losing control. “You know, Mom, I just realized something. You don’t love him.”
Lyoshka, peeking out from behind her back, jerked. Galina Andreevna frowned.
“What nonsense are you talking? I’ve devoted my whole life to him!”
“No,” Anton shook his head, and his calmness was more frightening than any hysteria. “You don’t love him. You’re raising him. Like some endless, loss-making project. You pour my strength, my nerves, my money, my time into him. And you don’t even expect him to ever ‘grow up.’ You enjoy the process itself. You like being the savior, the martyr, the heroic mother. And me—for you, I’m not a son. I’m a resource. A never-ending supply for your main project named Lyosha.”
He spoke in a flat, emotionless tone, stating facts. Then his gaze shifted, slid past his mother and locked onto his brother’s eyes—eyes that were cowardly trying to hide behind her.
“And you,” Anton’s voice grew even quieter and firmer, making Lyosha flinch, “do you hear me, Lyosha? I’m talking to you now, not to your press secretary. You’re twenty-eight years old. You don’t have any debts and you don’t have any problems. Because they were never yours. They were always mine. But I can’t handle them anymore. I’m bankrupt. From this very moment, you no longer have an older brother who will take care of your issues. You have only yourself. And those people you owe. Go deal with them. Like a man. If there’s anything left of a man in you at all.”
He paused, giving the words time to sink in. Lyosha turned pale and opened his mouth to say something, but not a sound came out. He looked at his mother in desperate appeal, but even she seemed paralyzed by her elder son’s cold monologue.
Anton turned to the little table, grabbed the shiny keychain and shoved it into his trouser pocket. That gesture was final and irreversible. He was taking not just the keys. He was taking his life back. He turned to Irina, whose face was pale but resolute, and took her hand again. Her fingers were cold, but she squeezed his palm with a strength that said more than any words.
“We’re leaving,” he said, looking not at his mother, but somewhere through her. “And we’re going to the sea. I’m not leaving you the keys, Mom. Not because I’m afraid for the apartment. But because I don’t want you to have a key to my life anymore. Goodbye.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. He simply turned, and he and Irina walked toward the door. Galina Andreevna didn’t move. She stared at their backs, and on her face was written total, crushing defeat. All her power, built on guilt and duty, crumbled to dust in a matter of minutes.
The lock clicked. The door closed, cutting off the stuffy world of his mother’s apartment. They found themselves on the stair landing. The air here was cool and fresh. Anton leaned his back against the wall and closed his eyes. He didn’t feel the joy of victory, nor relief. He felt only a huge, gaping emptiness where his family had once been. He had just performed an amputation on himself. Painful, bloody, but necessary to survive.
Irina pressed herself against him.
“You did the right thing,” she whispered. “You did everything right.”
He nodded silently, opened his eyes and looked at the dusty window on the landing. The vacation by the sea no longer seemed to him just a rest. Now it was the first step. The first step into a new life for which he’d had to pay far too high a price…