Other People’s Problems
The air in the coffee shop was thick and sweet, scented with freshly ground coffee, vanilla, and the damp wool of passersby coming in from the street, where the October rain tapped out a slow, melancholy rhythm on the asphalt. Katerina sat by the window, cradling a warm porcelain cup in her hands, and watched as drops merged into fanciful rivulets that twisted down the glass, drawing unrecognizable maps of nonexistent continents. It was her ritual—to come here every Saturday, order a cinnamon cappuccino, and allow herself an hour of complete, blissful idleness, switching off from the bustle, from obligations, from the past. The past, however, had a stubborn habit of showing up without an invitation.
The café door flew open, letting in a gust of cold, wet air—and him. Sergey. He stood on the threshold, scanning the room, and his gaze, familiar to the point of pain, of nausea, found her almost immediately. He wasn’t wearing a coat—just a rumpled sweater. His hair was wet from the rain, and his face held an expression that, once upon a time, in another life, she might have taken for despair. Now it seemed to her like nothing more than bad, theatrical acting.
He walked toward her table, and with every step Katerina felt the walls of her private little world tighten, dragging her back into the suffocating reality she had escaped with such difficulty.
“Katya,” he said, and his voice—hoarse from nerves or a cold—sounded like the creak of a rusty door in the peace she guarded so carefully.
She didn’t offer him a seat. She didn’t take her eyes off the window. She simply waited, holding the cup like a shield.
“I need to talk,” he sat down across from her without being invited and placed his hands on the table, fingers locked together. They were red from the cold; his knuckles had gone white. “It’s urgent.”
“We don’t have anything urgent, Sergey,” her own voice surprised her with its icy steadiness. “And we don’t have any shared topics for conversation.”
“Don’t pretend we’re strangers!” A familiar, infuriating note of demand rang in his tone—the same one that had accompanied all their conversations during the last two years of their marriage. “This is about the apartment. The one on Tverskaya. You know I put everything into it! And now that damn developer went bankrupt, and construction is frozen. My money… our money is just hanging in the air.”
Katerina slowly set her cup onto the saucer. The light, ringing sound landed for her like the snap of a trap closing.
“First of all,” she said, finally looking at him—her gaze as cold as the glass she’d been staring through—“those are your money. You always emphasized that finances were your domain, and my opinion on the matter didn’t carry any weight. Remember? ‘Stop sticking your nose into men’s business.’”
He winced as if from a toothache.
“Not the time for reproaches, Katya! This is serious! You’re facing losses too, we…”
“We?” she cut him off, and steel entered her voice for the first time. “What ‘we’? We stopped being ‘we’ exactly four months and seventeen days ago, when the judge stamped our passports. Did you forget?”
He stared at her, genuine astonishment in his eyes. He apparently truly believed that if he showed up, slapped his forehead, and said “our money,” everything would go back to the way it was. As if there hadn’t been his disappearances to that other woman. As if there hadn’t been her tears, her humiliation, her long and painful recovery.
“But the apartment…” he tried to begin again, but she stopped him.
“The apartment you invested in so you could live there with your mistress,” she said, pronouncing every word with merciless clarity, “is your problem. Yours and your new darling’s. You wanted so badly to be together, to build a shared future. Well then—build it. Deal with the developer, sue, lose money. Those are your shared difficulties now.”
He went pale. Clearly, the scene wasn’t unfolding according to his plan. He’d expected hysterics, tears, maybe even an attempt to help—because she always helped, always pulled him out of financial holes, found solutions while he played the role of the great provider.
“You don’t understand!” His voice cracked into a shout, and several café patrons turned to look. “I could lose everything! I won’t have anything to live on!”
Katerina leaned back in her chair. She looked at the man she’d spent eleven years with and felt nothing except mild disgust and fatigue—fatigue from his eternal “me,” from his selfishness, from his inability to admit his mistakes and take responsibility for them.
“And how is that my problem?” she asked with sincere bewilderment. “You made the decision to leave. You made the decision to pour everything into that cursed apartment. You chose a woman who, I assume, isn’t rushing to share financial risks with you. This is your life, Sergey. Your choices. And your problems.”
He fell silent, breathing heavily, staring at the table. He looked like a boy whose toy had been taken away, and he couldn’t understand by what right.
“But you won’t leave me in trouble, will you? We were family… once…”
The word he used sounded so blasphemous, so out of place, that Katerina almost laughed.
“Family?” She raised an eyebrow. “Families don’t abandon each other for young secretaries. Families don’t humiliate each other, count every penny, call your career ‘a little hobby,’ and your interests ‘stupid.’ We didn’t have a family, Sergey. We had an illusion—one you destroyed yourself.”
She took her bag, pulled out her wallet, and placed a few bills on the table for her unfinished coffee.
“So no,” she concluded, standing up. “I won’t leave you in trouble. Because your trouble no longer concerns me. You forgot? We’re divorced. Which means your claims are your mistress’s problems—not mine.”
She said that last sentence quietly, but in a way that made every word drive into him like a nail. He sat with his head bowed, and his back—once so straight and confident—slumped, revealing the full depth of his collapse.
Katerina threw on her coat and headed for the exit. She didn’t look back. Outside, the rain kept drumming on the pavement, but now it didn’t sound melancholy—it sounded cleansing, washing away the last traces of the past. She stepped into the street, and the damp, cold air stung her face. She walked without paying attention to where she was going and felt an invisible but unbearably heavy weight slide off her shoulders—the weight of his problems, his ambitions, his constant “you owe.” She was free. Truly free. And his pathetic attempts to load his difficulties onto her again shattered against her newfound independence, hard as diamond. He stayed behind in the coffee shop with his ruined plans and empty wallet, while she walked into her life—difficult, solitary, but hers. And in that life there was no place for other people’s debts or other people’s claims.