“— Igor, just look at him!” — the silver spoon clinked against the edge of the porcelain saucer. “Do you see how he holds the fork? Like a proletarian, with his whole fist!”
Eleonora Pavlovna sat at the head of the table in a silk blouse with a lace jabot, as if she were at a royal reception in England rather than a panel kitchen.
Her face, hidden beneath a thick layer of powder — not just to cover her natural pallor but also the signs of age — radiated theatrical disgust.
My five-year-old son, Vanya, froze mid-bite, a piece of cutlet on his fork. The cutlet was delicious, made by Grandma (well, technically Grandpa,
as Eleonora Pavlovna never cooked — she “preserved her hands for music”), and he really wanted to eat it. But under the gaze of the “countess-grandmother,” the bite wouldn’t go down.
“Mom, he’s just a kid,” my husband Igor muttered weakly, burying his face in his phone, trying to disappear. At forty, he still hadn’t learned to contradict his mother, even though his beard was already streaked with gray.
“A child is a blank slate!” snapped my mother-in-law. “What you write, will be. And what’s written in your household? ‘Collective farm’? Natasha,” she turned to me, and I felt like a fly under a microscope, “I’ve long wanted to say, his appearance worries me.”
I carefully cut a slice of cucumber.— “What exactly worries you, Eleonora Pavlovna?”“Everything!” she waved her hand dramatically. “Look at that nose! In our family, the Zavadszkis, we’ve always had Greek profiles — delicate bone, a slight hump.
And the ears? Stick-outs! My great-grandfather’s ears were always flat against his head. And this…” — she gestured to Vanya, who, of course, slurped his compote loudly at that exact moment — “this is genetic dilution! I don’t recognize our line!”
My father-in-law, Viktor Petrovich, sat by the window (closer to the vent so he could smoke out the open window) and grunted, but said nothing. He rarely spoke.
His life’s role was “fetch, carry, earn, don’t interfere.” A lifetime at the factory, now driving a taxi, silently funding his wife’s “aristocratic” whims, from the antique porcelain to her Skype French lessons.
— “What are you implying?” I asked calmly, though inside I felt every muscle tighten. I knew where this was going — it wasn’t her first performance.
— “I’m not implying anything, my dear, I’m stating facts,” my mother-in-law straightened up. “I had planned to transfer this apartment to my grandson… to give him a start in life. But now I have doubts.”
Silence fell over the kitchen.The apartment we lived in — me, Igor, and Vanya — legally belonged to my mother-in-law. We paid utilities, did repairs, but the papers were in her name. “It’s safer this way, you never know,” Igor had said five years ago.
Now that “you never know” sat across from me, spreading butter on toast.— “I’m not leaving the family nest to a cuckoo,” Eleonora Pavlovna said firmly.
“I need to be sure that this child carries my blood. The blood of the Zavadszkis. Not…” — she gave me a pointed look — “a random mix.”Igor finally lifted his head from his phone.
— “Mom, come on. Vanya looks like me, the eyes…”— “His eyes are brown! Yours are gray! Whose brown eyes? Natasha’s are green!”— “My father’s were brown,” I said quietly.
— “See!” she triumphantly raised a finger. “Proletarian genes! Natasha, I have nothing against your origin, but this apartment… it’s serious. I demand a DNA test.”
Igor stayed silent, staring at his plate as if it were showing the Champions League final.He didn’t say: “Mom, stop, this is my son, period.” He stayed silent, afraid of losing his mother’s favor.— “Igor?” I called him.
He looked up at me with guilty eyes.— “Natasha… maybe we should do it? Mom will calm down, her blood pressure is important. We have nothing to hide, right?”
I looked at his noble Greek profile, his smooth hands that had never done heavy work.And I realized: I was alone.My husband — not a wall, but drywall. Smooth, pretty, but poke it with a finger and there’s a hole.
