Thirty-four years I lived in that apartment. Thirty-four. And I never imagined that one day my own daughter would say to me, “Mom, come on, you’re already old. What do you need a three-room apartment for? Move to the dacha and give the apartment to me.”
I didn’t cry. I didn’t scream. I simply put the kettle on and sat down at the table, in the same place where I had sat for thirty-four years in a row, every morning, every evening. So this is how it is, then.
My name is Galina. I am sixty-four. I live alone in a three-room apartment on the sixth floor of an ordinary nine-story building. My husband, Tolya, worked at an instrument-making factory, and the apartment was given to us by the enterprise back in 1991. Back then, it felt like a miracle. Tolya carried me in his arms through the empty rooms, while I counted the steps from the window to the wall and couldn’t believe that so much space could be ours.
Tolya passed away six years ago. His heart failed, and the ambulance didn’t arrive in time. Since then, I have been alone here. My pension is twenty-four thousand. I worked as an operator at the postal hub for thirty years. My hands remember every parcel, every mail sack, every stamp and seal. It’s enough. I don’t live luxuriously, but I don’t starve either. I pay the utilities, have enough left for food, and once a month I treat myself to a cottage cheese cake from the bakery near the bus stop.
Tolya and I put everything into this apartment. He hung the wallpaper himself, changed the wiring himself, built the shelves in the pantry himself. I chose the linoleum, the curtains, the curtain rod. Every item here was bought with earned money, with our own money. The apartment was given by the enterprise, but everything else we did ourselves.
In the mornings I wake up at seven, even though I don’t have anywhere to hurry. The habit from thirty years of work has sunk in; my body wakes up by itself. I cook porridge with water and turn on the radio.
The announcer’s voice fills the emptiness, and it makes things easier for me. After breakfast, I dust the rooms. In the far room there is a bookshelf and an old sofa; in the middle room, a wardrobe and the armchair where Tolya liked to read newspapers. I never removed that armchair. Sometimes it feels as though the newspaper will rustle any moment now and he will say, “Galya, put the kettle on.”
My daughter, Diana, lives in a rented two-room apartment with her husband Yuri and their son Lyova. Lyova is nine. Yuri, my son-in-law, is an electrician at a factory. He has worked there a long time, seventeen years already in the same place.
He is a quiet man, never says an unnecessary word. Diana is different. Fast, sharp, she needs everything right now, and nothing is ever enough for her. She works as a senior cashier in a chain store, wears bright lipstick and heels even in winter.
The first call came in early February.
“Hi, Mom. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Diana. Drinking tea.”
“Aren’t you scared there alone? In such a big apartment?”
I didn’t attach any meaning to it then. I thought my daughter was simply worried.
Three days later, Diana called again. She asked about my health, about my blood pressure, about whether it was comfortable for me on the sixth floor. I answered briefly, while inside I kept thinking: what is she leading up to? But I pushed the thought away, because it is unpleasant to suspect your own daughter.
At the end of February, Diana came over with Lyova. I was happy. I set the table, took syrniki out of the fridge, warmed them up. Lyova ran off to the far room, Diana’s former childhood room.
We sat in the kitchen. Diana stirred her tea with a spoon and looked out the window. And then she said:
“Mom, I’ve been thinking something over. Honestly, why do you need a three-room apartment? Three rooms, and you live in only one. The others are just standing empty.”
“They’re not empty, Diana.”
“Mom. You’re old. Don’t be offended, but it’s a fact. You’re sixty-four. You’re alone. And Lyova doesn’t have his own room. He sleeps behind the wardrobe, on a folding bed. We pay twenty-five thousand a month for rent. Twenty-five. Every month.”
She spoke quickly, as usual interrupting herself, inserting that “well” of hers into every sentence. And something grew heavy under my ribs, as if someone had placed a boulder there.
“Move to the dacha. Mom, there’s a little house there, a plot of land. Fresh air. And give us the apartment. We’ll renovate it and set up a proper room for Lyova.”
I stayed silent. I looked at her hands with their bright manicure, at the spoon tapping against the edge of the mug. And I remembered how those hands, tiny and sticky from candy, used to hold my finger when we walked to kindergarten in the mornings.
“Diana,” I said. “Let me think about it.”
“Well, think about it, Mom. Just not for too long, okay? We’re tired of renting.”
They left at seven in the evening. Lyova hugged me in the hallway, pressing his nose into my sweater. Yuri froze by the door, his eyes lowered to the floor. While Lyova was fastening his jacket, my son-in-law quietly said to me, “Galina Vasilyevna, don’t rush with the decision.” So he knew. He knew his wife was planning to move her mother-in-law out to the dacha. And he was ashamed, but he would not argue with Diana. Seventeen years at a factory teaches a person to endure.
Then the calls began. Once every two or three days, like clockwork. Diana approached the conversation from different sides, but the essence was always the same.
“Lyova needs his own room. Mom, he’s growing. He’s nine years old; he needs space.”
“We’ll fix everything up for you at the dacha. Yurka will repair the fence, we’ll patch the roof.”
“You said yourself that it’s hard for you to clean three rooms. So don’t clean them. Move.”
I really had said that about cleaning. Once, in passing, when my knees had started aching after the third hour of washing floors. Diana remembered it and used it at the first convenient opportunity.
One day she went even further. She called on Saturday morning and said something she had clearly rehearsed in advance.
“Mom, Yurka and I calculated it. If we didn’t have to pay rent, in five years we could save enough for a down payment. But as it is, the money just disappears every month. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
“Well, since you understand, Mom, help us. You have the chance to help us. One decision, and everything will be easier for everyone.”
Her voice was so reasonable, so calm, as if she were explaining first-grade arithmetic to me. As if everything were obvious, and I was simply a stubborn mother who refused to see simple things.
I put the phone on the table and went to the far room. I settled into Tolya’s armchair. There had been no newspapers in the armrest for a long time, the faux leather had cracked, but the chair was still sturdy. I sat there for about twenty minutes, looking at the spines of the books on the shelf. Tolya’s technical handbook, the children’s encyclopedia we bought Diana for her tenth birthday. Twenty-eight years ago. Back then, she rejoiced at every page. And now she was counting my square meters.
That night I didn’t sleep. I got up and walked down the corridor. From the bedroom to the kitchen, from the kitchen to the room where books gathered dust on the shelves, then to Diana’s former childhood room. In the kitchen, the tile had cracked in the corner, and the walls had yellowed in places. The apartment was no longer young, just like me, but it was ours with Tolya. Every corner was familiar.
Here was his desk, where he soldered his circuit boards in the evenings. There on the wall hung a photograph: the two of us near the entrance, 1992. Tolya in a checked shirt, me with a short haircut, both of us smiling as though we had received not an apartment, but a whole world.
For thirty-four years, I had built that world. Ruble by ruble, day by day, weekend after weekend without rest.
In mid-March, I went to the dacha. A bus to the settlement, then two kilometers on foot along a muddy road. Snow still lay in places, the trees were bare, and the ground squelched under my boots. No one had opened the little house since autumn.
I unlocked the door and went inside. One room, a bed, a table. Dampness had settled into the walls so deeply that the wallpaper had bubbled. The heater was old, oil-filled, one for the whole house. In winter, it wouldn’t warm even that one room properly. The nearest store was three kilometers away, along the same muddy track. The bus stop was one and a half kilometers in the other direction.
I froze in the middle of that room for about ten minutes. I imagined November, December, January. Condensation on the windows, snowdrifts up to my knees, not a single living soul for kilometers around. At my age. With knees that ache after three hours on my feet.
On the way back, I stopped by my plot neighbor, Klavdia. She was also a pensioner, seventy-one years old, and lived in the settlement year-round, but she had a brick house with a gas boiler. I asked, casually, whether one could spend the winter in a summer panel house.
Klavdia looked at me as if I were sick.
“Galya, are you in your right mind? There are gaps in the walls, one heater, and in winter the water in the bucket freezes overnight. I visit you in summer and even then I’m cold in a sweater. Who is driving you there?”
I didn’t explain. I said goodbye and took the bus home.
Diana knew the dacha was not suitable for winter. Every summer she came with Lyova for weekends and saw the condition of the little house. And still she suggested it. Because she needed the apartment, not me.
And at the end of March, Diana got in touch again. This time she lost control.
“Mom, how long are you going to drag this out? I’m asking you nicely. We’re tired of renting. The two of us earn decent money, but a quarter of it goes to rent. That’s not normal. Your three-room apartment is standing empty, and we throw money away every month.”
“Diana, the apartment isn’t empty. I live in it.”
“Well, you live there, so what? Mom, how much time do you even have left? Are you planning to walk around three rooms until you’re a hundred?”
That phrase — “how much time do you have left” — went through me like a needle. She wasn’t shouting, no. She said it in an everyday tone, as if stating the obvious. Like: Mom, you don’t have long, why do you need so much space, give it away.
I hung up. I leaned my back against the refrigerator with the phone in my hand and felt my heart pounding. Not from hurt. From clarity. When you finally stop deceiving yourself, everything becomes simple and terrifying at the same time.
For thirty-eight years I had raised that girl. Cooked porridge for her, took her to kindergarten, bent over her homework, sewed her snowflake costume for the school performance. When Diana married Yuri at twenty-seven and moved out, she removed herself from my registration.
She registered at Yuri’s place, with his parents. They lived with her mother-in-law for a year, didn’t get along, and moved into a rented apartment. But her registration stayed there. Back then Diana did not yet consider my square meters hers.
I was happy for her. When Lyova was born, I was the first to rush over, bringing swaddling cloths, baby clothes, three packs of diapers. I believed my daughter and I would become closer when she became a mother herself. But the opposite happened. The older I became, the more I turned, in Diana’s eyes, from a person into an obstacle. An obstacle between her and square meters.
My daughter did not see a mother. She saw square meters.
The next morning, I called an acquaintance who had once helped a neighbor sell an apartment. I asked for the contact of a realtor. Two days later, a realtor, a woman named Kostyuk, came over, inspected the three-room apartment, and named a price. She said that from the difference between the three-room apartment and a good smaller two-room apartment, I could receive more than a million.
I asked for time to think, but the decision came quickly. For two evenings I sat at the kitchen table, looking at Tolya’s photograph on the wall, and spoke to him. Not out loud, but silently, as I had grown used to doing over the past six years.
“Tolya, I’m not betraying us. I just want to live peacefully. So that no one counts my years or eyes my apartment. A smaller two-room place, but it will be warm, with a balcony facing a quiet courtyard, a working elevator, and a store across the road. And I’ll put the difference into a savings account. For a rainy day. You never know.”
It is a strange feeling, making a decision you tell no one about. You walk around the apartment, touch the walls, run your hand over the door handles, and understand: soon this will belong to someone else. But the lightness has already arrived, and it turned out to be stronger than habit. I was not clinging to walls. I was clinging to memory, and memory can be taken with you.
In early April, I signed the contract. Appraisal, documents, paperwork, waiting for registration. The transaction took almost two months, and those two months were the strangest of my life.
I packed my things, wrapped the dishes, took Tolya’s photograph off the wall and carefully placed it in a box between towels. I went to the realtor and signed papers. Meanwhile, Diana called with ordinary conversations, and her voice was soft, pleased. She had decided that my silence meant I had accepted it.
“Mom, we’ll fix everything for you at the dacha. Yurka will insulate the walls, we’ll buy a new heater. Don’t worry.”
“Yes, daughter. I’ve already decided.”
Diana was happy. I heard it in her voice. She was certain she had received the three-room apartment. But I had received something else, something more valuable than any apartment.
The move took three days. I found an ad, arranged with a driver, loaded the furniture, boxes, and that same bookshelf with books. The movers, two young men of about twenty-five, carried the boxes silently and quickly. One asked whether he should help disassemble the wardrobe.
I nodded. Tolya had bought that wardrobe in 1995, for three monthly salaries, and had been terribly proud of it. Polished wood, with a mirror on the door. When it was taken apart and carried out, a rectangle of lighter wallpaper remained on the wall, and suddenly I felt that the walls had become foreign. Just like that, in one day: it had been my apartment, and now it was simply a space with nail holes.
The two-room apartment turned out to be cozy: two rooms, a kitchen bigger than in the three-room apartment, a balcony facing south, a quiet courtyard with a playground. Ninth floor, working elevator, clean entrance. A different district, closer to the center. A market and a bus stop nearby.
When the last box was brought in, I closed the door, sat down on a stool in the middle of the kitchen, and for the first time in two months exhaled so deeply that my temples throbbed.
I didn’t sleep the first night in the new place. I lay on the old sofa in the unfamiliar darkness and listened to foreign sounds. Someone was watching television behind the wall. A car drove by outside. The silence was different, not the one I had grown used to during six years in the three-room apartment. That silence had pressed down on me. This one simply existed.
By morning, I got up, cooked porridge, turned on the radio. And I understood: I could live here. Here, no one would tell me I was taking up unnecessary space.
Thirty-four years within those walls. And now new walls, a new view from the window, a new address.
Then I called Diana.
“We need to talk.”
“Well, Mom? Have you decided?”
“I have. Diana, I sold the apartment.”
“What do you mean, sold it?”
“I mean exactly that. I sold the three-room apartment. Bought a smaller two-room apartment in a good district. And put the difference into my account.”
“You… what?”
“You asked me to give up the apartment. I gave it up. To a realtor. The documents were processed, everything was legal.”
“What have you done? That was MY apartment! Mom, that was our apartment!”
“No, Diana. It was mine. It belonged to me. Tolya and I lived in it for thirty-four years. I paid the utilities for it my whole life, did repairs with my own money after you got married and moved out. It was mine.”
“But I… Mom, I asked you!”
“You didn’t ask, Diana. You demanded. You said I didn’t have much time left. You suggested I move to a dacha where it is impossible to live in winter, and you knew that perfectly well. At sixty-four years old. And still, you suggested it.”
“You didn’t even call me. You didn’t warn me. You just went and sold it.”
“And you didn’t call me to ask how I was sleeping. You called to ask when I would move out.”
“That’s not true!”
“It is true, Diana. Since February, you have not once asked how I was doing. Not one word about whether my pension was enough. You didn’t come to help me wash the windows for spring. You were interested in only one thing: when I would give up the apartment.”
She stood in the middle of the kitchen as red patches crept up her neck. Her arms hung at her sides.
“This isn’t fair,” she said quietly.
“And is it fair to count how much longer your mother has left to live?”
Diana did not answer. She turned around, went into the hallway, and snatched her bag from the chair.
“You’ll remember this,” Diana threw over her shoulder from the door.
I said nothing. The door closed. The elevator hummed, carrying my daughter down.
I remained standing in the corridor, leaning my shoulder against the wall. Would I remember it? Maybe. But certainly not the apartment.
That evening, Yuri called. For the first time in all those years, he dialed my number himself, not through Diana.
“Galina Vasilyevna,” he paused. “I wanted to say. Diana is upset, but I… I think you did the right thing.”
“Thank you, Yura.”
“I told her. Back then, in winter. That you can’t treat your mother like that. She wouldn’t listen.”
“I know.”
“We’ll save up. Ourselves. I’ll start putting money aside from my salary. They promised me a raise at the factory starting in summer.”
“Yura,” I said. “You are a good person. Bring Lyova anytime. I’ll send you the address.”
Yuri quietly thanked me and said goodbye. I put down the phone. Strange, isn’t it: my son-in-law, not a blood relative, turned out to be closer than my daughter. He did not lay claim to my walls. He simply worked, endured, and stayed silent while his wife pressured her mother-in-law. And when everything collapsed, he said the only right words.
I stayed in the kitchen for a long time, looking into the dark window. Outside was a courtyard, swings, a bench. An unfamiliar district, a new life in retirement.
A month passed. Diana did not call. Not once. I unpacked all the boxes, arranged the books on the shelves, hung Tolya’s photograph in the room above the sofa. I bought a new electric kettle, one with a light inside. I met my neighbor on the landing, Vera Nikolayevna, also a pensioner. She brought me a jar of marinated mushrooms and said, “Welcome.”
Lyova came over on the weekend. Yuri drove him by car, but he did not come upstairs himself; he waited below. Lyova rang the intercom, I opened the door, and he flew into the apartment, kicking off his sneakers at the entrance.
“Grandma, this place is cool! Will you show me the balcony?”
He ran through the rooms, touched everything, looked into the wardrobes. He didn’t say anything about his mother. I didn’t ask.
We drank tea with sweet buns that I had baked that morning. Lyova ate, swung his legs under the table, and told me about school, about a classmate who brought a grass snake in a jar to class, about a math test. A normal boy. Nine years old. He didn’t need living space. He needed a grandmother who would feed him and listen.
After tea, I went out onto the balcony. July, a warm evening, children below kicking a ball around the playground. Lyova was examining the books on the shelf in the room, while I looked at the courtyard and caught myself thinking that Diana had not once, in all those months, asked how I felt. Not once had she offered to help with the move. She hadn’t even remembered my pension. She had asked only about square meters.
And Tolya, my Tolya, when we received that three-room apartment thirty-four years ago, the first thing he said was, “Galya, now we’ll have enough space.” Not for himself. For us.
I went into the room and looked at his photograph. Tolya was smiling from the black-and-white picture. Checked shirt, narrowed eyes. I stroked the frame with my finger and said quietly:
“Don’t worry. I’m all right.”
The difference from the sale is sitting in my account, the two-room apartment is mine, and the documents are in order. My pension comes in, and my grandson visits on weekends.
And I told my daughter the truth. You wanted me to give up the apartment. I gave it up. Just not to you. And as for saving for your own place, Diana, you will have to do that yourself. The way Tolya and I once did. Ruble by ruble, weekend by weekend, year by year.
Lyova began getting ready to leave closer to evening. A crumb from a sweet bun remained on the table. Tiny, the size of a fingernail. I brushed it away with my palm: he would come back. In a week, in two. And Diana? I don’t know. Maybe she will call, maybe she won’t.
I closed the balcony door, drew the curtain, turned off the light, and went to bed.
Quiet and peaceful. My apartment, my walls, and the decision was mine too.
And Diana and Yuri are still renting. Yuri puts money aside from every paycheck. Diana does not. She says her mother owes her.
But I owe nothing to anyone. Thirty years at the post office, thirty-four years in an apartment, six years alone. I have earned my peace.
What do you think — should a mother give her apartment to her adult daughter just because she asked?