Part 4 — When My Husband Gave My Children No Place in His Home, His Smile Disappeared After My Calm Answer

“Sergo must not do this,” Igor repeated.

For the first time I heard fear in his voice.

Mariam brought the phone to her ear.

“Yes, I understand. I will send you the address right now.”

She ended the call and looked at me.

“Sergo says that he was helping Igor sell the apartment. But another man also went to the agent. He introduced himself as Igor’s business partner and said that after the renovation was finished, the apartment had to be emptied quickly.”

“Who was he?”

“We do not know yet. However, Sergo told the police that he saw this man once near the children’s school.”

The air disappeared from the room.

I took Max and Polina’s picture from the table.

“Was someone watching my children?”

Igor lowered his head.

“Nothing happened.”

“Not yet,” I answered.

At that moment the door opened. Two investigators entered, and behind them stood the bank’s lawyer. Igor immediately stepped forward.

“This is a misunderstanding. My wife is in an emotional state.”

“No one has detained your wife here,” one of the investigators said. “But we have several questions for you.”

Igor turned toward me.

“Ana, tell them that all this is a misunderstanding.”

“I cannot tell them something that is not true.”

“I am your husband.”

“And my children turned out to be your guests.”

Mariam handed the folder to the investigator. Then the voice recorder. Then the bank’s letter.

Igor stood against the wall, rubbing the wet sleeve of his jacket with his fingers. A few minutes earlier that jacket had simply been clothing. Now it seemed to have become the man’s last support.

The investigator played the recording.

“Ana will pay for everything anyway because she is afraid of being left alone.”

Igor raised his head.

His own voice sounded in the room.

It was then that he heard his own words through someone else’s ears for the first time. He could no longer remake them, declare them a joke, or blame them on my “emotionality.”

“I did not say it like that,” he whispered.

Mariam answered calmly:

“You did. The recording confirms it.”

Igor sat down on the chair.

“Ana, I was just joking.”

“It is not a joke when a person plans in advance how to leave you homeless.”

The bank representative handed him a document.

“The sale process has been suspended. Temporary restrictions have been imposed on your accounts. Until the examination is complete, the apartment cannot be sold.”

Igor looked at the paper.

“And where am I supposed to live?”

The question was so sincere that for a few seconds I felt sorry. Not for him, but for the man he could have become and no longer became by his own choice.

“That is for you to solve now,” I told him.

The police stayed for a long time that night. Sergo’s statement, the bank documents, the forged signature, and the description of the unknown man were combined into one case. Later it became clear that the unknown person was a collector of Igor’s debt. Igor had told him that after selling the apartment he would cover everything and would solve the “problem” in the family himself.

He used the word “problem” instead of my children’s names.

In the following weeks Igor contacted me several times.

On the first day he wrote: “Come, let’s talk as husband and wife.”

I did not answer.

The next day: “I am not a bad person. I simply made a mistake.”

On the third day Mariam called me.

“His lawyer says that he should return part of the money to you and wants an agreement.”

“I agree, if everything is official.”

“He is asking for a personal meeting.”

“No.”

Mariam sighed.

“I knew you would say that.”

“I already spoke with him. I spoke with him for eight months. He simply did not listen to me.”

Two days later Igor asked to come for his belongings. I left the children with my mother and waited for him alone at home.

He stopped in the doorway.

“Everything here was mine,” he said.

“No. The walls were yours. I created the life.”

There was an empty space in the living room where his large television had stood. On the wall there remained a small square mark. He took down the photograph in which all four of us were together.

“Should I leave this photograph?”

“No.”

“The children are mine too, Ana.”

“Children are not appropriated with words. You stand beside them.”

He looked away.

“Could you ever forgive me?”

“Maybe. But forgiveness does not mean returning.”

Igor stood in the hallway for a long time. At last he packed his old belongings and left. When the door closed, such silence fell in the apartment as the kind he himself had asked for.

But it was no longer the silence because of which children were driven out of the home.

It was the silence of freedom.

The next morning Max and Polina came. Polina first looked into the kitchen, then touched the door of her room.

“Are we really staying here?”

“Yes.”

“Forever?”

“Until you yourself decide where you want to be.”

Max put his bag on the floor.

“Igor will not come back?”

I was silent for a while.

“No.”

“Because he was bad?”

I knelt beside him.

“Because he made a choice whose consequences he himself had to bear.”

Polina took my hand.

“You are not a bad mother because you fought for us, are you?”

This question hurt me more than all of Igor’s words.

“No, my girl. I would be a bad mother if I did not protect you.”

That same week I submitted an application to the old school. The children continued studying in their classes again. Max attached a bookshelf to the wall. Polina placed a small pot with a purple flower on the windowsill.

I took an additional project at work and began working on financial consultations in the evenings. I realized that the skills with which I had built Igor’s apartment were not needed only to arrange his life.

In a few months an out-of-court agreement was concluded. Igor returned most of my expenses, while the investigation into the forged signature continued. The apartment was sold to cover the bank debt. The home for which I had worked so hard ultimately did not become mine.

Strangely, this did not destroy me.

Because for the first time I understood that a home is not walls, but the people with whom you can breathe there.

One morning, after the first snow, Polina left me a drawing in the kitchen. Four figures were drawn by the window. Above them was written: “Our real home.”

“This is you, Mom,” she explained. “This is me, this is Max, and here is our future dog.”

“Where is the dog?”

“We do not have one yet, but I left a place for it.”

Max chuckled from the side.

“The main thing is, do not draw Igor.”

Polina put the pencil on the table.

“There is no place for him.”

I hugged the children. Outside the window, snow was falling silently onto a new, clean street.

That evening I received the last message from Igor.

“I no longer have an apartment. I have debts left. You are still the only person with whom I felt at home. Come, let’s start again.”

I looked at the screen for a long time.

Then I wrote only one sentence:

“Home is not where you leave no space for others.”

I blocked his number.

I put the phone on the kitchen shelf and went in to the children. Max was reading a book, while Polina was arranging the pencils for her drawing.

By the door hung the small wooden measuring tape that I had bought on the first day of the renovation. On it I had marked the children’s heights: Max—“the first day in the new home,” Polina—“the day of Mom’s promise.”

Igor once told me that such little things do not create a place.

He was wrong.

I drew a new line on the tape, marked both children’s current heights, and wrote one word below:

“We stayed.”