The son struck his father; the father left the house without a word and lived in the bathhouse for three years, until his dying day.
The son struck his father; the father left the house without a word and lived in the bathhouse for three years, until his dying day.
Egor was a hot-blooded man. Not mean—just hot-blooded. He’d flare up like gunpowder. He could yell, he could swear, he could slam his fist on the table hard enough to make the plates jump. But raising a hand against another person? That was something he’d never done. Even back in his youth, when the neighborhood kids used to brawl, he’d mostly just swing his arms for show, never actually hitting anyone. He didn’t know how. And he didn’t want to.
Especially not his father.
Egor’s father was a man of a different breed. Ivan Stepanovich was an old forester, the kind they just don’t make anymore. Spent his whole life at the ranger station, his whole life in the taiga. He raised his son alone—his wife died young, and Egor barely remembered her. Ivan Stepanovich had been both mother and father to him. Fed him, clothed him, taught him how to live. He didn’t say much, but every word was like a nail driven home: solid, tight, forever.
Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Don’t betray. The rest will fall into place.
That was the whole lesson. And Egor had taken it to heart. He grew up, trained as a mechanic, got married, and built a house not far from his father’s, on the same edge of the village. His wife, Nadya, was a good woman, a hard worker. Two kids—a boy and a girl. Everything just like anyone else. By that time, Ivan Stepanovich was retired and lived alone, but he stopped by every day, either to play with the grandkids or to help around the yard. He trusted his son. He was proud of his son. And the son respected his father.
Only, that year had been a hard one for Egor. A very hard one.
First, he got laid off. The timber mill where he’d worked as a mechanic for twenty years shut down—a new owner sold everything off and threw the workers out on the street. Egor was left without a paycheck. Nadya worked as a school custodian, which paid pennies. The kids were growing up, the household needed things, and the tractor loan wasn’t paid off. Egor scrambled, looking for odd jobs—here a sawmill, there some freelance labor, anything for cash. But the money slipped through his fingers like water.
He started drinking. A little at first, on the weekends. Then more often. Then almost every evening. Nadya endured it in silence. The kids grew quiet. And Ivan Stepanovich watched his son and frowned. But he said nothing. He waited.
And then happened what no one expected.
It was an evening. Typical autumn weather, with rain and wind. Egor came back from another odd job—again no pay, again cheated, again fed a bunch of promises. He was angry, exhausted, and drunk, having stopped by a neighbor’s place on the way home to sit over a bottle. The light was on in the house. Ivan Stepanovich was sitting at the table, having dropped by as usual to check on the grandkids. Nadya was fussing by the stove.
Egor walked in. Saw his father. And something inside him snapped.
“You here again?” he said in an ugly voice. “Coming and going. Sitting there, watching. What are you always staring at? Why are you always so damn quiet?”
Ivan Stepanovich raised his eyes. Calmly, without a trace of fear.
“What is there for me to say? You know it all yourself.”
“What do I know?! What?!”
“That you need to quit drinking. That you need to feed your family. That you need to act like a man, not a doormat.”
It was said evenly. Without malice. But to Egor, it sounded like contempt. The very same old-man contempt that he felt had been accumulating inside him all these months of unemployment and humiliation. And Egor snapped.
“Who the hell are you to lecture me?!” he yelled. “You spent your whole life sitting in the woods! What do you understand?! What have you ever seen in life besides your damn pine trees?”
“I raised you,” Ivan Stepanovich said quietly. “That’s what I saw.”
Egor sneezed a twisted grin. “Raised me! And so what? What did you ever give me? Your measly forester’s pennies? This old shack? I made something of myself all on my own! By myself!”
He stepped toward his father. Nadya rushed to get between them, but he shoved her aside—without looking, with a single motion. And, completely beside himself, he reared back and struck.
He struck his father across the face.
The old man staggered. Took a step back. Grabbed hold of the edge of the table. Blood trickled from his split lip.
Silence descended on the house. The kind of silence where you could hear the grandfather clock ticking on the wall. Nadya froze by the stove, pressing her hands to her face. The children—son and daughter—stood in the doorway of the front room, staring with eyes rounded in horror.
And Ivan Stepanovich wiped his lip—calmly, as if nothing had happened. Looked at his son. His eyes were dry. And empty. Like the eyes of a man who had just lost something very important—and already realized he’d never get it back.
“Well,” he said. “Guess that about covers it.”
And he walked toward the door. On the threshold, he turned back.
“You’re no son of mine anymore. Goodbye, Egor.”
The door closed. Footsteps on the porch. Silence.
Egor stood in the middle of the room, staring at his hand—the one he’d struck with. He still couldn’t believe he’d done it. That he was the one who did it. That he had hit his father. His own father. An old man. The one who had raised him alone, without a wife. The one who…
Suddenly, he choked for air. He sat down on the bench. Grabbed his head in his hands.
“God,” he whispered. “What have I done…”
But it was too late.
Ivan Stepanovich didn’t go back to his house. He didn’t go into a house at all. He stood on the porch for a moment, staring up at the dark sky. Blood was still trickling from his split lip, and he wiped it away with his sleeve. Then, slowly and heavily, he walked down the steps and crossed the vegetable garden—heading toward where the old bathhouse stood black against the night.
Why the bathhouse? Why not his own home—warm, lived-in, with a stove, with books, with all his belongings? It wasn’t an act of protest. Ivan Stepanovich didn’t know how to protest—he wasn’t that kind of man. He had lived his life in the forest, at the ranger station, where everything is simple and honest. A tree falls the way you notch it. Tracks lead the way the animal went. The snow doesn’t lie. And people shouldn’t either. They don’t have the right.
The continuation is in the first c0mment 
