My brother and his spouse were offended by me, and then kinfolk said I could count them as abandoning me. And now I’m agonizing with the question, “Did I ever have them, did they ever accept me?” I’m a late child, I’m more than twenty years younger than my brother. My brother has been married a long time, his son is now fourteen. I’m not married yet. My brother was in college when I was born, then he was drafted into the army, got married there, and eventually bought a condo with his wife on a mortgage.
I lived with our parents all these years. My parents have a municipality apartment, they didn’t privatize it. We lived in a former barracks: shared hallway, toilet in the yard, shared kitchen, and my father and his neighbors made a shower at the end of the hall by themselves. They kept promising my father at work that they would give him a decent place to live, but we never got it. When mom passed away I was seventeen, and after her death my father and I were left in our apartment.
When my mother passed away, my father started drinking, which was aided by his environment, which consisted mostly of marginalized people. Mom had worked all her life as a letter carrier and Dad as a handyman. At the time of my mother’s death, he and my father were long retired. I didn’t go back to my parents’ nest after graduation, but went to live in a rented one-room apartment.
– Daughter, there was a fire, we managed to save our documents and some things. They put us up in a hotel,” my father once told me.
The fact of the fire did not upset my father too much, as rumors spread among the fire victims that they would be given normal apartments. I called my brother, and he told me:
– How do I know what to do? I don’t want to take my father away.
Dad didn’t manage to live long enough to get an apartment: he died of a heart attack. At that time I was told by the city council that I was entitled to the same amount of space as our apartment. They also told me that in addition to me there would be an adolescent registered there, and therefore the new apartment wouldn’t belong to me alone.
I was taken aback, because I could not understand who they were talking about, because my mother had always said that only I should get housing, since my brother had already checked out of our apartment. It turned out that my father had registered my brother in our apartment, and he registered his son, but he himself had checked out.
– And what did you think, that you would get the whole apartment? – my sister-in-law told me when we met her to get the housing documents. – Even if the apartment had been privatized, the inheritance is still divided among the children in equal shares. Your parents were cunning, they didn’t privatize the apartment, but for every wise man there is simplicity, and we are not in the dark either.
I understood that my daughter-in-law’s words made some sense, but I couldn’t imagine why they would do such a mean thing. I didn’t sue the in-laws, though I understood that everything wasn’t as transparent as the in-laws wanted me to think.
I lived alone in the apartment, since the boy lived with his parents. I was glad that now I had a normal place to live, but my joy was overshadowed by the fact that the apartment was large, and therefore the rent was not insignificant, I recruited my brother:
– What do you want from me? I’m not going to pay rent, because my son doesn’t live there…
I don’t understand anything about the law, but in spite of that, I had the good sense to apply for a division of personal accounts for the utilities. After that, my sister-in-law called me and started calling me names because she didn’t like what I had done.
I then decided that I had better privatize my part and sell it. My in-laws were not going to privatize their part, so I decided that I could offer my share to the municipality. After they refused I could sell it to the first buyer who approached me.
I sent a registered letter to the municipality with the offer, and at the same time I found a buyer. When everything was coming to a close, my relatives called me and started to complain:
– “Why the fuck did you do this? We could have given you the money gradually…
– I’m planning to buy my own place with a mortgage, so I’m not satisfied with a gradual payment.
– Why didn’t you tell me you were going to sell your share? Don’t you have a conscience? – Yelled my brother.
– And you warned me a lot when you signed your son into the apartment. I’m not going to wait, if you want you can buy my share, but I’m not going to wait.
After that, my sister-in-law and brother-in-law called me all the words they had in their foul language, and then they told me that they were giving me up, didn’t they once consider me family?
