– Ten thousand forints – said Valerij, as he carefully yet condescendingly spread the banknotes across the table, as if demonstrating the rules of a card game. – For a whole month. This should be enough.
The money lay on the table, and yet it somehow felt as if it wasn’t money at all, but some foreign, cold message that had already decided every day of the month in advance.
There were two five-thousand notes, one slightly crumpled, as if it had already traveled a long road, while the other was too smooth, too new, as if it did not yet know what fate awaited it in this house.
I looked at them, and I thought that these pieces of paper did not represent a month of life, but rather a precise measurement of how much I was worth to someone.
– And what if this money is not enough? – I asked quietly, trying not to reveal how exhausted I was from this conversation that returned every single month in exactly the same way.
By then Valerij was already adjusting his jacket, not even glancing at me, as if my question were not a human thought but some annoying background noise.
He turned his keys in his pocket and shrugged, as if stating the simplest law of the world.
– Then you will learn to manage everything better – he replied completely naturally, as if this were a universal solution to every problem. – Other people live on less and do not complain about every little thing.
I had known this sentence for a long time, because eight years earlier it had been spoken in exactly the same form, when he said I was spending too much on unnecessary things.
Back then I had bought myself a winter pair of boots that cost four thousand forints, and I paid for them entirely from my own salary, yet he acted as if I had committed some enormous luxury.
For an hour and a half I explained that my old boots were already leaking and torn, but he only saw unnecessary spending in it.
Since then, every month followed the same pattern, where the money was always placed on the table, the decision was always his, and my life slowly shrank somewhere in between.
I worked as an accountant in a property management company, where everything in the world of numbers had its place and every forint had a precise meaning.
My salary was thirty-eight thousand forints a month, which was not much, but still enough for a modest life if I had actually been the one living from it.
Instead, every month I transferred twenty-three thousand forints to the bank, because Valerij had taken two loans in his own name, one for a boat and another for its engine, which I never even asked whether was truly necessary.
Formally, the loans were his, but in reality they burdened my life.
It all happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way water finds the smallest crack. At first he only asked me to cover one installment for a month because he had temporary difficulties.
He said he would pay it back the next month, but of course he did not, and then came another request the following month.
Over time it was no longer a request, but a natural expectation, where I became the paying party and he became the decision-maker.
The bank called me, because I was listed as the contact person, and I became the one who started to fear late payment notices.
One evening he brought home a long box wrapped in colorful packaging, and it was obvious from a distance that it was something expensive and unnecessary.
He held it in his hands as if he had brought home a treasure he had been waiting for all his life.
– What is this? – I asked, already sensing that I would not like the answer.
– A fishing rod – he said proudly, stroking the box as if it were a living creature. – Japanese carbon, very serious piece, a long-term investment.
The word “investment” sounded especially sharp, because I knew it represented my entire monthly salary.
Yet he did not see it that way, because for him everything he bought for himself was always justified and necessary, while everything I needed was considered a luxury.
In the kitchen I stood stirring a cheap soup that no longer contained chicken breast, only chicken necks, because that was all I could afford.
The spoon moved slowly along the bottom of the pot, and I was automatically counting, because numbers were always in my head like constant background noise.
After a while I no longer saw only money, but patterns, all revolving around him.
His salary was eighty-five thousand forints, and from that sixty-two thousand remained each month after I paid his loans.
He lived from that, went fishing, met friends, and meanwhile taught me how to save money.
And I tried to maintain a life from ten thousand forints, a life that should have belonged to both of us.
The nights became harder, because I could not sleep while listening to his calm snoring, which felt like certainty from another world.
One early morning I got up and opened an old green checkered notebook from my accounting studies.
I did not know exactly what I wanted to do with it, but I began writing down every month, every loan, and every balance, as if I could regain control through it.
The next day I did not transfer the usual payment to the bank, and it was the first time in ninety-six months that I did not obey the established order.
My hand hovered over the button for a long time, as if everything could still be reversed, but in the end I closed the application and put the phone away.
Three days later the first warning message arrived while he was in the shower and I read it in the kitchen.
I said nothing, because he still believed it was some technical error.
In the following weeks everything continued as before, but something invisible had shifted between us.
Then came the moment when I could no longer remain silent, because every purchase and every decision showed the inequality more sharply.
One day a conflict broke out over shampoo, because I had dared to spend two hundred eighty forints on a product that did not cause itching or pain on my scalp.
He considered even this an exaggeration, while ignoring his own fuel expenses.
The conversation became more heated, and finally I spoke out all the numbers I had been repeating only in my head.
I told him how much he spent on his car, fishing, and everything else, while my life was reduced to pocket change.
That evening the door slammed so hard that the whole house seemed to shake.
The silence afterward was not calming, but heavy and tense, as if all unspoken words remained in the air.
The green notebook became thicker, and every page turned into new evidence of what I had always felt.
When I finally stopped paying his loans, everything around him slowly began to fall apart, but not in the way he expected.
There was no sudden collapse, only a gradual realization that the system he lived in had actually depended on me.
Bank calls increased, tension grew, and one evening we sat across from each other in the kitchen when I brought out the notebook.
He flipped through it, and for the first time I saw real uncertainty on his face, because numbers do not lie and cannot be rewritten.
By the end of the conversation there was no more argument, only the realization that something between us had permanently changed over the years.
He went to the garage, and I remained alone in the kitchen, where for the first time I felt not absence, but the weight of silence.
Life slowly took on a new rhythm, and the numbers balanced again, but they no longer meant safety in the same way.
They instead reminded me how much a life costs when someone else decides it for you, and how much it costs to take back what had always been yours.
