Читать книгу The Code of Male Honor - Алексей Ворм - Страница 5

My name is Semyon Pavlintsev. And this is not a story about how I was betrayed. This is a story about how my eyes were opened.

Intuition, observation, communication… I thought these words were backed by my twenty-five years of marriage to Anzhelika. I could gauge her mood by a single sigh, tell how her day had gone by the sound of her footsteps in the hallway. We built this life together, brick by brick. The apartment, the dacha, the car, our growing children—three daughters and two sons. I was sure I knew every corner of this structure called «our family.» Turns out, I only knew the facade.

Anzhelika always smelled of expensive perfume and coffee. It was her scent. The scent of my morning, my evening. And one day, hugging her, I caught a different smell. Faint, almost imperceptible, alien. Tobacco that I don’t smoke, and an unfamiliar cologne. A trifle. A mere bagatelle. My brain dismissed it, but something inside, some string, quivered and rang out softly, softly, warning me.

Then the little things started to disappear. Her gaze, always so direct, began to evade. Her phone, forever lying on the kitchen table, was now nowhere to be found without her presence. She began staying late for «meetings» and «get-togethers with girlfriends» more often. I saw it, but I didn’t want to see. My mind refused to put these puzzle pieces together into a complete picture. It was easier to think I was paranoid. It was easier to live in the rose-tinted glasses she herself had put on me once. They were comfortable. They hid the sharp edges.

The break happened on a Wednesday. An ordinary Wednesday. I was supposed to go to a site in another city, but the call was canceled. I decided to surprise her—pick her up from work, buy that wine she loved. I stood by the entrance to her office, saw her come out. Not alone. With him. And by the way she touched his hand, by the way she laughed, throwing her head back—by a thousand of these minute details, familiar only to me—everything collapsed.

In that moment, there was no anger, no fury. There was silence. Absolute, deafening silence, in which everything I had believed to be true cracked and turned to dust. The glasses shattered.

The divorce was like clearing the rubble after an earthquake. Painful, dirty, agonizing. Lawyers, division of assets, five pairs of eyes looking at me with a silent question and a pain that can’t be put into words. Anzhelika said something about «incompatibility» and «lack of understanding.» I remained silent. What difference does it make which words you use, when the fact is one—betrayal.

The hardest part wasn’t that. The hardest part was inside me. The question drilling into my brain: «Then who am I?» If I was a blind man led by the nose for twenty-five years, then does that mean my male competence, my honor—was it all an illusion? I felt annihilated.

And it was there, in the very depths of that fall, that I found what I was searching for. Something solid and unshakable. My backbone. Male honor.

It turned out not to be about preventing betrayal. Not about controlling another person. And certainly not about humiliating myself, seeking revenge, or begging for love.

Honor turned out to be in how you go through it. In clenching your teeth and preserving your human dignity. Not dragging her name through the mud with mutual acquaintances. Not turning our five children into a battlefield. Not letting grief and anger eat you alive from the inside and deprive them of a father. Accepting the fact that the person you loved is gone. And the one who remained is just a stranger named Anzhelika, with her own weaknesses and mistakes.

Honor is looking your friends in the eye and not making excuses. Saying: «It didn’t work out.» And knowing that behind those words lies not weakness, but strength. The strength to accept reality, to stand up, and to be a father. To be the rock against which any storm will break, because behind your back are your children.

I couldn’t save the marriage. Perhaps there was nothing left to save at that point. But I saved the most important thing—myself. My inner samurai, for whom there is no goal, only a path. The path called LIFE.

It didn’t end that Wednesday. It just began anew. And in this new life, there is still a place for honor. And that means there is still meaning.