“I saved up for six months to pay for this renovation,” Alice said. “I picked every single roll myself. And you come in and tear down the wallpaper because you think the colour looks like mourning? Get out of my flat right now, or I’ll push you down the stairs!” Her voice cracked into a deafening, piercing scream that echoed off the ruined walls of her once-perfect living room.
She stood on the threshold, her fingers white-knuckled around the handle of her travel bag. Only a few hours before, she and Arthur had driven back from a countryside guesthouse, looking forward to a quiet Sunday evening in their immaculate flat—clean, fresh-smelling, with expensive interior perfume lingering in the air. Alice had gone upstairs a little ahead of her husband while he parked the car, already anticipating brewing coffee and sinking into the new sofa. Now, before her eyes, a battlefield lay spread out. The exclusive Italian wallpaper—deep matte graphite, ordered directly from the factory after a three‑month wait—hung in torn, pathetic shreds along the walls. In places it had been ripped off with such fury that the grey concrete underneath was exposed, and the expensive, perfectly smoothed filler bore deep, ugly gouges from a metal scraper.
“Don’t shout at me, Alice. You’re the lady of the house, but you carry on like a market trader,” Zinaida Ivanovna said, completely unruffled. She hadn’t even flinched at her daughter‑in‑law’s outburst; she just pressed her lips into a thin, hard line. “I walked in and was stunned. How could you live like this? Darkness everywhere, like a tomb. My son works hard—he needs to come home to something that lifts his spirits, not something that depresses him. I decided to surprise you while you were out. I found some excellent enamel paint on my balcony, quality that lasts forever. See how much more spacious it looks now? Like the sun has peeked into the room.”
The mother‑in‑law stood in the middle of the room, wearing a faded chintz apron printed with garish burgundy flowers, pulled over her good blouse. In her right hand she clutched an old paint roller, from which thick beige goo dripped lazily onto the expensive light‑oak laminate. On the wall behind her, right over the remnants of the graphite non‑woven wallpaper, was a huge, uneven patch of paint. The cheap glossy oil paint had gone on in ugly bumps, oozing sticky streaks onto the new white skirting boards. The air was thick with a suffocating, toxic smell of solvent and old oil paint, instantly giving Alice a throbbing headache and a wave of nausea.
“A surprise?” Alice took one mechanical step forward. Under the sole of her trainer, a puddle of spilled paint squelched disgustingly. “You used the spare keys we left with you—only for emergencies, like a burst pipe—to break in and commit this act of vandalism? Do you realise you’ve destroyed materials worth thousands of pounds? Not counting the work of the qualified tradesmen we waited six months for!”
“Thousands of pounds? Are you out of your mind?” The mother‑in‑law gave a superior snort and waved the roller theatrically through the air, sending a spray of tiny beige droplets onto the arm of the new light‑coloured faux‑leather sofa. “For that black paper? They conned you in the shop, sold you rubbish nobody else wanted. People have lived in bright rooms for centuries, and they turned out fine. You’ve turned the place into a catacomb. You should be thanking me—I spent hours on my bad back, peeling off those gloomy strips. They were barely hanging on anyway, shoddy work. I’ve been slaving away here for four hours to give you a decent look.”
Alice turned her glassy stare towards the corner of the living room. There, black builder’s bags bulged with crumpled, mutilated pieces of her dream. Next to them stood an old galvanised bucket of dirty soapy water, with a grey floor cloth floating inside. A wide metal scraper lay nearby, caked with wallpaper scraps. The scale of the destruction was maniacally systematic. This wasn’t a spontaneous impulse of a flighty woman. The mother‑in‑law had methodically, metre by metre, destroyed someone else’s work. She’d deliberately soaked the walls with water, scraped them furiously with metal, stripped the covering, and then smeared the resulting bald patches with that nauseating glossy substance. Every movement of her roller was steeped in aggressive self‑assertion and open contempt for her daughter‑in‑law.
“You pulled it off with a scraper,” Alice said, stretching out her arm to point at the wall, feeling pure, concentrated hatred boil up inside her, burning away every other emotion. “You punctured the layer of finishing plaster right down to the concrete. You poured enamel over our new expensive floor—no solvent will ever get that off without leaving a mark. You ruined the sofa. You weren’t creating comfort. You came here deliberately to cause damage, Zinaida Ivanovna. You’ve committed a crime in my home.”
“I came to fix your designer whims!” Zinaida Ivanovna planted her free hand on her hip, striking a pose of absolute superiority, staring her daughter‑in‑law straight in the eye. “Your taste is pure ugliness. Arthur is too soft—he won’t argue with you, he puts up with your stylist airs. But I’m his mother. I have every right to put order into my child’s life. I’ll finish this wall today, and tomorrow I’ll start on the next one. And you don’t get to tell me what to do in my son’s flat.”
The claim about “my son’s flat” was the detonator. Alice vividly remembered taking endless extra shifts at the clinic, the two of them scrimping and saving on everything—no holidays, no restaurant meals—to pay off the mortgage on this two‑bedroom flat, which was in both their names. She remembered every sleepless night spent choosing wall textures so they would absorb light perfectly and emphasise the sharp lines of the furniture. And now, in front of her stood a woman who had put not a single penny or a single hour of labour into this home, yet with brazen, impenetrable self‑satisfaction claimed ownership over someone else’s property, brandishing a filthy paint roller. The tension in the air reached a breaking point, as if the windowpanes might shatter. The argument was escalating into full‑scale war of annihilation.
“In your son’s flat?” Alice said it quietly, but with such an icy tone that the temperature in the stuffy, solvent‑stinking room seemed to drop a few degrees. “Are you seriously trying to convince me you have the right to destroy my property just because you gave birth to one of the owners?”
Instead of stopping, Zinaida Ivanovna defiantly dipped the roller into a rusty tin can. The thick, yellowish‑beige goo—like sour condensed milk—slurped as it absorbed the fuzzy sleeve. She pressed the tool hard against the ribbed edge of the tray, shaking off the excess directly onto the floor, where an oily stain was already spreading, eating its way into the expensive laminate.
“Don’t get clever with me,” she shot back without turning, and slapped the roller onto the wall, crossing the remains of the noble graphite with a greasy, glossy stripe. “Property… what a word you’ve invented. This isn’t property—it’s a whim. I happen to be worried about Arthur’s mental health. Look what you’ve done! Black walls, white skirting boards—it’s a coffin, a real coffin with music! How can anyone live here? How can you raise children? A child would grow up stuttering or turn into a maniac in a place like this. Beige is classic—warm, homely. I’ll roll it all over, put up the curtains with frills I brought from my dacha, and it’ll look like a proper home. Light and festive.”
Alice watched this performance, and her vision darkened. She could physically feel the thin thread of her self‑control snapping. It wasn’t even the money, although the damage, by the most conservative estimate, had already exceeded five thousand pounds. It was the sadistic pleasure with which this woman was destroying their world. Alice remembered how she and Arthur had argued over shades, held colour swatches against the furniture, dreamed of evenings with a glass of wine in this stylish, muted loft atmosphere. And now that atmosphere had been violated by a can of expired floor paint, probably found in a garage or a skip.
“Do you have any idea that your ‘enamel’ takes three days to dry and stinks so badly you can’t stay in the room without a respirator?” Alice’s voice trembled with barely contained fury. “You’ve poisoned the air in the flat. The furniture, the curtains, the clothes in the wardrobes—everything will absorb that smell. You haven’t just ruined the walls; you’ve made the flat uninhabitable.”
“Oh, aren’t we delicate!” Zinaida Ivanovna snorted contemptuously, continuing to smear the paint in chaotic strokes, leaving bald patches and greasy blobs. “We painted with paint all our lives, and nobody died. Open a window and it’ll air out. And it washes beautifully. A wipe with a cloth and it’s clean. Those paper wallpapers of yours are dust traps. Touch them and they stain. I scraped one with my fingernail, and it came off like tissue paper. Ugh, rubbish! And you paid money for that? You were cheated, my dear, and you lapped it up.”
Alice stepped closer to the wall, careful to avoid the puddles of paint, and saw what the shreds of wallpaper had hidden. The plaster wasn’t just scraped—it was gouged with something sharp, like animal claws. The mother‑in‑law hadn’t tried to remove the covering carefully; she’d torn it off with flesh and blood, leaving deep furrows in the perfectly finished surface. This wasn’t an attempt at renovation; it was an execution. An execution of her daughter‑in‑law’s hateful taste, of her choices, of her presence in her son’s life.
“That’s Italian textile non‑woven wallpaper,” Alice said slowly, articulating every word. “A roll costs two hundred and twenty pounds. There were twelve rolls here. Plus the wall preparation under the paint, which you’ve destroyed with your scraper. Plus the tradesmen’s labour. Plus the new laminate you’ve soaked with oil. You’re standing in the middle of damage equal to the value of your dacha, Zinaida Ivanovna. And you will pay for it. I don’t know how, but you will repay every penny.”
The mother‑in‑law stopped abruptly. The roller froze on the wall. She turned slowly, and on her face—dotted with small beads of sweat and paint spots—was a mixture of genuine astonishment and malice.
“Have you lost your mind?” she hissed, narrowing her eyes. “Demand money from a mother? For putting things in order? You should be bowing at my feet! I didn’t spare my own hands, I ruined my manicure, to help you. And you wave bills in my face? Greedy little thing. I always knew you only wanted Arthur for his money. There it is, your true nature. For some rags on the wall you’re ready to drag your own mother‑in‑law into debt.”
“You are not my mother,” Alice cut her off. “You’re a vandal who broke into someone else’s home. You’ve destroyed the work of dozens of people. You’ve ruined something you had nothing to do with. Look at the sofa! Look at it!”
Alice jabbed a finger towards the expensive corner sofa. On the light upholstery, which they’d been so careful to protect, was a scatter of tiny yellow splashes. The mother‑in‑law had swung the roller so energetically that she’d sprayed everything within two metres.
“Sew a cushion cover, hide it,” Zinaida Ivanovna waved dismissively, turning back to her task. “It’s no big loss. The walls are human now. Before, you walked in and felt like howling. I’m looking at this and thinking: maybe I should repaint the kitchen too? That’s also some sort of grey gloom, like an operating theatre. I have half a can of green paint left—cheerful, grassy colour.”
Alice’s breath caught. She pictured her kitchen—matte fronts, stone worktop, integrated appliances—and this woman with a can of toxic green paint. This was beyond good and evil. It was like the barbarian invasion of Rome. The mother‑in‑law not only didn’t understand what she was doing; she revelled in her impunity, hiding behind the sacred status of “mum” and “helper.”
“If you don’t put that roller down right now, I’ll…” Alice choked on her own helplessness, unable to find words. She knew she couldn’t physically push this heavy, strong woman, now in full destructive frenzy.
“You’ll what?” Zinaida Ivanovna turned to face her fully, hands on her hips, the roller swinging menacingly. “Hit me? Go ahead. Hit an old woman. Arthur will come home, and I’ll show him the bruises. Let’s see who he chooses—a hysterical wife who attacks people over wallpaper, or a mother who wanted to make things cosy. You’re evil, Alice. Empty inside, just like your grey walls. No warmth, no respect in you. I paint and I feel the anger leaving the corners. I’m covering your black aura.”
Alice stared at that triumphant face, twisted into a mask of righteous fury, and understood: dialogue was impossible. Before her stood a person living in her own distorted reality, where beige oil paint over designer wallpaper was a blessing, and destroying someone else’s property was an act of maternal love. In that reality, Alice was the enemy, the invader, who had to be smoked out, erased, painted over with cheap enamel.
Suddenly, the front door clicked shut. The sound was heavy, confident. Alice flinched.
“Arthur?” she called, not taking her eyes off the mother‑in‑law, whose face changed instantly at the sound of the door.
Zinaida Ivanovna hunched her shoulders, pretending to be incredibly tired. She placed a hand theatrically on her lower back, and her expression shifted from aggression to one of martyr‑like virtue.
“Oh, my son’s here…” she whined, deliberately loud so he could hear from the hallway. “I’ve been getting a surprise ready for you, Artie—working hard, sparing no effort… And Alice is shouting, cursing, almost hit me…”
Alice stood frozen. She knew what was coming. The mother‑in‑law would start her performance, play the victim, tug at heartstrings. And Arthur, who always tried to smooth things over, would be caught in the middle of this madness. But this time Alice wasn’t going to stay silent. This time there were no compromises. She looked at the ruined wall, where beige paint was slowly sliding down in ugly drips like festering wounds, and realised: this was the end. Either he threw her out, or their marriage ended right here, among the smell of solvent and the wreckage of their broken dream.
“What the hell is going on here, and where is that unbearable stench coming from that’s filling the whole stairwell?” Arthur’s voice pulled the women out of their tense standoff. He stepped into the living room in his outdoor shoes, stripping off his light jacket, but froze with it in his hands, stunned by the scene of utter destruction before him.
The air in the room was thick with toxic fumes from cheap solvent and old oil enamel, so strong it immediately stung the eyes. Arthur shifted his bewildered gaze from his wife—rigid in an pose of absolute, unbending fury—to his mother, wearing a ridiculous burgundy apron over her good blouse. In her hand, Zinaida Ivanovna clutched the paint roller, from which thick yellowish‑beige goo continued to drip onto the expensive laminate. Then his eyes moved to the wall. The very wall he and Alice had painstakingly prepared, levelled, and hung with Italian non‑woven wallpaper in deep graphite. Now it looked like a flayed carcass. The wallpaper hung in miserable strips, exposing the plaster gouged by a metal tool and the grey concrete beneath. Over this barbaric display, crooked, greasy stripes of glossy paint had been smeared.
“We’re finishing the renovation!” Zinaida Ivanovna instantly switched her aggressive tone to honey‑sweet, thrusting the dirty tool forward like a trophy. “I decided to make you a bright living room. You live in this black den, never see daylight. You come home tired from your shifts, and the black walls press in on you from all sides. So I found some excellent paint on my balcony—I’ll roll it all smooth, it’ll be fresh and cheerful. And Alice is screaming at me. Imagine, attacking an old person over some paper on the walls! I’m slaving away for you, bending my back, and she’s kicking me out.”
Arthur took a slow step forward. Under his shoe, a puddle of spilled enamel squelched wetly. He walked closer to the wall, ignoring the fact that he was ruining his own shoes. He ran his hand over the scraped surface. Under his fingers, the ruined filler crumbled, pieces falling to the floor and mixing with dirty water and paint. He remembered how he and Alice had primed that wall in the evenings after work, how they’d rejoiced over every smooth centimetre. Now all that hard work had been turned into a disgusting, filthy parody of renovation. He looked at the builder’s bags in the corner, stuffed with crumpled strips of their exclusive wallpaper, then at the new light‑coloured faux‑leather sofa, its back generously flecked with tiny yellow splashes.
“She’s lying, Arthur,” Alice said in a flat, metallic voice, her hard gaze fixed on her mother‑in‑law. “The wallpaper was stuck on solidly. She deliberately soaked it with water from that bucket and tore it off in fury using a wide metal scraper, punching through the finishing plaster right down to the base. Look at these deep grooves. She poured aggressive oil enamel over our new floor—it’s already eaten into the gaps between the laminate planks. Look at the ruined sofa. She let herself in with your spare keys while we were out of town and staged a full‑scale riot. The amount of damage is colossal. She deliberately and methodically destroyed everything we’ve put our money into for the last six months.”
“What money, Artie?!” Zinaida Ivanovna shrieked, sensing that her son wasn’t about to be grateful for her surprise, and instantly shifted to an aggressive offensive. “That girl has wrapped you around her little finger, made you buy this gloomy horror at an insane price! They cheated you in the shop! It came off easily—shoddy work. I’m doing you a favour, cleaning off this filth. Beige is always in fashion, it calms the nerves. I’ve been slaving away here for four hours without a break, peeling off this nightmare, breathing in dust, so you could rest comfortably in your own flat! And she calls me a thief! I have every right to come to my own son. You’re registered here; it’s your living space! I won’t let her tell me what to do in your home!”
Arthur stood silent, processing what he’d heard. He looked at his mother’s red, strained face, twisted with malice, and for the first time in his life he saw her with absolute clarity, without the usual haze of filial attachment. The illusions collapsed with a deafening crack. He didn’t see a caring woman trying to do good for her child. Before him stood an aggressive, cruel person who had committed an act of vandalism out of pure, unadulterated envy and a desire to prove her unconditional authority. The beige paint wasn’t an attempt to create cosiness; it was a weapon, chosen specifically to humiliate Alice, trample her taste, destroy her work, and stake a territorial claim over their shared space. Zinaida Ivanovna had spent hours of hard physical labour not to help, but to demolish.
“I gave you the keys,” Arthur said, enunciating every word. His voice was low, but with such icy firmness that his mother involuntarily stepped back, nearly tripping over the bucket of dirty water. “I gave them to you only for emergencies—a burst pipe or a fire. I did not give you permission to come here with a bucket, a scraper, and stinking paint to wreck our home.”
“Wreck?!” Zinaida Ivanovna threw up her free hand in outrage, splattering paint from the roller everywhere. “I’m putting things in order! Your wife has turned the flat into a gloomy cave! You’ve gone blind under her influence, stopped thinking straight! I’m saving you from this darkness! That black colour depresses the psyche, makes people ill! Beige is…”
“Shut up,” Arthur cut her off sharply. No shouting, no excess emotion—just a hard, uncompromising order that made his mother instantly freeze and close her mouth. “Just shut your mouth and look around. Look at what you’ve done to our living room. Alice and I chose that wallpaper together. I like that colour. I like that design. We put our own earned money and our own time into it. And you brought a can of the cheapest, most poisonous muck and poured it over our hard work. Out of pure spite. Out of a compulsive need to prove that you’re the boss here and can destroy other people’s property with impunity.”
“Oh, so now I did it out of spite!” The mother‑in‑law’s face broke out in ugly red blotches; she gripped the roller handle with both hands, as if ready to physically attack the ruined wall. “I dragged that paint across town on the bus to help you, and you insult me! You’re just ungrateful egoists! No respect for your elders! I’m going to finish this wall anyway—I won’t leave it like this! You’ll thank me later when you see how light and spacious it is! I’ll finish this wall right now, and nobody’s going to stop me!”
She made a sharp, aggressive lunge towards the ruined surface, intending to sweep the roller across the remaining graphite, but Arthur was faster. He stepped in front of her, completely ignoring the thick paint squelching under his outdoor shoes, and grabbed her wrist firmly. His fingers closed around her arm with such unyielding force that she gave a short cry of surprise and pain. The roller slipped from her weakened fingers and hit the ruined laminate with a dull, squelching thud, splashing the remaining beige enamel around it. The row had reached its absolute peak, passing into open, irreversible confrontation. The air in the solvent‑poisoned room grew so dense and heavy it felt knife‑edged. There was no going back.
“Let go of my wrist, Arthur, you’re hurting me! Have you completely lost your mind because of this harpy of yours?” Zinaida Ivanovna tried to pull free, but her son’s fingers held her in a dead grip, preventing her from touching the ruined wall again. “You’re raising your hand to your mother? Over what? Over this black scribble that I wanted to remove? You should be thanking me when you wake up in a normal, bright room!”
Arthur slowly released his fingers, and his mother’s arm hung limp. He looked at her as if he were seeing a complete stranger, a dangerous person. There was not a drop of pity in his gaze, only the cold, crystallised realisation of what had happened. On the floor at his feet, a greasy puddle of beige paint spread out from the fallen roller, slowly seeping into the laminate gaps, irreversibly ruining the expensive wood.
“You’re not leaving here until you give me the keys. Right now. Take them out of your bag and put them on that ruined windowsill,” Arthur said in a frighteningly calm voice. There was no tremor, no doubt. It was the voice of a man who had just cut away a gangrenous piece of his own life.
“What keys? You’re throwing your own mother out of the house?” Zinaida Ivanovna tried to muster outrage, but under her son’s icy stare her confidence began to crack. She adjusted her paint‑splattered apron and took a step back, away from Arthur and towards the door. “I’m as much the mistress here as that wife of yours… I raised you; I have the right to come and put things in order if you can’t manage yourselves! Look at her, standing there, keeping quiet, glad we’re fighting! She’s turned you against me; she’s stuffed into your head that this crypt is beautiful!”
“You destroyed the result of six months’ work. You entered our flat without invitation and staged a riot,” Arthur took a step towards her, forcing her further back into the hallway. “You ruined materials, furniture, the floor. You poisoned the air with that chemical. And you still dare talk about rights? Your only right now is to get out and never cross this threshold again. The keys. On the table. Now.”
Zinaida Ivanovna fumbled in her apron pocket and hurled a key ring onto the hall console. The keys clattered against the surface, leaving a deep scratch. Her face twisted with impotent malice; the mask of the “caring mother” had finally fallen, revealing her true nature—domineering, selfish, utterly ruthless towards other people’s feelings.
“Choke on your keys!” she spat, pulling off the dirty apron and throwing it on the floor in a heap of builder’s mess. “Live in your mausoleum, if you like it so much! You’ll suffocate in that blackness, and you’ll remember your mother—but it’ll be too late. Not a scrap of gratitude for everything I’ve done for you. I came, I bent my back, I brought the best paint… Damn you and your renovation!”
Alice had stood by the window throughout, arms crossed. She hadn’t said a word since Arthur came in. She didn’t need to—her husband’s actions spoke for themselves. She watched him methodically push his mother out of their space, physically blocking the ruined room.
“That’s not all,” Arthur said, blocking his mother’s path to the front door as she reached for the handle. “You’ll leave now, but tomorrow I’ll send you an itemised bill. Every damaged strip of wallpaper, every centimetre of ruined plaster, the laminate that has to be replaced across the whole living room, the sofa cleaning, and the professional clean. You’ll repay every last penny. I don’t care where you get the money—take it from your savings or sell your dacha buildings. But you will pay for this ‘surprise’ in full.”
“Have you completely lost your mind?” Zinaida Ivanovna gasped at the sheer audacity. “Demand money from your own mother? I’ll take you to court! I’ll tell everyone what kind of son I raised! You won’t get a single penny from me, what do you think? Pay for help?”
“You didn’t help. You committed an act of vandalism.” Arthur opened the front door and pointed to the landing. “If the money isn’t transferred within a month, I’ll find a way to take it. And don’t call me. Don’t come here. For us, you no longer exist until the damage is fully repaid. Now—get out.”
The mother‑in‑law tried to scream something else; her voice came from the stairwell, mixed with the heavy thud of her footsteps descending. She hurled curses, threatened divine punishment, but Arthur simply closed the door, cutting off the stream of hatred. The flat fell into a heavy, sticky atmosphere, saturated with the smell of cheap enamel.
Arthur walked back into the living room and stopped in the middle of the ruins. He looked at Alice, still standing by the window. His shoulders sagged; his face showed the infinite weariness of a man who had just undergone a major surgical operation without anaesthetic. His eyes swept over the walls: the graphite wallpaper hanging in tatters, and that disgusting beige daub that now seemed like a brand of shame on their home.
“I’ll call the contractors tomorrow,” he said quietly, not looking at his wife. “We’ll strip everything back to the concrete. Get rid of this smell, pull up the laminate. We’ll do it all over again, Alice. Even better than before.”
Alice walked over to him and put a hand on his shoulder. Her fingers felt the tension—he was like a drawn wire. She looked at the wall where, beneath the layer of ugly paint, their original vision could still be made out. This wasn’t just a room. It was their first real joint project, their sanctuary, which had been desecrated in the crudest, most cynical way.
“She won’t pay back the money, Art,” Alice said, staring at the paint stains on the floor. “You know her. She’d rather die than admit she’s wrong.”
“She will,” Arthur raised his head, and the same cold fire that had silenced his mother glinted in his eyes again. “She’s got that dacha plot she loves so much. She’ll sell it if she has to. I wasn’t joking. I won’t let her barge into our lives and destroy what we’ve built without consequences. That was the last time she sets foot inside this house. No more ‘spare keys,’ no more compromises.”
He walked to the wall and tore off another strip of wallpaper that had somehow survived his mother’s attack. Underneath lay the grey, cold surface of the filler. Arthur crushed the paper in his fist and threw it into the builder’s bag.
“She will never come in again,” he repeated, and it sounded like a final verdict. “Even if she kneels at the door.”
Alice nodded. She knew this row had changed their family forever. Between them and Zinaida Ivanovna now lay not just a gulf—there was scorched earth, drenched in toxic beige paint. No apology, no future attempt at reconciliation could ever hide those deep grooves the mother‑in‑law had carved with her scraper—not only into the walls, but into their souls.
They stood in the wrecked living room, surrounded by the smell of solvent and the shreds of their dream. Ahead lay weeks of renovation, enormous expense, and difficult conversations. But of one thing they were certain: this home now belonged only to them. And no one—not even the most “caring” mother—would ever again dictate what colour their life should be. The quarrel had ended in a full, unconditional victory of common sense over the tyranny of kinship, but the price of that victory was written in beige enamel on the graphite walls of their memory.
