The Toilet

I decided it was time to buy a house. How much longer was I supposed to live like a nomad, drifting through rented apartments? The last decade of my life had been an endless migration from one set of cold, damp walls to another — slightly brighter, perhaps, but still belonging to someone else. With every move, my belongings dwindled, got lost, or wore out, and alongside them, I felt my own sense of rootedness slipping away. Buying a house back then was far simpler, before real estate prices skyrocketed catastrophically and securing a loan mutated into an impenetrable bureaucratic labyrinth. I picked a good time — or so I thought.

Despite the supposedly favorable timing, finding a home was no easy feat. For about six months, the entire family — my wife, our two young children, my elderly but inexhaustible mother, and I — hunted for the right place. Every weekend devolved into an endless expedition through the urban jungle. Prices in the central districts were fantastically high, and the local real estate agents looked at us as though we were beggars who had accidentally wandered into their palaces. Moving to the outskirts was absolutely out of the question; my mother firmly believed that living away from the center was the final nail in the coffin of our social status.

Yet, as time dragged on and our frustration mounted, we were forced to expand our search to the peripheries. And lo and behold! We discovered a completely inexplicable economic phenomenon: prices in the suburbs were practically identical to those in the center. Our illusion of buying a massive, dirt-cheap apartment on the edge of town shattered instantly. Reality flowed in an entirely different direction, governed by the ruthless logic of the market. What could we do? Through sheer logical deduction, we pivoted back to the central neighborhoods — if we had to live in cramped, overpriced quarters anyway, we might as well do it where public transport actually functioned.

In short, half a year passed, and one evening, just as half the family was ready to surrender, a peculiar ad caught our eye in the newspaper. Some desperate seller was offering an unfinished “black frame” apartment in a central district for a highly acceptable, almost suspiciously low price. We didn’t think twice. We viewed the apartment the next day, and by the third, we were sitting in the notary’s office. Renovations soon followed. Normally, renovating is akin to waging war — a chaotic state where budgeting is practically an impossible task — but by some miracle, everything wrapped up quickly. The whole family breathed a sigh of relief. The stress of being homeless was relegated to the past.

But this is where the most bizarre, and perhaps to the modern mind, utterly inconceivable part of our story begins.

At that time, and within the specific subculture to which our family — with its conservative, patriarchal, and somewhat primitive worldview — belonged, having a separate toilet inside the apartment was simply not accepted. Yes, it sounds absurd today, but back then, our philosophy of life was rooted in the concept of absolute indivisibility. We were a single entity — one organism that breathed, fed, and excreted together.

Everything happened in one massive room that took up almost the entire square footage of the apartment. In the very center, entirely flouting all safety regulations, we had built a large, open hearth where firewood (which we dried on the balcony) crackled constantly. The entire family gathered around this fire. This space was the center of our universe: it was the kitchen with its pots and pans; it was the bedroom where we laid our mattresses directly on the floor at night; it was the living room; and, most importantly, it was the place where absolutely all human physiological needs, without exception, were met.

It was a place of great clamor. Our evenings resembled Bruegel paintings: in one corner, my mother would be frying onions and humming a song; in another, the children played; my wife and I would sit by the fire drinking wine. And if nature called for anyone, they simply retreated to a dark corner of the room — a designated but by no means isolated spot. There was no awkwardness, no shame. We were completely open with one another about absolutely everything. It was a primal, wild, yet uniquely harmonious coexistence where the very concept of intimacy simply did not exist.

However, a crack eventually appeared in this idyllic, collective existence. A terrible, bizarre incident occurred that turned our lives upside down and opened a Pandora’s box of mystical, psychological, and hysterical events.

It was the New Year holidays. Traditionally, this is the season when hospitality reaches its zenith and relatives and friends flock together. A feast was laid out right next to the hearth, filling the air with the aroma of roasted meat, various dishes, and melting candles. We were visited by a distant relative, a man distinguished by his extraordinary silence and an unbelievable appetite. He devoured everything in sight, drank three liters of heavy, dark wine, and, as was to be expected, soon felt the urge to utilize the dark corner of our communal room.

The guest stood up, marched heavily to the corner, squatted down, and... what happened next defies description. He unleashed a smell into the room — a cloud so pungent, concentrated, and toxic — that the fire in the hearth nearly went out. Conversation died instantly. A song caught in someone’s throat. The children began to cry as the fumes burned their eyes. Staying in the room became a physical impossibility. One by one, coughing and weeping, the guests fled to the balcony and the stairwell just to draw a breath of fresh air. The feast was ruined. Meanwhile, our guest sat by himself, perfectly serene, as if nothing had happened.

After that night, our lives could never be the same. The illusion that absolutely everything could be shared was shattered. The family, in its entirety — including the traumatized children — decided to hold a council. The meeting took place the next morning in a freezing room with the windows thrown wide open, where the phantom of yesterday’s tragedy still lingered.

My mother, the fiercest defender of our traditions, was the first to break the silence: “We cannot go on like this. We are a respectable family, not cavemen. We must build a separate room... for that business.”

We all agreed unanimously. However, a new, equally dramatic debate ensued: where should this toilet be built?

There were two options: inside the house or outside.

My mother adamantly demanded that we put it outside, on the balcony, or even go down to the courtyard, like in a village. “We must not bring filth into the house!” she argued. My wife and I were vehemently opposed. We pictured the bitter winter nights, the wind, the snow, and the prospect of trekking outside every time nature called. “We are in a civilized city, not the Middle Ages!” I shouted.

The argument raged for three days. Ultimately, logic, the fear of the cold, and my own ultimatum won out. It was decided: the toilet would be built inside. To achieve this, we sacrificed a rather large, bright section of our enormous room, one that even had a window.

We began construction. We hired the best craftsmen. We erected thick, soundproofing walls. We laid expensive Spanish tiles. We purchased a beautiful, snow-white toilet bowl, placing it in the center of the room like an altar. We hung mirrors, installed soft, warm lighting, and brought in scented candles.

The toilet turned out not just large and beautiful, but grandiose. It was an oasis of cleanliness, isolation, and peace against the backdrop of our noisy, chaotic lives. When I first stepped inside, locked the door behind me, and found myself in total silence, I felt spiritually reborn. It was the first truly private space I had ever experienced.

Soon, however, this architectural triumph yielded entirely unexpected and disturbing results. A series of inexplicable events began.

Guests started visiting us again. At first, they only used the toilet out of necessity. But gradually, we noticed a trend: a guest who went into the toilet wouldn’t come out for a very long time. It was as if they wanted to stay there.

Initially, we thought our cooking had upset their stomachs. But when it became systematic, suspicions arose. A friend, for instance, would go to the restroom and vanish for forty minutes. He would emerge with a glowing, rested face and sigh, “The acoustics you have in there are amazing... and the tranquility. It’s practically built for meditation.”

Another guest, a female colleague of mine, took a book with her and read nearly a whole chapter while sitting on the toilet. “This is the best room in the entire house!” she declared ecstatically upon exiting. “Out here by the hearth it’s hot, it’s loud, the kids are running around... but in there, it’s paradise.”

Without exception, guests always remarked that the toilet was the best part of the home. They would glance superficially at our living room — where we lived, ate, and worked — but spared no compliments for the restroom. Some guests visited us specifically just to use our toilet and relax. They would walk in, bolt the door, sit on the closed lid, and simply bask in the silence.

What was worse, some guests even started offering advice: “Why don’t you expand this incredible space?” one of them asked me. “If you knocked down a wall and merged the other rooms into it, the whole house could be this oasis of peace.”

This plunged our family into utter bewilderment, followed by a terrible rage. Jealousy took root. The toilet, designed for dirty business, had become the cult of our house, the main attraction overshadowing our traditional hearth and family warmth. My mother was furious: “I slave away cooking all day, I exhaust myself, and they come over just to fawn over that... that sitting-place!”

We decided to take drastic measures. Since the toilet’s size and comfort were the draw, we had to shrink it.

We brought the workers back, tore down a wall, and nearly halved the square footage. The reclaimed space was added back to our main communal room. We replaced the flooring with plain, gray tiles to kill the romantic aura. The toilet bowl was now much closer to the wall, making the space feel slightly claustrophobic.

We thought this would solve the problem. But, to our amazement, the guests continued to visit it with the same enthusiasm, lingering just as long. Now they would say, “How cozy! What an intimate atmosphere you’ve created... true minimalism! Nothing superfluous!” Someone even started sitting on the floor, since lingering on the toilet seat had become a bit uncomfortable.

The family’s hysteria reached its peak. We felt insulted by a room we had built ourselves. This was a war over space, a battle to restore the dignity of our home’s main room.

So, history repeated itself — we shrank it again. The workers returned, demolished the newly built wall, and squeezed the toilet even tighter. Now, you could only enter sideways. We bricked up the window entirely, allowing darkness and dampness to settle in.

But even this didn’t help. The guests, as if acting out of spite, still found peace in that cramped confinement. Their praise morphed into a sort of underground, cultish admiration: “How conceptual... it is a point of absolute seclusion and tranquility.”

An exasperated family huddled together in a room, staring at a closed bathroom door and heatedly arguing how to shrink its size further.

Finally, realizing that merely moving walls wasn’t enough, we descended into total absurdity. We decided to strip the toilet of anything that could kill the negative space. The toilet remained just a toilet, in the most literal, physiological sense of the word. We took down the mirrors and the lighting fixtures, leaving only a single, dim, naked bulb. We pulled the walls so close together that a person sitting on the toilet would have their knees pressed directly against the door.

Because we shrank the space so drastically, the washing machine — which had stood in that dark corner for years — physically couldn’t fit anymore. We were forced to drag it out and place it right in the kitchen area, next to the hearth. Inside the bathroom, we left only the toilet bowl and a showerhead mounted directly above it, which constantly dripped cold water.

The toilet was transformed into a torture chamber — an airless, cold, cramped, wet cell that a person would only enter out of the most extreme, undeniable physical necessity.

And only then did we achieve victory.

When the next guest — who still held fond memories of our “paradise” — went into the toilet, he burst out five minutes later, terrified, soaking wet, and gasping for breath. “It’s... it’s impossible to breathe in there,” he wheezed, quickly taking a seat by our large, noisy, smoke-filled hearth.

The heart of our home had returned to the main room. We had defeated the little demon of individualism that had crept into our lives in the guise of a toilet. True, we had destroyed the only place where we could ever be alone, but in exchange, we reclaimed the unity of our family, our guests, and our wild, indivisible existence.

Today, our toilet is a place no one talks about. Everyone goes in quickly and comes out even quicker. And every evening, as the washing machine loudly spins clothes in the kitchen and we sit around the fire roasting meat, I feel that everything is back where it belongs. We survived.