Our shop sits in the end wall of a five-storey block, the entrance is off the courtyard, and the sign has hung there since eighty-nine, hand-lettered. The letters have faded unevenly: REPAIRS is still blue, SHOES is nearly white. Every spring Igor says we should order a new one, and every autumn it turns out the money went on something else.
We work nine to seven, lunch whenever it happens, Sundays off. Mornings bring the people on their way to work, evenings the ones coming back, and midday is often empty; in those hours I manage to sort the shelves, phone the forgetful, and sit with my tea watching the bread van being unloaded in the yard.
On Wednesday a woman came for her boots just before closing.
I found the pair by its number and set it on the counter; she examined the new heel counter, felt it from the inside with one finger, was satisfied, counted out exact change, and did not leave.
That is how people stand when they mean to say something they have no good opening for. I waited. Behind the partition Igor switched off the machine, and in the shop you could hear the courtyard gate being opened.
"I'm not here about shoes," she said at last, and took a compass out of her bag.
Brass, the size of a palm, with a tarnished lid. She set it on the counter between us but did not take her hand away, so the thing belonged to no one.
"It was in my coat pocket. And I haven't worn that coat since Thursday; it's my good one."
On Thursday she had brought in these very boots. The heel counter was broken down from the inside, the way it goes with people who walk a lot and set the foot slightly inward, and I asked her then whether work was far. Two buses, she said, because the direct line had been cut the year before last. I asked why not the tram. She said the tram went the wrong way. I said it went exactly there, only along the other bank of the river, and she stopped in the middle of her next sentence and stayed silent all the while Igor wrote out the ticket and explained that the counter would have to be replaced and that it was two days.
Now she stood waiting to hear what I would say about the compass.
I picked it up and turned it to the window. The glass was scratched fine and close, the way anything gets scratched that is carried together with keys; the brass was dark where hands darken it; and there was nothing else to be found on it: no engraving, no thumb-wear on the lid, no trace of a habitual grip.
An old thing, and nobody's at all.
"The needle spins," the woman said, watching my hands as closely as if I could do something to the compass. "It spins all the time. I checked twice at home."
"The counter here is iron." I set the compass in the middle of the counter and took my hands away. "It's yours. I have nothing to do with it."
"I didn't buy it."
"So I understood."
She looked at me carefully and without any sympathy, the way one looks at a person refusing to take an order.
"Then why did it turn up after I talked to you?"
I said what I always say.
"You rode two buses for two years," I said, "and never once looked at the map. The compass has nothing to do with it."
"Then what does?"
"The map. It's in your phone."
She thought about it. Then she took the compass, weighed it on her palm, and put it away in her bag with the motion people use for documents, not trinkets.
"My son lives in Zarechye," she said, already at the door. "I take two buses to see him, too."
Our door is stiff, with a closer Igor has been meaning to adjust for four months now, so everyone leaves us more slowly than they intended. Through the glass I could see the woman stop on the front step and take out her phone. She studied the map a long time, spread her fingers twice, and looked back at the door once.
Then she set off, but not toward the bus stop.
I locked the till, counted the takings, entered them in the ledger, washed two mugs, and lined up on the windowsill the shoes that should have been collected back in September and that no one is coming for.
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