Mondays are quiet with us, and on a Monday you can see clearly what our work actually consists of.
In the morning Valera from the third floor came in, brought his son's trainers and spent twenty minutes explaining that the son doesn't look after them and that they cost what he, Valera, earns in a week. He tells it every time and every time in new words. I nod. Igor says "mm" from behind the partition without raising his head, and Valera goes away reassured.
Then a woman came with a bag. We don't take bags; I explain this about fifteen times a week and every time I feel guilty, though I don't understand to whom. She said nobody in the whole town takes them, and I said I knew, and that was true.
Then nobody came for an hour and a half.
In hours like that I sit behind the counter and do something that commits me to nothing: copy out the order book if it has got grubby, ring round the people who forgot to collect, sort the box of fittings, where everything got mixed up before my time. Igor works behind the partition and says nothing. He says nothing for eight hours at a stretch and considers it nothing out of the ordinary.
I got behind this counter twelve years ago and entirely by accident.
I was working then at the reception desk of clinic number two, and they made me redundant along with half the reception staff, and I spent a month going round adverts and getting angry. And I came into the shop with one boot. The boot was mine, the heel had come off at the bus stop, and I arrived furious, in one boot and in a slipper they had given me at the chemist's opposite so I wouldn't walk through the snow like that.
Igor looked at the boot, said both would have to be done or it would go crooked, and that he had nobody free at the moment, so wait twenty minutes. I sat down to wait. In those twenty minutes four people came into the shop, and all four left, because there was nobody behind the counter and Igor couldn't hear them from behind the partition.
I told him so. He said he knew.
"And how many go like that?"
"Half, I should think."
"And that suits you?"
"No," he said. "But I'm on my own."
I sat there in a slipper, furious, out of work and with one boot, and said I could stand behind the counter for a week while I looked for something proper, if he paid me. He thought about it and paid me.
I never did find anything proper, because I stopped looking around the third month.
I stopped after one particular incident.
That was when I gave out the wrong pair of boots. The orders still hung from a nail on slips of paper, the slips got mixed up, and I handed over the wrong pair. The woman took them and left, and toward evening the owner came in. The boots were expensive, and we had no telephone number for the other woman, because I was not writing numbers down yet.
Igor said we had to look for her. We looked for two days and found nothing.
He paid the owner. It was more than he paid me in a month.
That evening I gathered my things from the windowsill and stood with them in the front room while he locked the back door, because I was certain he was going to let me go.
He looked at me and asked where I was going.
I said, "Home."
He said, "Tomorrow at nine."
He never mentioned the boots again, and I am still waiting for him to remember them one day.
I started the order book the following week, with telephone numbers. Then I thought of phoning the ones who forgot. That winter when Igor went down with flu for two weeks, I put on the heel tips myself, because otherwise everything would have stopped: he showed me once, and with the simple work it isn't a science, it is something your hands get used to. I never learned to work on welts. Then it turned out that if I talk to a person while they wait, they come a second time and bring their wife.
About this Igor once said the following:
"You talk them round."
He meant that I know how to occupy a person while they wait, and that's true, I do. But the word stayed with me.
Igor's father died eight years ago.
Igor did not cry at the funeral or afterward and worked as usual all week, so I decided it had passed. A few days later it was clear it had not: one morning he reached the shop, unlocked the door and stayed standing in the front room.
I asked what was wrong. He said, "Nothing. Just a moment."
He stood there a little longer and went through to the machine.
The next morning it was the same, and I began coming earlier.
I unlocked the door, turned on the light in the front room, put the kettle on and laid out the receipts, and when he came someone was already there in the shop. Then he went behind the partition and turned on the light there himself, and after that the day went like a day.
He never once asked me to do it. I said nothing either.
For those six months he needed me every morning, and I remember that it felt good.
It ended by itself. One day I was held up at the bank, arrived at ten and saw that he had already unlocked the door, already turned on the light and was already working. He said nothing about my being late.
After that he could go in alone. I still went on opening up, and we had never agreed that I would.
That Monday, toward evening, a man came for his shoes and, while I was looking for them by number, asked whether we repaired watch straps. I said no. He nodded and left, and he was the last person of the day.
I locked the till, entered the takings in the ledger and stood a while at the window.
Snow was falling in the yard, the first that year, and it melted before it reached the ground.
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