Valera and I have had the same conversation for a good seven years, and I know it by heart.
He brings his son's trainers, says the son doesn't look after them, names the price, I say "what do you expect, sixteen years old," he agrees and leaves. Sometimes instead of the trainers it's his wife's shoes, but the text doesn't change.
That time he came on a Tuesday, with no footwear at all, and simply sat down on the chair by the window.
"May I?"
"Sit down."
He sat five minutes in silence, which had never happened with him before, and then said he was being made redundant. Not straight away, from February, but they had already told him, and now he walks about and thinks.
"Twenty-three years in one place," he said. "I started there after the army."
I poured him tea. He took the mug and didn't drink.
Valera worked at a design institute that has long since stopped being an institute and is now several firms in one building, and he dealt with what he called "networks": which pipe runs where, where to take it, what to do with it when it's old. I had never asked him about it, and he had never talked about it, because we had the conversation about the trainers.
"And did you like it?" I asked.
He thought about it so long that I had time to take in an order and come back.
"I don't know," he said. "I never thought about it. It had to be done, so I did it."
"And what was interesting about it?"
"Nothing." Valera shrugged. "Well, sometimes. When you bring up an old drawing, from the sixties, and it's all done by hand, and you can see a person made it. That, yes, that's a pleasure."
I asked whether there were many drawings like that.
"A whole archive. Nobody needs them, it's all on the computer now." He finally took a sip. "They'll be thrown out when the building is sold."
We talked another twenty minutes. He said the networks were laid differently in the sixties and that half the town is still on those diagrams, and that the new designers don't know it and are surprised every time. Then he said his wife had told him not to panic, and he isn't panicking, he just walks about and thinks.
Then he finished his tea, thanked me and left.
Nothing turned up in his pocket.
I know because he came a week later, already with his son's trainers, and was perfectly ordinary, and the text was the old one, and the price he named was the same. I asked about the archive. He said: ah, yes, there is that, and started talking about the trainers again.
It happens that way more often than not. I got used to it long ago and still check every time whether anything has turned up.
Open in the reader