Anton brought in work shoes of the kind a dozen of which pass through us every week: black, cheap, evenly worn, without a single story.
I wrote out the ticket, said we'd put the heel tips on by Wednesday, and he didn't leave but stayed standing at the counter, the way people stay who have nowhere to hurry to on a Thursday evening. He stood, looked at the shelving, asked whether we had a lot of work. I said enough till New Year.
We got talking about food. He said he cooks on Sundays, for the whole family, from morning till dark, and that it is the one piece of the week nobody assesses.
"And the other days?"
"The other days I'm at the office." He thought and added what I hadn't asked: "At the office I'm assessed four times a year."
I asked what he had cooked last Sunday.
He began to list it and got tangled halfway through the list and laughed, because the list was coming out longer than he had meant to admit. There was brawn, which he starts on Saturday evening, and a cabbage pie, and something with mutton that I don't remember, and separately he explained why you must not put carrots in.
I listened for five minutes and didn't interrupt, because it was a long time since anybody had come to me with a face like that.
"And where did you learn?"
"Nowhere." Anton shrugged. "My grandmother, then on my own. At first everything burned. I spent a year frying onions and a year burning them, and then I realised it was the pan and not me."
He explained about the pan. Then that he has a bad stove at home, and that he has got used to it, and that he can't cook on someone else's stove now, because he can't feel it.
"And who eats it all?"
"We do. My wife, the children, my mother-in-law on Sundays. Sometimes the neighbours drop in." He thought. "They used to drop in more. Now everyone has their own business."
"On Sunday my wife said I'm wasting my talent," he said, in a different voice now. "And asked: when are you finally going to stop being afraid and open your own café?"
Then he reached into his inside pocket and took out a notebook.
An order book, narrow and long, of the kind they keep by the till. The corners worn down to the board, the edges of the pages greasy to a yellow, a good dozen and a half leaves torn out flush with the spine, and in the bottom right corner of the cover a pale patch where it had been opened with a thumb for years. On the cover a name was written in ballpoint.
"'Sunday,'" I read aloud.
"My wife thought of it. Back when we were courting, as a joke. And the notebook I found on Monday, in my jacket. She'd taken the jacket to the cleaner's before that."
I opened it. Inside it was all empty, not a single entry, only ruled pages and torn-out stubs, and I leafed through to the end and came back to the cover.
"And where was it torn out from?"
"I don't know, it was like that already." Anton looked at the stubs without any interest. "Maybe somebody wrote in it before me."
I held the notebook and saw a man who had long and seriously been going his own way, only he wouldn't admit it even to himself, and I was glad the thing had come to him so lived-in and not empty and new, as though he had to start from nothing.
"So you've already begun," I said. "Not today. Long ago."
He looked at me the way people look when they've finally been told what they wanted to hear, and it is, I must admit, an agreeable minute for both sides.
"And how do you know?"
"I don't know what was done with the thing." I closed the notebook and gave it back. "I can see where it was held. That's my trade."
He took the notebook, put it in his inside pocket, buttoned it and left far lighter than he had come. He didn't ask again about the heel tips by Wednesday.
I stood a little longer and went to lock up.
Open in the reader