We drove out to the old man on Sunday, and everything turned out unlike the way Igor had told it.
He lived not out of town but in the low-built quarter beyond the railway, in a house with a corrugated slate roof and a dog that didn't even get up when we arrived. The lasts were in the shed, in two crates, and Igor crouched over them for some forty minutes while I stood watching yesterday's snow melt in the yard.
"There are no pre-war ones," he said at last, without turning round.
"But you said you'd seen them."
"I did. He must have sold them, then." He thought and added without any resentment: "Or I got it wrong."
The old man stood beside us and said nothing. He was about eighty, and he carried himself as though it made no difference to him whether we bought or not, and I think it really made no difference.
"Those are from the seventies," he said.
"I can see," said Igor.
"Good ones."
"Good ones. Only I've got three pairs of those myself."
After that they haggled for twenty minutes, and I was embarrassed, because Igor haggles in silence. He picks up a last, turns it over, puts it back and sighs. Then he picks up the next one. In that time the old man quoted his own price twice and brought it down both times, and Igor did not make a single offer.
"Twelve of them," he said at the end.
"Take them," said the old man.
He let them go at a price I would have paid sight unseen and, I think, was pleased, because he wanted the things to go to someone who knew what to do with them.
While Igor was carrying the crates to the car, the old man showed me the shed. There was a workbench there, covered with oilcloth, and on the oilcloth there was nothing.
"Twenty-two years at the combine," he said. "And then fifteen more on my own. Now I can't, my hands."
He showed his hands. His fingers wouldn't straighten all the way, and he showed it calmly, without any complaint.
"And your son?"
"My son's in Norilsk. He works shifts." The old man thought. "It doesn't interest him, I hold nothing against him. To each his own."
We drove back in the dark. Igor drove and said eight of the lasts would go straight into use and four would need working over, and that he'd get them worked over by January, and that on the whole it was a piece of luck.
"Listen," he said on the bridge. "Why didn't he get rid of the bench?"
I said I didn't know.
We drove on another fifteen minutes and he said nothing more, and at home, when we were already carrying the crates into the stairwell, he said:
"I wouldn't have got rid of it either."
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