Galina's shoes wear out differently from Tamara's. The heel intact, the toe intact, but the insole crushed down to the cardboard and the counter broken from the inside: that is how it goes with people who don't walk but stand for twelve hours, shifting from foot to foot.
"Bakery?" I asked as I wrote the ticket.
"Bakery. My sister and I, the two of us, on Zavodskaya."
She had flour in the seam under the tongue as well, and Igor said afterwards that you can't get it out of there, you can only pretend to. We got talking about water, and Galina explained that dough behaves differently in different months and that it isn't the flour, it's the water, and that in winter what comes out of the tap is different, and she feels it with her hands before she sees it in the dough.
"And do you write it down?"
"Write what down?"
"Well, which water, which month, how it behaved. You remember it, after all."
Galina looked at me and said nothing.
She came a week later, ahead of time. I took her shoes off the shelf and set them on the counter, because there were still a few days to go and Igor hadn't touched them. Galina did not look at the shoes. She laid a folding loupe down beside them. A brass mount, ten-power, the glass without a single scratch, and on the mount not one trace of fingers.
"Take it," said Galina.
"It isn't mine."
"It isn't mine either. I don't use such things and I've no idea where it came from." She pushed the loupe toward me. "You take it."
I explained as best I could: the thing had come to her, I have nothing to do with it, and giving it to me won't work in any case. Not because I wouldn't take it. Because it won't stop being hers.
"Then I'll throw it away," said Galina without any anger.
"Throw it away. Only look through it first."
She looked. She opened the loupe, held it to her palm, then to her sleeve, then to the flour in the seam of her own shoe lying right there, and I saw by her face that she had understood what it was and what could be done with it. For ten seconds she didn't hide it.
Then she folded the loupe and covered it with her hand.
"No," said Galina.
"Why?"
I asked for nothing, but I really was interested.
"Because I know myself."
She spoke calmly, without taking offence, and it was clear she had already thought it through.
"I'd start in the evenings. Then at weekends. Then it would turn out this matters to me more than the baking, and Lena can't manage alone, she has two children. I'm not saying it's not allowed. I'm saying I wouldn't stop."
I had nothing to say against it. And I didn't.
We stood a little longer. I asked whether they had had the bakery long, she said six years, and that the first two years they worked without days off, both of them, and both lost weight, and then they took on a girl for the evenings and it became possible to live.
"And before the bakery?"
"Before the bakery I was in a canteen. Twenty years." Galina fastened her bag. "A canteen is fine, only it isn't yours there. There it's as you're told."
She put the loupe in her apron pocket, took the shoes, paid, and said in parting that if Igor and I needed bread for the week, they bake more on Thursdays than they sell, and you have to come after six, when Lena has already gone.
I thought about her many times afterwards, but not that evening. That evening I only thought that here was a person who knows how to say no in time, and that there are few of them.
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