I went for the bread on Thursday, after six, as Galina had said.
Their bakery is small, in a semi-basement on Zavodskaya, with its own entrance and three steps down. Inside it is hot, and the smell is such that I stood for a minute simply breathing, and behind the counter was Galina in the same apron, and her sister had already gone.
"You came," she said without any surprise and began putting things in a bag: two brown, one white, and some buns I hadn't asked for.
"I won't eat that much."
"You will. That's for Sunday, it comes right by Thursday."
I went to pay, she wouldn't take money for the buns, and we argued a little, and she won, because she was on her own ground.
Then we talked for twenty minutes. She said she hadn't taken up baking on her own but from her mother, and that her mother baked badly, and that this had tormented her, Galina, all her life, because her mother was convinced of the opposite. She talked about Lena, who has two children and a husband working shifts, and about how Lena understands nothing about dough and never will, but on the other hand reckons faster and talks to people better.
"So you're both in the right place," I said.
"Both of us, then."
She didn't mention the loupe once, and neither did I.
Already in the doorway I looked back. Galina was wiping the counter, then stopped, took the loupe out of her apron pocket, looked through it at her own palm and put it back.
She wasn't doing it for the first time; you could tell from how quickly it all went.
We ate the bread until Tuesday, and Igor said the brown was better than the shop's and asked whether it was expensive. I said it wasn't.
The next Thursday I went again, and then again, and somehow it became a habit of its own accord: I came after six, took two brown and a white, and we talked for twenty minutes, and every time she put in something extra.
Once I asked whether she had any regrets.
"About what?"
"Well, generally."
Galina thought and said she regretted one thing: that they hadn't started five years earlier. About the loupe again not a word.
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