November is dead for us. The autumn wave has passed, the winter one hasn't started, people are wearing out what they had mended in October, and they come into the shop mainly to warm up and to ask whether we take bags. We don't take bags. Whom I am guilty before on that account I have not established in twelve years.
That week we had Velichko's cases, and Igor worked at them slowly and with pleasure; the job wasn't urgent, it didn't have to be handed over by Friday. Three of the thirty-one cases were not torn but cut through, and that occupied him more than anything else.
"Cut from the inside," he said to me on Tuesday, and showed me. "Look. From the outside the leather's whole, and on the reverse there's a cut, and the edges are turned inward."
"And what does that mean?"
"That it was cut from the inside." Igor thought. "It doesn't mean anything more. It's just not clear what for."
He set the case on the bench and came back to it twice more that day.
I was doing the usual November things meanwhile: went through the display, threw out two pairs unclaimed since the winter before last, rang the hotel about the next batch, and booked in for Wednesday a woman who wanted pale boots dyed black, although we don't do that and I told her we don't, and she booked in all the same.
The door I heard.
Before, you couldn't hear it. The machine hummed so that a person had time to reach the counter while I was turning round, and I had got used to recognising people already at close quarters. The new motor runs quietly, the door can be heard now from anywhere, even when Igor is stitching, and for the first few days after it was fitted I kept starting.
An elderly man in a grey coat came in. He took off his hat at the threshold, brushed the snow off it, snow that was already melting, and stopped without coming up to the counter.
"Good afternoon. I was looking for Igor Ilyich."
"He's behind the partition. Shall I call him?"
"No need, if he's busy. I can wait."
And he really could. He sat down on the chair by the window, put his hat on his knees, and waited so calmly that I felt awkward about my own busyness. For about five minutes I wrote out tickets, then I couldn't stand it.
"Would you like tea?"
"I won't say no."
Our tea is bad, from bags, and the mugs don't match. I gave him the one with the chipped handle, because the second is Igor's and I broke the third in September.
"Safonov, Nikolai Arkadyevich," he said when I set the mug down. "I already came by last week, only he wasn't here then."
He had been with him last week, and Igor had been there, and they had talked, and Igor had told me about that conversation the same evening, and I stood there with the kettle and said nothing. I did not correct him this time either.
"Are you here about shoes?"
"No." Safonov blew on the tea. "I worked for thirty-one years as a vocational training master. Trade school number seven, then the combine. Do you know where the combine was?"
"Beyond the bridge."
"Beyond the bridge. There are warehouses there now."
He said that workshops all over town used to keep apprentices and that it was a separate post and separate paperwork: pick out a person, come to terms with the master, process the transfer, then watch for six months that he doesn't run off. He spoke without any nostalgia, more as of a procedure he knows well.
"Did many run off?"
"Every fifth one." He said it at once, without thinking, and you could hear that he had counted that figure. "Of the ones I handled. Others had more."
A woman came in with a shoe, I took the shoe and wrote the ticket, and Safonov sat all that time drinking tea and not looking at us but out of the window, where nothing was happening.
"I knew his father," he said when the woman had gone.
That was where I should have called Igor. I even took half a step toward the partition.
"Ilya Nikolaevich?"
"Ilya Nikolaevich." Safonov nodded as though I had passed an examination, and set the mug on the windowsill. "He wasn't in my group, he was already working by then. We met for another reason."
I asked what reason.
"There was a chance to transfer him. To the restoration workshops, to leather. He had the hands for it, and they needed someone there just then." Safonov was silent a moment. "I dealt with such transfers then, I told you."
I poured myself some too and sat down on the other side of the counter, which I don't usually do, because it's uncomfortable there and you can't see the street.
"And?"
"And nothing. He signed the consent form, they took him on, and he didn't come."
Behind the partition Igor was tapping with the hammer, rarely and not hard, the way one taps when setting an insole.
"Perhaps he changed his mind," I said.
"Perhaps. Only people change their minds before signing." Safonov said it as though we were working out a problem together. "That's why I can't let it go. In thirty-one years I've seen everything. One couldn't manage, one was taken into the army, one married and moved away, one went to prison. Those are all understandable stories, they lie in my head each in its own place. This one won't lie down."
"And you've been carrying it around for forty years?"
"Of course not." He gave a half-smile. "For forty years I didn't think of it. And now I'm retired, I've nothing to do, and it's all come up at once."
He took a sheet folded in four out of his inside pocket and unfolded it on the counter, turned toward me.
A photocopy of a form, an old one, with a printed border. Surname, first name, patronymic. The signature, short, legible, the I with a long loop. The date of appointment. And below, in a different hand, written in: "did not report for work".
The handwriting was the father's, and the loop in the capital I was just like Igor's. I saw it at once and couldn't shake it off all evening afterwards.
"The original is in the workshops' archive," said Safonov. "If Igor Ilyich needs it, I'll tell him where to ask, there's a capable woman there now."
I looked at the line "did not report for work" longer than it takes to read it.
"And what is it you want, then?" I asked at last.
"To understand." He shrugged as though it were the most ordinary wish in the world, and it probably is. "I'm not blaming the dead man, don't think that. I don't consider he owed anything. It's just that a man signed, they took him on, and he didn't come, and I still don't know why. The son might know."
"The son was small."
"Then he doesn't know." Safonov stood up and began buttoning his coat. "Then let him at least be aware of it. You pass it on to him, all right? I can't go about with this."
He put on his hat right at the door, with both hands, carefully, and went out, and the door closed slowly behind him, the way everything closes here.
The copy stayed lying on the counter.
Igor came out about ten minutes later, a case in his hand, and said he'd worked it out: it wasn't the case that had been cut but what was lying inside it, and it had been cut in a hurry, which is why the blade went right through.
"Somebody was getting something out and was in a hurry," he said. "Thirty years ago."
I said that was interesting.
Open in the reader