After that it was good, and this has to be described honestly, or else it isn't clear what it was all for.
About the father Igor stopped speaking altogether. Completely. Before that he had come back to it three times a month or so, usually in the evening and usually from some edge or other: sometimes he'd remember how the father wouldn't let him touch the machine, sometimes he'd tell about a customer who used to come to the father, sometimes he'd just say "the father would have done that differently" and fall silent for half an hour.
After that Tuesday it stopped.
At first I thought I was imagining it. I counted the weeks: one, two. In the third I caught myself waiting, and stopped counting.
In December he took on an apprentice.
That was unexpected, and I didn't even believe it at once, because the conversations about an apprentice had been going on for some four years and always came up against the same thing: Igor said there was no time to teach, and you had to pay an apprentice anyway, and it was easier to do it yourself. And then a lad turned up, Slava, eighteen years old, from the next building, who could do nothing and was very polite, and Igor looked at him for five minutes and said: all right, come from Monday.
"You said there was no time."
"Well, now there is."
He taught him the way he does everything else: silently and by showing. Slava for the first two weeks only cleaned and took things apart, then they gave him the heel tips, then they gave him the seam. By February he could already do it decently, and by March Igor stopped redoing things after him.
And Igor started talking more. Not with me, with Slava, but the house got louder for it: he'd come home and retell what Slava hadn't understood, and get annoyed, and explain to me what he had explained to him, and I listened and understood half of it, and that was very good.
He also started talking about the future.
Before, our future ended at the end of the season. Now he suddenly began reasoning that if Slava stays, we could get a second machine, and if we get a second machine, we could take bigger batches, and that the hotel isn't the only one in town, and that he had long been thinking about the sanatoriums.
"You've long been thinking about the sanatoriums?"
"All my life." Igor said it completely seriously. "There just weren't the hands."
In February we went to the sea for three days, in winter, out of season, because it was cheap. The sea was grey and empty, it was cold for walking, we went along the promenade in our jackets and drank hot wine out of plastic cups, and Igor slept the whole way back on the train with his head on my shoulder, and I sat motionless for four hours and did not regret a second of it.
All of that was bought by one short "no".
On the Tuesday I didn't think about it. In December I noticed. By February I already knew.
And even so it never once entered my head that it could have been otherwise.
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