The summer turned out well, and I don't say that for form's sake.
By June Slava was already working on his own, with nothing to be redone, and Igor began taking orders he used to refuse: two batches from the sanatorium at Klyuchi, and then a children's home asked us to go through their footwear before September and paid in advance. We put in a second machine, secondhand, and it stood by the window, and the shop became crowded in the good way.
In July we took a week off. In winter we had gone to the sea for three days, and that was not a holiday but an outing, and this was the real thing, with tickets bought in advance. We went to my cousin in Lipetsk; it's hot and dull there, and on the third day Igor started mending my cousin's gate, and mended it for two days, and left satisfied.
In August a man came in and asked whether we take bags, and I said we don't, and he left. He was the fourth that week. Igor says to that we should put up a notice, and I say nobody reads notices, and we have been discussing it for about three years.
I open the till every morning.
I have one key, it's in my overall pocket along with two others, and in the morning I take off my coat, hang up my overall, turn on the light in the front room and open the till. I take out the tray, spread the change into its compartments, put the tray back.
Under the tray lies a sheet of paper folded in four, and on it a flat wooden spool.
The first week I thought I wouldn't be able to. Then it turned out that I could, and that it takes four seconds, and that in four seconds a person doesn't manage to think about anything if they don't want to.
By August I had stopped seeing them.
That is not a figure of speech. I would open the till, take out the tray, spread the change and not see either the paper or the spool, exactly as I don't see the second drawer of the desk, where the old tickets from the year before last are kept.
Once, at the end of August, I took the spool out and held it. The thread was the same, wound on whole, the end tucked in. In all that time nothing had happened to it.
I put it back and went to open up.
Open in the reader