Tamara came at the beginning of October, and I didn't recognise her at once.
She had put on weight, and it suited her, and the grey under her eyes was gone. The shoes she brought were new, winter ones, that needed stretching at the instep, and there was no repair on them at all.
"I promised to tell you when it got to a hundred and fifty," she said from the doorway.
"And?"
"And it won't. I stopped at a hundred and forty-three."
She sat down on the same chair and began to talk, and talked for about twenty minutes.
She had stopped counting in May, because past the centre came districts where there are either no benches at all or three outside every entrance, and there was no longer any sense in it. She finished the map, printed it in colour at her own expense, took it to the district office and then went back there four more times.
"They put in one," said Tamara.
"One?"
"One. On Volodarsky Street, on the rise. Where I said, in the middle."
She said it calmly, without resentment and without triumph, and I couldn't tell whether that was much for her or little.
"And the rest?"
"And about the rest they said they're in next year's plan. That means never, but I'll go in the spring just in case."
She still has two jobs, and her mother is still on Eighth of March Street, and she still walks. One thing has changed: she has started sleeping.
"In February I realised I couldn't manage," she said, as though it were the most ordinary thing. "Not the map I couldn't manage, but generally. And I stopped the nights. I counted on Sundays after that, half a day."
"And your mother?"
"And my mother on Sundays too." Tamara shrugged. "That's how we divide it up."
As she left she said that on Volodarsky Street a woman with bags now sits in the mornings, always the same one, and that she, Tamara, has already passed by twice and seen her.
"I don't know, you see, whether she sits there because of me or whether she'd have sat down anyway."
She said it and laughed, and so did I.
We stretched the shoes by Thursday.
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