I put it off the whole of October, and I won't lie about that.
First there was the explanation about the season: the autumn wave, twenty pairs a week, Slava can't manage alone, Igor's back. Then the explanation that we had to wait until the children's home was handed over. Then the explanations ran out, and I still put it off.
In November it was Igor's mother's birthday, and we went, and she put on the shawl we had given her the year before, and said there had been no need for anything. At the table she remembered the photographs and brought the box again, and I myself, with my own hands, found that picture in it: Ilya Nikolaevich at a workbench, from behind, in someone else's workshop, larger than ours.
"And where's this?" Igor asked, as he had last time.
"Oh, somewhere at their work. He wasn't there long."
The mother said it in the same words, and I understood that last time too she had said them without thinking, and that she really doesn't know.
I held the picture and counted.
The consent form is signed. Four days later the tool is received. In the photograph he is already at the bench. So he didn't merely sign at the door: he got into that life at least that far. And then he left it.
Nobody in that room but me had counted anything of the sort.
On the way back Igor drove and said that Velichko had come by again in September and had invited him to look at the workshops once they've finished moving, and that there will be a separate leather section there, and that he, Velichko, had asked whether Igor didn't want to try.
"And you?"
"And I said I'd think about it." Igor was watching the road. "I haven't thought about it at all, to be honest. Where would I go from here."
He said "where would I go from here" and put on the indicator.
At home I sat down in the kitchen and sat until three, and in the morning went to open the shop, as always.
Open in the reader