October 29 – November 30, 1993
Back in my office, I sank into a heap of problems Zhorik had walked past. I telephoned the old office and reported that cash collection was finished with. Big clients are served at «Metallsnab», we’ll sort out the bonuses. Small sums will accumulate in the till at Kalyazinsky. Evenings or mornings, take your pick, drive them to the «Vatrushka» with a floppy disk of the sales figures, to simplify keeping the database.
Having wrapped up the old office’s problems, I turned my attention to the new one. Zhorik hadn’t cleared everything.
I was drowning, spinning like a hamster on a wheel, but I managed to catch two or three classes at the institute now and then. My body demanded rest in the form of a change of activity: lectures and seminars were a rest from the madhouse at the office.
To keep from dwelling on it too much, I bumped my own salary up to Kostya’s level: a thousand dollars a month. I still spent around two hundred: eighty on «gas» for Verochka, a hundred and change on groceries for breakfast at home. Lunch and dinner were free.
On his third day in charge, Zhorik discovered a cafeteria on the ground floor. Nikolai Petrovich, the director of Metallsnab, offered to lease him the space so he could open a casino or a strip club, his pick. Zhorik weighed it: dead-end spot, wouldn’t pan out. Out of respect for Petrovich he’d go ahead and lease the eatery, but not for much, say a hundred bucks a month. They settled on two hundred plus free meals for the local staff, of which there turned out to be two dozen – four shifts of guards plus the director, chief accountant, and secretary. The rest of the people milling around the building turned out to be tenants, who they planned to feed on a commercial basis. Petrovich’s daughter-in-law automatically became the café’s founder with a fifty-percent stake and its director, whatever that was supposed to mean.
A couple of weeks later, to the metalworkers’ joy, the café-canteen «Black Coffee and Langet» opened. The cooks from the «Terem», closed for refurbishment, got the process going. The food did not differ from restaurant fare in quality, and the prices raised a smile – two thousand rubles for a first course, a second, a salad and compote.
These days, only those four items brought me any pleasure – soup, main, salad, and compote.
