August 17, 1998
Monday
11:30 a.m.
«Five years have passed. Proma Holding has taken a leading position...» Loomed, drove itself in... No, not like that... Flattened the limp thing and drooped! Not for a single hour of its history had Proma ever been a leader. It adapted to circumstances...
How do you edit an edit properly? Where is the director of public relations and GR Svetlana Vladimirovna? Where has the philologist tart in leopard-print leggings with the airs of a society lioness got to? At her sugar daddy’s on Rublyovka, at her grandfather’s in Malakhovka, turning the lads from Mosrentgen upside down? Meetings start in an hour, one after another, and I’m fooling about! When she turns up I’ll punish her... but how?
Good question.
She’s Vasilich’s daughter! You don’t punish people like that — you do their work for them, you kiss their little backside: «Svetlana Vladimirovna! I understand that through sheer perseverance and hard work you’ve conquered high-society Moscow, but could you possibly spare a couple of minutes for your actual job duties?»
With Sveta it’s clear. Whoever has a father who was a regional committee secretary, carved up the province and became a deputy minister in Moscow – that one is fortune’s darling! Svetlana Vladimirovna reached the heights on her own. Her father is merely a major general of the SVR, an old servant out of Bachurino, seven years into retirement, attached to some damned businessmen. Svetka’s entire inheritance is a three-room flat in Yasenevo and one family treasure, a «Zhiguli» Four with the Seven’s interior.
While Sveta is out lighting it up, because you can’t be this beautiful, someone has to approve the press release for Proma’s anniversary and send it to print. How sick of it I am! Why am I doing this? Why do I live?
Four years ago it was simpler. I got discharged from the hospital and stepped straight into a yoke I never climbed back out of...
