Having worked two days off at the till in the grocery shop, mama still decided not to sit at home, but to try her strength in another place. Next to our house there was a little manufactured-goods shop, and there too they needed a cashier. I think in manufactured goods at the till there was not such a load as in the grocery shop. And at a family council we decided that mama should work there, although my sister did not yet go to kindergarten, but I could stay home with her until lunch, since I went to school in the second shift, then papa came home for lunch for an hour, then in the manufactured-goods shop there was a break from 14 to 15 hours. And a pensioner from the neighbouring house, Faina Mikhailovna, also agreed to help us nanny for a couple of hours. And by 17.30 papa would return from work and already always walked with the child in the evening, until about 7.
And now I will write in detail about this little manufactured-goods shop and what big affairs one aunt named Raisa Titovna turned there. In the shop there were two departments: haberdashery and manufactured goods. Raisa Titovna was in charge of the manufactured-goods department. There they sold fabrics, ready-made clothes, shoes, underwear. The goods were, how to put it more decently, unattractive. Only the fabrics were not bad, natural, though not always good colourways. Little imported goods came into this shop (then deliveries went by order of party people from the trade administration), that is there was practically nothing to put out for free sale to the people.
It depended on Raisa Titovna how she would distribute this scarce goods “among her own.” This did not mean that she shared with her subordinates. And under her there were very young girls after trade school, who still could not “get” the system of Soviet trade. One can call Raisa Titovna a kind of mistress of shortage. She had a storeroom, in the basement, the entrance without a door, simply a hole hung with dense cloth. To get there you had to crawl on all fours through this hole. When mama started work, she did not learn all these secrets at once. She had her own section of work for which she bore material responsibility, and the rest worried her little.
But there was such an order in all manufactured-goods shops, on the last day of the month to do a stocktaking, necessarily with a representative from higher structures. Several months pass, and every month in Raisa Titovna’s department — a shortage, which they divided “brotherly” — equally. These poor girls after trade school in fact worked to pay off the shortage. A disgrace, and nothing else! Raiska steals, the girls pay and cry, and they don’t know how to fight.
Well, my mama had learned to fight since the war and she decided to call a meeting. They compiled compromising material on Raisa and threw her out with a bang! They threw her out, yes, but the saga did not end. In the shop there was also a credit department, so-called Instalments. In Soviet times this was a very popular system of buying expensive goods. And people used this system very actively. You could arrange instalments at once for several things.
Here Raisa Titovna would sidle up to a customer who was arranging instalments, with a little request to include her goods, say a pair of imported shoes, for 45 roubles (wow! with an average salary of 80 r. a month), and she in turn would offer the customer better goods. Of course they met her halfway, that is they helped her out, entered her goods into the cost of their credit. Of course Raisa Titovna promised to pay her debt, “but nothing of the kind! Raiska was not going to pay anything to anyone, and nobody who had arranged instalments could prove that Raisa had “included” her goods and in this way had deceived more than a dozen people.
That is how Raisa Titovna knew how to trade and steal! I think she was not acquainted with V.I. Lenin’s slogan, but she possessed the talent for a swindle in full. To be continued….