Chapter 5

Gordeev stepped to the side and stopped in front of me, waiting. Faithful Valya, mistaking my silence for fear, gave me a gentle poke in the ribs. But I kept looking anywhere except at Dimka. I still remembered my humiliation, and I hadn’t decided how to behave yet.

Gordeev glanced briefly toward the entrance and called out:

“Igor! Come in for a minute!”

The door had been left ajar when we entered the office, and a young man immediately poked his head through it—a tall, thin blond man in his early thirties.

“Yes, Dmitry Alexandrovich?” He squeezed into the office and stopped by the threshold. He awkwardly adjusted his tie. “You wanted me?”

Well, look at that. Gordeev had really trained everyone here. I wonder if anyone brought him slippers in their teeth.

But I didn’t have time to get a good look at the stranger. My new boss had already given orders to his subordinate and his new employees:

“Meet Igor Buryak, the head of your group. Igor, please show Yury and Valentina their workstations and bring them up to speed for starters. Berry, you stay.”

Valya’s eyes went wide with alarm—she probably thought I was about to be thrown out on the street. Well, what did I expect, standing there silently instead of smiling, nodding, and bowing at the new boss’s feet? It was my own fault! Didn’t I understand how the workplace hierarchy worked?

But I couldn’t. I really couldn’t—not out of spite.

When everyone had left, Gordeev pulled the doors mostly shut and came back. He stopped, his hands in his pants pockets, and silently looked at me.

Well, look at all this attention—and every bit of it for me. I remembered how he’d turned up his nose in the technical director’s office.

“I’m not going to say hello to you, Gordeev. I promised myself I wouldn’t, understand?”

Whether he understood or not, Dimka continued to stand just a step away. In the silence, once my shock had passed and the voices beyond the wall had faded, the scent of expensive men’s cologne suddenly reached me. It was a very pleasant scent, the kind that spoke of luxury on warm skin. The kind you wanted to remember.

For crying out loud! What kind of thoughts were those? Completely inappropriate and badly timed! I’d never thought anything like that before!

I tried to summon the image of Grandma’s vegetable garden and a young cow named Nyurka swishing her tail in the cowshed. I pictured Gordeev with a garden hoe in his hand, scraping manure out of a stall, and immediately felt better. No more perverse perfectionism for me!

“How are we supposed to work together, Berry? I have big plans for all of you when it comes to work, of course,” the “boss” clarified. “I hope you value the team’s well-being at work as much as I do?”

I finally looked at my former classmate. Good grief, I’d already forgotten what Dimka’s eyes looked like. How quickly time flew. It had only been six years, and I was memorizing them all over again—light brown and cold. But what lay behind them, what he was thinking, was impossible to tell. It had always been that way. He was probably savoring his position as he looked at me. Snob!

“Don’t worry, I’m not going to dredge up our shared school history or make you uncomfortable in any way,” I replied as impassively as I could. “If this is our first time meeting again, then so be it. Just assume I have a problem with the word ‘hello.’ I really need this job, so I promise to take it seriously. Don’t doubt me… I mean, don’t doubt me, Dmitry Alexandrovich. And now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to know what my job as an engineer will involve and get an assignment. The sooner I start, the less you’ll have to see me.”

It turned out that changing jobs made very little difference to me professionally. My authority had expanded, and I could openly explore the market for commercial proposals and tenders on behalf of the company instead of hiding behind vague schemes as I had at SNiPTechPromGaz. That let us act much more boldly and aggressively. Yurka and I rubbed our hands with satisfaction, feeling the power of GBG-Project behind us.

The department received equipment orders—Gordeev secured them—and our job, mine included, was to find the equipment and suppliers, prepare the technical and commercial documentation, and, whenever possible, beat the competition to an interesting tender. As it turned out, GBG-Project often acted as an intermediary, keeping only the most profitable offers for itself. And I had to admit, the boss had an exceptional nose for those offers.

In short, we settled into the new job quickly and threw ourselves into it!

The department had twelve engineers, not counting the boss. There were three groups of four. We all worked in one enormous office, divided by low partitions, with a separate desk and computer for each person and a central aisle leading straight to Gordeev’s office. So I saw Dimka every day, but I kept my word: whenever he appeared in the main office, I would inevitably drop a pen, a bag, or a notebook, duck behind my monitor, and pretend to be frantically searching for it.

I sat at the last desk against the wall, tucked away in a quiet corner, so it wasn’t too hard to do. Not being late for work turned out to be much harder.

“Leshka, Dashka, wake up, sleepyheads! Oh God, we almost overslept again! Time for preschool!” That was how every workday morning had begun for a whole year, so nothing changed for the little ones. But now I had to travel five extra stops every day and run across downtown to the entrance gate. Which meant getting up twenty minutes earlier than usual.

“Come on, my little Berries!”

My children woke up like children everywhere: first their bottoms rose into little hills, then blanket houses grew, and only after that did their eyes open.

“Hey, sweeties! If Mom is late for work…”

“Then Uncle Boss, the web-footed goose, and the security guard, Captain Hook, will scold her really badly!” my clever daughter yawned, and I kissed her cheek.

“Exactly!”

“Moo-om, will you buy me a Kinder Surprise?”

“Lesh, don’t push it. I bought you one two days ago.”

“But, Moo-om! I want a Marvel Joy or the Green Robot! That one had a stupid Smesharik inside!”

“Mom, I want a little Santa!”

“But you already had one.”

“Leshka took it from me! And lost it!”

“I didn’t take anything. Tattletale!”

“You’re the tattletale! Mom, why is he calling me names?”

“No, you started it!”

And in two voices:

“Moo-om!”

“All right, all right, I’ll buy one. Just get dressed, quick!”

***

 We found out about the boss’s foreign fiancée on our second day.

Garant had its own cafeteria and snack bars, but it turned out that half our department ate right there in the utility room, which had its own microwave, an electric kettle, and even a miracle of technology—a brand-new, insanely expensive coffee machine. Rumor had it that Gordeev had bought it with his own money and given it to the department for everyone to use because he couldn’t live without coffee. In any case, we couldn’t afford the cafeteria yet, and Yurka, Valya, and I quickly claimed the utility room as our own.