Changing jobs is always an important event in the life of a professional – Nina had to search around for opportunities and weigh them up carefully in order to make a forced resignation into a step ahead in her career. However, she could not concentrate on her own affairs as her mind was full of her father and his severe crisis. Nina wanted with all her heart to help him, but he kept detached and would not allow her anywhere near him. Nina spent many evenings in gloomy reflection, sitting in her armchair in front of the mutely shimmering TV set. For a long time, she could not think of any way out.
However, her unfailing, bright mind finally came up with an answer. The idea that occurred to her seemed absurd but already the next day, Nina set to putting it into practice. She decided to quit the investment company and take up a job in the bank that credited her father – in order to at least be informed of his financial affairs and, given a chance, be of help to him. She could do that without disclosing their relationship – especially as she bore a different surname now.
Getting a job in the bank was easy. The bank’s management was in the process of change, new bosses recruiting new employees, and Nina who already had some experience was taken on readily. Her wish to work in the area of industrial credit was respected, too. Thus, without telling anything to her father, Nina landed in the very bank and the very department that credited him.
The bank had a weird atmosphere to it – everything reminded of its semi-criminal past. Back in the nineties, the bank had been started by some Komsomol functionaries and cooperative profiteers in crimson jackets. Where the starting capital had come from was a mystery – not only to the tax authorities, but it seemed, to the present owners of the bank as well, since the founders who had kept that secret had long been dead.
The first shady dealers had been replaced by others, then yet others. However, the times were changing, and the bank was touched by new drifts. The management was joined by new people who aimed at legal business and professionalism. Nina came to the bank at the time of transition when the bank resembled a frog which had almost turned into a prince but was still bearing spots of its frog past. In the managers’ offices, respectable Western businessmen could be met as well as local criminal bosses, and lofty financial talk was mixing with prison jargon.
In the industrial credit department, the table next to Nina’s was occupied by a character that looked like a professional boxer and did not even know how to turn on the computer. He came to work every day, never spoke to anyone, and killed time studying automobile magazines. Nina did not know why someone who had nothing to do with finance should be kept in that position, neither did she want to find out. Another table was always vacant although the staff list said that it was occupied by a specialist on long-term loans. Apart from her own work, Nina did everything for those two, and she did not mind the arrangement.
Also, the department had on its staff a number of mature women who had received accounting education some thirty years before. All of them had children and grandchildren. They were as interested in their work as in life on Mars, but they needed their jobs for the sake of the same children and grandchildren. For that reason, they were ready to perform great volumes of routine operations, but any attempts by the department manager to charge them with anything that went beyond their thirty-year-old skills were doomed.
The department manager, named Kirill, was a very corpulent young man with rosy cheeks who looked like a big baby. He had graduated from the same financial university as Nina, but he was five years her senior. He was very glad to have Nina in his department – he recognized at once a kindred mind in her, and soon the two of them formed a kind of alliance. Hardly a day went by without Kirill summoning Nina to discuss some business matters or, not infrequently, just have a chat and complain about his life.
Kirill’s life in the bank was not an easy one. He lived in cycles. From time to time, he was possessed by the zest for action. Then he called in Nina and Ignatiy Savelievich, the department’s leading specialist. Kirill unfolded grandiose plans before them – in his imagination, they were going to expand the operations many times over, and transform the modest credit department into a branch leading an independent investment policy. Ignatiy Savelievich, who had heard such speeches many times before, agreed with everything. Nina, for whom those plans were new, tried to grasp them and was surprised to find that, with all their Napoleonic audacity, Kirill’s ideas were not idle fantasies – they could very well be feasible. Inflamed with his projects, Kirill would cry out, “Let’s get to it, people! Time waits for no one.” With these words, he hustled his subordinates out of his office, and then tackled specific issues himself stirring up everyone around.
A period of Kirill’s great activity would end by his being called up to the bank’s bosses. From the top floor, Kirill came back crushed. The castles in the air that he built collapsed as they came in contact with the crude reality. The bosses who could not tell debit from credit or do without obscene slang in their speech imparted Kirill to their view of the business. The instructions that Kirill received were not too various – typically, he was ordered to write off, for unknown reasons, the debt of some client company, launder large sums of cash, or take on another criminal mug as a financial consultant for his department.
After his visits to the top, Kirill lapsed into apathy, let things take their course and signed without looking the papers that were brought to him. Nina became a shoulder to cry on for him. She was worried about that at first, fearing that Kirill might have his eye on her as a woman. That kind of interest on his part could thwart all her plans. Luckily, it soon became clear that there was no reason for her concern – Kirill was married and adored his wife. He kept a framed picture of her on the table in his office. His wife was thin and angular, with a face like a horse – in Nina’s view, not an attractive woman, but, thank heaven, Kirill was of a different opinion.
Apart from Kirill and Nina, the department’s only real specialist in finance was Ignatiy Savelievich, a man of retirement age. In former times, he had been himself a department head in one of the major state-owned banks. He knew everything and everyone – both in the profession and beyond it. Once, as they were having tea, he told Nina that one of the current vice-premiers in the federal government had served under him at one time. “Nina, do you know what dyslexia is? It’s pathological inability to make up words out of letters. A dyslexic person simply cannot read. Now, that guy has a severe case of dyslexia. You want to ask me how someone who was unable to read could work in a bank? You tell me – how can he work as vice-premier today?” Ignatiy Savelievich chuckled, “Who cares about dyslexia? It’s nothing! I know some more exciting things – what industries were privatized by whom in the government, and what foreign accounts billions were transferred to. I don’t know all of it, but I know a lot. If I wanted to die in style, I could let out one per cent of it to the media. But I mean to live on a bit longer, so I’m not letting out anything.”