the bag back to the foreigner. Nobody could have taken it but you. Give it back, don’t embarrass the whole neighbourhood. ‘My son has been dreaming of an Adidas bag for months now. ‘Tomorrow I’ll get you not one but two of these bags from the warehouse. Give this one back.’ ‘’I was going to take it with me, but when my wife opened it, she saw an old lambskin and threw it out to the dogs.’ ‘Use the one in your hand. There must not be any marks on that hide.’ ‘Still, we should have taken £500 from him…’ He shook himself off, took the bag that hung on the post supporting the chain-link fence around the plinth, slipped a lambskin into it and handed it to the secretary. ‘You have no use for English pounds, Ashten. All the shops where you could sell foreign currency are now closed. You can only buy with Soviet money. Understand? Now go home. And don’t take a step out of the house without our permission. You never know what else these foreigners will think of.’ Ashten staggered back to his room, and the secretary staggered towards the hotel with his Adidas bag. Zhanaidarov was preparing to take the foreign guests to the jailau when the red telephone rang again. ‘Zhanaidarov speaking,’ he picked up impatiently. ‘What?!’ he covered his eyes and was silent for a while. ‘From Italy? When? Tomorrow…? Ugh! Well ok, we are waiting…’ He hung up and sat still for a long time, unable to come to his senses. ‘He’s a strange man,’ he thought reproachfully of the first secretary of the district committee. ‘Did he tell the whole world that a statue of a leather tanner had been unveiled? He had to make such a fuss about that damn statue! The English have barely been dealt with, and now the Italians are coming. They probably drank the advance, and now they’re looking for a new order… And we don’t care about ours…’ After seeing the English off, Zhanaidarov breathed a sigh of relief. Now the Bulgarians would be welcomed and seen off too… And after that he firmly decided not to have anyone else: he would say that the plinth had a crack in it. Better that than to be exposed for such a shameful fabrication. The day before, when the Italian delegation arrived, it had been a

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