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sure if it was the uniform she liked more than the man in
it.
Before Dusha could unpick this riddle, her colleague had
grown tired of her repetitive work, and of the toffees. And it
wasn’t too long before her boss had also stumbled upon
his salesclerk, curled up like a baby among the shoeboxes
on the warehouse floor one afternoon.
But since misfortune never walks alone, comrade
Podlogar, a notorious snoop from a nearby town, heard
through the grapevine that his model daughter, Dusha,
who worked so hard at the shoe shop to earn her keep,
hadn’t been seen at the Faculty of Education in ages.
Dusha’s father, Dushan, was a special sort: he had
reluctantly moved away from his modest home, where he
had dragged himself after the first heart attack, which
resulted in obligatory invalidity retirement from his
long-standing career as the staunch police commander of
the small town. But when comrade Maria Podlogar, a
former secretary at the primary school, who made a
hobby of keeping tabs on the moral meanderings of the
neighbourhood, commented one day that it just wasn’t
right when parents don’t know what is happening with
their own children, Dushan felt forced into action. It was
never his choice, but he went about it professionally.
So Dusha not only lost her job at the beginning of March
1978, but former police chief Podlogar made sure, in his