Trafika Europe 5 - Slovenian Interlude

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

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