red moscow

Chapter 2689

When he arrived at the market early the next morning, Sokov opened his shop door as usual and moved some things out of the shop and placed them at the door.

Just as I was about to clean, a strange young man suddenly walked in from outside and asked politely, "Brother, can you lend me the vacuum cleaner in your store?"

Sokov looked at the other person and thought that he knew all the Chinese colleagues on this street, but the person in front of him was a stranger. When he was about to refuse, the other person continued: "My store is just across the street. I will return it to you after I use it."

Opposite? Sokov looked at the opposite door and thought, isn't that Lao Wu's shop? Why did a young man suddenly appear? "The shop opposite," he said carefully, "Isn't it Lao Wu's shop? I don't remember him having relatives like you."

"I just came here two days ago." The young man said respectfully: "My last name is Ma, you can call me Xiao Ma. The old Wu you mentioned is my uncle."

"Oh, so you're Lao Wu's nephew." After figuring out the other party's identity, Sokov readily lent him the vacuum cleaner in the store: "You can use this vacuum cleaner."

When Xiao Ma took the vacuum cleaner back to his shop to use, Lena walked into the shop. After she put down her bag, she was ready to start cleaning, but she found the vacuum cleaner in a familiar place, so she came over to ask Sokov: "Misha, where is the vacuum cleaner in the shop?"

Sokov pointed to the shop across the street and said, "The neighbor across the street borrowed it."

Lena looked into the store across the street and asked in surprise, "Who is that person? Why have I never seen him before?"

"He's Lao Wu's nephew." After Sokov finished speaking, he suddenly remembered that there were many vocabularies missing in Russian. Nephew and nephew used the same word, so he quickly added, "He's the son of Lao Wu's sister."

After a while, Xiao Ma came over to return the vacuum cleaner.

Lena asked politely, "Are you done using it?" The implication was that if you don't use it anymore, I will start cleaning the store.

Unexpectedly, Xiao Ma's face turned red, and he turned around and asked Sokov awkwardly: "Brother, what did she say?"

When Sokov heard this, he knew that the other party had no Russian foundation at all, so he explained to him: "She asked you if you still needed the vacuum cleaner. If not, she would clean the store."

"No, no." Xiao Ma waved his hand and said to Lena, not caring whether the other party could understand him or not. Finally, he said in stiff and unfamiliar Russian: "Thank you!"

"You're welcome." Lena answered with a smile and looked at Sokov with a meaningful look, because when she first met Sokov, he could only say "thank you" and "hello", and he couldn't say any other words. He even had to rely on a calculator to communicate with customers when selling goods.

"Lena, why are you looking at me?" Sokov felt a little embarrassed by Lena's gaze and said awkwardly, "Hurry up and clean up!"

Lena was very efficient and finished cleaning the store in no time.

After putting the vacuum cleaner away, Lena asked Sokov curiously: "Misha, I have known you for four or five years, right?"

"Well, almost." Sokov asked back in confusion: "Why are you asking this?" While asking this, he thought to himself, does she want him to give her a raise?

"When I first met you, you were just like the guy across the street. You could say 'thank you' and 'hello'. No, you could also say 'toilet'." Lena laughed as she spoke. "You learned the word 'toilet' on purpose because you were worried that you wouldn't know where to go when you needed to go to the bathroom urgently."

When Sokov heard Lena's words about him, his face turned red. When he first learned this word, he was worried about encountering such an embarrassing situation.

Lena continued, "Your Russian has improved rapidly in the past few years, but your pronunciation of many words is still inaccurate, and there are countless grammatical errors. But what surprises me is that your Russian has improved by leaps and bounds since you went with a few friends to explore the underground fortifications during Victory Day. If I hadn't seen you when you spoke Russian, I might have thought you were a real Russian speaking."

Sokov remembered that Victoria had said the same thing, but she had only known him for a few days and didn't know how good his Russian was before, so she must have thought that she had always spoken Russian so well. But Lena had known him for four or five years, and she knew his Russian level very well. He hesitated for a moment and came up with a rather far-fetched reason: "In fact, the reason is very simple. I practice Russian hard every day. The accumulation of quantity leads to a qualitative leap. The vocabulary and grammar I have mastered will naturally improve by leaps and bounds after breaking through a certain key node, and my Russian level will naturally improve rapidly."

After hearing Sokov's far-fetched reason, Lena showed a puzzled expression on her face. When she was about to continue asking, a customer walked into the store.

After the customer came in, he grabbed the sleeve of a piece of clothing and looked at it, then asked Lena: "Girl, how much is this piece of clothing?"

Seeing the customer asking about the price, Lena naturally didn't bother to continue asking questions and went to serve the customer.

After Lena told the customer the price, she put her bag aside and started trying on clothes in the store.

Seeing Lena helping a customer try on clothes, Xiao Ma, who had been sitting in a daze at the door of the opposite shop, suddenly became interested and stood at the door staring at the customer.

Seeing this, Sokov couldn't help but frowned. He walked quickly to Xiao Ma and whispered to him, "Xiao Ma, when a customer is trying on clothes in the store, you can't stare at her. This is very impolite, understand? It doesn't matter here, but if you were in the Russians' store, if you stared at the customer like this, the owner might just chase you away."

When Xiao Ma heard what Sokov said, his face turned red with shame, he quickly said sorry, and turned back to his shop.

After Xiao Ma left, Sokov returned to his shop again, looked at the customer who was trying on clothes, and politely asked her if she was satisfied with the size and style of the clothes. If she felt that they were not suitable, he would help her find a suitable one.

The customer tried on more than a dozen pieces of clothing in the store. Although he liked two of them, when he asked about the prices, he found that they were beyond his budget. He hurriedly shook his head and said politely, "I'll go around again. If I don't find something suitable, I'll come back to buy them." Before leaving, he also took a business card from the store.

After the customer left, Lena sorted out the clothes with Sokov and said dissatisfiedly: "She didn't even know what fur is, but she came to try on the clothes. Can the price of this thing be the same as that of shirts and skirts? I think she will definitely not come back." "It's better not to come back." Sokov had a better attitude. He smiled and said: "If she really wants to use the price of a shirt or skirt to buy an expensive mink fur, do you think you should sell it or not?"

Just after she finished tidying up her clothes, Lena saw a lot of people gathered at the other end of the street. It seemed that something was happening. She said something to Sokov and ran over to watch the fun.

After a while, Sokov heard someone shouting "Hurak, Hurak!" He wanted to go over to see what was going on, but he was the only one in the store and he definitely couldn't leave. He could only stand on tiptoe and look over there, trying to figure out what was going on.

The pony on the other side came over again and asked curiously, "Brother, what does the 'Ula' they shouted mean?"

"Ura is an interjection, which is probably equivalent to our shouting 'Long live'." Sokov said casually: "If you have seen Soviet war movies, you can see that the commanders and fighters in the movies kept shouting 'Ura' when they were charging."

“Is Ura the Russian word?”

After hearing Xiao Ma's question, Sokov thought for a moment and then replied, "Although 'Ura' is a Russian word, I don't think I've heard any Russians shout it. It's mostly Ukrainians who shout it."

Ten minutes later, Lena, who had been watching the fun, came back. Sokov immediately asked, "Lena, what happened over there?"

"It's models taking wedding photos." Lena said excitedly, "You know, on our street, only Zhenya sells wedding dresses. Their wedding dresses are custom-made from Ukraine, and there are many people buying them. Today, the head of a modeling company came and said that he wanted to take a few wedding photos for the models in his store. It is said that the price is not low. Zhenya saw that he could not only get a lot of advertising fees, but also someone would advertise for him for free, so he shouted there."

Xiao Ma was very anxious when he saw Sokov and Lena talking non-stop but he couldn't understand a word. After waiting for a long time until the two stopped talking, he quickly asked Sokov, "Brother, what are you talking about?"

Sokov simply translated what Lena said to him.

After Xiao Ma heard this, he turned his head and looked in the direction of the bridal shop, and asked tentatively: "Brother, are the wedding dresses here for rent or for sale?"

"Of course they are for sale." Sokov had talked with Zhenya before and knew that the price of wedding dresses was not lower than that of furs. Not every woman would buy furs, but wedding dresses are something that every woman who is getting married must buy: "People here don't have the habit of renting wedding dresses when they get married, they buy them themselves."

"Ah, you buy your own wedding dress when you get married?" Xiao Ma said in surprise, "A wedding dress is different from other commodities. You only wear it once when you get married, and then you put it away and never have the chance to wear it again. I guess it's not expensive, right?"

Sokov knew that Xiao Ma had just come from China and had no intuitive understanding of the prices in Russia, so he pointed to the shop opposite and said, "What do you think of the price of the fur sold by your uncle?"

"It's too expensive." Xiao Ma looked back at his store and shook his head, saying, "If I had to pay for it, I definitely wouldn't be able to afford it."

"Many wedding dresses are more expensive than furs," Sokov continued. "But according to Russian custom, women have to buy a wedding dress when they get married, so during the peak wedding season, the store's business is booming."

"Really?" Xiao Ma looked at the bridal shop in the distance and said with envy, "I want to open a bridal shop, too."

"The shops selling wedding dresses in the market are either Ukrainian or Azerbaijani," Sokov explained. "So far, no Chinese has opened a wedding dress shop because they can't find a place to buy goods. If they buy goods from others, the styles are monotonous and outdated, and the prices are expensive and they can't be sold at all."

After hearing this, Xiao Ma showed a surprised expression on his face: "I really didn't expect that doing business has so many details."

Sokov wanted to tell him more about business matters, but then he thought that it would be inappropriate to tell him so much rashly since he just met him today and didn't even know what kind of person he was. So after chatting for a few more words, he changed the subject and asked about the other party's background in a roundabout way.

But Xiao Ma seemed to be the kind of person who looked like a pig but had a loud heart. Although he was talking and laughing with Sokov, he would change the subject to avoid the main point when it came to key issues. Sokov saw from the chat that Xiao Ma was a scheming person, so when his cell phone rang, he took the opportunity to end the awkward chat.

After returning to the store and finishing the call, Sokov's mind suddenly popped up what Lida said. She said that she had seen Kopalova in Moscow in the 1950s. Since he had nothing to do anyway, he might as well call Izvestia to see if anyone there seemed to know Kopalova.

Thinking of this, he searched for the phone number of the Izvestia newspaper on the Internet with his mobile phone and dialed it directly.

The person who answered the phone was a woman. Judging from her voice, she should be a young girl: "Hello, this is the Izvestia newspaper office. What can I do for you?"

"Hello, girl!" Sokov asked politely, "I want to ask you about a person in your newspaper."

"Sir!" the girl who answered the phone said politely, "Please tell me his name so I can see if I know him."

"Kopalova!" After saying this name that he had remembered by heart, Sokov was worried that the other party didn't know Kopalova, so he quickly provided more detailed information: "She is a photojournalist who started working at a newspaper in the 1940s. I wonder if you can provide me with some information about her."

"I'm sorry, sir. I'm sorry, I can't help you." The girl who answered the phone rejected Sokov's request without hesitation: "I don't manage personnel files. I can't help you look up an old photojournalist from seventy or eighty years ago." After that, she hung up the phone without giving Sokov a chance to continue speaking.

Listening to the "beep beep" sound coming from the phone, Sokov couldn't help but smile and shook his head. When he made this call, he still had a glimmer of hope in his heart that if Kopalova was a very famous person in Izvestia, even after decades, someone would remember her. But through this conversation just now, he felt that he thought the problem was too simple. The employees of the newspaper might not even remember the former president and editor-in-chief of the newspaper, let alone an ordinary photojournalist.

"Misha," Lena walked into the inner room and asked curiously, "Who did you call? I seemed to hear you say that the person was an old employee from 70 or 80 years ago."

Sokov nodded and said, "I heard a centenarian mention a person who was her old friend from decades ago and worked at a newspaper. I wanted to call and ask about the other party, but the person who answered the phone at the newspaper didn't know this person at all. It's no wonder, after all, she was someone who worked there decades ago, who would remember her now?"

(End of this chapter)