Episode 12

The woman behind the counter—an auntie with hair the colour of iron filings and glasses that magnified her eyes like a carp’s—had said, “You’ll get the proofs by Thursday.” It was Tuesday. I had no contract, no invoice number, only the memory of her voice and the faint smell of toner. I walked out into the rain and realised that the whole city ran on such things: handshake leases, verbal amendments, a nod over a cup of kefir that sealed a deal for a summer sublet. We called it parol—the word that hung in the air between two people, binding them without a stamp or a signature.

My grandfather had been a master of parol. He never wrote down a loan, never asked for a receipt when he lent his neighbour fifty litas for a new carburettor. “The paper is for the tax man,” he used to say, tapping his temple. “Here is where the real accounting lives.” He died owing nothing to anyone, but everyone in the village remembered what they owed him. That was his ledger: the collective memory of a hundred small favours, unrecorded, unenforceable, yet somehow more durable than the files that now cluttered my own desk.