A pub. A militiaman, a baker, a cobbler and a caretaker at the city administration. Four shot glasses strike the table now and then. They’re talking about honesty.

Of an entire row of lamps, all exactly the same, just one has a different shade, evidently the old one got broken, and these days no identical shade could be found ― where would you start? There’s a grey-and-brown flypaper hanging from each lamp, some twisted, some straight; it’s July, after all, and there are lots of flies. They come in from the countryside, from ditches at the edge of town, swarms of them, especially now, settling on everything. There are cakes on the counter under a glass bell, but try reaching for a piece, and at least one fly will instantly appear and have to be shooed away with a wave of the hand, once, and again, until the customers start joking that the waiter’s a bundle of nerves today.

“But what we’re talking about here is honesty!” said the baker, raising a solid, bread-baking hand, which he curled into a fist as if about to bang it on the table, but he got the better of himself, uncurled it and let it drop to his knee. “Honesty. It’s not as if everything costs whatever you like. Only among profiteers, perhaps.”

“Weeell, among profiteers anything was possible,” said the caretaker. “We all remember what it was like during the recent war, but during the earlier one it was really bad…”

“It’s a fact,” agreed the cobbler, who couldn’t remember the earlier war because he was lying in his cradle when it ended, but he agreed anyway.

“Have you got children?” the baker continued. Two of them nodded, but not the militiaman, who was a bachelor. “So you have got some. How many?”

They both answered in chorus, the cobbler to say two, the caretaker three.

“And when you or your lady wife sends one of them out to the shop, the kid knows a kilo of bread costs fifteen