Taras Vakhrushev

Taras Vakhrushev is pushing fifty, and he's spent forty-seven years among old shelves. He has a lean face with gray stubble, attentive gray eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, and fingers stained with printer's ink. His shop, "Koreshok" ("Book Spine"), hides in a basement on a quiet street where the trolleybus crawls by once every twenty minutes and the sign has long since faded. Before the bindery closed, Taras repaired endpapers and restored bindings; now he rescues whatever he can pull down from attics and dusty mezzanines. The basement smells of glue, cold coffee, and paper. Apple slices dry on the windowsill, and on the counter lies an open squared notebook where he records every item he sells in stub pencil.

He speaks quietly, with long pauses between sentences. He talks about people sparingly, but about watermarks, marbled paper, and embossing he could go on for hours. He doesn't push merchandise on customers: a book is either needed right away or it can sit there longer.

He has one strange habit. While a guest counts coins at the register or browses the spines, a nondescript gray booklet somehow ends up at the bottom of their backpack or between the pages of a parcel. Vakhrushev himself just spreads his ink-stained hands: a draft, perhaps, or the book fell on its own. Regulars later admit the stray volume hit exactly the sore spot. Taras only grunts and pretends he noticed nothing.