They say a person is what they eat.
After watching my colleagues at the “Red Horn” meat-processing plant day after day, I came to a depressing conclusion: their inner world was made mostly of soy, cheap moisture-retaining additives, and food coloring E120.
Not a single trace of real meat. Nothing but substitute filler.
My name is Vera Pavlovna, and I run the quality control department.
By the age of forty-seven, I had acquired three extremely useful things: impeccable taste in clothes, a strong immunity to male stupidity, and the ability to observe human meanness with the same calm curiosity an entomologist shows while studying a dung beetle.
My story began on that fateful Monday when rumors started crawling through the plant.
The position of logistics director — a warm chair upholstered in genuine leather and smelling pleasantly of power — had suddenly become vacant.
And our general director, Ivan Ilyich, a man whose mind was as straight and strict as a government standard for boiled sausage, decided that I was the one who should take it.
Naturally, this caused a storm of fermentation among the staff, comparable only to unsold kefir turning sour in the July heat.
There were two main sources of this fermentation.
First, Zinaida from accounting — a woman with permanent makeup, eyebrows frozen in eternal surprise, and the soul of a petty tram pickpocket.
Second, Arkady, the deputy warehouse manager, whose slippery, evasive nature matched the offal department under his supervision with almost poetic precision.
The two of them dreamed of seeing Arkady in that soft leather chair. And Zinaida, of course, had been promised the position of his deputy in return for her help.
I noticed them whispering in corners and throwing glances at me filled with primitive class hatred.
Whenever Zinaida saw me, she smiled so sweetly that one of my filled teeth began to ache. Arkady, meanwhile, held heavy workshop doors open for me with such exaggerated politeness that I suspected he secretly hoped one of them would someday fly off its hinges and slice me in half.
I was expecting something nasty.
And nastiness, much like good salami, needs time to mature.
Then came Friday.
End of the shift.
The factory horn announced that the working class was temporarily free.
I calmly put on my coat and headed toward the security checkpoint. In my hand was my large shopper bag, where I usually kept books, a light scarf, and my empty lunch container.
That day, there was a suspicious amount of activity at the entrance.
Our noble security guard, Pyotr Petrovich — normally vigilant only when it came to crossword puzzles — was suddenly standing at attention like a hunting dog that had caught a scent.
Beside him, “completely by chance,” stood Zinaida and Arkady, shifting from foot to foot. They were in their outerwear too, carrying bags, apparently also on their way home. Their faces were tense and solemn, like provincial theater actors waiting for the curtain to rise.
“Vera Pavlovna,” Pyotr Petrovich said in an oily bass voice, blocking my path with his massive body. “I’m afraid I must ask you to submit to an inspection. We received a report. Theft, you understand.”
“Really, Pyotr Petrovich?” I raised one eyebrow, showing the highest possible degree of surprise.
“Don’t tell me someone tried to steal our Doctor’s sausage? How brave. I wouldn’t take it home even at gunpoint.”
Zinaida snorted indignantly in the background. Judging by the sound, her nose was blocked from sheer anticipation of triumph.
“Open your bag, please,” the guard ordered sternly.
I shrugged and unzipped it.
Pyotr Petrovich shoved his great paw inside and, with a triumphant grunt, pulled into the light of day…
A huge stick of premium Braunschweiger smoked sausage, generously dusted with white pepper.
Zinaida dramatically pressed her hands to her chest. Arkady shook his head reproachfully, looking like a biblical prophet witnessing the fall of Babylon.
“Oh, Vera Pavlovna,” Zinaida sang, her voice containing more genuine joy than a Brazilian carnival. “And we thought so highly of you! But it turns out you’re a thief! And you were about to become logistics director! What a disgrace!”
I looked at the sausage.
Then at Zinaida.
Then back at the sausage.
“How fascinating,” I said thoughtfully. “Judging by the size of this meat projectile, it must have crawled into my bag by itself while singing La Marseillaise.”
Then I looked sternly at the guard.
“Pyotr Petrovich, do be kind and don’t smudge the evidence with your hands. Let’s go to Ivan Ilyich. All of you will come with me as witnesses.”
The atmosphere in the general director’s office was suffocating, like a field tribunal.
Ivan Ilyich sat red-faced behind his desk, breathing heavily and staring at the sausage, which had been placed between his bronze paperweight and a glass carafe.
“Well, Vera,” the director sighed heavily. “I didn’t expect this from you. How could you? We trusted you. A promotion was coming. And you steal from your own plant?”
“Ivan Ilyich,” Arkady immediately spoke up, stepping forward. “I always said her so-called intelligence was just a mask! Underneath it is pure greed.”
“Today it’s sausage,” he continued, “tomorrow she’ll be selling whole shipments off to the side! Zina and I have noticed strange things for a long time…”
“Exactly!” Zinaida chimed in, dabbing her completely dry eyes with a handkerchief. She held her enormous imitation-leather handbag on her lap with both hands, like a life buoy.
“She always has shifty eyes. Thinks she’s so clever, always reading books, but in reality… a thief! I demand she be dismissed immediately, with the proper record!”
I stood by the window, arms crossed, and watched this burned-out little theater performance with sincere pleasure.
“Have you finished your speech, ladies and gentlemen of the jury?” I asked politely once they had finally run out of steam. “Then allow me.”
I walked over to the desk, picked up the sausage, and weighed it in my hand with satisfaction.
“Ivan Ilyich,” I said to the director in the tone of a kind schoolteacher explaining multiplication tables to a not particularly gifted child, “you’ve known me for five years. Do you honestly believe that a woman with my level of intelligence, if she decided to commit theft, would drag a giant stick of sausage through the front security checkpoint?”
“But they found it!” Zinaida squealed from her seat. “That’s a fact!”
“The fact, Zinaida, is on your face — that cheap foundation of yours, which hides neither your wrinkles nor your rotten character,” I replied.
“And this,” I tapped the casing of the sausage with my fingernail, “is not a fact. This is a prop.”
I took a small pocketknife from my coat, snapped open the blade, and struck the sausage with it.
There was a dull plastic clack.
The blade bounced off without leaving even the smallest scratch on the “meat.”
Ivan Ilyich flinched.
Arkady turned pale with remarkable speed.
“What the hell is this?” the director barked, grabbing the “sausage” from the desk.
“Allow me to introduce it, Ivan Ilyich,” I said, gently stroking the stick. “This is a polyurethane dummy from our advertising department. It was made in 2018 for an exhibition of national economic achievements.”
I turned toward the now-whitening conspirators.
“Today during lunch break, I had the pleasure of walking into the changing room and seeing Zinaida, puffing with effort and looking around like a thief in a church, stuffing a real smoked sausage into my shopper bag. Considering Zinaida has the grace of a dockworker, it was difficult not to notice.”
Arkady glanced toward the door like a trapped animal.
Zinaida clutched her bag tighter.
“Naturally,” I continued in the same calm tone, “I waited until she left, then removed the planted evidence. But I wanted a beautiful finale. A grand opera.”
“So I went to the marketing department, borrowed this dummy, and put it in my bag. I did it for you, dear colleagues. I wanted the performance at the checkpoint to take place.”
I paused, enjoying their complete and total paralysis.
“You short-sighted little schemers forgot the most important rule: if you want to dig a pit for someone else, make sure you aren’t standing on the edge of a cliff yourself. Once I removed the sausage that had been planted in my bag, I asked myself a reasonable question: where did Zinaida get it in the first place?”
I began counting on my fingers.
“There is no shortage listed in the finished goods warehouse. So it must have come from unregistered stock. And who deals with unregistered goods and writes up disposal reports? Correct. Our crystal-honest Arkady.”
“This is slander! Complete nonsense!” Arkady squeaked, breaking out in large drops of sticky sweat.
“Slander would be calling you a competent employee, Arkasha,” I cut him off. “Facts, however, are stubborn things. As head of quality control, I have full access to the surveillance cameras in the loading area.”
“I took the time to review last night’s footage. It shows very clearly how an elite cut of balyk, written off yesterday as ‘irreparable defective product,’ very cozily moved into the trunk of your car. Your company car, by the way.”
The office became so quiet you could hear Zinaida’s loose false eyelash trembling.
“She did it herself!” Zinaida made one final desperate attack, pointing at me with a shaking finger and chipped manicure. “She set this whole thing up! You have nothing!”
“Zina, darling,” I smiled at her with the kind of smile that usually makes houseplants wither, “to set all this up, one needs a brain. And to believe that I would carry balyk into Arkady’s trunk, one would need a complete absence of one.”
I stepped close to Zinaida.
“And besides… the real sausage, the very one you so generously planted in my bag in the changing room, I did not put back on the shelf.”
“I simply dropped it into your bag. Since it was standing open right there. The same bag you are now clutching so desperately against your stomach.”
Ivan Ilyich rose from behind his desk heavily, like an angry bear.
He looked at the plastic sausage dummy, then at the miserable, shrinking conspirators.
“Zinaida,” the general director growled so loudly the windowpanes rattled. “Open your bag. Now.”
With trembling hands, Zinaida unzipped it.
At the very bottom, under a makeup pouch and an umbrella, lay the real Braunschweiger Premium, shamelessly gleaming with its fatty side.
When my pale colleagues — now stripped of their vocabulary and the last remains of their dignity — were being led out of the office, I walked over to Arkady.
“Arkasha,” I whispered in his ear, “when you write your resignation letter, check your spelling. The word ‘incompetence’ is difficult enough. Don’t embarrass yourself at the very end.”
Arkady only swallowed convulsively, while Zinaida hid her face in the collar of her cheap blouse.
They were not merely frightened.
They were suffering from something far worse — the unbearable shame of realizing just how hopelessly stupid they had been.
Ivan Ilyich closed the door behind them, collapsed back into his chair with relief, and wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.
“What a situation, Vera Pavlovna… A nest of snakes, not a staff. And to think I trusted them.”
“People are people, Ivan Ilyich,” I said philosophically, placing the polyurethane sausage back into my shopper bag. “Some simply spoil much faster than the expiration date on the package claims.”
“So, about my appointment order…”
“Are we signing it today, or should we wait until accounting carries off the entire workshop?”
The director chuckled, pulled a leather folder of documents toward himself, and firmly picked up his pen.
And as I stepped out into the warm Friday evening, I thought that being an intelligent woman in our society is, of course, hard and thankless work.
But damn it, it can be wonderfully entertaining.
