Thieving was paramount. If someone worked in a bread factory, considerable bread supplies would go to himself and his relatives. In the mid ?80s, when scarcity grew intolerable, people struggled to be employed in companies that produced usable materials, which, I repeat, would make life easier for both the man?s family and his acquaintances. If you were a bread man, you had to take into account your equivalent, the man with the meat. The exchange was mutually profitable. Naturally, all this came to influence the quality of products. Resources were limited, and the price was controlled, hence recuperation for stolen products was only possible by modifying the recipes, and lessening the normal quantities? The principle was: if others do it, why shouldn?t I. Any more humane point of view had to cope with this generalizing notion that came to reign nationwide. It?s still with us nowadays. The notion that stealing is actually a virtue, not the result of despair. I for one will never put up with thieves. (114)

I?ll tell you about clothes stealing. The building was separated by a railway and two big fences from another factory, where they made tools and machines. The boys fixed a catapult on the roof of the building, and at night they?d hurl whole packets of clothes into the yard of the other factory. They put them aside during the day, and the guardian wrapped them together at night and did the catapulting too. You could well get out of the machine factory with a suit in your hands, no one said anything, since there was no way you could steal clothes from a machine factory.

You could also steal one shirt piece by piece. One day you took the front piece, wrapped it around your waist, the next day you took the sleeves, then a pack of buttons and threads: it took you several days to steal a whole shirt, or dress, or whatever. (I. H., 48)

I would have said I never stole anything, but finally I discovered I did. But it wasn?t really stealing? I was in the inventory commission of our food shop. According to the norms, a damage percentage was stipulated for the salami. 100 kilos came in, and 10% was expected to be lost, so 90 kilos were to be sold and accounted for. But they were sold immediately, there wasn?t much on the markets anyway, so there was no time for any of it to be damaged. And we had to do something about the extra 10 kilos. The administrator took 9 and one was for me. It was almost legal. The same with the oranges or bananas, the damage percentage was even bigger. And they sold immediately, too. We should have taken the left percentage in front of a committee and destroy it or throw it in the canal. But they were not damaged at all, and we took them home.