THE STORY WITH A FUR COAT

During the 80th I worked for an Iranian business man, who had fled Iran in 1971 when the Shah was overthrown by the Iranian Revolution. As he had married a Belgian, he had established his family in Brussels in a big house, unfortunately for her without servants.

He created an export company to buy everything possible in Europe and ship it to Iran. Now Europe and America didn't export anything anymore to Iran, but as usual there is always a hole somewhere and this time it was Sweden which didn't participate in the blockade. So what did my boss do, he shipped all the goods from bicycles to buttons, from clothes to machinery to Sweden to his brother who had an export company too and from there the goods were shipped without any problem to Iran.

The wife was quite special and very posh. She had poor education but was or had been a beauty. She was always dressed in very expensive clothes and amongst her various fur coats she also had a baby seal fur coat. It was just the time when the demonstrations against the massacre of the baby seals started.

One day she came into my office which was an apartment with kitchen, bathroom, living room and two bedrooms. I had one room the accountant the other and our boss the living room as office.

When I saw her my eyes almost popped out of my head ! Her so well combed hair was hanging around her head with something red and yellow sticking in it, the furcoat was red and yellow spotted and her face looked as if it was bleeding. She screamed and yelled and was furious and I tried to calm her down which wasn't easy but I managed with a cognac and a hot bath !! (my work was very various) and while she was sitting as God had created her in the bath,  she told me she had been to a market and when she walked around like a queen in person, people started to insult her and worse, threw eggs and rotten tomatoes on her and the precious coat ! She had to run away and save herself in her car, otherwise the people would have been even more violent. Now she complained to me, that these people were completely crazy that they had nearly killed her because she had that beautiful coat, and when I tried to explain her why they had behaved like this, she didn't understand what fuzz was made because of an animal !!

I was singing of joy inside but made a face full of compassion, it was useless to explain to this woman anything, with her IQ level she didn't understand anyway. She mumbled that now she had to throw this beauty away, and I told her it would be better for her not to wear her fur coats anymore on the street. As an answer she called home and asked her husband to bring her another coat and complained bitterly about what had happened to her, and that now she would go to the hairdresser to have her hair fixed. She had another cognac put on the coat her husband had brought meanwhile and disappeared. My boss smiled to me, he was used to worse and I returned in my office.

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