The blinds stay rationed. I keep mine for eighteen months, Rab comes up on Thursdays, and the corridor fills with people pretending to be going somewhere.
By spring there is a market in it. Not money — hours. People trade a Thursday for a favour, the favours get larger, and I have invented a currency.
RabTwelve rooms. Four hundred people. It was going to be a market the moment anybody worked out what the blind was for.
A folded paper turns up under the twelfth door one morning with a number on it and no signature, and nobody ever finds out who put it there.