Free Encyclopedia of a Life in Russia by Jose Manuel Prieto Page A

Romanian gypsies, Mongols, Bulgarians, Slovaks, and Croats all hurled themselves through the breach: all those who, in the depths of the I MPERIUM , felt the sudden diminution of pressure in their swim bladders and came racing in myriads and droves to prosper in this new ocean.
    But in 1989 we were also moving through the prehistory of the amassment of fortunes, the initial accumulation, devoid of Victorian sideburns or the tedious 3 percent per annum. There was oil in Western Siberia, emeralds in the Urals, diamonds in Yakutia, all of them affaires of such powerful magnetism that even if you approached them timidly, thousands of kilometers from the golden epicenter, you could become rich between nightfall and dawn.
    I needed money; this was the principal correlative to my discovery in the (C HINESE ) P ALACE , the half-sphere indispensable to achieving the critical mass of full frivolity. I went to West Berlin with several kilos of Caspian caviar smuggled in jam pots. (I’m not ashamed to confess this: I had endured long five-year plans in the I MPERIUM , subjected to inhuman budgets of a few rubles per month.) I invested the earnings from that sale in renting a small room and found myself a job washing dishes in a bar: the astonishing automatic dishwasher there, a beautiful and useful machine; the illusion of doing easy work, which in fact was not easy at all. Now I know that I was running the risk of losing my way in a labyrinth of petty expenses where I might have wandered for years, stumbling in the darkness against unpaid invoices and excessively high prices. But one evening, there in the kitchen of that bar, I read a headline in the Berliner Zeitung sticking up from the cook’s jacket pocket. I plucked it out with my damp fingers. The great news, thanks to which I am here today telling you this story, sipping this 1935Massandra here in Y ALTA . (Waiter, please . . . Perfect.)
    Verkauf, Inkauf. Easy to decipher. Verkauf im summer . . . A plan to auction off quite a bit of pretty decent East German merchandise. To clear kilometers of shelves in preparation for the Bundesrepublik’s great leap forward. All the department stores of Dresden, Potsdam and Karl-Marx-Stadt up for sale. For ridiculously low prices! I sat down to ponder the news. The sound of glasses clinking and customers laughing reached me from the bar: workers and small property owners, perhaps a few professionals. Nobodies, in a word, with their small monthly incomes. I went outside, crossed the street, and went into the bar that was opposite. I stayed there for an hour, looking at the buildings, at this other bar. All this could be mine!
    And so, well, I managed it. Because I was in on the secret: I knew that to make money, to grow rich, was a virtue. I had passed through the straits of Marxism and rediscovered a simplicity that was Adamic (in the Smithean sense), an excellent theoretical grounding for a more fitting use of the ABACUS . Listen: All systems, either of preference or restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as soon as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interests in his own way, and to bring both his industry and his capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men. We’re saved! I managed to divert the contents of some Leipzig stores into the depths of Eurasia. That was all. Since then, I’ve chartered airplanes from Southwest Asia, cargo ships full of goods from China.
    “Products from Turkey? I’ve heard there’s a real glut of Turkish merchandise.”
    “No, Chinese merchandise.” (The silk route: Bukhara and Samarkand.)

J
    J OSIK , J OSHELE , J OSEPH . We sat down next to the windows overlooking the plaza. I said to L INDA , “This is where you exclaim ‘I’ve never seen such a luxurious place before!’”
    She glanced up from the menu. “Are you