After a year, the banks and the trusts developed a desire to find out how much the Revenge Industrial Cooperative benefited from all the financial and material aid it received, and they wanted to know whether the healthy private establishment needed any further assistance. The commission, decked out in scholarly beards, arrived at the Revenge in three coaches. The chairman stared into Engels’s dispassionate face for a long time and kept banging on the fir counter with a cane, in an attempt to summon the administrators and members of the cooperative. Finally the door of the manufacturing plant opened, and a teary-eyed boy with a bucket in his hand appeared in front of the commission.
An interview with the young representative of the Revenge revealed that the manufacturing process was going full-throttle, and that the owner had been gone for a week. The commission didn’t spend much time at the production plant. In its taste, color, and chemical composition, the liquid that babbled so busily in the enema hose resembled ordinary water, and that’s exactly what it was. Having established this incredible fact, the chairman said “Hmm” and looked at the other members, who also said “Hmm.”
Then the chairman looked at the boy with a terrible smile and asked:
“And how old are you?”
“Twelve,” answered the boy.
And then he burst out crying so inconsolably that the members ran outside, pushing each other on the way, climbed into their coaches, and left in total confusion. As for the Revenge Cooperative, all of its operations were duly recorded in the profit and loss balance sheets of bank and trust ledgers, specifically in the sections that say nothing about profits and deal exclusively with losses.
On the same day that the commission had such a meaningful exchange with the boy at the Revenge, Alexander Ivanovich Koreiko got off the sleeper car of an express train two thousand miles from Moscow, in a small grape-growing republic.
He opened his hotel room window and saw a small oasis town, complete with bamboo water lines and a shoddy mud-brick fortress. The town was separated from the sands by poplars and was filled with Asiatic hubbub.
The next day he learned that the republic had started building a new electric power plant. He also learned that money was short, and that the construction, which was crucial to the future of the republic, might have to be halted.
And so the successful entrepreneur decided to help out. He got into a pair of orange boots again, put on an embroidered Central Asian cap, and headed to the construction office with a fat briefcase in his hand.
They didn’t receive him very warmly, but he carried himself with dignity, didn’t ask anything for himself, and insisted that the idea of bringing electricity to backward hinterlands was especially dear to his heart.
“Your project is short of money,” he said. “I’ll get it for you.”
He proposed to create a profitable subsidiary within the construction enterprise.
“What could be easier! We will sell postcards with views of the construction site, and that will bring the funds that the project needs so badly. Remember, you won’t be giving anything, you will only be collecting.”
Alexander Ivanovich cut the air with his hand for emphasis. He sounded convincing, and the project seemed sure-fire and lucrative. Koreiko secured the agreement – giving him a quarter of all profits from the postcard enterprise – and got down to work.
First, he needed working capital. It had to come from the money allocated for construction. That was the only money the republic had.
“Don’t worry,” he reassured the builders, “and remember that starting right now, you will only be collecting.”
Alexander Ivanovich inspected the gorge on horseback. The concrete blocks of the future power plant were already in place, and Koreiko sized up the beauty of the granite cliffs with a glance. Photographers followed him in a coach. They surrounded the site with tripods on long jointed legs, hid under black shawls, and clicked their shutters for a while. When all of the shots were taken, one of the photographers lowered his shawl and said thoughtfully:
“Of course, it would’ve been better if the plant was farther to the left, in front of the monastery ruins. It’s a lot more scenic over there.”
It was decided that they would build their own print shop to produce the postcards as soon as possible. The money, as before, came from the construction funds. As a result, certain operations at the power plant had to be curtailed. But everybody took solace in the thought that the profits from the new enterprise would allow them to make up for lost time.
The print shop was built in the same gorge, across from the power plant. Soon the concrete blocks of the print shop appeared right beside those of the plant. Little by little, the drums with concrete mix, the iron bars, the bricks, and the gravel all migrated from one side of the gorge to the other. The workers soon followed – the pay at the new site was better.
Six months later, train stations across the country were inundated with salesmen in striped pants. They were selling postcards that showed the cliffs of the grape-growing republic, where construction proceeded on a grand scale. Curly-haired girls spun the glass drums of the charitable lottery in amusement parks, theaters, cinemas, on ships, and at resorts, and everyone won a prize – a postcard of the electric gorge.
Koreiko’s promise came true: revenues were pouring in from all sides. But Alexander Ivanovich was not letting the money slip through his hands. One quarter was already his under the agreement. He apprehended another quarter by claiming that some of the sales squads hadn’t submitted their reports yet. He used the rest to expand the charitable enterprise.
“One has to be a good manager,” he would say quietly, “first we’ll set up the business properly, then the real profits will start pouring in.”
By then the Marion excavator taken from the power plant site was already digging a large pit for a new printing press building. The work at the power plant had come to a complete halt. The site was abandoned. The only ones still working there were the photographers with their black shawls.
Business was booming, and Alexander Ivanovich, always with an honest Soviet smile on his face, began printing postcards with portraits of movie stars.
As was to be expected, a high-level commission arrived one evening in a jolting car. Alexander Ivanovich didn’t linger. He threw a farewell glance at the cracked foundation of the power plant, at the imposing, brightly lit building of the subsidiary, and skipped town in a jiffy.
“Hmm,” said the chairman, picking at the cracks in the foundation with a cane. “Where’s the power plant?” He looked at the commission members, who in turn said “Hmm.” The power plant was nowhere to be found.
In the print shop, however, the commission saw the work going full-speed ahead. Purple lights shone; flat printing presses busily flapped their wings. Three of them produced the gorge in black-and-white, while the fourth, a multi-color machine, spewed out postcards: portraits of Douglas Fairbanks with a black half-mask on his fat teapot face, the charming Lya de Putti, and a nice bulgy-eyed guy named Monty Banks.
Portraits flew out of the machine like cards from a sharper’s sleeve. That memorable evening was followed by a long series of public trials that were held in the open air of the gorge, while Alexander Ivanovich added a half-million rubles to his assets.
His shallow, angry pulse was as impatient as ever. He felt that at that moment, when the old economic system had vanished and the new system was just beginning to take hold, one could amass great wealth. But he already knew that striving openly to get rich was unthinkable in the land of the Soviets. And so he looked with a condescending smile at the lonely entrepreneurs rotting away under signs like: GOODS FROM THE WORSTED TRUST B. A. LEYBEDEV, BROCADE AND SUPPLIES FOR CHURCHES AND CLUBS, or GROCERIES, X. ROBINSON AND M. FRYDAY.
The