by James Cook
You felt as if you had gone back a thousand years, ten thousand, to the mines of the Pharaohs, King Solomon, or the Incas. The miners were beasts of burden, moving the raw ore back from the mine face in baskets hung from their foreheads onto their bent backs. There were children among them—boys eight, ten, twelve—handling the simpler underground jobs, delivering the fuel to the lanterns, guiding the mules. I never got used to it.
Mitya, Smitty, and the others were suspicious of what I was up to. They didn’t like me; they didn’t want me coming in questioning what they were doing. But for all that, they told me what I needed to know, and what had to be done. The mine was operating just as it had when it opened a half century before, and nobody had spent any money on it since. There were no mechanized shovels, no electric drills, no mechanical crushers to break down the ore. The men still worked mainly by hand, with pickaxes and shovels, in the light of kerosene lamps or even candles, and mules pulled the ore cars up the slope to the mine entrance. So the solution was obvious. You mechanized where you could. But Mitya and Smitty didn’t like that. They worried about the men. You introduced this equipment and you put people out of work.
I told them that that wouldn’t happen—I hoped it wouldn’t—we would increase the output of the mine instead. The miners were suspicious as well when they got word of what I was planning to do. So I began holding talks with their union, until I discovered that the union meant nothing, that everything was run by the local town council, the local soviet, that is. And since as concessionaire I was the representative of the government the party would deny me nothing.
At the Miller School of Typing & Shorthand in New York, I had taken the courses Manny had prescribed for me and had discovered that accounting, at least, was not all that uncongenial to me. I liked reducing everything to numbers, manipulating these numbers to produce changes in the real world. All that winter, I pored over my worksheets with fingers so stiff I could hardly move them, calculating the cost of every procedure we undertook—from breaking up the ore, moving it out of the mine, loading it onto the sledges, and moving the sledges to the rail head.
But we were still losing money and so I came up with a scheme to build some incentives into the system. We would no longer pay the men by the day, but by how much they produced. The more tonnage the miners produced, the more money they would make. However, I couldn’t just divide these gains equally. People had always been paid according to their skills—an explosives expert earned more than a driller, a driller more than an ore breaker, an ore breaker more than a mule driver. I didn’t change that; I worked out a formula for apportioning by skills the labor costs per ton produced and allotted the savings proportionately. The scheme gave the workers an incentive not only to increase production, but to monitor the productivity of their coworkers as well. Somebody who was malingering wasn’t monitored by us but by his peers, whose output and compensation depended on the production of the mine. I always had the feeling that this wasn’t a very Marxist arrangement but nobody raised any objection. It wasn’t quite the piecework that provided most of the discipline in Russian industry in the decades ahead but it was as close as I could come to it.
Winter was the busiest time of the year. We stockpiled the ore during the warm months and when snow fell began shipping the ore out by horse-drawn sleigh to the railhead ten miles away. There it was transshipped to the south, to Bakema, where the ore was smelted into metal.
Every couple of weeks I would ride with the sledges to the railroad. I had made friends with the regional superintendent there and I’d generally spend the evening with him eating, drinking, talking about home. He was an American in his late twenties and had come to Russia because of his commitment to the socialist cause. We drank vodka in quantities that left my head spinning and my legs weak, and somehow this compensated me for what was otherwise an intolerable life. I soon discovered why the Russians drank so constantly. Drinking was the only thing that made their lives bearable.
But my new friend didn’t share my cynicism. He had seen everything since he had been there—the famine, the shootings, the prison camps, the slave workers—and it didn’t dampen his faith in the slightest. All these things were necessary to achieve the dream of human justice and equality.
There was no telephone service beyond the Urals, but I could reach Manny through the railroad telegraph system, even talk with him sometimes over the wire. He had started placing orders for the equipment we needed and gradually it began to appear at the railhead at the far end of the valley.
At the end of March, when the snow would actually melt a little in the sunlight, Manny came back from Moscow, looked over what I had done, and found it acceptable. I had got my incentive systems in place, and with Mitya and Smitty on the scene we could safely return to Moscow, order the rest of the equipment we needed, and begin the development of the other Faust enterprises.
You did a good job, Manny told me, a really good job, and I beamed at that. He had one exception. He cut back the salary base, so that we captured for ourselves part of the productivity gains the workers made. But at least they weren’t any worse off than before. With the increased productivity, they were making the same amount as they did previously. This was unusual among Siberian mines, I later discovered, because at most other mines, you didn’t share anything with the workers. You simply cut wages and let the workers make the best of it. It wasn’t much to ask of people when they were building a socialist paradise.
Before he went back to Moscow, Manny decided he had to climb those mountains that towered over our narrow world. The Raptors of the Dawn, they were known as—I forget now what the name was in the local dialect, but it referred to the carrion birds that caught the morning in their talons—hawks, eagles, falcons—and brought daylight to the world.
I could come along if I wanted to, Manny said. That was up to me. He was determined to go. It was the chance of a lifetime. I could stay at home if I liked, he was going anyway. But there was an edge of scorn in his voice. So what could I do? I was never one who got a kick out of looking at the world from on high, but what did I have to lose?
And so we started out one morning a few days before Manny went back to Moscow. At first the ascent was less difficult than it looked, a gently rising slope through pine forests, but then the slopes grew steep, and you climbed breathless and leaden in the thinning air, your legs heavy, your breath churning in your chest. There were just the three of us, Manny and I and one of the mine workers, a squat Asiatic-looking peasant named Isaakii, who had lived in the valley since before there was a mine and who had been climbing those peaks all his life.
We spent the night above the tree line under a shallow overhang that gave us some protection from the wind. It had snowed a little in the night, and the world was adazzle when we awoke. The sun came up on the blue line of the horizon, and we ate some of the sausage we had brought with us, got the blood stirring with a slug of vodka, and began climbing again. By nine o’clock we had reached the snow line. The snow was solid and hard as rock. Isaakii cut steps with his pickax, and with metal grids fixed to our boots, the going was fairly easy. Even so, you thought of nothing but what you were doing—climbing higher, finding the next foothold for your boot, the next nub of rock for your hands.
By eleven, our route abruptly leveled off and we found ourselves crossing a snow field between two rocky walls. The air was cold and clear, the sunlight blinding; sweat froze on our goggles. By noon we were climbing the sharp face of the mountain top, roped together, driving pitons into the rock, and when we were 300 feet from the top, I knew I couldn’t go on. I had no breath left. I was weak and dizzy; I thought I was going to either fall or pass out. Isaakii said simply, Too high, and helped me back down a few hundred feet, then left me in the shadow of a rock, and the two of them went on without me.
I watched Manny and Isaakii disappear from sight and began to feel better. The sun was hot and dazzling, and I was sweating even there in the shade. From my perch in the mountain, I
could see all the rest of the world rolling away to the east—treeless, flat, snow-covered. The town was out of sight beyond the shoulder of the mountain, but you could see the ridge where the trees stopped. Beyond that there was nothing but white, more white sun upon snow, sun upon ice and running water, and the great blue vault of the sky. I watched the fluffy clouds in the distance dragging their shadows across the snow. Down below there were wild birds flying, in flocks, in formation, herons, cranes, like clouds of gnats.
Suddenly somewhere a sound, a screaming cry, and for a moment I was frozen with terror, as if the universe had broken asunder.
How much later I don’t know, Manny and Isaakii returned, half running back down the slope of the mountain, laughing, breathless, and Manny threw himself on the snow, while Isaakii hunkered down to watch.
“I can’t begin to tell you,” Manny said. “You reach the top of that last peak, and suddenly you’re at the top of the world. I stood there, higher than anything anywhere, higher than anybody, and something began surging up in me, triumph, jubilation, I found myself roaring, howling, overwhelmed, something, bursting hidden deep inside me that had never got out before.”
“And what else did you see—Moscow, Petersburg, the Alps?”
“More mountains, snowy saw-toothed peaks, bare rocks and valleys, ridges and glaciers, then where the mountains ended, just short of the horizon, there was this green and pleasant place, so lush, so beautiful you wanted to cry. The sunlight fell on it, the way it does when a thunderstorm is coming, with a shaft of light turning everything golden.”
I was sick with envy. For a moment I could have killed him with my bare hands.
Manny fell silent then, shut his eyes, and lay there a while, regaining his breath. Finally he sat up, and Isaakii said, We go back now. Off to the west was a wall of dark clouds, a faint rumble of thunder echoed in the canyon and there was a bright blaze of lightning.
We catapulted down the mountain like an avalanche, like three stones rolling, with me in the lead, running and sliding, and what had taken us a day and a half to achieve we undid in an afternoon. By nightfall, we were back at the mine, in our warm civilized house, and I was myself again.
iii
In the eight months I had spent in Platinumburg Manny had been establishing Faust Enterprises as a foreign showcase in Moscow. He had given the company a new name, Faust American Corp., and set up quarters on the ground floor of a four-story marble building in Koznetsky Most, a steep narrow commercial street near Petrovska in the heart of Moscow’s shopping district. The Russians had greater hopes for Faust American than we did. They wanted us to take over the whole building, but Manny said no, all he would need was the ground floor, and he worked out a deal to rent it not for a quarter or so of what it would cost to occupy all four floors, but less than a fifth. That was symptomatic somehow of the new Russian economy. Moscow was the only city in the world where you paid less for more and where even the scalpers in Sverdlov Square sold you tickets to the ballet for less than you’d pay at the box office.
Manny turned the Faust American headquarters into a European’s dream of an American corporate office. He cut a paneled waiting room into the corner, filled it with dark leather-upholstered furniture, polished oak tables and chairs, green-shaded brass lamps, a few strategically placed potted palms, and a pretty girl sitting at a switchboard at the reception desk.
Out back there was a large office in which Manny conducted his business, and next to it a smaller one that was to be mine. Both had windows overlooking the office floor so we could keep an eye on the staff—a half-dozen young women and two men sitting at desks, shuffling papers, and doing their best to look busy and efficient. For months, we had twice as much staff as we needed, but they cost us practically nothing, and Manny insisted we had to seem to be the sort of substantial organization that needed many employees. So FAC looked like a real business, and as a foreign corporation it was exotic enough to attract attention.
But if we now had an office to work in and a place for doing business, our living conditions were no better than they had been a year before. The housing shortage was already acute in Moscow, and the best Manny had been able to find was some rooms on the fourth floor of a seedy hotel called the Excelsior, not far from Stoleshnikov Lane. To people who visited us there, the place seemed fairly luxurious. But to us, the filth and squalor were beyond belief.
You climbed those rickety stairs, past families of six and eight crowded into rooms barely large enough for two, and wound up at the Faust quarters on the fourth floor front: three rooms facing the street and affording a view of the river in the spaces between the buildings. Manny took the bedroom, I the living room, and we shared the sitting room in between. The floors were bare and the furniture wobbled when you touched it, so you propped it up with an old book, newspaper, or piece of wood. There was a ramshackle unlighted bathroom off the bedroom and hot water in an unlighted room at the end of the hall. You slept on bedding in unbelievable filth. The management provided a mattress, but no sheets or blankets.
Roaches scattered across the walls when you turned on the lights, and bedbugs disappeared into the linen when you turned back the bedding. The smell of cooking pervaded everything, the halls, the rooms, even your clothes, and hung in your head like smoke when you went outside. But there by the living-room window was a spanking new Swedish telephone—bronze-plated, with earpiece and mouthpiece in a single implement that rested in an elegant cradle.
“You don’t know how lucky we are,” Manny would tell me, “this is one of the best places in Moscow.” I hoped I never had a chance to experience the worst the city could offer.
What Manny didn’t tell me was that such living quarters were a perpetual insult to him. For all his connections, we hadn’t merited the superior accommodations that foreign residents were usually offered at Government House, a dull gray mansion built by some Tsarist sugar tycoon at the far end of the bridge that crossed the river into the Kremlin. By superior accommodations, I don’t mean the kind you would find in New York. I mean luxury accommodations in a style unknown to me and Manny anywhere back home, a style you had to have lived in imperial Russia to begin to imagine—marble staircases and chandeliered ballrooms, brocaded wall coverings and gilded furniture. They called Government House the Sugar King’s palace, and palace it was.
I settled into my new life. The office needed to be reorganized, and despite my meager Russian, I set about doing so. Manny had considerable talent with languages and used to boast that he could learn 100 words of Russian a day, which by that time would have given him a 10,000-word vocabulary, large enough to enable him to get by comfortably in any language anywhere in the world. His grammar was shaky but he could make himself understood, and though most people refused to speak French—it had been the preferred speech of the old aristocracy—many of the people he dealt with would admit to a smattering of English. Before he was through, Manny was speaking Russian like a Muscovite and, though I took a lot longer in the end, I got by.
Almost from the start Manny decided to turn me into Faust American’s currency desk. There was a thriving black market operating in one of the corridors of the big GUM, state-owned department store across Red Square from the Kremlin, and one morning Manny gave me a couple hundred dollars in twenties and told me to go downtown and turn the money into rubles. I knew nothing about currency trading, and I was uneasy because black market trading was illegal, but Manny wasn’t worried. Although the government might not like the black market in theory, in practice it couldn’t do without it, and a foreigner didn’t need to worry about being thrown in jail. If they threw you into jail, Manny said, it would be because they wanted to throw you into jail, not because of anything you’d done, so I shouldn’t worry.
So I went to the GUM store, the money in my pocket like a batch of pornographic pictures. I paid fifty cents to get into the market, and once inside I began offering dollars for whatever they’d bring. I scarcely knew the language for what I was doing
, but the money spoke for itself. In my fractured Russian I made my first currency trades and learned how the game was played. I needn’t have worried about breaking the law. There were guards posted to be sure that the market was safe, and traders from the state bank were there buying and selling with the rest.
It was a shattering experience for me, discovering that money—and everything else I suppose—is worth only what somebody is willing to give you for it, and its value varies from day to day, moment to moment. Before the black market finally closed a few years later, I was a fixture in the place, sitting at a small table by the wall, with piles of twenties, fifties, and hundreds lined up before me, turning dollars into rubles to finance the operation of our business and into gold rubles, when we could get them, to finance almost anything anywhere.
That summer, I spent most of my spare time wandering around Moscow, educating myself in the Cyrillac script from the signs, getting to know the city, the slums, the red-light district, the places of unbelievable luxury. Moscow was still a medieval city, with narrow streets and endless alleys that twisted and looped, without plan or order, through a maze of wooden two-story houses, warehouses, and shops. Running through it all were the city’s two rivers with their embankments and esplanades, leaping bridges, and heart-stopping views. Everything had been dumped into the stew, Western classicism and Russian barbarity, buildings that looked as if they had come out of Florence or Vienna or London, buildings that smacked of Baghdad, Ispahan, or Samarkand, though I had seen none of them. The onion domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral chockablock with the medievalism of the great Kremlin fortress and the classic elegance of the Ministry of Defense. An ancient city. In the last gasp of night you could even hear morning cocks crowing.
Moscow was amazing. Before the revolution it had been a glittering cosmopolitan city, energetic, brash, unashamedly vulgar sometimes, maybe the way New York always has been. It was the intellectual and cultural center of Russia, the real Russia, as opposed to the Western facade it offered the world at St. Petersburg. Moscow’s theatres were the envy of the world, its university one of the great ones in Europe, but the revolution had ended all that—overturned everything—left the city as scarred as the buildings that still bore the pockmarks of revolutionary bullets and mortars.