with doughnuts and in the evening, dinner if required. Servants did all the cleaning, and in the collidor there was a washbasin and a privy – not quite like Death’s privy, of course, but it was clean, you could sit and read a newspaper in it. A right royal mansion, in other words. True, it cost a fair bit, thirty-five roubles a month. By Khitrovka standards that was crazy money –you could stay there for five kopecks a night. But if you had almost two thousand roubles in your pocket, it didn’t seem so bad.
Senka settled in, admired his new things, laid them out, hung them up, sat down by the window and looked out on the square. He had to do some thinking about his new life in this world.
It’s a well-known fact that every man turns his nose up at his own lot, and envies other people’s. Take Senka. He’d dreamt of riches all his life, though he knew in his heart he’d never have any. But the Lord above sees all things, He hears every prayer. Whether He’ll grant them all is a different matter altogether. The Almighty has His own reasons, beyond the ken of mortal men. One of the lame cripples who wander the earth once said: The most grievous test the Lord can set is to grant you all your wishes. There you go, dreamer, choke on that. Weren’t you coveting too much? And what are you going to covet now?
And that was how it happened with Senka. God was asking him: ‘Did you really want earthly treasures? Well, here’s some treasure for you – now what?’
Life without money is rotten – no two ways about it – but even with riches, it’s not all as sweet as honey.
So Senka had stuffed his paunch – he’d gobbled down eight pastries in the confectioner’s shop, and got belly cramps for his trouble. He’d dressed himself up and got beautiful lodgings, but what came next? What will you wish for now, Semyon Trofimovich?
But Senka’s state of philosophical melancholy (brought on by those pastries) didn’t last very long, because his dreams took shape of their own accord. He had two: one for earth and one for heaven.
The earthly dream was about turning riches into even greater riches. They named you Speedy, now show some nous, use your noggin.
Any fool could see that if you dragged all the silver sticks in that vault out into the open, no one would buy them except by weight. Where would you find enough numismatists to take them all, one stick each?
All right, let’s figure out how much that is, by weight. How many rods are there. . . God only knows. Five hundred at least. Five pounds of silver in each one, right? That makes . . . two and a half thousand pounds, right? Ashot Ashotovich said that a zolotnik of silver is twenty-four kopecks these days. One pound is ninety-six zolotniks . . . Multiply two and a half thousand by ninety-six zolotniks by twenty-four kopecks – that makes . . .
He groaned and started totting up figures on a piece of paper, like they’d taught him to do at commercial college. But they hadn’t had very long to teach him, and he’d forgotten a few things, he was rusty – so the sum didn’t work out.
He tried a different way, simpler. Samshitov said there was 155 roubles’ worth of pure silver in a bar. For five hundred bars that made . . . fifty thousand, right? Or was it five hundred thousand?
Hang on a minute, Senka thought. Ashot Ashotovich gave me four hundred for a rod, and I don’t suppose he was doing himself down. He might let those numismatists of his have them for a thousand each.
If the black sticks were worth that much, he’d be better off trading them himself, without Samshitov. Of course, it wasn’t an easy business. There were lots of things he’d have to figure out to get started. And the first thing of all was the real price. After that he could service all the Moscow buyers. Then the ones in Peter. And then, maybe, he could find a way to the foreign ones. He’d have to hang on to the rods and flog them one at a time, to the suckers willing to pay more than their weight in silver. Then later, when those fools had had their fill, he could sell the rest of the sticks for melting down.
Thinking like