The gold seemed to swell in the heat, and the holds were close to bursting. Indeed, one of the cases had broken, letting loose a spill of ducats. For a long time Ivan squatted by the case and passed the gold from one hand to another, trying to feel the weight of its inner substance.
He had once looked upon the gold with pride, eager to show it to his father and brothers, but that pride had now dimmed to a memory. Upon inspection (he was constantly inspecting it, rummaging through the holds, ordering cases brought into the sunlight, tapping a spoon against the ingots), the gold appeared to have taken on a strange, overbright luster, even an odor that was something like licorice. Yet it was steadfastly inert, stupid in its inertness.
Where resided the virtue in gold? It had little practical use, except for fashioning jewelry, which itself had no intrinsic value but only an arbitrary, assigned value based on ephemeral fashion. The metal had a symbolic use, of course, in trade, in which it took on a value for which men would labor, cheat, debase themselves, and even make war. But this value was also arbitrary, established by unspoken consensus or through some kind of mass hallucination.
Gold was minted into money. In trade men confused money with the items for which it paid, as if the former could somehow absorb the qualities of the latter, which could then be transported in their purses. Money was a khitraya mekhanika, a deceitful mechanism, invented by foreigners and Jews.
Wickedness roamed the world. Weathervanes perched atop church crosses, confounding the most profoundly spiritual with the most ludicrously prosaic. Clocks imprisoned time in symbolic walls of hours and minutes. Instrumental music mocked the godly harmonics of the human voice. Representational art depicted Our Savior with full-blooded lips, heaving breasts and sinewy muscles, a carnal being. By making Jesus human, the artists denied His divinity; by denying His divinity, they denied His actuality, making Him yet another symbol with an assigned value.
Ivan had gone through life believing that a great secret, composed of a vast number of small secrets, had been kept from him and that only he, of all the world’s men, was the victim of this conspiracy. The secret had to do with what was real and what was not. For example, was the conventional sequence of the cardinal numbers—one, two, three, four, etc.—their natural order, or a humanly contrived one?
He saw that men earned their livelihoods through the manipulation of intangibles, mostly figures in ledgers and words in books. They talked to each other in a kind of code, about indentures, stock prices, and warrants. They performed transactions after which they announced themselves satisfied and walked away from the table with nothing added to their pockets. The conspirators knew that there was a falseness at the bottom of their dealings, but they would not concede it to Ivan.
Ivan thought he knew what the real world was: it was a desyatina of land, a pud of wheat, an arshin of fabric. You could break your teeth on the real world, but now, out on a sea as still as glass, he had come to wonder if the land, the wheat, and the fabric were symbols themselves, a chimerical overlay for another world that was even more real.
Ivan paced along the deck of the ship, where the sailors drank vodka and played chess. The men were using the various gold coins that had scattered from the storerooms not for stakes, but as game pieces. They refused to recognize the gold’s assigned worth. For them the coins had been transformed into the ranks of chivalry, another arbitrary designation. Ivan recalled that in his early-morning departure from the city, the king had stood at the edge of the pier and stretched his arm in farewell. As he had done so, a wan smile had become visible, a watermark just beneath the surface of his face.
Ivan now ordered his men to reverse course, back to the king’s city. At once the wind picked up and the sails billowed and grew taut.
They soon reached their destination. Ivan docked his ship in a hidden lagoon and entered the city in disguise. But was this the same city from which he had departed? Its air was suffused with a strange, mellow glow. In his absence, the city’s streets had been paved, the homes that lined the streets had been enlarged and more elaborately ornamented, and the dress of the city’s inhabitants had become refined.
He stopped at an inn and ordered an expensive meal in its gay and bright dining room. The food arrived well salted, perfectly prepared. Ivan sourly noted that the cooks of this kingdom not only used his good Russian salt, but they used it in ways unknown to the cooks of his own land. At every table there were men and women eating and drinking their fill.
Ivan questioned the innkeeper.
“Has your dining hall always been so successful?”
“No sir, it has been so only since we introduced the rare spice salt to our dishes. Despite our high prices, every night we turn away patrons for lack of tables.”
“Are you the only innkeeper in the city?”
“No,” the innkeeper acknowledged. “The others are also using salt in their food.”
“But certainly if you prosper, it must be at their expense.”
“No, they too have few empty places in their halls.”
“How is that possible? How can there be an increased number of patrons dining out at increased cost? How do they afford their meals?”
The innkeeper shrugged. “When we first introduced salt into our cuisine, it was an immediate success, but we all had to work harder to afford it. The increased competition closed some unprofitable businesses; people were forced to change their way of working and doing business. In doing so we have become more prosperous. I’ve bought myself a small coach, which I had never before dreamed of possessing. And there at the next table is the coachmaker.”
“If you prosper and he prospers, then who suffers?”
The innkeeper smiled ruefully. “Not everyone can afford to eat salt, sir. There is poverty, more individual cases of poverty than we are accustomed to. But it is quite evident that our land, taken in its entirety, is much wealthier than before.”
“Has this kingdom made war on another and looted its riches?”
“No, we are at peace.”
“But,” Ivan asked, “if the wealth has not come from the purses of the poor, nor from the coffers of the vanquished, from where has it come? Perhaps you have cheated some innocent traveler?”
“We have made it ourselves, sir.”
“That is not possible,” Ivan replied. “Wealth is a fixed thing, declared to be equal to such-and-such amount of gold. One man can win, rob, or earn another’s gold, but the sum of the gold held by the two men stays constant. That is simple physics.”
Ivan paid his bill and left, sure of his argument and of the fact that he had been grievously swindled.
Ivan went to his men and gave them great quantities of beer and wine. “The king has turned my salt to gold, and I shall return the favor. Drink up, my comrades.”
That night while the kingdom slept, Ivan and his men left their ship in its moorings and silently stole through the city, their bladders full. They broke into all the places where salt was stored. They either urinated on the salt or in some other ways befouled it. On Ivan’s instructions, only a single thimble of the good Russian salt was saved. It was spirited away under his cloak.
In the morning, an alarm was raised and the pirates found. A terrible battle ensued in which the city was destroyed and Ivan’s ship was sunk, plunging his gold into the murky depths of the lagoon. The king’s army cornered Ivan and his men on a bluff overlooking the water and beyond that the ruined, smoking streets of the city, whose people had suddenly been impoverished.