Everyone longed for wealth, the natural end of all cares. The people hungered after money, earned with a few swift transactions. They built homes with the mortar of their fantasies, houses that said, ‘Look, a rich man lives here’, wondrous constructions in every style of the world — the domes of Samarkand perched atop Ionian pillars, the fountains of Damascus burbling in the courtyards. Every day all those thousands of little hustlers came to the bazaar, waiting for the miracle.
Whenever he walked around the grounds, Pontus Beg would think about his father, about the man’s impotent disdain for commerce. Commerce, that wasn’t labour, he’d felt; that was making money off labour. The froth of trade was richer than the fat of labour — that was the bitter lesson his father had taught him. Commerce had been a forbidden city to old Beg, one he knew only from its periphery — whenever he sold milk and meat to the cooperative, whenever a truck came to pick up the grain. He never found out precisely how the price of milk, meat, and grain was established; all he knew for sure was that others earned more from it than he did.
For Beg, too, who visited the bazaar almost every week, the trading life remained a web of mysteries. How could someone who had bought a shipment of Chinese cuckoo clocks yesterday know that he could sell them for twice the price twenty miles down the road? Why wasn’t the price of cuckoo clocks the same there as it was here? How did they know over there that here, today, there would be a demand for cuckoo clocks?
Those who made a killing on the bazaar disappeared from sight. They lived in big houses behind tall fences, their interests seen to by go-betweens.
In the early days of the bazaar, one such man had become breathtakingly rich, but remained true to the market nonetheless: ataman Chiop. He was the richest of them all. Pontus Beg was going to see him now. Ataman Chiop: 350 pounds dripping wet, and strong as an ox. People said he’d once mounted a sturdy horse and broken its back.
The law had a mobile police station on the grounds, but no arm reached as far as ataman Chiop’s. No shylock changed zlotys for euros and grivnas for rubles without his knowledge; no article changed hands without him earning a few cents on it. In each of the thousands of transactions a day, one cent would disappear into the merchant’s pocket, and one into ataman Chiop’s. Taken together, all those cents added up to a mountain, and atop that mountain sat the ataman. From the summit, he kept an eagle eye on the bazaar with its myriad corridors, where everyone longed to be as rich as him.
‘Well, if it isn’t Pontus!’ the ataman said when Beg entered his office, a café at the edge of the bazaar. ‘Come, Pontus, sit down, take a seat. Vladimir, bring a glass for my guest.’
Beg slid onto the seat across from him.
Rumor had it that a secret tunnel ran from the café to a shed somewhere far from the market, and that a getaway car kept its motor running there, but Beg didn’t believe it. The ataman was too big for tunnels — he would become wedged like a cork in a bottle.
‘Cheers, Pontus!’
They raised their glasses and knocked them back. The ataman, Beg had noticed before, liked to call him by his first name. He had done that right from the outset, as though they were old friends. Beg could no longer ask him to stop; it was too late for that now. He addressed the other man as ‘ataman’, which immediately established the pecking order. The one was his first name; the other, his position in the hierarchy.
They ate pickles and salted meat along with the vodka. If you didn’t know better, you would have seen two friends running through the day’s news.
Beg looked at the ataman’s forehead, and the bristly grey hair above it. No one could have told you the colour of his eyes, tucked away as they were between folds of fat.
‘I stopped a truck yesterday,’ Beg said.
The ataman’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen and said: ‘Just a moment, Pontus.’
Beg laid his hands on the table and waited.
‘Round it off to thirty,’ the ataman said. ‘I’ll accept that.’
Silence.
‘Thirty, tops,’ the ataman said. ‘But start at twenty.’
He snapped the phone shut and put it back in the holster on his belt.
‘What was it you wanted to say to me, Pontus?’
‘Last night I stopped a truck,’ Beg said.
‘Good,’ said the ataman. ‘Why?’
‘And this morning the truck was empty.’
The ataman raised his face to the ceiling, and then lowered it again. He sighed deeply. ‘It’s terrible, the way people steal these days. Thieves everywhere, absolutely everywhere. People have grown too lazy to work for it.’
The best thing to do now was to say nothing, Beg knew. He simply looked at the man across from him and marvelled at how a head could grow like that — a giant pumpkin forgotten at the edge of a field. Pity the poor mother who’d had to give birth to him, though it was hard to imagine this man being born of a woman.
‘What do you want me to do about it, Pontus? I’ll keep an eye out for the thieves, I’ll do that. That goes without saying.’
His phone rang again. He answered, listened for a bit, and then said only: ‘I can’t talk right now. Call me later this afternoon.’ He hung up.
Beg helped himself to a pickle, looked at it for a moment, then stuck it in his mouth.
‘Where were we, Pontus?’ the ataman asked.
While chewing, Beg said: ‘Life’s expensive these days. Everyone wants to be able to give his sweetheart a present every now and then, or go to the seashore for a vacation. When you do that, you want to feel money in your pocket — real money, not plastic. Plastic isn’t money. Tell me, do you think the ataman has a credit card? Don’t make me laugh. The ataman trusts only real money; he’s a wise man. He doesn’t trust the banks — the banks work with people, they have power failures, people looking over your shoulder. One day they might say: “Dear ataman, we don’t like the look of this: the fiscal authorities want us to freeze your account until the investigation is over.” Then you’re stuck.’
The ataman shook his head. ‘Pontus, what kind of person do you think I am? I’m in the import-export business. Times are tough. The business is flat on its arse.’
‘You mind if I take the last pickle?’
‘Go ahead.’
It crunched nicely between his teeth. ‘We all have to make a living,’ Beg said pensively. ‘The ataman is right about that. That’s easier for some of us than it is for others. Some people see a penny from a mile away; others wouldn’t see it if they tripped over it. The ataman sees pennies everywhere. The pennies come to him almost by themselves. He’s a penny-magnet; you can hear him jingle when he walks.’
The ataman slammed the tabletop with the palms of his hands. The shot glasses bounced from the shock. ‘Pontus! Pontus! Stop! Where do you get this from? I tell you, I’ve hit a rough patch. I can’t help you!’
Beg tipped the contents of the second glass into his mouth, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘That truck …’ he said.
‘Was almost empty,’ the ataman said, raising his voice. ‘Packaging material. A couple of pallets of laundry detergent. It wasn’t worth the effort. You want detergent? For the white stuff? For coloureds? It’s all yours.’
‘White goods and electronics,’ Beg said. ‘According to the waybills.’
‘A little bit, almost nothing. Not worth the trouble.’
But Beg knew that in the next few days the bazaar would be flooded with washing machines, blow-dryers, and CD players. Miele, Braun, Sony; brand stuff, no junk. The ataman didn’t want people asking about where it came from, any more than about the firearms and hard drugs you could get here without much trouble.