Five Rubles

Welcome. If you have arrived here from the Amazon author page, or from the top of the website, you already know the basic facts: I grew up in West Germany during the Cold War, I have sold wheels for most of my working life, and I have written a novel called The Courier about a man who does the same while carrying other things across a border. This blog is where the rest of it goes. Not the novels, which have their own shelf, but the material they were made from: the trips, the counters, the paperwork, and the people on both sides of a line that no longer exists.

I want to start with a shop window in 1980.

FELIX Arithmometer. Cost: Five Rubles in 1980.

I was in the Soviet Union that year because my father was. He went regularly. He sold machine tools and factory equipment to the East, and in those years West Germany was lending the Soviet Union money to develop its industry, on the understanding that the money would come back to West Germany as orders. My father, in the plain terms of his trade, followed the money. He would go where a credit line had been opened and make sure that when the purchase orders were written, some of them were addressed to him.

On this trip he had brought me along, and while he sat in ministries and visited industrial sites, I was given the things a visitor was given: Red Square, the Kremlin, the Metro, the Hermitage, the palaces around Leningrad, all of it very grand and very well organised, with a guide who knew exactly which way I should be facing.

The shop window was not on the itinerary. I found it walking, in a central district, in one of the hours nobody had planned for me. It was an ordinary state shop with an ordinary range of things in the window, and among them were two calculators.

The first was a Sharp. A basic one: add, subtract, multiply, divide, a little green display, the kind of thing that sat in every desk drawer in Frankfurt and cost what a decent lunch cost. In that window it was priced at roughly a month's worth of an average Soviet salary.

The second was mechanical. A pinwheel arithmometer, cast metal, grey enamel, with a row of setting levers and a crank on the side. You set the number on the register, set the operation, and turned the handle, and the machine did the sum with a sound like a very small mill. It did exactly what the Sharp did. It was a Felix, made by the tens of thousands in a Soviet factory that had been turning them out since before the war. It was beautifully built. The tolerances were good, the enamel was good, the action was clean. It cost five rubles (between 25 and 2 Deutschmarks, depending on where you exchanged your cash). The price was stamped into the metal body.

I bought the mechanical one, and I have never regretted it. The metal in it was worth more than the price. The craftsmanship was worth far more than the price. It sat on my desk for years, and I still know the sound it makes.

But I stood in front of that window for a long time before I bought it, because it did not add up. Here was a superpower, a country that had put a man in orbit, and its shop window offered a Japanese pocket calculator at a price no one in that street could pay and a precision instrument of its own manufacture at a price that did not cover the iron. A block away there was a queue for bread. A few blocks the other way there was a shop where I could buy anything I could have bought at home, Levi's, Marlboro, Scotch, the lot, so long as I paid in dollars, which meant that the shop was not, in any sense that mattered, for the people who lived there.

I was young, and I did not understand economics or global politics. I did not need to. The window did the arithmetic for me. Two prices for the same function, one absurdly high and one absurdly low, and neither of them had anything to do with what the thing was worth. Somebody, somewhere, had set those numbers for reasons that were not commercial, and the people on the pavement lived inside the results.

The other thing I want to record about that trip, because it is the thing that has stayed longest, is the people. Everyone we met was warm, curious, and generous to a degree that shamed me. Families with very little put food on the table for strangers and would not hear of anything in return. Whatever the prices in the windows said about the system, they said nothing about the people, and it took me years to stop conflating the two, and I am not sure the West has finished doing so yet.

That is the direction this blog will work along. Not the politics, which others have written better than I can, but the things you could see if you were standing there: what a thing cost, who could pay it, what paper it needed, and what that told you. My father paid attention for a living, across every country in the Eastern Bloc, for the better part of 20 years. As a boy, I was interested in his trips, and later as a man in the trade, on the other side of the counter, I learned about the machanics, and what gets things across borders.

The Courier came out of that interest. Its hero, Wheeler, sells wheels and reads labels. He notices what a thing costs, who is paying and what the receipt says, and he learns that in a divided Europe that habit is not a quirk. It is a trade. The Broker, the second book, is in draft and follows him past the fall of the Wall into the years when the paper mattered more than ever, because the paper was suddenly the only proof of who owned what.

This is the ledger. I will keep it the way Wheeler's practice keeps its book: one entry at a time, dated, with the object in front of me and no more conclusion than the object supports.

Entry one. Moscow, 1980. One Felix arithmometer, cast iron, grey enamel, crank handle, in working order. Five roubles. Against receipt.