SIBERIA BOUND
Chasing the American Dream on Russia's Wild Frontier |
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Single Page Format “Well, don’t get your hopes up, boys,” Vitaly Victorovich said. “We can’t pay you money for anything. With all this insane inflation, we can't afford to hold money. As soon as we get any money, we buy something that won't lose its value overnight, like…"
“Gruzaviki,” I said triumphantly, having finally figured out what all those dump trucks were for.
He nodded once, unimpressed. "So, unless you're willing to accept a dump truck as payment for cocoa beans, I’m afraid we don’t have enough money to pay you for any raw materials that you sell us.”
Just like I thought. No deal.
Not flustered a bit, Sasha said, “If we supply you with cocoa beans, you could give us chocolate in return.”
“There is more than just cocoa beans in chocolate," the deputy director cautioned. "We would have to agree ahead of time on how much chocolate you get for the cocoa beans.”
“Details,” Sasha brushed off the warning.
“Okay. You write up a contract and come in on Friday. If everything looks okay, we can give it a try,” the deputy director said with an unenthusiastic smile. One of the phones rang. He grabbed it and began barking commands. While yelling into the receiver, he nodded and pointed to the door. Our time was over. We nodded back and left.
We had two days to prepare a contract. We wasted forty-five of the forty-eight hours because Sasha had insisted that I pay him the bottle of vodka for the bet I lost. And, of course, one bottle had led to another. So, with only a few hours before we were to be back at the factory, we slapped together a dual-column, Russian/English contract on an enormous and anonymous computer that could barely run the pirated Chinese word processor software. Needless to say, it was a short contract. We left blank the exchange ratio of beans to chocolate. That we would negotiate on the spot.
Back at the factory, the deputy director looked over the contract quickly, too quickly to read the terse text. After haggling for a few minutes, we came up with a figure that satisfied all parties and filled in the blank spot with a black pen that came from Sasha's briefcase.
Sasha and I got up to leave. Halfway out the door, Sasha turned and said, “It will take several weeks for the beans to get here. Then it will take a few weeks for us to sell the chocolates. How about you start giving us chocolate before the cocoa beans get here. That way we’ll have some revenue to buy more cocoa beans sooner.”
I wanted to hit Sasha in the arm. It seemed like he was trying to seize failure out of the jaws of success.
“Sounds reasonable,” the deputy director said. “I can give you six tons tomorrow. Will that be enough?”
“That should be okay,” Sasha confirmed in a matter-of-fact voice.
We shook hands with the deputy director and left.
“Six tons,” I said, as we went down the steps. “Sasha, six tons is a lot of chocolate! What are we going to do with it all? And where are we going to get cocoa beans?”
Sasha turned to me with a confident smile. “Two guys meet in Red Square. One asks the other if he wants to buy a train full of butter for a million rubles. The second man says he does. The men shake hands and agree to meet again at the same spot in a week. The first goes off to look for a train full of butter and the second goes to look for a million rubles.”
We both laughed.