A STORY ABOUT ONE DOLLAR
This is a true, not a made-up, story. When I set of for America, my father, being completely convinced that America is a fantastically rich country with dollars lying around everywhere, even on the street, strongly advised me, although we laughed at him, to take a large shovel with me so that I could gather as much money as possible. Having arrived in a small, provincial town, I immediately wrote father to advise him not to be too upset that I hadn’t taken a shovel with me because in America, money doesn’t just lie around on the street. Moreover, I was indeed hoping to earn a little money but, because I didn’t have official permission to work in America, no one would hire me; and it looked like I would return a half a year later, to everyone’s chagrin, not with overfilled pockets but with empty ones.
But God took pity on me. In three months, I obtained the right to work and, with fervent energy, I began making up for lost time. I took on two jobs, working all Saturdays and Sundays, often during the night shift, sometimes only sleeping a few hours a day, and the work was very intense and at a pace not unlike that with which I would disassemble and assemble an automatic rifle while in the army. But the earnings in that small town were meager, which discouraged me. I even ended up working on Easter Sunday (Gregorian calendar). And it was on that very day that something happened to me that affected me greatly and, as I can now say, changed me drastically. On that day I received a gift from God.
And this is what happened. When the number of customers in the fast-food restaurant had died down, I took a seat by a wide window to drink a cup of hot coffee with milk. It was warm and quiet in the restaurant, but it was windy outside. The wind whistled loudly by the window, swaying the tops of trees and whipping a path of random trash around the restaurant: newspaper shreds, crumpled plastic food wrappers, dried weeds. “Looks like I’ll have to go out and sweep again,” I thought unhappily and set off to the task. But then, suddenly, I saw that the wind was tossing directly at me, along the asphalt road and across the flowerbeds, a green banknote. It was difficult to make out what kind of bill it was, but I immediately became happy that God had not forgotten about me, even though I was in distant America, and had sent me a gift right on Easter Sunday. It turned out to be only a dollar bill, but this did not disappoint me in the least bit; conversely, it cheered me up. Because a thought instantly popped into my head that God, tired of hearing me pleading for help, sent me a dollar so that I could use it to buy a lottery ticket with which I would win the jackpot, rendering me materially comfortable for the rest of my life. But then this thought made me laugh, because God and money are discordant. More likely, God sent me a sign: He calmed me so that I wouldn’t be so concerned with making money, because money is nothing but trash that gets blown along the street by the wind. And I did calm down, and I don’t even remember what I spent that dollar on—whether I spent it on a bus ride or whether I just added it to a larger sum when buying something at a store. But nonetheless, a devilish voice then said: “You should have bought a lottery ticket with that dollar, because it certainly would have been a winner.” I don’t know, maybe it would have. But that’s not the point—this found dollar taught me not to be overly concerned with money and not to tremble over every hard-earned penny. That is why, upon returning home, my close friend and I had the guts to set off on a risky venture—we put up all of our hard-earned cash to publish the “A Private Collection” anthologies. We could not cover all the printing costs, we borrowed money to publish the book, and our debt was so high that we basically would have had to sell both of our houses in order to just settle it. Today, it seems that our initiative really was insane, but without it a whole series of books published in Lviv under the title “A Private Collection” would not exist. And all of this was influenced by one dollar.
I like to tell my friends this story, and some of them think I am exaggerating a bit about the effect one dollar had on my life. But no, I counter, I am like my father, who likes to say that he only truly feels good when he is being thrifty, when he’s sitting on a bit of money. And I now have an alternative: I can sit on a stack of published books . . .
Translated by Mark Andryczyk