The Geographer's Library

Jon Fasman
Marxist-Leninist seaborne maneuvers at the Soviet Naval Officers’ Training
Institute—but to inquire as to the whereabouts of “those two funny little
coins that Grandfather always swore he would bury in the church before he
allowed the Russians to get their hands on them.” They were doing nobody
any good buried, he reasoned, whereas they would be a source of Batumian
pride if displayed at the Museum of the Socialist Brotherhood of Native
Peoples in Moscow. He would ask nothing for himself, naturally, simply an
additional school in his ancestral home, and if the authorities saw fit to name
the school for its renowned son—well, he would not object. Lavrenty was
older than Boris, and perhaps remembered Grandfather’s stories better; did
he, by any chance, remember where around the church Grandfather had
buried the coins, or would Boris have to send Russian excavators to dismantle
the church brick by brick and comb through the rubble?
Estimated value: Lavrenty dug up the coins with his bare hands in the
middle of the night—the same way he and his grandfather had buried them—
and sewed them into the lining of his suitcase. During his first trip to New
York, he noticed an ad in the back of Novoye Russkoye Slovo. He sold the
coins for enough to pay for a one-way ticket to California, establish a dental
practice in Bakersfield, and change his name to Larry Mack.
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