When we become poor we will never go to Turkey, but it will not
matter much as we have already been there. When we become poor we will have less clothing,
but even now we cannot buy the most necessary things as we have no time to see to it. When
we become poor we will not have the money to throw any food in the cart at the nearest
supermarket or to dine out in a cafe paying through the nose, but we will have time to go
to the bazaar to choose fresh and cheap groceries. When we become poor we will always have
time: we will be able to watch the sunset, to chat on the phone for a long time, to read
books not on the double in the metro, but sensibly, at home on the couch or even maybe in
the strict silence of a reading room at the library. When we become poor we will not drive
for entire days about the city on business inhaling the exhaust of huge trucks on the left
and on the right, we will be able to grow squash at leisure around our old dacha, to
listen to birds' song, to walk, to bathe in the evenings, breathing the fragrance of
grasses and flowers near the river, learning of its approaching from the enthusiastic
laughter and splashing of children by the sandy bank.
When we become poor we will have time for the friends who are forgotten now, we will
get together with them as previously, we will drink beer, cheap wine or, if worse comes to
worst, tea, we will talk about everything in the world and if the light of subconscious
dreams and hopes does not appear in our eyes again, then the warm light of affection that
we feel for each other will.
When we become poor we will dedicate our lives to our grandchildren, we will be able to
stay with them, to feed them, to read good books aloud to them, to give them everything we
have not given to our children who are captured now by Internet and MTV.
When we become poor our home will be filled again with valueless mementos which like
things our grandmothers accumulated will be precious not because of their cost, but by the
memories of the circumstances in which they came to us and then our home will find its
character lost in the conventionalism of "Euro-renovation".
When we become poor it will be probably not so scary, as it seemed to us at the
beginning of our unending race whose failure will be perhaps more dear to us than victory,
and continuing our struggle we will tell each other fearlessly, but with a smile, as if
dreaming about something desirable, but rather vain: "When we become poor".
