Life is a gamble

               Before coming to Australia I heard the opinion that people sleep while walking over there.
               And it’s true. There are such satiation and peace that you can hardly keep your eyes open.
               But not all people like this.
               You can meet some people who are so restless that any sleep remedy is not working for them. They are the sort of people which quiet and smooth Australian life, being suddenly reared, may roll by tight turns so that it would take your breath away.
               I am one of them.
               I am a gambler.
               People, who don’t suffer from this affliction, have got the God’s mercy.         
               And he who has tried on the armour of Fortuna’s knight himself can only sympathize with me. For the sake of propriety. And then he gives me a wink.
               People think that gamblers would play only for money. It’s nonsense. If it were like this all casinos would collapse.
               The gamblers play for these wonderful moments when the Fortune is looking seductively in your eyes – all you need is reach your arms out for her.
               
               “Some end up with a fighter, some with a hard drinker, but the card gambler became my lot,” used to say my distressed wife, “and who knows which is worse”.
               She took me to see all kinds of psychologists, but they could only shrug their shoulders. They announced that it was a hereditary disorder and they could nothing with that.
               They were right about it being hereditary. My father had been mad on cock-fighting and even now my granddad, a famous punter, is remembered by old residents of the restaurant “Bega” on the Moscow horse track.
               
               My wife wasn’t satisfied and dragged me along to a fortune-teller, repeating: “She will save you, a crazy man, from the evil eye.”
               If the fortune-teller, the fortune-teller. I found myself in a dark room, filled with all sorts of strange things. A candle was smoking on the table. There were a mirror and a saucer of water there.
               Suddenly from out of the darkness appeared the old woman with a black cat sitting on her shoulder. She began to mumble something and blew on the water.
               My own waters shifted uneasily, but then she placed on the table… a pack of cards.
               I didn’t know whose eye she was going to save me from, but my lit up.
               “Would you like to deal a few hands, granny?” I proposed rousing myself.
               She raked up the cards and turned me out. The old witch felt that this meant trouble for her. I would tell her fortune so, that she could say “bye-bye” to her evil things with the cat together.
               “Only a grave will straighten a hunchback”.

               And so my toes would have turned up at the card-table if we had not moved to Australia.
               But it all didn’t run smoothly straight away. While walking around Melbourne I noticed signs up depicting the old man in a hat and cards placed fan-shapely around him. My heart began to throb. However I’d already promised myself that I’d begin a new life.
               I restrained myself from temptation for long time.
               But the old man in the hat, who, by the way, looked a lot like my granddad, winked at me from all corners.
               One beautiful day I didn’t notice how my feet brought me to stop under one of these signs. “I’ll just look and go away”, I thought, although I well knew what lay behind this treacherous idea.
               I came in and looked. I saw that it wasn’t for me. Some kind of bullshit.
               What is going in card play? There would be three of us there: I, a rival and The Fortune.
               The Fortune is the Fortune, but you have to think yourself. You have to count your moves and foresee your opponent’s plans. You should feel his thoughts.
               And you may meet such aces who can read your mind. Not just mind they would stick into your inside. They can hypnotize your so, that you would yourself completely. You would do what they want from you.  Against you will. The old woman with the cat would be too far from them.
               And mathematics and psychology are there. It is a combinaton of science and art, briefly speaking, and a test of intelligence and character.
               And what’s here? The players set numbed staring at screens and pulling handles of machines like robots. When one of them had sometimes a rattle of dropping coins, the rest of the gambler was getting crazy. They began pulling the handles with such desperation as if their destiny depended on that.    
               “They make a fool of us, gamblers”, I felt sorry for my Australian colleagues. “It’s time to pull your claws out from here”.
               But something prevented me from go away. The more I gazed at the screen, the more clearly it seemed that there was the hidden meaning in those flushing figures. I felt with my inside that I could reveal it.

               And so I began...
               Every night I dived into the pokies. For hours I pulled handles and wrote down the fall of the figures. During sleepless nights I tried to calculate all the possible combinations.
               I managed to get the cunning probability when the machines never lost, but kept feeling the passion of the players at the same time.
               It seemed I even worked out a sure-fire winning formula, but experimental tests of it required a lot of money. I had already spent the two or three my government benefits for this research. It was hopeless business; even a donkey was able to see that. But how to stop?
               “The next game will be yours”, the old man with little horns under the hat was whispering to me.
               I lost weight. And it happened in Australia!
               My eyes became like those of the rabbit which had a contact with a boa. My night dreams were not dreams but a carousel flushing figures on the screen.
               “Here we go again,” cried my wife and she proceeded to curse me, the Australian Tabarets, and her own unhappy fate.
               And children! Most difficult for me were the reproachful looks of them. They really got the sort of dad as I had got one in before.

               One day my distant relative, who had been living in Australia for a long time, came to visit us. My wife told him about our trouble straight away.
               “Like cures like”, he uttered and offered me to try the business which he had been running for many years.
               He was a gold-prospector. His captivating stories about the life-style and unbelievable godsends of hunters of fortune intrigued me. He produced a nugget he had found himself.
               This nugget was shaped like a spade from a deck of cards and it ran through my heart. I became feverish.
               My relative advised me to try my luck in Ballarat*. My wife got into argument, saying “A horse-radish is not sweater than black radish” (English equivalent – “Choose the lesser of two evils” or “It’s six of one to half a dozen of the other”).    
               Finally she gave her blessing to me saying, “Go to Ballarat, go to the Antarctic, or go to hell, as long as it’s far away from these bloody pokies”.
               We borrowed money. We had to beg for long time. There and here, from one and from another. If even people gave money they did it not for me, but because they felt sorry for my wife. On a honest word, on interest or on security.

               I bought a plot. And I started again from the beginning...
               I was burrowing like a rabbit and crawling out of the hole only by late nights. I would jump up with very early birds singing, and go into the hole. The handle of my spade became polished up to amber-colour shine, but my palms – it was better not to see them. Reddish clay and sand got into my skin.
               Robinson Crusoe would have looked like a fashionable dandy next to me. A cave man would have recognized me as his own brother.
               Soon my plot resembled a battlefield. Galleries were like trenches, sand-pits were like mine-craters, There were parapets, gun-emplacements...
               It was fighting, indeed.
               Fighting for meters of drifting, for tones of rocks, for milligrams of metal and, the God knows for what else.
               And who is the opponent? The bewitching Fortuna? The Devil with horns? I myself? It doesn’t matter, by the way. All is equal. The choice has been done. I have done it.
               I already needed Ariadne's thread, because I begun to loose myself in the labyrinth of underground ways. If I had kept digging in a southerly direction I would probably have tunneled through to Tasmania, and if I’d gone north I would have dug until I reached the fantastic treasures of Indian Maharajah. But there was nothing valuable for me in Tasmania and I was hoping to find some golden treasure on my own plot of land.
               At first the magic twinkling of nuggets appeared to me in each piece of rock. I could feel Lady Luck of the Underground’s breath upon my face. But she turned out as unattainable a tease as her sister from the surface.
               Several months passed but I only gathered as much gold dust in my purse as my neighbors panned in weeks.
               My plot was what’s known in cards as a closed miser. But unlike in cards, it promised no reward. It seemed that there was as much chance of finding a nugget here as a needle in a haystack.
               My hunger began to dry up.

               I phoned my wife and said that this plot seemed not to be the right place and that I was sick of this Sizif’s slog. As the mention of Sizif my wife let out a sympathetic sigh. I made bold to ask how she would be about… if I made off... 
               My wife snubbed me and blurted out that instead my useless mumbling it would be better if I thought how I was going to return the borrowed money. Then she started crying as usual, and through her sobbing I caught that a big casino was being built in Melbourne and I could completely perish there.
               Another couple of months passed unsuccessfully. A gloomy foreboding would settle in my heart like the dirt in the bottom of my pan. My entire past appeared a senseless chase for phantoms.
               This Sizif, punished for past sins, firmly stuck in my mind. I even envied him. He had no other worries apart from to push his stone. But I, apart from the other problems, had the feeling guilty about my family, which was a heavier stone than Sizif’s one.

               I was completely down and out and dropped into a local pub first for the very long time. I came down with money and bought a bottle of vodka. I requested some music; something for my heart. To peg is better with music.
               Some stranger sat next to me. He had a shabby appearance, and his inflamed stare was directed restlessly on the floor as if he was searching something invisible for others. I recognised a kindred spirit.
               Glass after glass, word after word me shared. While we were still sober we complained of the vicissitudes of our fate, but once we were pissed we fell to boasting.
               My new friend showed me a weighty nugget hanging around his neck. He was said he was being offered a lot of money for it, but he wouldn’t sell it, since this nugget was his talisman.
               “Gold sticks to gold”, he announced.
               The gambler awoke in me. Could I leave my rival’s trump move without response?!
               I casually threw my bag with all my gold onto the table and said this was today’s find. “And it’s at least as much,” I added, “every glorious day.”
               I was drunk but not much. I was still able to think. Anyway, whilst parting I asked my friend to keep a still tongue behind his teeth.

               The next day while I was drearily pottering about on my plot, a luxury ‘Mustang’ pulled up and out stepped two gentlemen dressed to the nines. One even had on a white bow-tie.
               They told me they were buying up land around here and wanted mine. I muttered that they had got a wrong address. However they started playing some strange game and unexpectedly offered a price which was much more than I had paid.
               In another time a move like this could have roused me. But today I wasn’t a player. I gave them a brief and clear description of my plot and added a couple the most popular English expressions about it. I spit out with relish and turned back hinting that the play would not take place.
               They didn’t go away. They looked at me with a very familiar expression which gamblers use on their opponents who might be bluffing. After a quite long pause the man with the white bow-tie announced the new price. It was improperly high.
               The air started smelling with smoke of battle. The wave went through my body. I came to the fighting point. All I needed was the command from above…
               I called my wife and told her about these wackers’ offer. 
               The long and distressing silence fell. Then she with tragic voice said the Melbourne’s casino was already up and running and that I would blow any money there anyway. After another pause she decisively added that if I were to sell the plot I’d risk losing my family.
               I didn’t feel like risking my family. Without going into details, I told these scroungers through that my place was only in the bush.
               They made understanding faces and nodded their heads in sympathy. Then they asked my permission to look over the plot. With a gesture of indifference I consented.
               From their car they dragged an ultramodern metal detector, in comparison with which my cheap model looked like a spyglass that Captain Cook might have used. If this had been half a year ago, I wouldn’t have been able to tear myself away from their machine. But by now I was bored stupid by all this business and didn’t from the spot.
               From a distance I observed how, without a care for their smart clothes, they crawled around the plot with the detector, carefully rubbed the earth in their fingers, examined it and even sniffed it for some reason. The only left was to taste it.
               Finally they consulted each other with high words, and the one who was wearing the now brown bow-tie came up to me and said with solemn tones that since I was such a lover of country idylls, he would offer to exchange my plot for a farm in Shepparton.
               Since a child, I’d admired the moves of the schemer Ostap Bender (a character of skillful and dubious repute from “The Twelve Chairs”, a satirical novel about life in post-revolutionary Russia) and I, like he, can cope spectacularly with any situation.
               However the unpredictable moves of my rivals had thrown me off completely.
               Once more I telephoned my wife. This time she at once announced that there was no need to even think it over, since this was the best, and perhaps only, way out of our situation.
               Then she made me happy saying that her distant ancients were landlords and she’d be happy to look after goat kids in the lap of nature. Our children, as it turned out, became already independent and didn’t need parents’ support.

               And so I became the owner of a farm.
               To be honest, as a city inhabitant by birth I didn’t know which end of a cow was which, or what the difference was between wheat and oats.
               But it was no important. Much important was that I came to life again...
               Although farming is far being a card game for fools, and although its subtleties cost me a lot of sweat, to our surprise our business quickly took off. We settled accounts with our debts for three years and we have got something on our bank account.
               My wife would say that if I’d directed my nous and energy properly from the start, we would have millionaires long ago.
               She hit the nail on the head. This has become my new dream. To reach a million has become my new goal.
               I heard there was a column in the Melbourne Casino filled with a million one-dollar coins. I put up a similar column on my farm and the bottom of my column has already covered with coins.
               By the way, the new owners uncovered a rich gold deposit on my old site. It turns out I had been just two picks away. But I have no regrets it. The aboveground Fortune had at last smiled at me.
               Life is a big gamble, and the gain and the loose like twin-brothers would go with arms round each other.
               My daughter studies psychology at University. She dreams of finding a method of treatment for gambling addicts. I have expressed my doubts in this possibility, but she stand firmly by her dream. It’s our vein! Inherited!
               My son also takes after me. He has always raved about the sky. He intends to become a pilot. I hope that sky Fortune will favour him.
               When we visit them in Melbourne, I try to avoid looking in the direction of the Casino.
               At the thought of it, some kind of wave rises inside me which I manage to restrain only with difficulty. The fact is, I still don’t have the money necessary to test my method.
               But it’s not night time yet... The challenge still awaits.
               And this will be a struggle to the death.
               It’s either Mr. Packer or me!
               Either the Casino or my farm!
               There’s no other choice.