I was almost nineteen and life was beautiful. The world was crumbling around me, but I didn’t mind. On the contrary: I felt alive—living, as the expression goes, intensely. I had begun writing poems and more poems. They were not worth much, and I no longer like them; I prefer those I wrote later, here in prison. But what was important was to keep myself busy, to express myself, to say what I thought about people, what I felt for them—not for everyone, of course, not for the industrial tycoons with their pompous, sinister manners, but for their pitiful slaves, the wretches like myself—and there were a lot of us. Life was funny. Though housewives no longer went marketing with suitcases stuffed with banknotes, and shopkeepers no longer went home pushing wheelbarrows filled with money, the poor were still poor and hungry. I gave, I kept giving as much as I had, sometimes less, mostly more. The money I had brought from Liyanov still represented a veritable fortune. Compared with my new friends I was a Rothschild.
