Girls, be Good

PROLOGUE

PROLOGUE

Dear Director Sager,

Please accept my resignation from the post of investment manager as final and irrevocable.

Before I get to the point, I would like to remind you of the short chronology of events related to my career in our company over the last several years.

It all started back on 25 December 1989, exactly on Christmas Day, when, at a short meeting at the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Serbia, formerly SFRY, I presented a prototype of a toy which, we all assumed, would be all the rage in the future globalized world. As manager of new investments, I had given up spending the holidays with my family in order to foist a small plush lemur on minor conceited apparatchiks of an anti-democratic, quasi-socialist decaying system. The lemur had flown in from Boston, picked me up here in Frankfurt, and together we went to Belgrade, the Ottoman-European town its residents love to call a city. If you remember, and I am sure you do remember quite well, the mass production of our plush toy was supposed to begin two years after that meeting, at a plant of the first German-Yugoslav toy factory to be built in Pančevo. The Ministry was supposed to issue a certificate stating that the product was useful for the education of children at an early school age, which would exempt us, as investors, from most taxes and put us on the same level with the then state-run companies in terms of privileges and subventions. In order to achieve this, I had to take the secretary general of the Ministry of Education, a certain Dragan Milanović, out to dinner. That dinner, let me remind you, cost us over thirty thousand Deutsche marks. At that time, offering a bribe was considered to be a wise business move. I was even given a pay raise for the success. I am sure you can remember this, as well.

We, self-proclaimed creative economists, planners, entrepreneurs, politicians, we all rely on statistics and research, on experts’ projections. Despite this, we are always necessarily optimistic. It seems to me today, I am certain, that being objective and being an optimist at the same time is actually an oxymoron, something like being a Christian Democrat, since, you’ll concede, we don’t follow research and objective indices, but we want research and objective indices to follow us and our hormonal or suchlike ambition, or a consequence of an early frustration of ours. I am convinced we don’t invest in the world so it becomes better, worthier and richer, so that our investment pays off, but we make the world a better, worthier and richer place because, for some reason unbeknown to us, we wish, we feel a need to invest in it. I know, my director, that it is no use lamenting over spilled beer but, you tell me, who would have thought that everything would be f****d up so spectacularly? Nobody. Neither you nor me.

Unfortunately, two years after the above-mentioned meeting in Belgrade, we witnessed a total collapse. Only the zero series of small big-eyed plush monkeys designed by the American hit-making JoyToy studio came out of the factory plant. Our strategic planners advised us to start with a female version of the lemur, intended for girls, as in focus groups they more easily fell for hit toys with no sign of new technology. This is why the zero series had a pink tail and made-up eyelids with which female lemurs would blink with each movement up or down. Male lemurs would follow only after six months.

Right after our spectacular beginning, the war broke out in Yugoslavia, and as a consequence of the sanctions we abandoned that market, and the lemur zero series, universally but pretentiously ironically called Aya, was on sale throughout Europe and the Mediterranean countries of Africa and the Middle East. Thanks to that i***t of a woman from the marketing department, the advertisement was utterly wrong or good for nothing. The sales were, despite the affordable price, disappointing, to put it mildly. We moved the production to the Czech Republic and there we made a boom with luminous sound-emitting plastic swords and R2-D2 robots.

The factory in which I placed so much trust had been closed down even before it started operating at full capacity. My lemurs were soon forgotten. No-one thought about them and I myself attempted to erase them from my mind. But it didn’t work. The failed investment worth two million marks was my direct fault. I should have seen where the things were heading for. I should have seen what and where I invested. You generously forgave me this loss because of my previous successes and new promising plans, for which I am grateful to you, but I must say I have never forgiven myself. My motivation for work has, together with my lemurs, gone to the dogs.

Dear director, this is why I decided to resign from the post of investment manager and to move to my parents’ village near Eslohe. A relative of mine will find me a convenient small property. I’ll have a garden and a dog. I’ve had enough of everything. Life is too big for me at this time, it goes over my head. I have to carry out a tactful withdrawal for two or three years, while there’s still time, and after that, who knows. I’ll say it once again – this decision is final and irrevocable. I give up my right to severance pay and compensation for the unused vacation days.

The years spent working with you have been nice and difficult, as life itself. Take care.

Kristian Adler,

Former new investment manager

Kristian had written his resignation letter for the third time. He wasn’t happy at all with the arbitrary tone and informal manner of address, but he couldn’t do otherwise. He decided this was it. He put the paper in the envelope and left the envelope on the director’s desk. He went outside. He walked down Kaiserstrasse trying not to think, possibly for the first time in the last few years, about irresistible pink-tailed lemurs. As he was further away from his company’s headquarters with each step, he managed to eliminate them, at moments, from his conscience.

He didn’t even suspect that the zero series – the entire small army of lively tiny pop-eyed plush animals had been taken over by a force larger than any manager, any company and any country, that lemurs were ready, at a signal, to be deployed to any position in any world, to carry out any mission assigned to them.

And their mission was larger than this world.