North Borneo

Original story in Russian "Северное Борнео"

When I was little, I loved money a lot. I especially liked collecting shiny nickel coins with denominations of 10, 15, and 20 kopecks, and my collection was constantly growing in various ways. Many adults easily parted with the coins that went out of circulation after the 1961 reform and gave them to me as gifts, but finding something on my own was more interesting. Right next to our house was the suburban train station Petrovsko-Razumovskoye, and my favorite place for walks was the low space under the wooden platform. Unlucky passengers dropped their money there; they rolled and disappeared between the planks. At some point, my mom found out about my heists, and I was forbidden to climb there, I think, for safety reasons, although the income was decent.

I had to switch to other objects: right in front of our house was a coal shed, and from there a path led to the water crane, near which there was a long-burned house that belonged, as my grandmother said, to some rich person. These ashes turned out to be a real Klondike - on my very first expedition, I found two copper coins there: a heavy Russian imperial five-kopeck coin, later useful for playing “knockout” and “coin stacking,” and a British halfpenny coin identified by my dad. I started visiting the charred house regularly, taking with me, like a decent archaeologist, children’s rakes and a shovel, and soon fortune smiled at me - I dug up a 9mm Soviet “Makarov” pistol, rusty but with a preserved ribbed black handle. I cleaned it as best I could and hid it, but of course, I couldn’t resist showing it to my friends and my cousin Zhenya. Unfortunately, there were no bullets.

Around the same time, I became interested in collecting stamps. I inherited two albums from my recently deceased grandfather Misha on my mom’s side: one had Soviet stamps, and the other had foreign ones. At first, I decided to collect “Lenin” and “Space,” but then, at the suggestion of older comrades, I switched to “Colonies.” However, it turned out that if my dad could buy “Lenin” and “Space” for me, then the Colonial stamps could only be obtained through exchange. Luck never left me, and soon, a wonderful opportunity presented itself. My friend Sasha Spiridonov, nicknamed Spirya, who was three years older than me, also known as a numismatist and philatelist, showed me his collection of several albums and, in addition, a large envelope with stamps for exchange. I asked if he had “colonies” and, receiving an affirmative answer, asked for an exchange. Spirya flipped through my two albums and said that he didn’t see anything interesting for himself, but there was an option: he could offer me several colonies in exchange for my “Makarov.” I couldn’t resist, and the next day, I brought the gun, and Spirya gave me five wonderful stamps: Mozambique, Guadeloupe, Senegal, and two from Northern Borneo.

Several years passed. My interest in stamps would flare up and wane, and the collection gradually grew. I later gifted my collections of “Lenin” and “Space” stamps to my school on the occasion of the October Revolution anniversary, and the world colonial system in the 60s almost collapsed – no new stamps were issued, but the old ones increased in value. One day, my parents and I went to visit my uncle Marat, who worked as a lead engineer, I believe, at the Hydropower Plant and often went on business trips to foreign countries, where he built various Aswan dams. His son Vadik showed me his stamps – he collected “Sports” - and told me his dad regularly bought him sets directly from the catalog. I wasn’t familiar with this concept, and Vadik pulled out from the drawer a thick book, in which I saw thousands of stamps with various information, including prices. There were Soviet stamps issued over the years, and I was surprised to find that the Lenin stamps, collected by Grandpa Misha and gifted by me to the school, had quite significant value – some were valued at tens and hundreds of francs. But the real surprise awaited us when we checked my colonies: the blue stamp from Northern Borneo was worth five thousand francs, and the yellow one a whopping thirty thousand. Overjoyed, I ran to another room to tell my dad this news – we would sell these stamps and buy a car like the parents of my school friend Sergey. Uncle Marat was also pleased but said that we needed to check if they were indeed those stamps, in what condition they were, and if they were canceled or not. I promised to bring them to him for inspection and couldn’t wait for the moment when we would go home.

We hadn’t even crossed the threshold when I rushed to my album and brought it to my parents. Dad, apparently also anticipating how to spend thirty-five thousand francs, took out a magnifying glass and carefully examined the stamps from Northern Borneo. At first, he was pleasantly surprised - both stamps turned out to be uncanceled, which theoretically meant the full catalog value, but then came the crash...

-- Look, -- he said, -- do you see the perforations kinda separating from the picture? He held the stamp over the steam from the teapot, and the picture completely peeled off the perforated backing, on which the letters “USSR Post Office, 2 kopecks” emerged. It became clear that Spirya had cut out these stamps from some magazine and pasted them onto the first ones he found to satisfy my passion for colonies and acquire the pistol. I cried, and Dad probably did too.

Since then, countless years have passed, and I have been deceived many times, even for larger sums, but it has never been as heartbreaking.

© Dimus, 2020 (ru), 2025 (en)