by Yuri Olesha
The windows were wide open. In one, on the third floor, there was a dark blue bud vase with a flower. The little man was drawn to the vase. He stepped off the sidewalk, walked to the middle of the street, and stopped under the window, his face upturned. His bowler had slipped back on his head. He was holding the pillow tight. His knee was blooming feathers.
I observed from around the corner of a building.
He called out to the vase: “Valya!”
Immediately a girl in pink stormed to the window, upsetting the vase.
“Valya,” he said, “I’ve come for you.”
Silence fell. The water from the vase was running onto the ledge.
“Look what I brought … See?” He raised the pillow in front of his belly with both hands. “Recognize it? You used to sleep on it.” He laughed. “Come back to me, Valya. Don’t you want to? I’ll show you Ophelia. Don’t you want to?”
Silence again. The girl was resting facedown on the sill, hanging her tousled head. Next to her the vase was dripping. I remembered that a second after this girl’s appearance, when she had hardly seen the man standing on the street, she’d already dropped her elbows to the sill, where her elbows had given way.
Clouds were crossing the sky and the windows, and their paths crossed in the windows.
“I beg you, Valya, come back. It’s easy: run down the stairs.”
He waited.
Gawkers were stopping.
“Don’t you want to? Well then, goodbye.”
He turned around, righted his bowler, and started down the middle of the street in my direction.
“Wait! Wait, Papa! Papa! Papa!”
He picked up speed and began to run. Past me. I saw he wasn’t young. He was short of breath and pale from running. A silly-looking, tubby little man was running with a pillow pressed to his chest. But there was nothing crazy about it.
The window was empty.
She was running in pursuit. She ran as far as the corner—where the street’s emptiness ended. She hadn’t found him. I was standing by the hedge. The girl turned back. I walked toward her. She thought I might help, that I knew something, so she stopped. A tear swerved down her cheek like a drop on a vase. She was on tiptoe, preparing some passionate question, but I interrupted her, saying, “You whooshed by me like a branch full of leaves and flowers.”
That evening I edit.
“ … So the blood collected during the slaughter can be processed either for food, for sausage making, or for manufacturing clear or black albumen, glue, buttons, paints, fertilizers, and feed for livestock, poultry, and fish. The crude lard from all types of livestock and the fat-containing organic wastes are for the manufacture of edible fats, such as lard, margarine, artificial butter, and for technical lubricants, such as stearin, glycerin, and machine oil. Sheep heads and feet are processed, using electric drills, automatic cleaning machines, gas singers, chopping machines, and scalding vats, into foodstuffs, technical grease, cleaned hair, and bone for all types of goods …”
He’s talking on the telephone. He gets ten or so calls an evening. Who knows whom he might be talking to? But suddenly this reaches me: “It is not cruelty.”
I listen closer.
“It is not cruelty. You’re asking me, and I’m telling you. This is not cruelty. No, no! You can rest perfectly easy. Do you hear me? … Humiliating himself? What? Walking around under windows? … Don’t believe it. He’s up to his little tricks. He walks around under my windows, too. He likes walking around under windows. I know him … What? Huh? Crying? All night? There’s nothing to be crying all night about … Going crazy? Then it’s off to Kanatchikov … Ophelia? What Ophelia? Ah … Phooey. Ophelia—that’s his raving … As you like. But I’m telling you, you’re doing the wrong thing … Yes, yes … What? A pillow? Really?” A chuckle. “I can imagine … What’s that? What’s that? The one you used to sleep on? Imagine … What? What makes that pillow better than the one you’re sleeping on now? Every pillow has a history of its own. In short, abandon all doubt … What? … What’s that?” At this he fell silent and listened for a long time. I was sitting on pins and needles. He burst into noisy laughter. “A branch? What? What kind of branch? Full of flowers? … Leaves and flowers? What? … Probably some alcoholic from his crew.”
8
IMAGINE an ordinary tea sausage: a fat, perfectly round slice cut from the beginning of a hefty chunk. At its blind end, from the wrinkled casing tied in a knot, hangs a string tail. It’s just sausage. Weight, probably a little more than a kilo. A sweating surface, yellowish dots of under-the-casing fat. Where it’s cut, the same fat looks like white specks.
Babichev was holding the sausage in his hand. He was talking. Doors were opening. People were coming in. It was getting crowded. The sausage was resting in Babichev’s raised pink hand like something alive.
“Great, isn’t it?” he inquired, addressing everyone at once. “No, you have to look … Too bad Shapiro’s not here. We have to call Shapiro. Ho ho! Great! You called Shapiro? It’s busy? Call again.”
Then the sausage was on the table. Babichev lovingly arranged its bedding. Moving back and not taking his eye off it, he sat down in his armchair. He found it with his backside, dug his fists into the arms, and burst out laughing. He raised a fist, saw the grease on it, and licked it.
“Kavalerov!” (After the laughing.) “Are you free right now? Go to Shapiro, please. At the warehouse. You know it? Bring it straight to him.” (With his eyes on the sausage.) “Bring it to him. Have him take a look and call me.”
I took the sausage to Shapiro, at the warehouse. And Babichev kept trying to reach Shapiro.
“Yes, yes,” he howled. “Yes! Absolutely superb! Let’s send it to the exhibition. Let’s send it to Milan! Yes, that one! Yes! Yes! Seventy percent veal. A great victory … No, not half a ruble, you’re crazy … Half a ruble! Ho ho! Thirty-five kopeks apiece. Great, isn’t it? A beauty!”
He rode off.
His laughing face—a rosy jug—swayed in the window of the automobile. As he walked he handed the doorman his Tyrolean hat and, his eyes bugging out, ran up the stairs, heavy, noisy, and by fits and starts, like a wild boar. “The sausage!” was heard in many offices. “Yes, that one … I told you … What a story!” While I was still making my way through the sun-filled streets, he was calling Shapiro from each office: “He’s bringing it to you! Solomon, you’ll see! You’ll burst … He still hasn’t brought it? Ho ho, Solomon …”
He wiped his sweaty neck, reaching deep under his collar with his handkerchief, nearly tearing it, frowning, suffering.
I got to Shapiro’s. Everyone saw me carrying the sausage, and everyone made way. A path was magically cleared. Everyone knew this was the messenger with the Babichev sausage. Shapiro, a melancholic old Jew with a nose that looked in profile like the number six, was standing in the warehouse yard under a wooden awning. The door, which was filled with the shifting summer darkness, like all doors that open out from storehouses (you see the same gently chaotic darkness if you shut your eyelids and squeeze), led into a huge shed. The telephone hung outside by the doorpost. Next to it, jutting out from the wall, was a nail with yellow pages of documents of some kind posted on it.
Shapiro took the log of sausage from me, tested it for weight, rolled it in his hand (rolling his head simultaneously), lifted it to his nose, and sniffed. After that, he ducked out from under the awning, put the sausage on a box, and with his penknife carefully cut a small, soft slice. In complete silence the slice was chewed, pressed to his palate, sucked, and slowly swallowed. His hand holding the penknife was held out to the side and it was trembling: the hand’s owner was heeding his sensations.
“Ah,” he sighed after swallowing. “Babichev is a wonder. He’s made the sausage. Listen, it’s true: he’s done it. Thirty-five kopeks for that sausage—you know, it’s really unbelievable.”
The phone rang. Shapiro rose slowly and walked toward the door.
“Yes, Comrade Babichev. I
congratulate you, I could kiss you.”
There, wherever he was, Babichev was shouting so hard that here, a decent distance from the telephone, I could hear his voice, the crackling and popping in the receiver. The receiver, shaken by the powerful vibrations, nearly tore away from Shapiro’s weak fingers. He actually shook his other hand at it, frowning, the way people wave at a naughty boy who is keeping them from hearing.
“What should I do?” I asked. “Will you keep the sausage?”
“He’s asking you to bring it home to him, to the apartment. He’s invited me to come eat it this evening.”
I couldn’t stand it.
“I’m actually supposed to bring it home? Couldn’t he buy another?”
“You can’t buy a sausage like this,” Shapiro intoned. “It’s not for sale yet. It’s a test run from the factory.”
“It’s going to rot.”
Shapiro, folding up his knife and sliding his hands down his side in search of his pocket, smiled faintly, his lids lowered, the way old Jews do. He spoke slowly, pedantically: “I congratulated Comrade Babichev on the sausage, which won’t start stinking in just one day. Otherwise I wouldn’t have congratulated Comrade Babichev. We’re going to eat it up today. Put it in the sun, don’t be afraid. In the hot sun it’ll smell like a rose.”
He vanished into the darkness of the shed, returned with paper, greased paper, and a few seconds later I was holding a masterfully assembled package.
From the very first days of my acquaintance with Babichev, I’d been hearing talk about the famous sausage. Somewhere experiments were being done to manufacture some special sort—nutritious, pure, and cheap. Babichev was constantly inquiring at one place or another; shifting to a concerned note, he would ask questions and give advice; sometimes gloomy, sometimes sweetly excited, he would walk away from the telephone. Finally the species was bred. Out of mysterious incubators crawled a fat, tightly stuffed casing, swinging heavily like an elephant’s trunk.
When Babichev was given a piece of this stuffed gut, he turned bright red and was even embarrassed at first, like a bridegroom who has seen how splendid his young bride is and what an enchanting impression she’s made on their guests. In happy distraction he looked at everyone and immediately put the piece down and pushed it away with a raised-palms expression that seemed to say: “No, no. No need. I’ll just refuse. So I don’t suffer after. Such successes can’t happen in a simple human life. It’s a trick of fate here. Take it away. I’m unworthy.”
Carrying the kilo of marvelous sausage, I roamed in no particular direction.
I was standing on a bridge.
The Palace of Labor was on my left and behind me was the Kremlin. On the river were boats, swimmers. A cutter slipped quickly under my bird’s-eye view. From this height, what I saw, instead of the cutter, looked like a gigantic almond cut lengthwise. The almond hid from view under the bridge. Only then did I recall the cutter’s smokestack and the fact that near the smokestack two people were eating borscht from a kettle. A white puff of smoke, transparent and dissipating, flew in my direction. Before it could reach me, it shifted to other dimensions and touched me only with its final trace, twirling in a barely visible, astral hoop.
I was about to toss the sausage in the river.
A remarkable man, Andrei Babichev, a member of the society of political prisoners, a ruler, considered today a holiday. And all because they showed him a new type of sausage … Did that really make it a holiday? Was this really glory?
He was beaming today. Yes, the mark of glory lay on him. Why wasn’t I infatuated? Why wasn’t I smiling and bowing at the sight of this glory? I was filled with spite. He, the ruler, the Communist, was building a new world. And in this new world, glory was sparked because a new kind of sausage had come from the sausage-maker’s hands. I didn’t understand this glory. What did it mean? Biographies, monuments, history had never told me of glory like this … Did this mean the nature of glory had changed? Everywhere but here, in the world being built? Though I did feel that this new world being built was the chief, triumphant world. I wasn’t blind. I had a head on my shoulders. No need to teach or explain to me. I was literate. It was in this world that I wanted glory! I wanted to beam the way Babichev was beaming today. But a new type of sausage was not going to make me beam.
I dashed through the streets with my bundle. A piece of lousy sausage was directing my movements, my will. I didn’t want that!
A few times I was ready to chuck the bundle over a railing. But no sooner did I imagine the ill-fated piece of sausage freeing itself of its wrapper in flight, falling and disappearing torpedo-like in the waves, than another image instantly made me shudder. I saw Babichev advancing toward me, an ominous, insuperable idol with bugged-out eyes. I was afraid of him. He was crushing me. He didn’t look at me—and he saw right through me. He didn’t look at me. Only from the side could I see his eyes, and when his face was turned in my direction, there was no gaze, just the flashing pince-nez, two round, blind saucers. He wasn’t interested in looking at me, he had neither the time nor the desire, but I realized that he saw right through me.
That evening Solomon Shapiro came, as did two others, and Babichev arranged the refreshments. The old Jew brought a bottle of vodka, and they drank, cutting bites of the famous sausage. I refused to participate in the feast. I watched them from the balcony.
Painting has immortalized many feasts. Commanders, doges, and plain old greasy gluttons have feasted. The eras have been engraved. Feathers wave, fabrics drape, cheeks quiver.
Today’s Tiepolo! Hurry on over! Here are some feasting subjects for you … They’re sitting under a bright, hundred-candle lamp, around a table, talking animatedly. Draw them, today’s Tiepolo, draw Feast at the Economic Planner’s!
I can imagine your canvas in a museum. I can see the visitors standing in front of your picture. They’re perplexed, they don’t know what’s inspired the corpulent giant in the blue suspenders you’ve drawn … On his fork he’s holding a slice of sausage. That slice should have vanished into the speaker’s mouth long ago, but it can’t because the speaker is too carried away with his speech. What is he talking about?
“We don’t know how to make wurst!” the giant in the blue suspenders was saying. “Do you call what we have wurst? Quiet, Solomon. You’re a Jew, you don’t understand anything about wurst—you like that lean Kosher meat … We don’t have wurst. Sclerotic fingers, not wurst. Real wurst should spurt. I’m going to do it, you wait and see, I’m going to make wurst like that.”
9
WE WERE gathered at the airfield.
I say “we”! I was really just tagging along, for no good reason. No one spoke to me, no one took any interest in my impressions. I could have stayed home with a clear conscience.
A new model Soviet airplane was supposed to be making its maiden flight. They’d invited Babichev. The guests went behind the barrier. Babichev was the big cheese even in this select company. No sooner did he enter into conversation with someone than a circle formed around him. Everyone listened with respectful attention. He strutted in his gray suit—grandiose, head and shoulders above everyone else, and what an arch-span of shoulders it was! Black binoculars hung from a strap on his belly. When he listened to someone else talk, he would thrust his hands in his pockets and rock quietly from heel to toe and toe to heel on his widely planted legs. He scratched his nose a lot. After scratching he looked at his fingers, which he pinched together and brought close to his eyes. The listeners, like schoolchildren, involuntarily mimicked his movements and the play of his face. They scratched their noses, too, surprising themselves.
Enraged, I walked away from them. I was sitting in the snack bar drinking beer, caressed by a field breeze. I sipped my beer, watching the breeze fashion graceful ornaments out of my tablecloth’s corners.
Many miracles had converged at the airfield: chamomile was blooming in the field here, very close by, near the barrier, ordinary chamomile blowing yellow pollen; there
, down low, along the line of the horizon, round clouds rolled like puffs of cannon smoke; here, painted in the reddest lead, were wooden arrows pointing in various directions; there, high up, a silk tail—a wind sock—bobbed up and down, first dropping then blowing straight out; and there, across the grass, across the green grass of ancient battles, deer, and romance, crawled the flying machines. I savored this fancy, these delicious contrasts and combinations. The rhythm of the silk tail bobbing up and down disposed me to reflection.
Ever since I was a child, the name Lilienthal—transparent, quivering like insect wings—has sounded marvelous to me … This name, which flew as if stretched over light bamboo planks, was linked in my memory with the dawn of aviation. Otto Lilienthal, an aviator, killed himself. Flying machines stopped looking like birds. Lightweight, transparently yellow wings were replaced by flippers. You could believe they beat the ground during takeoff. In any case, dust rises during takeoff. The flying machine now looks like a heavy fish. How quickly aviation became an industry!
A march thundered. The military commissar had arrived. Quickly, outstripping his companions, the military commissar walked down the lane. He created a wind with the pressure and speed of his pace. Leaves rushed after him. The or- chestra played foppishly. The military commissar strode foppishly, too, quite to the orchestra’s beat.
I rushed toward the fence, toward the gate onto the field. But they stopped me. A soldier said, “You can’t go there,” and put his hand on the gate’s top bar.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He turned around. His eyes were aimed at the interesting events unfolding. The designer and pilot, who was wearing a tan leather jacket, were standing in front, facing the military commissar. A tight strap crossed the military commissar’s thickset back. Both were holding on to their visors. The motion had been sucked out of everything. Only the orchestra was in full swing. Babichev stood there with his belly jut-ting out.