by Ilya Ilf
Zosya began setting the table for dinner. She moved between a china cabinet with mirrored portholes and the table, unloading the dishes. She brought a glazed soup bowl with broken handles; plates, some decorated with little flowers and some not; forks, yellowed with age; and even a punch bowl, although punch wasn’t on the menu.
On the whole, the Sinitskys were in dire straits. The riddles and puzzles brought home more worries than money. The homemade dinners that the old puzzle-maker had been offering to his acquaintances were their chief source of income. But that was in trouble, too. Subvysotsky and Bomze were away on vacation. Stoolian married a Greek woman and started eating at home. Pobirukhin was purged from his organization under Category Two. He was so upset that he lost his appetite and stopped coming to dinner. He just wandered around the city, accosting his acquaintances and repeating the same sarcasm-laden question:
“Have you heard the news? I got purged under Category Two.” Some of his acquaintances commiserated with him: “Look what they did, those bandits Marx and Engels!” Others wouldn’t say anything; they’d fix a fiery eye on Pobirukhin and race past him, rattling their briefcases. In the end, there was only one diner left, and even he hadn’t paid for the whole week, blaming it on delayed wages.
Zosya shrugged her shoulders unhappily and went to the kitchen. When she came back, the only remaining diner was already sitting at the table. It was Alexander Ivanovich Koreiko.
Outside the office, Alexander Ivanovich did not act timid or servile. Nevertheless, a vigilant expression never left his face even for a minute. At the moment he was carefully studying Sinitsky’s new puzzle. Its mysterious drawings included a sack spilling letter Ts, a fir tree with the sun rising behind it, and a sparrow sitting on a line from a musical score. It all ended in an upside-down comma.
“This one won’t be easy to solve,” said Sinitsky, pacing slowly behind the diner’s back. “You’re going to have to sweat over it!”
“Right, right,” replied Koreiko with a smirk. “I’m just not sure about this goose. What’s with the goose? Ah! Got it! ‘Through struggle you will attain your rights’?”
“That’s correct,” drawled the old man, disappointed. “How did you solve it so quickly? You must be gifted. No wonder you’re Bookkeeper First Class.”
“Second Class,” corrected Koreiko. “And what’s this puzzle for? For publication?”
“Yes, for publication.”
“That’s too bad,” said Koreiko, glancing with curiosity at the borscht with gold medals of fat floating in it. There was something meritorious about this borscht, something of a decorated veteran. “‘Through struggle you will attain your rights’ is the motto of the Socialist Revolutionaries, not the Bolsheviks. It’s no good for publication.”
“Oh my God!” moaned the old man. “Merciful Mother of God! I messed up again! You hear, Zosya sweetheart? I messed up. What am I going to do now?”
They tried to calm the old man down. After eating dinner half-heartedly, he rose quickly, collected the week’s puzzles, put on a huge straw hat, and said:
“Well, Zosya dear, I’m off to The Youth Courier. I’m a bit concerned about the algebraic puzzle, but I’m sure they’ll give me some money.”
The editors at the Young Communist League magazine The Youth Courier often rejected the old man’s material, and admonished him for his backwardness, but they treated him kindly—the magazine was the only source of the tiny stream of money that came his way. Sinitsky was bringing in the puzzle that began with “My first one is a little word,” two collective-farm anagrams, and an algebraic puzzle which, through some very complex division and multiplication, proved the superiority of the Soviet system over all other systems.
After the puzzle-maker left, Alexander Ivanovich began to examine Zosya gloomily. He had started eating at the Sinitskys’ because their dinners were good and inexpensive. Besides, his first and foremost rule was to always remember that he was just a lowly clerk. He liked to talk about how hard it was to live in a big city on a meager salary. After a while, however, the price and the taste of the food lost its abstract, camouflaging value for him. If he had to—and if he could do it openly—he would gladly pay not 60 kopecks for dinner, but three or even five thousand rubles.
Alexander Ivanovich—this hermit who deliberately tormented himself with financial chains, who forbade himself to touch anything that cost more than fifty kopecks, and who at the same time was irked that he couldn’t openly spend a hundred rubles for fear of losing his millions—fell in love with the abandon of a strong, austere man who had been embittered by an endless wait.
Today he finally decided to open his heart to Zosya and to offer her his hand, with its small, mean, ferret-like pulse, and his heart, which was bound by enchanted hoops.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s the way things are, Zosya Victorovna.”
Having made this pronouncement, Citizen Koreiko grabbed an ashtray—it had the pre-revolutionary motto “Husband, don’t vex your wife” printed on the side—and began studying it very carefully.
One needs to point out here that there isn’t a young woman in the whole world who doesn’t sense an upcoming declaration of love at least a week in advance. That’s why Zosya Victorovna sighed uneasily as she lingered in front of the mirror. She had that sporty look that every pretty young woman had acquired in recent years, and after reaffirming her beauty in the mirror, she sat down in front of Alexander Ivanovich and prepared to hear him out. But Alexander Ivanovich said nothing. He knew only two roles: clerk and secret millionaire. He hadn’t known anything else.
“Have you heard the news?” asked Zosya. “Pobirukhin was purged.”
“It started at our place, too,” said Koreiko, “heads will roll. Lapidus Jr., for example. Come to think of it, Lapidus Sr. isn’t squeaky clean either . . .”
At this point, Koreiko realized that he was playing the role of a poor clerk, and he fell back into his leaden thoughtfulness.
“Yes,” he said, “one lives like this, alone, without any bliss.”
“Without any what?” Zosya perked up.
“Without a woman’s affection,” said Koreiko tensely.
Seeing that Zosya wasn’t offering any help, he elaborated.
He’s quite old. Well, not exactly old, but not young. Well, not exactly not young, but time passes, you know, the years go by. Time flies, in other words. And this passage of time makes him think of various things. Of marriage, for example. Let nobody think that he is something like, you know . . . He’s actually not bad. A totally harmless man. One should feel for him. He even thinks that one might be able to love him. He’s not a show-off, like some, and he means what he says. So why shouldn’t a certain young lady marry him?
Having expressed his feelings in such a timid way, Alexander Ivanovich gave Zosya an angry look.
“So they really might purge Lapidus Jr.?” asked the puzzle-maker’s granddaughter.
And without waiting for an answer, she delved into the subject at hand.
She understands everything perfectly well. Time really does fly. She was nineteen just recently, and now she’s already twenty. And in a year, she’ll be twenty-one. She never thought that Alexander Ivanovich was something like, you know . . . On the contrary, she’s always been convinced that he is a good man. Better than many. And, of course, he deserves a lot. But right now she is seeking something, she doesn’t yet know what. In other words, she can’t get married at the moment. Plus, what kind of life would they have? She is seeking. And he, in all honesty, only makes forty-six rubles a month. And besides, she doesn’t love him yet, which, frankly speaking, is rather important.
“Forget the forty-six rubles!” exploded Alexander Ivanovich, rising to his feet. “I . . . me . . .”
But that was all he said. He chickened out. The role of the millionaire would only lead to disaster. He was so scared he even mumbled something to the effect that money can’t buy happiness. At this very moment, a puffing sound came from behin
d the door. Zosya rushed out into the hallway.
Her grandfather stood there in his huge hat, its straw crystals sparkling. He couldn’t bring himself to come in. His grief had caused his beard to open up like a broom.
“Why so fast?” cried Zosya. “What happened?”
The old man slowly raised his eyes to her. They were filled with tears.
Worried, Zosya grabbed her grandfather’s prickly shoulders and pulled him into the room. For half an hour Sinitsky just lay on the couch and shivered.
After a good amount of cajoling, the old man finally told his story.
At first, everything was wonderful. He made it to the office of The Youth Courier without incident. The head of the Exercise Your Brain section was exceptionally nice to him.
“He shook my hand, Zosya dear,” sighed the old man. “Comrade Sinitsky, he said, have a seat. And that’s when he hit me with it. Our section, he said, is closing. The new editor-in-chief has arrived, and he announced that our readers don’t need brain teasers anymore. What they need, Zosya dear, is a special section on the game of checkers. So what’s going to happen? I asked. Nothing, he said, it’s just that we can’t accept your material, that’s all. He praised my riddle, though. Sounds like Pushkin’s verse, he said, especially this: “The second is the finest dirt that every maid expunges duly.”
The old puzzle-maker kept trembling on the couch and complaining about the omnipresent Soviet ideology.
“All that drama again!” exclaimed Zosya.
She put her hat on and headed for the door. Alexander Ivanovich followed her, even though he knew it wasn’t a good idea.
Outside, Zosya took Koreiko by the arm.
“We’ll still be friends, right?”
“I’d much rather you married me,” grumbled Koreiko candidly.
Bare-headed young men in white shirts, their sleeves rolled up above their elbows, were crowding the wide open soda bars. Dark-blue siphons with metal faucets stood on the shelves. Tall glass cylinders on rotating stands, filled with syrup, cast out glimmering drugstore light. Sad-looking Persians roasted chestnuts on open grills, enticing the strollers with pungent fumes.
“I want to go to the movies,” said Zosya capriciously. “I want some nuts, I want some soda.”
For Zosya, Koreiko was prepared to do anything. He was even prepared to lift his disguise a bit and splurge to the tune of five rubles or so. He happened to have a flat metal Caucasus cigarette box in his pocket. The box contained ten thousand rubles in 250-ruble bills. But even if he had lost his mind and was bold enough to produce a single bill, no movie theater would have been able to break it anyway.
“Wages are delayed again,” he said in complete despair, “they pay very irregularly.”
Then, a young man wearing very nice sandals on his bare feet stepped out from the crowd. He raised his hand to greet Zosya.
“Hi there,” he said, “I’ve got two free passes to the movies. Wanna come? But it has to be right now.”
And then the young man in fabulous sandals led Zosya under the dim sign of the Whither Goest movie theater, formerly the Quo Vadis.
The millionaire bookkeeper didn’t spend the night asleep in his bed. He wandered aimlessly through the city, stared blankly at the photos of naked babies in photographers’ display windows, kicked up the gravel on the boulevard with his feet, and gazed into the dark hollow of the port. There, invisible steamers exchanged greetings, policemen whistled, and the lighthouse flashed its red flare.
“What a wretched country!” grumbled Koreiko. “A country where a millionaire can’t even take his fiancée to the movies.”
Somehow he already thought of Zosya as his fiancée.
By dawn, Alexander Ivanovich, pale from lack of sleep, found himself on the outskirts of the city. As he was walking down Bessarabian Street, he heard the sound of the maxixe. Surprised, he stopped.
A yellow car was coming down the hill towards him. The driver, in a leather jacket, crouched over the wheel, looking tired. Next to him dozed a broad-shouldered fellow in a Stetson hat with vent holes, his head hanging to one side. Two more passengers slouched in the back seat: a fireman in full dress uniform and an athletic-looking man wearing a white-topped seaman’s cap.
“Greetings to our first Chernomorskian!” hollered Ostap as the car drove past Koreiko, rumbling like a tractor. “Are the warm seawater baths still open? Is the theater functioning? Has Chernomorsk been declared a free city?”
Ostap didn’t get any answers. Kozlevich opened the choke, and the Antelope drowned the first Chernomorskian in a cloud of blue smoke.
“Well,” said Ostap to the awakened Balaganov, “our deliberations continue. Just bring me your underground Rockefeller. I’m going to peel his skins off. Those princes and paupers, let me tell you!”
PART 2
THE TWO
STRATEGISTS
CHAPTER 10
A TELEGRAM FROM
THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
At some point, the underground millionaire began to feel that he was the subject of someone’s unflagging attention. At first, it wasn’t anything in particular. It was just that his familiar and comfortable feeling of privacy had somehow disappeared. Then came far more sinister signs.
One day, when Koreiko was walking to work with his usual measured gait, a pushy street bum with a golden tooth accosted him right in front of the Hercules. Stepping on the underwear straps he was dragging behind him, the bum grabbed Alexander Ivanovich by the hand and muttered:
“Gimme a million, gimme a million, gimme a million!”
Then the bum stuck out his fat dirty tongue and began blurting out complete nonsense. It was just a half-crazy bum, a common sight in southern cities. Nevertheless, Koreiko went up to his desk in Finance and Accounting with a heavy heart.
After that encounter, all hell broke loose.
Alexander Ivanovich was awakened at three o’clock in the morning. A telegram arrived. His teeth chattering from the morning chill, the millionaire tore the seal and read:
“COUNTESS WITH STRICKEN FACE RUNS TO POND.”
“What countess?” whispered the baffled Koreiko, standing barefoot in the hallway.
There was no answer. The postman was gone. Pigeons cooed passionately in the courtyard. The neighbors were all asleep. Alexander Ivanovich looked at the gray sheet of paper again. The address was correct. His name was, too.
“LESSER TANGENTIAL 16 ALEXANDER KOREIKO COUNTESS WITH STRICKEN FACE RUNS TO POND.”
Alexander Ivanovich didn’t understand a thing, but he was so distressed that he burned the telegram with a candle.
At 5:35 P.M. on the same day, another telegram arrived:
“DELIBERATIONS CONTINUE COMMA MILLION KISSES.”
Alexander Ivanovich went pale with fury and tore the telegram into small pieces. But the very next night, two more urgent cables arrived.
The first read:
“LOAD ORANGES BARRELS BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.”
The second read:
“ICE HAS BROKEN STOP I AM COMMANDING PARADE.”
After that, Alexander Ivanovich had an unsettling accident at work. While multiplying 985 by thirteen, at Chevazhevskaya’s request, he made a mistake and gave her the wrong answer. This had never happened before. But he was incapable of focusing on mathematical problems. He just couldn’t get the crazy telegrams out of his mind.
“Barrels,” he whispered, staring at the old Kukushkind. “Brothers Karamazov. That’s shameless, plain and simple.”
He tried to calm himself down with the thought that these telegrams were a cutesy joke being played by some friends of his, but this theory had to be rejected on the spot: he had no friends. As for his co-workers, they were serious people and joked only once a year, on April Fools’ Day. And even on this day of cheerful merriment and joyful pranks, they invariably played the same depressing trick: they used the typewriter to concoct a fake pink slip for Kukushkind and put it on his desk. And each time, seven years in a row, the o
ld man would gasp in horror, which entertained everybody to no end. Besides, they weren’t wealthy enough to waste money on telegrams.
After the telegram in which a mysterious person announced that he, rather than anybody else, was commanding the parade, things quieted down. No one bothered Alexander Ivanovich for three days. He had already started getting used to the idea that these strange occurrences had nothing to do with him when a thick registered letter arrived. It contained a book The Capitalist Sharks: Biographies of American Millionaires.
Under different circumstances, Koreiko would have bought such a curious little book himself, but he literally squirmed in horror. The first sentence, underlined in blue pencil, read:
“All large modern-day fortunes were amassed through the most dishonest means.”
Just in case, Alexander Ivanovich decided to stop checking on his treasured suitcase at the train station for the time being. He was very alarmed.
“The main thing is to create panic in the enemy camp,” said Ostap, leisurely pacing around the spacious room in the Carlsbad Hotel. “The opponent must lose his peace of mind. It’s not that difficult to pull off. After all, what scares people the most is the unknown. I myself was once a lone mystic and got to the point where I could be scared with a simple sharp knife. That’s right. More of the unknown. I am convinced that my latest telegram, ‘You’re in our thoughts,’ had a crushing effect on our counterpart. All this is just the superphosphate, the fertilizer. Let him agonize. The client must get used to the idea that he’ll have to part with his money. He must be disarmed psychologically, his reactionary, proprietary instincts must be suppressed.”
After finishing the speech, Bender gave his subordinates a stern look. Balaganov, Panikovsky, and Kozlevich sat stiffly in their plush, fringed, and tasseled red armchairs. They felt awkward. They were troubled by the captain’s lavish lifestyle, by the golden draperies, by the bright, chemically-colored carpets, and by the print of The Appearance of Christ to the People. They were staying in a hostel, along with the Antelope, and came to the hotel only to receive instructions.