The Golden Calf

by Ilya Ilf

  “Never!” answered Funt. “Briand is a real brain.”

  He flapped his lips in silence for three minutes and then added:

  “Hoover is a brain. Hindenburg is also a brain. Hoover and Hindenburg, that’s two brains.”

  Ostap grew very concerned. The oldest of the Piqué Vests was preparing to plumb the depths of world politics. At any moment, he might have launched into a discussion of the Kellogg-Briand Pact or the Spanish dictator Primo de Rivera, and then nothing, absolutely nothing would stop him from this commendable pursuit. A gleam of madness appeared in his eyes, his Adam’s apple began trembling above the yellowed starched collar, heralding the advent of a new sentence—when Bender unscrewed a light bulb and threw it on the floor. The bulb broke with the cold cracking noise of a rifle shot. It distracted the dummy chairman from international affairs. Ostap quickly took advantage of the opportunity.

  “But have you met anybody from the Hercules, ever?” he asked. “To discuss the advances?”

  “I only dealt with Berlaga, an accountant from the Hercules. He was on their staff. But me, I knew nothing. They never told me anything. People only need me to do time. I did time under the tsars, under Socialism, under the Ukrainian Hetman, and under the French occupation. Briand is a brain.”

  Nothing else could be squeezed out of the old man. But what he had already said was enough to start the hunt.

  “Feels like Koreiko’s hand,” thought Ostap.

  The president of the Chernomorsk Branch of the Arbatov Bureau for the Collection of Horns and Hoofs sat down at his desk and recorded the dummy chairman’s speech on paper. He did, however, leave out Funt’s thoughts on the complex relationship between Valiadis and Briand.

  The first page of the underground investigation of the underground millionaire was numbered, punched through properly, and filed away.

  “So, are you going to hire a chairman or not?” asked the old man, putting his mended panama back on. “I can tell that your bureau needs a chairman. I’m not asking much: 120 rubles a month while I’m outside, and 240 while I’m in prison. There’s a one hundred percent surcharge for hazardous duty.”

  “Well, I guess we are,” said Ostap. “Submit your application to the Vice President for Hoofs.”

  CHAPTER 16

  JAHRBUCH FÜR

  PSYCHOANALYTIK

  The workday in the Finance and Accounting Department at the Hercules started at 9 A.M. sharp, as usual.

  Kukushkind had already raised the flap of his jacket to wipe his glasses, preparing to inform his colleagues that working at the banking firm of Sycamorsky and Cesarewitch was far less unnerving than working at this Sodom, the Hercules; Tezoimenitsky had already turned in his swivel chair towards the wall and reached out to tear a page off the calendar; and Lapidus Jr. had already opened his mouth wide to welcome a piece of bread slathered with chopped herring when the door opened—and in came the accountant Berlaga.

  His unexpected appearance caused much commotion in Finance and Accounting. Tezoimenitsky slipped on his rotating saucer, and the calendar page remained in place for the first time in perhaps three years. Lapidus Jr. forgot to bite into his sandwich and just moved his jaws idly. Dreyfus, Chevazhevskaya, and Sakharkov were flabbergasted. Koreiko raised his head and lowered it again. Old Kukushkind quickly put his glasses back on, forgetting to wipe them for the first time in his thirty years of service. Berlaga sat down at his desk, as if nothing had happened, and opened his ledgers, ignoring Lapidus Jr.’s expressive smirk.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Lapidus anyway. “How’s your heel nerve?”

  “It’s fine now,” said Berlaga without raising his head. “It’s as if it doesn’t even exist.”

  Up until the lunch break, everybody in Finance and Accounting fidgeted on their stools and cushions, dying of curiosity. When the alarm bell finally went off, all the bright lights of bookkeeping gathered around Berlaga. But the fugitive hardly answered any questions. He took four of his most trusted friends aside, made sure that no one else was listening, and told them about his incredible adventures at the insane asylum. The fugitive accountant’s story was interwoven with numerous interjections and intricate expressions that are omitted here for the sake of coherence.

  THE STORY OF THE ACCOUNTANT BERLAGA,

  detailing what happened to him

  at the insane asylum,

  as told by himself in the strictest

  confidence to Borisokhlebsky,

  Dreyfus, Sakharkov, and Lapidus Jr.

  As we already know, Berlaga fled to the insane asylum to escape the purge. He was hoping to wait out the dangerous period at this medical institution and return to the Hercules after the storm was over and the eight men with gray eyes had moved on to the next organization.

  His brother-in-law slapped the whole thing together. He got hold of a book about the manners and customs of the mentally ill, and after much discussion, they selected delusions of grandeur from the available manias.

  “You won’t have to do anything,” explained the brother-in-law, “you just have to yell in everybody’s face: ‘I’m Napoleon!’ or ‘I’m Émile Zola!’ or ‘Prophet Mohammed!’ if that’s what you want.”

  “How about the Viceroy of India?” asked Berlaga naïvely.

  “Why not? Crackpots can be anything they want. So, the Viceroy of India, yes?”

  The brother-in-law spoke with authority, as if he were at the very least a junior intern at a mental hospital. In reality, however, he was just a salesman who pushed subscriptions to lavishly printed book sets from the State Publishing House. The silk-lined bowler hat that he kept in his storage chest was the only reminder of his past commercial greatness.

  The brother-in-law rushed to the phone to call an ambulance, while the new Viceroy of India took off his tunic, tore up his cotton undershirt, and just in case, poured a bottle of the best, premium-quality iron gall copying ink onto his head. Then he lay on the floor face down and, when the orderlies arrived, started bellowing:

  “I’m none other than the Viceroy of India! Where are my trusted nawabs and maharajas, my abreks and kunaks, my elephants?”

  Listening to his megalomaniacal ravings, the brother-in-law shook his head in doubt. He wasn’t convinced that the abreks and the kunaks fell under the purview of the King of India. But the orderlies just wiped the premium-quality ink from the accountant’s face with a wet cloth, picked him up, and stuffed him into the ambulance. The shiny doors slammed shut, the siren went off, and the vehicle whisked Viceroy Berlaga to his new domain.

  On the way to the hospital, the patient flailed his arms and babbled incoherently, all the while worrying about his first encounter with real madmen. He was afraid that they would be nasty to him, and maybe even kill him.

  The hospital was very different from what Berlaga had pictured. People in light-blue robes sat on couches, lay in beds, or strolled around a large, well-lit ward. The accountant noticed that the madmen hardly ever spoke to one another. They didn’t have time to talk. They were busy thinking. They were thinking all the time. They had many thoughts, they had to recall something, something very important that their happiness depended upon. But their thoughts were falling apart, and, worst of all, they were simply disappearing, wiggling their tails. And so one had to start anew, think everything over again, finally understand what had happened and why everything was so bad when everything had been so good before.

  The same disheveled and miserable madman had already walked past Berlaga several times. Holding his chin in his hand, he walked along the same line—from the window to the door, from the door to the window, back to the door, back to the window. So many thoughts roared in his poor head that he had to put his other hand on his forehead and accelerate his pace.

  “I’m the Viceroy of India!” cried Berlaga, giving the orderly a quick glance.

  The madman didn’t even look at the accountant. Wincing, he went back to gathering the thoughts that Berlaga’s wild cries had scattered. Then the
Viceroy was approached by a short idiot, who put his arm around Berlaga’s waist and chirped something in his ear.

  “What?” asked the frightened Berlaga cautiously.

  “Ene, bene, raba, quinter, finter, baba,” his new friend enunciated clearly.

  Berlaga said “Oh my God” and moved away from the idiot. He then found himself near a man with a bald, lemon-like pate. The man quickly turned away to the wall, giving the accountant an anxious look.

  “Where are my maharajas?” Berlaga asked him, feeling he had to maintain his reputation.

  But then a patient who was sitting on a bed deep inside the large ward stood up on his legs, which were thin and yellow like church candles, and yelled out with pain:

  “Freedom! Freedom! To the pampas!”

  Later, the accountant learned that the man who longed for the pampas was an old geography teacher, the author of the textbook from which the young Berlaga had learned about volcanoes, capes, and isthmuses many years ago. The geographer went mad quite unexpectedly: one day he looked at the map of the two hemispheres and couldn’t find the Bering Strait. The old teacher spent the whole day studying the map. Everything was where it was supposed to be: Newfoundland; the Suez Canal; Madagascar; the Sandwich Islands with their capital city, Honolulu; even the Popocatépetl volcano. But the Bering Strait was missing. The old man lost his mind right then and there, in front of the map.[1] He was a harmless madman who never hurt anybody, but he scared Berlaga to death. The shouting broke his heart.

  “Freedom!” the geographer yelled out again. “To the pampas!”

  He knew more about freedom than anyone else in the world. He was a geographer: he knew of the wide open spaces that regular people, busy doing their mundane things, can’t even imagine. He wanted to be free, he wanted to ride a sweating mustang through the brush . . .

  A young woman doctor with doleful blue eyes entered the room and went straight to Berlaga.

  “How are you feeling, dear?” she asked, touching the accountant’s forearm with her warm hand. “You’re better now, aren’t you?”

  “I’m the Viceroy of India!” he reported, blushing. “Give me back my favorite elephant!”

  “You’re having a delusion,” said the doctor gently. “You’re in a hospital, we’ll help you recover.”

  “Oooh! My elephant!” cried Berlaga defiantly.

  “But you must understand,” said the doctor even more gently, “you’re not the Viceroy. This is a delusion, you understand? A delusion.”

  “No, it’s not!” objected Berlaga, who knew that he was supposed to be difficult.

  “Yes, a delusion!”

  “No, it’s not!”

  “Delusion!”

  “Is not!”

  Seeing that the iron was hot, the accountant struck. He gave the gentle doctor a shove and emitted a lengthy howl that startled the other patients, especially the little idiot, who sat down on the floor and said, drooling:

  “Un, dun, trois, quatre, Mademoiselle Jourauvatre.”

  Then, to his delight, Berlaga overheard the woman doctor telling an orderly:

  “We need to put him in with those other three, or else he’ll scare the whole ward silly.”

  Two even-tempered orderlies took the cantankerous Viceroy to a smaller ward, for disruptive patients, where three men lay quietly. And it was there that the accountant finally learned what true madmen were like. Seeing the visitors, the patients grew extremely agitated. A fat man rolled out of bed, quickly got down on all fours, stuck out his rear end—it looked like a mandolin in his tight clothes—and started barking in bursts, digging the hardwood floor with his slipper-clad hind legs. The other one wrapped himself in a blanket and started shouting: “Et tu, Brute, sold out to the Bolsheviks!” This man clearly thought he was Gaius Julius Caesar. At times, however, something would snap in his deeply disturbed head, and he’d get confused and yell: “I’m Heinrich Julius Zimmermann!”

  “Go away! I’m naked!” shouted the third man. “Don’t look! I’m ashamed! I’m a naked woman.”

  As a matter of fact, he was a fully dressed man with a mustache.

  The orderlies left. The Viceroy of India was so petrified that he lost any interest in demanding the return of his favorite elephant, the maharajas, the faithful nawabs, never mind the mysterious abreks or kunaks.

  “These guys will kill me just like that,” he thought, breaking into a cold sweat.

  He kicked himself for making such a scene in the quiet ward. It would have been so nice to sit near the kindly geographer and listen to the comforting babble of the little idiot: “Ene, bene, raba, quinter, finter, baba.” But nothing terrible happened. The dog man yelped a few more times, growled, and went back to bed. Julius Caesar kicked off his blanket, yawned deeply, and had a good stretch. The mustachioed woman lit up his pipe, and the sweet smell of Our Capstan tobacco calmed Berlaga’s tormented soul.

  “I’m the Viceroy of India,” he declared, recovering his bravery.

  “Shut up, bastard!” replied Julius Caesar dismissively, and he added with the directness of a Roman: “Or you’re dead meat.”

  This remark by the bravest of the warriors and emperors brought the fugitive accountant to his senses. He hid under the blanket, sadly reflected on his grueling life, and drifted off to sleep.

  In the morning, still half-asleep, he overheard a strange conversation:

  “They stuck a real lunatic in here, goddamit. It was so nice with just the three of us, and now look . . . He’s trouble! This damn Viceroy could very well bite us all.”

  Berlaga recognized the voice: it was Gaius Julius Caesar. A few minutes later, he opened his eyes and saw that the dog man was staring at him with keen interest.

  “That’s it,” thought the Viceroy, “now he’ll bite me!”

  But the dog man suddenly clasped his hands and asked in a perfectly human voice:

  “Excuse me, aren’t you the son of Foma Berlaga?”

  “I am,” answered the accountant, but then he came to his senses and started hollering: “Give the poor Viceroy his faithful elephant back!”

  “Please look at me,” invited the mongrel man. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  “Mikhail Alexandrovich!” exclaimed the accountant, regaining his sight. “I’m so happy to see you!”

  The Viceroy and the dog man gave each other a friendly hug and a kiss. Their foreheads collided, clapping like billiard balls. Mikhail Alexandrovich had tears in his eyes.

  “So you’re not crazy?” asked Berlaga. “Then why are you playing the fool?”

  “And you, why are you playing the fool? Look at him! Just give him his elephants or else! Besides, my dear Berlaga, I have to tell you that if you want to make a good madman, the Viceroy is not a very convincing role, not at all.”

  “My brother-in-law told me it was fine,” said Berlaga dejectedly.

  “Take me, for example,” said Mikhail Alexandrovich, “a subtle act. A dog man. Schizophrenia complicated by bipolar disorder and on top of that, Berlaga, de-personalization. Do you think it was easy to pull off? I studied the literature. Did you read Autistic Thinking by Professor Bleuler?”

  “I’m afraid not,” answered Berlaga, sounding like a Viceroy who had just been stripped of the Order of the Garter and demoted to officer’s orderly.

  “Gentlemen!” called out Mikhail Alexandrovich. “He hasn’t read Bleuler! Don’t be scared, come over here. He’s no more a Viceroy than you are Caesar.”

  The two remaining denizens of the small ward for disruptive patients came closer.

  “You haven’t read Bleuler?” asked Julius Caesar with surprise. “But then what did you use to prepare?”

  “He probably subscribed to the German magazine Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytik und Psychopathologie,” suggested the mustachioed psychopath.

  Berlaga felt like a complete fool. Meanwhile, the experts continued spouting abstruse terminology relating to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Everybody agreed that Berlaga was
in deep trouble, and that the head physician, Titanushkin, who was expected back from a business trip at any moment, would see through him in five minutes. They failed to mention that they themselves were not looking forward to Titanushkin’s return.

  “Maybe I should switch delusions?” asked Berlaga meekly. “What if I become Émile Zola, or the Prophet Mohammed?”

  “Too late, “ said Caesar. “Your case history already says that you’re the Viceroy. A madman cannot change his manias like socks. For the rest of your life, you’ll be the stupid Viceroy. We’ve been here for a week, and we know how it works.”

  Within the next hour, Berlaga had learned the real case histories of his companions in great detail.

  Mikhail Alexandrovich had entered the insane asylum for very simple, mundane reasons. He was an important businessman who had inadvertently underpaid his income tax by forty-three thousand rubles. This could mean an involuntary trip way up north, whereas business urgently required his presence in Chernomorsk. Duvanov, the man who pretended he was a woman, was apparently a petty criminal with good reasons to fear arrest. But Gaius Julius Caesar, or, according to his papers, I. N. Starokhamsky, a former attorney-at-law, was a different matter entirely.

  Gaius Julius Starokhamsky had entered the madhouse for lofty, ideological reasons.

  “In Soviet Russia, the only place where a normal person can live is an insane asylum,” he said, draping himself in a blanket. “Everything else is super-bedlam. I cannot live with the Bolsheviks, no sir! I’d rather live here, among common lunatics. At least they aren’t building socialism. Plus, here they feed you, while out there, in bedlam, you need to work. And I have no intention of working for their socialism. Finally, I have my personal freedom here. Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech . . .”

  Seeing an orderly who was passing by, Gaius Julius Starokhamsky started screaming:

  “Long live the Constitutional Assembly! Everyone to the Forum! Et tu, Brute, sold out to the party apparatchiks!” He turned to Berlaga and added: “See? I yell whatever I please. Try that outside.”