by Ilya Ilf
A German engineer named Heinrich Maria Sause, brought in from Germany at considerable expense, had been sitting on the bench since the morning. He wore the usual European suit, and his embroidered Ukrainian shirt was the only sign that the engineer had already spent a few weeks in Russia—he had had enough time to visit a gift shop. He sat still, his head resting on the wooden back of the bench, his eyes closed, as if he was about to get a shave. One might even think he was snoozing. But the half-brothers, who had repeatedly raced past him in pursuit of Sardinevich, noticed that the complexion of the foreign guest was constantly changing. At the beginning of the day, when the engineer took his position outside Polykhaev’s door, his face was fairly rosy. The color grew in intensity with every passing hour, and by the first break it had taken on the color of postal sealing wax. By that time, Comrade Polykhaev had probably only reached the second flight of stairs. After the break, his complexion started changing in the opposite direction. The sealing wax turned into scarlet-fever spots. Heinrich Maria started going pale, and toward the end of the day, when the director of the Hercules had probably broken through to the second floor, the face of the foreign specialist became snow-white.
“What’s with him?” Ostap whispered to Balaganov. “Such a huge spectrum of emotions!”
The moment Ostap uttered these words, Heinrich Maria Sause jumped up from his bench and looked at Polykhaev’s door furiously. Behind it, the phone was ringing off the hook. “Obstrukzionizm!” shrieked the engineer in a high-pitched voice, grabbing the grand strategist by the shoulders and shaking him as hard as he could.
“Genosse Polihaeff!” he shouted, jumping in front of Ostap. “Genosse Polihaeff!”
He took out his pocket watch, thrust it in Balaganov’s face, and then went after Bender again.
“Was machen Sie?” asked the dumbfounded Ostap, demonstrating a certain level of familiarity with the German language. “Was wollen Sie from a poor visitor?”
But Heinrich Maria Sause wouldn’t let go. Keeping his left hand on Bender’s shoulder, he dragged Balaganov closer with his right hand and gave them both a long, passionate speech. While he was at it, Ostap looked around impatiently, in the hope of getting hold of Sardinevich, while the Vice President for Hoofs hiccuped quietly, covering his mouth respectfully and staring mindlessly at the foreigner’s shoes.
The engineer Heinrich Maria Sause had signed a year-long contract to work in the Soviet Union, or, as he put it with his usual precision, at the Hercules Corporation. “Watch out, Mr. Sause,” warned his friend Bernhard Gerngross, a Doctor of Mathematics, “the Bolsheviks will make you work hard for their money.” But Sause explained that he wasn’t afraid of work and that he had long been looking for a good chance to apply his expertise in the field of mechanized forestry.
When Sardinevich informed Polykhaev that the foreign engineer had arrived, the director of the Hercules got all excited under his palm trees.
“We need him badly! Where is he?”
“Right now, at the hotel. Resting after his trip.”
“Resting? You must be kidding!” exclaimed Polykhaev. “All that money we’re paying him, all that hard currency! He’s to report here tomorrow, at 10 A.M. sharp.”
At five to ten, Heinrich Maria Sause entered Polykhaev’s office, sporting coffee-colored pants and smiling at the thought of putting his expertise to good use. The boss wasn’t in yet. He wasn’t in an hour later either, or two hours later. Sause started losing patience. His only distraction came from Sardinevich, who would turn up every now and then and ask with an innocent smile:
“So, Genosse Polykhaev isn’t in yet? That’s odd.”
Two hours later Sardinevich approached Bomze, who was eating breakfast in the hallway, and started whispering:
“I don’t know what to do. Polykhaev told the German to be here at 10, but then he left for Moscow to see about the building. He’ll be gone for at least a week. Do me a favor, Adolf Nikolaevich! I’ve got so many things to do. Continuing education, for instance—we’re having so much trouble reorganizing. Would you stay with the German and keep him busy somehow? He costs big money, you know, hard currency.”
Bomze sniffed his daily meat patty for the last time, swallowed it, brushed off the crumbs, and went to meet the foreign guest.
During the next week Sause, under the guidance of the affable Adolf Nikolaevich, visited three museums, attended a performance of Sleeping Beauty, and sat for some ten hours at a welcoming meeting that was held in his honor. The meeting was followed by a private celebration, during which select Herculeans had plenty of fun, raised their goblets and other glasses again and again, and challenged Sause with their usual “Drink it up!”
“Dearest Tillie,” the engineer wrote to his fiancée in Aachen. “I’ve been in Chernomorsk for ten days now, but I haven’t started working at the Hercules Corporation yet. I’m afraid I won’t get paid for this time.”
But the paymaster handed Sause his half-month’s salary promptly on the fifteenth.
“Don’t you think I’m getting paid for nothing?” he said to his new friend, Bomze. “I’m not doing any work.”
“Don’t give it another thought, my friend!” protested Adolf Nikolaevich. “But if you wish, we can set up a desk for you in my office.”
So Sause wrote the next letter to his fiancée at his own desk:
“Darling, My life here is strange and very unusual. I do absolutely nothing, yet they pay me punctually, as stipulated in the contract. I am surprised. Tell this to our friend, Dr. Bernhard Gerngross. He’d find it interesting.”
When Polykhaev returned from Moscow, he was happy to hear that Sause already had a desk.
“Perfect!” he said. “Sardinevich should bring him up to speed.”
But Sardinevich, who at the time was devoting all his energies to the organization of a major accordion club, dumped the German back on Bomze. Adolf Nikolaevich wasn’t happy. The German interfered with his meals and generally refused to keep quiet, so Bomze dumped him on the Industrial Department. At the time, however, that department was reorganizing, which boiled down to endlessly moving their desks around, so they got rid of Heinrich Maria by sending him to Finance and Accounting. Here Arnikov, Dreyfus, Sakharkov, Koreiko, and Borisokhlebsky, who didn’t speak any German, decided that Sause was a tourist from Argentina, and spent entire days explaining the Hercules’s accounting system to him using sign language.
After a month, a distressed Sause caught up with Sardinevich in the dining room and started shouting:
“I don’t want to get paid for nothing! Give me some work to do! If it continues like this, I’ll complain to your boss!”
Sardinevich didn’t like this last part of the foreign specialist’s speech. He called Bomze to his office.
“What’s with the German?” he asked. “Why is he blowing his top?”
“You know,” said Bomze, “I think he’s just a troublemaker. I’m telling you. The man sits at his desk, does absolutely nothing, makes tons of money—and still complains!”
“He really is a troublemaker,” agreed Sardinevich, “a German, what can you expect? We have to resort to punitive action. I’ll tell Polykhaev when I get the chance. He’ll stuff him into a bottle in no time.”
Heinrich Maria, however, himself decided to try to get to Polykhaev. But because the Hercules director was one of those people who “were here just a moment ago” or who have “just left,” this attempt only led to the wait on the wooden bench and the explosion that the innocent sons of Lieutenant Schmidt fell victim to.
“Byurokratizmus!” shouted the German, switching to the difficult Russian language in agitation.
Ostap quietly took the European guest by the arm, brought him over to the complaints box that was hanging on the wall, and said, as if he was talking to a deaf person:
“Here! Understand? In the box. Schreiben, schrieb, geschrieben. Write. You understand? I write, you write, he, she, it writes. Understand? We, you, they write complaints and put
them in this box. Put! The verb ‘to put.’ We, you, they put the complaints in . . . And nobody takes them out. To take out! I don’t take out, you don’t take out . . .”
But then the grand strategist spotted Sardinevich’s broad hips at the end of the hallway and, forgetting about the grammar lesson, rushed after the elusive activist.
“Hang in there, Germany!” shouted Balaganov to the German with encouragement, hurrying after his captain.
But to Bender’s utter frustration, Sardinevich had dematerialized once again.
“Now that’s sorcery,” said Bender, turning his head back and forth. “The man was here just a moment ago—and now he’s gone.”
In desperation, the half-brothers started trying all the doors one by one. But after entering the third door, Balaganov jumped back out in a panic. His face was contorted.
“Uh, uh,” uttered the Vice President for Hoofs, leaning against the wall, “uh, uh, uh . . .”
“What’s the matter, sonny?” asked Bender. “Was somebody mean to you?”
“In there,” mumbled Balaganov, pointing his shaking hand.
Ostap opened the door and saw a black coffin.
The coffin rested in the middle of the room on a desk with drawers. Ostap took off his captain’s cap and tiptoed over to the coffin. Balaganov watched him apprehensively. A minute later Ostap beckoned Balaganov and showed him a large white sign that was painted on the side of the coffin.
“See what it says here, Shura?” he asked. “‘Death to red tape!’ Are you all right now?”
It was a magnificent propaganda coffin. On major holidays, the Herculeans carried it outside and paraded it around town, singing songs. The pall bearers were usually Sardinevich, Bomze, Berlaga, and Polykhaev himself. He was a man of democratic principles, and he had no qualms about joining his subordinates at various political marches and festivals. Sardinevich held the coffin in high regard and considered it very important. From time to time, Yegor would put on an apron and repaint the coffin with his own hands, sprucing up the anti-bureaucratic slogan. Meanwhile, the phones in his office were ringing off the hook, and head after head popped in through the cracked door and glanced around hopelessly.
Bender never got a hold of him. The doorman in the cap with a zigzag informed Ostap that Comrade Sardinevich had been there just a moment before—but he had just left for a swim at the beach, which, as he often said, helped him recharge.
The Antelopeans woke up Kozlevich, who was dozing off behind the wheel, and headed out of town, bringing Berlaga along just in case.
Was it any surprise that Ostap, who was worked up from everything that had happened that day, went straight into the water in pursuit of Sardinevich, and that he was completely unconcerned by the fact that an important conversation about dirty business dealings had to be conducted in the Black Sea?
Balaganov followed the captain’s instructions to the T. He undressed the compliant Berlaga, led him to the edge of the water, and waited patiently, holding him by the waist with both hands. A difficult exchange was apparently taking place at sea. Ostap bawled like a sea lion. Nobody could make out the words. They could only see that Sardinevich attempted to head back to shore, but Ostap intercepted him and chased him further out into the open sea. Then the voices became louder, and certain words could be heard: “The Intensivnik!”—“And who profited? The Pope?”—“What do I have to do with it?”
Berlaga has long been stomping his bare feet, leaving an Indian’s tracks in the wet sand. Finally, a call came from the sea:
“Send him in!”
Balaganov launched the accountant into the sea. Berlaga paddled off quickly, slapping the water with his arms and legs. Seeing him, Yegor Sardinevich dove in terror.
The Vice President for Hoofs, in the meantime, stretched out on the sand and lit a cigarette. He waited for about twenty minutes. Berlaga was the first to return. He squatted, took a handkerchief from his pocket, and said, wiping his face:
“Our Sardinevich confessed. Confronting a witness did him in.”
“The creep has squealed?” asked Shura good-naturedly. He took the cigarette butt out of his mouth with his thumb and index finger and tut-tutted. Spit shot out of his mouth, swift and long, like a torpedo.
Hopping on one foot and aiming the second into his pant leg, Berlaga offered a cryptic explanation:
“I did it not in the interest of veracity but in the interest of truth.”
Next to arrive was the grand strategist. He dropped on his stomach and, with his cheek on the hot sand and a meaningful look on his face, watched the blue Sardinevich get out of the water. Then he took the folder from Balaganov’s hands and, wetting the pencil with his tongue, started recording the new information that he worked so hard to obtain.
The transformation of Yegor Sardinevich was amazing. Just thirty minutes earlier, the sea had embraced a most exemplary activist, a man of whom even Comrade Netherlandov, chairman of the local union, always said: “Of all people, Sardinevich would never fail us.” But Sardinevich had failed them this time. And how! Instead of a lovely female body with the head of a shaving Englishman, the gentle summertime waves carried to shore a shapeless sack filled with mustard and horseradish.
While the grand strategist plundered the waves, Heinrich Maria Sause finally ambushed Polykhaev and had a very serious talk with him. He left the Hercules totally bewildered. With a strange smile on his face, he went to the post office and, standing at a tall desk with a glass top, wrote a letter to his fiancée in Aachen:
“My dear girl, I have some exciting news. My boss Polykhaev is finally sending me to a factory. But what I find incredible, dear Tillie, is that here at the Hercules Corporation this is called ‘to stuff one into a bottle’ (sagnat w butilku)! My new friend Bomze told me that I’m being sent to the factory as a punishment. Can you imagine? And our good friend Dr. Bernhard Gerngross—will he ever be able to understand it?”
CHAPTER 19
THE UNIVERSAL STAMP
By noon the following day, the Hercules started filling with rumors that the director had locked himself up in his palm-filled gallery with a visitor, and that for the last three hours he hadn’t been responding to Impala Mikhailovna’s knocking or to internal telephone calls. The Herculeans didn’t know what to make of it. They were used to Polykhaev being promenaded up and down the hallways, or seated on window sills, or lured into nooks under the stairs; those were the places where all the decisions were made. Somebody even suggested that the boss had quit the ranks of those who “had just left” and joined the influential category of “the hermits.” People like this usually sneak into their offices early in the morning, lock the door, unplug the phone, and, with the rest of the world effectively blocked off, start putting together all kinds of reports.
Meanwhile, work had to go on: documents urgently needed signatures, responses, and resolutions. An edgy Impala Mikhailovna repeatedly approached Polykhaev’s door and listened carefully. Small round pearls swayed in her large ears.
“This is without precedent,” the secretary said gravely.
“But who, who is in there with him?” asked Bomze, giving off a strong odor of both cologne and meat patties. “An inspector, maybe?”
“No, I’m telling you, it’s just an ordinary visitor.”
“And Polykhaev has already spent three hours with him?”
“This is without precedent,” repeated Impala Mikhailovna.
“So how are we going to overcome this outcome?” Bomze became agitated. “I urgently need Polykhaev’s signature. Here’s the full report on the reasons why the premises of the former Tin and Bacon Co. do not meet our needs. I have to have a signature.”
The staff besieged Impala Mikhailovna. They all held documents of varying degrees of importance in their hands. After another hour during which the rumble of voices continued behind the door, Impala Mikhailovna sat down at her desk and said softly:
“All right, comrades. Let’s see your papers.”
S
he reached into a cabinet and took out a long wooden stand. Thirty-six rubber stamps with thick polished handles were hanging on it. Expertly picking the proper stamps from their nests, she started applying them to the papers that just couldn’t wait any longer.
The director of the Hercules hadn’t signed papers in his own hand in a long while. Whenever the need arose, he took a stamp out of his vest pocket, breathed on it affectionately, and imprinted a purple facsimile of his signature next to his title. He really enjoyed this process, and it occurred to him that it wouldn’t be a bad idea to commit some of the most common resolutions to rubber as well.
That was how the first of the rubber dictums came into being:
NO OBJECTIONS. POLYKHAEV
AGREED. POLYKHAEV
GOOD THINKING. POLYKHAEV
AKE IT HAPPEN. POLYKHAEV
After testing the new tool, the boss of the Hercules concluded that it simplified his job significantly and thus deserved to be promoted and advanced still further. Another batch of rubber was soon put to work. This time, the resolutions were more elaborate:
ISSUE A FORMAL REPRIMAND. POLYKHAEV
ISSUE A WARNING. POLYKHAEV
ASSIGN TO A REMOTE LOCATION. POLYKHAEV
DISMISS WITHOUT SEVERANCE PAY. POLYKHAEV
The war that the director of the Hercules was waging against the Municipal Affairs Department over the building inspired a few more general-purpose statements:
I DON’T REPORT TO MUNICIPAL AFFAIRS. POLYKHAEV
ARE THEY COMPLETELY CRAZY? POLYKHAEV
LEAVE ME ALONE. POLYKHAEV
I’M NOT YOUR NIGHT WATCHMAN. POLYKHAEV
THE HOTEL IS OURS, AND THAT’S THAT. POLYKHAEV
I’M NOT A FOOL. POLYKHAEV
NO BEDS, NO SINKS FOR YOU. POLYKHAEV
This particular set was ordered in three copies. The war was expected to be protracted, and the insightful director had good reason to believe that a single set might not suffice.