The Golden Calf

by Ilya Ilf

  “Christians!” he yelled out, tearing his shirt apart. “Citizens!”

  He ran away from the fire sideways, barged into the crowd, and, shouting something unintelligible, started pointing at the burning building. The crowd was rattled.

  “They forgot a baby,” said a woman in a small straw hat confidently.

  People surrounded Nikita. He tried to push them away and get to the house.

  “On my bed!” he yelled like a madman. “Let me go, let me go!”

  Violent tears streamed down his cheeks. He hit Hygienishvili on the head in order to clear the way and ran into the courtyard. A minute later, he ran back out with a ladder.

  “Stop him!” shouted the woman in a straw hat. “He’ll burn alive!”

  “Get lost!” yelled Pryakhin, setting the ladder against the wall and pushing away the young men who were trying to grab his legs. “I can’t leave it. My soul’s on fire!”

  He kicked with his legs and climbed up the ladder, toward the smoke billowing from the second-floor window.

  “Get back!” people shouted from the crowd. “What are you doing? You’ll burn!”

  “On my bed!” Nikita continued to bellow. “A full bottle of vodka, a big one! Three quarts! How can I leave it behind, Christians?”

  With unexpected agility, Pryakhin grabbed onto the flashing and instantly disappeared, sucked in by the air stream. His last words were: “We’ll do as we wish.” Silence fell over the street, only to be interrupted by the bell and the trumpets of the fire brigade. Firemen in stiff canvas suits with broad dark-blue belts came running into the courtyard.

  A minute after Nikita Pryakhin committed the only heroic act of his life, a large burning timber fell from the building and crashed onto the ground. The roof cracked open with a tearing sound and collapsed into the house. A shining pillar rose to the sky, as if the house had fired a cannonball toward the moon.

  Such was the end of apartment No. 3, which was known as the Rookery.

  The clatter of hoofs was suddenly heard in the lane. The fire lit up a racing horse cab carrying the engineer Talmudovsky. A suitcase covered with luggage labels sat on his knees. Bouncing in his seat, the engineer was leaning toward the coachman, shouting:

  “I’m not staying here for another minute! Not at this salary! Go, go!”

  And then his fat back, lit by the flames and the firemen’s torches, disappeared around the corner.

  CHAPTER 22

  I AM COMMANDING

  THE PARADE

  “I’m dying of boredom,” said Ostap, “we’ve only been chatting here for two hours, and I’m already sick of you, like I’ve known you all my life. Maybe an American millionaire can afford to be pig-headed, but a Soviet millionaire must be more amenable.”

  “You’re crazy!” replied Alexander Ivanovich.

  “Don’t insult me,” said Bender peacefully. “I’m the son of a Turkish subject and hence a descendant of janissaries. I will not spare you if you’re not nice to me. Janissaries have no mercy for women, children, or underground Soviet millionaires.”

  “Please go away!” said Koreiko, sounding like a bureaucrat from the Hercules. “It’s past two o’clock. I want to sleep, and I have to go to work early in the morning.”

  “Oh, yes, I forgot about that!” exclaimed Ostap. “You can’t afford to be late to work. You might get fired without severance pay. Two-week’s wages are nothing to sneeze at: twenty-three rubles! It may very well last you for six months, considering how thrifty you are.”

  “It’s none of your business. Leave me alone. Do you hear me? Get out!”

  “But that same thriftiness will be your undoing. Of course, revealing your millions would be dangerous. But you’re trying too hard. Have you thought of what might happen when you’re finally able to spend your money? Abstinence is a dangerous thing! Somebody I knew, a teacher of French named Ernestina Iosifovna Poincaré, never once touched alcohol in her life. So guess what? Somebody gave her a shot of brandy at a dinner party. She liked it so much that she drank the whole bottle and lost her mind right there, at the dinner table. The number of teachers of French on this planet was reduced by one. This could happen to you, too.”

  “So what the hell do you want from me?”

  “The same thing my childhood friend, Nick Osten-Backen, wanted from another childhood friend of mine, Inga Zajonc, a Polish beauty. He wanted her love. And I want yours. Citizen Koreiko, I want you to fall in love with me and hand me a million rubles as a token of your affection.”

  “Out!” said Koreiko quietly.

  “Well now, you’re forgetting again that I’m a descendant of janissaries.”

  With that, Ostap got up. The two of them stood facing each other. A storm came over Koreiko’s face, with whitecaps flashing in his eyes. The grand strategist was smiling warmly, showing white teeth that looked like kernels of corn. The adversaries moved closer to the desk lamp, and their giant shadows stretched across the wall.

  “I already told you a thousand times that I never had any millions—and I still don’t,” said Koreiko, trying not to blow up. “Do you get it? Do you? Now get lost! I’m going to report you.”

  “You’re not going to report me to anybody,” said Ostap knowingly. “Of course I can leave, but the moment I step out onto this Lesser Tangential Street of yours, you’ll run after me, crying, licking my janissary’s heels, and begging me to come back.”

  “And what makes you think that I’ll beg?”

  “You will. And that’s how it should be, as a friend of mine, Basilius Lokhankin, often said. That’s exactly what the Great Homespun Truth is all about. Here it is!”

  The grand strategist put the folder on the table, started to undo its shoelaces slowly, and continued:

  “But first let’s make a deal. No dramatic moves! You are not to strangle me, not to throw yourself out the window, and, most importantly, not to die of a stroke. If you decide to experience an untimely death, you’ll make me look foolish. The fruits of my lengthy and honest labors would be lost. So let’s have a little chat. It is now clear that you don’t love me. I’ll never get from you what Nick Osten-Backen got from Inga Zajonc, my childhood friend. So I’m not going to sigh in vain or grab you by the waist. Consider the serenade over. The sounds of balalaikas, psalteries, and gilded harps have all died out. I come to you as one legal entity to another. Here’s a file weighing six to eight pounds. It’s for sale, and it costs a million rubles, that same million you refuse to give me as a gift because you’re so stingy. So buy it!”

  Koreiko leaned over the table and read:

  “’The Case of Alexander Ivanovich Koreiko. Opened June 25, 1930. Closed August 10, 1930.”

  “Hogwash!” he said, shrugging. “I’m sick of this. First you bring me this money, now you come up with some kind of case. It’s ridiculous.”

  “So are you buying or not?” the grand strategist persisted. “The price is very reasonable. For a pound of riveting information on the subject of underground commerce, I only charge 150,000.”

  “What information?” asked Koreiko rudely, reaching for the folder.

  “The most fascinating kind,” replied Ostap, politely pushing Koreiko’s hand away. “The information about your second, real life, which is strikingly different from your first life, the one at the Hercules, the forty-six ruble one. Everybody knows about your first life. From ten to four, you support the Soviet regime. As for your second life, from four to ten—I alone know about it. Do you get the picture?”

  Koreiko didn’t answer. Shadows lay in his drill-sergeant jowls.

  “No,” said the grand strategist emphatically, “unlike everyone else, you came from a cow, not an ape. You think very slowly, like a hoofed mammal. I’m telling you this as an expert on horns and hoofs. So once again: I think you have roughly seven or eight million. The file costs a million. If you don’t buy it, I’ll take it elsewhere immediately. They won’t give me anything for it, nothing. But you will be finished. I’m telling you th
is as one legal entity to another. I will remain the same poor poet and polygamist I was before, but, to my dying days, I will cherish the thought that I saved society from one greedy bastard.”

  “Show me the file,” said Koreiko pensively.

  “Take it easy,” said Ostap, opening the folder, “I am commanding the parade. You’ve already received a telegram to that effect. Well, the parade has started, and I am commanding it, as you may have noticed.”

  Alexander Ivanovich glanced at the first page, saw a picture of himself, smiled unpleasantly, and said:

  “I still don’t understand what it is that you want from me. Well, why don’t I take a look, out of sheer curiosity.”

  “I, too, was driven by curiosity,” declared the grand strategist. “All right, let’s get started, strictly out of curiosity—an innocent motive, after all. Gentlemen of the jury, Alexander Ivanovich Koreiko was born . . . Well, we can skip the happy childhood. In those innocent times, little Sasha wasn’t yet involved in commercial plunder. Then comes rose-colored adolescence. Let’s skip another page here. Now comes youth, the beginning of life. Here, it may be worth pausing for a moment. Out of sheer curiosity, of course. On page six . . .”

  Ostap turned page six over and read out loud from pages seven, eight, and on through page twelve.

  “And so, gentlemen of the jury, you have just learned of my client’s first major operations, among them: selling government-owned medications during the famine and the typhoid epidemic, as well as working in the field of food supplies, which led to the disappearance of a food train that was headed for the famine-stricken Volga region. Gentlemen of the jury, all these facts are of interest to us strictly out of curiosity.”

  Ostap spoke in the awful manner of a pre-revolutionary attorney who would catch on to a certain word and then never let it go, using and abusing it throughout a long ten-day trial.

  “The arrival of my client in Moscow in 1922 may also arouse curiosity . . .”

  The face of Alexander Ivanovich remained neutral, but his hands felt around the table aimlessly, as if he was blind.

  “Gentlemen of the jury, allow me to ask you a question. Out of sheer curiosity, of course. How much profit can two ordinary barrels of tap water possibly bring? Twenty rubles? Three rubles? Eight kopecks? No, gentlemen! They brought Alexander Ivanovich exactly four hundred thousand golden rubles. Of course, the two barrels carried the colorful name of Revenge, the Industrial Chemicals Cooperative. But let us continue. Pages 42 to 53. The location: a small gullible republic. Blue skies, camels, oases, and dandies in gilded skullcaps. My client helps build a power plant. I repeat: helps. Look at his face, gentlemen of the jury!”

  Getting carried away, Ostap turned toward Alexander Ivanovich and pointed a finger at him. But he wasn’t able to trace a dramatic curve with his hand, the way pre-revolutionary attorneys used to. The defendant suddenly grabbed his arm in midair and started to twist it silently. At the same time, the defendant made an attempt to grab his attorney by the throat. For about thirty seconds, the opponents wrestled each other, shaking under the strain. Ostap’s shirt came unbuttoned, and his tattoo showed through the opening. Napoleon was still holding a beer mug, but he was very red, as if he had already had a few too many.

  “Stop putting pressure on my psyche!” said Ostap, shoving Koreiko away and catching his breath. “I can’t work like this.”

  “Bastard! Bastard!” whispered Alexander Ivanovich. “What a bastard!”

  He sat down on the floor, wincing from the pain inflicted upon him by the janissaries’ descendant.

  “Our deliberations continue!” said Ostap, as if nothing had happened. “Gentlemen of the jury, you can now see that the ice has broken. The defendant tried to kill me. Out of childish curiosity, of course. He just wanted to know what’s inside me. I’m happy to satisfy his curiosity. Inside, there’s a noble and very healthy heart, excellent lungs, and a liver without any signs of stones. Please enter all this in the record. And now—let our games continue, as the editor of a certain humor magazine would say, opening a new meeting and looking sternly at his staff.”

  Alexander Ivanovich hated the games. The business trip from which Ostap returned with wine and lamb on his breath left substantial traces in the file. There was a copy of the sentence, which was delivered in absentia, blueprints of the charitable printing plant, excerpts from the profits and losses account, as well as pictures of the electric gorge and of the kings of the silver screen.

  “And finally, gentlemen of the jury, the third phase in the activities of my belligerent client: a humble desk job at the Hercules for the sake of society, and intensified efforts in underground commerce for his own sake. Let us note, strictly out of curiosity, some illegal dealings in hard currency, furs, stones, and other compact staples. Let us also point out a series of self-exploding stock companies with flowery, cooperative-sounding names like the Intensivnik, the Toiling Cedar, the Sawing Aid, and the Southern Lumberjack. It wasn’t Mr. Funt, the prisoner of private capital, who was in charge of all this, it was my friend the defendant.”

  With that, the grand strategist once again pointed at Koreiko, tracing at last the long-planned dramatic curve with his hand.

  Then Ostap pompously requested the imaginary court’s permission to ask the defendant a few questions, waited for a minute in order to stay in character, and inquired:

  “Did the defendant have any out-of-office dealings with a certain Berlaga from the Hercules? He didn’t. Right! A certain Sardinevich, also from the Hercules? He didn’t either. Perfect! A certain Polykhaev?”

  The millionaire clerk kept silent.

  “I have no further questions. Whew! I’m tired and I’m hungry. Tell me, Alexander Ivanovich, you wouldn’t happen to have a cold meat patty in your breast pocket? No? Unimaginable poverty, especially in view of the amount you wheedled out of the kindly Hercules, with Polykhaev’s assistance. Here’s Polykhaev’s testimony in his own hand. He was the only Herculean who knew what was hiding behind that forty-six-ruble-a-month clerk. Yet even he didn’t fully understand what you are. But I do. Yes, gentlemen of the jury, my client has sinned. This has been proven. But I am nevertheless asking for leniency, albeit on the condition that the defendant purchases this folder from me. I am finished.”

  Alexander Ivanovich came to his senses toward the end of the grand strategist’s speech. He put his hands in the pockets of his summer pants and went over to the window. The young day, adorned with streetcar bells, was already filling the city with sounds.

  Volunteers from the Society for Defense and Aviation were marching past the front yard, holding their rifles every which way, as if they were carrying rakes. Pigeons strolled on the zinc-plated roof ledge, tapping with their red-twig feet and flapping their wings constantly. Alexander Ivanovich, who had trained himself to be frugal, turned off the desk lamp and asked:

  “So it was you who sent me all those stupid telegrams?”

  “Yes,” said Ostap. “‘Load oranges barrels brothers Karamazov.’ Pretty good, isn’t it?”

  “A bit silly.”

  “And how about that crazy bum?” asked Ostap, sensing that the parade was going well. “Wasn’t he good?”

  “A childish prank! Ditto for the book about millionaires. When you showed up as a cop from Kiev, I knew right away you were a small-time crook. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Otherwise, there’s no way in hell you would’ve found me.”

  “Yes, you were wrong. No one is wise all the time, which is what Inga Zajonc, the Polish beauty, said a month after she married Nick Osten-Backen, my childhood friend.”

  “Well, I can understand the mugging, but the weights! Why did you steal my weights?”

  “What weights? I didn’t take any weights.”

  “You’re just too ashamed to admit it. All in all, you did a lot of stupid things.”

  “Perhaps,” allowed Ostap. “I’m no angel. I have my shortcomings. Well, I enjoyed chatting with you. My mulattos are waiting. Are you ready w
ith the money?”

  “Oh yes, the money!” said Koreiko. “There’s a bit of a problem with the money. It’s a nice folder, no question about it, wouldn’t be a bad purchase. But as you were calculating my profits, you completely disregarded my expenses and direct losses. A million is a preposterous amount.”

  “Goodbye,” said Ostap coldly, “please make sure you stay home for the next thirty minutes. A lovely carriage with bars on its windows will come pick you up.”

  “That’s no way to do business,” said Koreiko with a haggler’s smile.

  “Perhaps,” sighed Ostap, “but I’m not a financier, you know. I’m a freelance artist and a wandering philosopher.”

  “So what makes you think you should get the money? I worked for it, and you . . .”

  “I didn’t just labor for it. I even incurred some losses. After talking to Berlaga, Sardinevich, and Polykhaev, I lost my faith in humanity. Isn’t faith in humanity worth a million rubles?”

  “Yes, it certainly is,” assured Alexander Ivanovich.

  “So, shall we go to the vaults?” asked Ostap. “Where do you keep your cash, incidentally? Not in a savings bank, I imagine?”

  “Let’s go!” said Koreiko. “You’ll see.”

  “Is it far?” fussed Ostap. “I can get a car.”

  But the millionaire refused the car and stated that it wasn’t far at all, and that they should avoid any unnecessary pomp. He graciously let Bender go first and went out after him, picking up a small newspaper-wrapped package from the table. Going down the stairs, Ostap hummed: “Under the sun of Argentina . . .”

  CHAPTER 23

  THE DRIVER’S HEART

  Outside, Ostap took Alexander Ivanovich by the arm, and the two strategists started walking briskly toward the train station.

  “You’re better than I expected,” Bender said amicably. “Good for you. One should part with money easily, without complaining.”

  “What’s a million if it goes to a good man?” replied the clerk, listening for something.