by Ilya Ilf
A new blow awaited them on Lemon Lane.
“Where’s the house?” exclaimed Ostap. “There was a house here just last night, wasn’t there?”
But there was no house, and there was no Rookery. There was only a claims adjuster, who was treading on the pile of charred beams. He found an empty kerosene can in the back yard, sniffed it, and shook his head doubtfully.
“And now what?” asked Balaganov, smiling nervously.
The grand strategist didn’t answer. He was floored by the loss of his bag. Gone was the magic sack that contained the Indian turban, the High Priest poster, the doctor’s coat, the stethoscope . . . It had everything!
“There,” Ostap finally said. “Fate plays with a man, and the man plays a trumpet.”
They wandered away, pale, disappointed, and numb with grief. When people bumped into them, they didn’t even snarl back. Panikovsky, who raised his shoulders during the fiasco at the bank, never lowered them again. Balaganov fiddled with his red locks and sighed dejectedly. Bender walked behind the rest, looking down and humming absentmindedly: “The days of merriment are gone, my little soldier, aim your gun.” In this same condition, they finally reached the hostel. The yellow Antelope was visible in the back, under a canopy. Kozlevich was sitting on the tavern’s porch. He was sucking in hot tea from a saucer, blowing the air out blissfully. His face was terracotta red. He was in seventh heaven.
“Adam!” said the grand strategist, stopping in front of the driver. “We lost everything. We’re destitute, Adam! Take us in! We’re sinking.”
Kozlevich got up. The captain, humiliated and miserable, stood in front of him, bare-headed. Tears glistened in Adam’s pale Polish eyes. He went down the steps and hugged each of the Antelopeans one by one.
“The taxi is free!” he said, swallowing his tears of pity. “Please get in.”
“But we may have to go far, really far,” said Ostap, “maybe to the edge of the earth, maybe even farther. Think about it!”
“Anywhere you want!” said the faithful Kozlevich. “The taxi is free!”
Panikovsky wept, covering his face with his small fists and whispering: “What a heart! I give you my word! What a heart!”
CHAPTER 24
THE WEATHER WAS
RIGHT FOR LOVE
Everything the grand strategist did in the days following the move to the hostel elicited a highly negative response from Panikovsky.
“Bender has lost his mind!” he told Balaganov. “He’ll drive us all into the ground.”
And indeed, instead of trying to stretch the last thirty-four rubles for as long as possible by applying it strictly to the purchase of provisions, Ostap went to a flower shop and spent thirty-five rubles on a stirring bouquet of roses that was as big as a flower bed. He took the missing ruble from Balaganov. He put a note in the flowers that said: “Can you hear my big heart beating?” Balaganov was instructed to take the flowers to Zosya Sinitsky.
“What are you doing?” asked Balaganov, gesturing with the bouquet. “Why does it have to be so fancy?”
“It has to, Shura, it just has to,” replied Ostap. “What can you do! I have a big heart. As big as a calf’s. Plus, this isn’t real money anyway. We need an idea.”
With that, Ostap got into the Antelope and asked Kozlevich to take him out of town.
“I have to ponder over everything that’s happened in solitude,” he explained, “as well as make some necessary projections for the future.”
All day long the faithful Adam drove the grand strategist along white coastal roads, past vacation homes and health resorts, where vacationers shuffled in their open-backed shoes, hit croquet balls with mallets, and jumped in front of volleyball nets. Telegraph wires hummed like cellos overhead. Summer renters dragged purple eggplants and melons in cloth bags. Young men with handkerchiefs on their hair, wet from a swim, boldly looked women in the eyes and offered their compliments, the full set of which was known to any male in Chernomorsk under the age of twenty-five. If two vacationing women walked together, the young locals would loudly say behind their backs: “The one on the side is so pretty!” And they would laugh their heads off. They thought it was funny that the women couldn’t figure out which one of them was being complimented. If a woman was walking alone, the jokers would stop, as if struck by lightning, and make kissing sounds with their lips, mimicking lovelorn yearning. The young woman would blush and run to the other side of the street, dropping purple eggplants, which caused the Romeos to laugh hysterically.
Ostap, deep in thought, was leaning back on the Antelope’s hard cushions. He couldn’t get money from Polykhaev or Sardinevich—they were away on vacation. The insane Berlaga didn’t count—one couldn’t expect to get much from him. Meanwhile, Ostap’s plans, and his big heart, demanded that he stay on in Chernomorsk. At this point, he would have been hard-pressed to say for exactly how long.
Hearing a familiar, otherwordly voice, Ostap glanced at the sidewalk. A middle-aged couple was strolling arm-in-arm behind a row of poplars. The spouses were apparently headed for the beach. Lokhankin trudged behind them. He was carrying a ladies’ parasol and a basket with a thermos and a beach blanket sticking out of it.
“Barbara,” he nagged, “listen, Barbara!”
“What do you want, you pest?” asked Mrs. Ptiburdukov without even turning her head.
“I want to have you, Barbara, to hold you!”
“How about that bastard!” remarked Ptiburdukov, without turning his head either.
And the odd family disappeared in the dust of the Antelope.
When the dust settled, Bender saw a large glass pavilion set against the background of the sea and a formal flower garden.
Plaster lions with dirty faces sat at the base of a wide stairwell. The pavilion exuded the unnerving scent of pear essence. Ostap sniffed the air and asked Kozlevich to stop the car. He got out and continued to inhale the invigorating smell through his nostrils.
“Why didn’t I think of this right away!” he muttered, pacing in front of the entrance.
He trained his eyes on the sign that said CHERNOMORSK FILM STUDIO NO. 1; stroked the stairwell lion on its warm mane; muttered, “Golconda”; and hurried back to the hostel.
He spent the whole night sitting at the window sill and writing by the light of a kerosene lamp. The breeze that came through the window shuffled through the finished pages. The view wasn’t particularly attractive. The tactful moon lit a set that was far from palatial. The hostel was breathing, shifting, and wheezing in its sleep. Horses, invisible in the dark corners, communicated with one another by tapping. Small-time hustlers slept in horse carts, on top of their paltry wares. A horse that had gotten loose wandered around the courtyard, carefully stepping over shafts, dragging its halter behind it, and sticking its head into the carts in search of barley. It came up to Ostap’s window as well, put its head on the window sill, and looked at the writer forlornly.
“Off you go, horse,” said the grand strategist, “this is really none of your concern.”
Just before dawn, when the hostel started waking up, and a young boy with a bucket of water was already walking among the carts, calling out in a high-pitched voice, “Water for your horses!,” Ostap finished his opus, took a blank sheet out of Koreiko’s file, and wrote down the title:
THE NECK
A full-length film
Screenplay by O. Bender
The Chernomorsk Film Studio No. 1 was in that rare state of chaos that only exists at horse markets, and only when the whole market is trying to catch a thief.
There was a guard sitting inside the doorway. He demanded passes from everyone who walked in, but if somebody didn’t have a pass, he waved them through anyway. People wearing dark-blue berets bumped into people wearing workman’s overalls, flew up the numerous stairs, and then immediately rushed down the very same stairs. They traced a circle in the hallway, stopped for a second, looked ahead, dumbfounded, and then raced back up as fast as if somebody was lashi
ng them from behind with a wet rope. Whizzing by were assistants, consultants, experts, administrators, directors with their lieutenants, lighting people, film editors, middle-aged screenwriters, managers of commas, and keepers of the great cast-iron seal.
At first, Ostap moved about the studio at his usual pace, but he soon realized that he was failing to become part of the world that whirled around him. Nobody would answer his queries; nobody would even stop for him.
“One must adapt to the ways of the adversary,” said Ostap.
He started running slowly and immediately discovered that it worked. He even exchanged a few words with somebody’s lieutenant. Then the grand strategist began running as fast as he could and soon noticed that he had managed to join the crowd at last. He was running neck in neck with the chief script advisor.
“A script!” shouted Ostap.
“What kind?” asked the script advisor, maintaining his racing trot.
“A good one!” replied Ostap, overtaking him by a half-length.
“I’m asking you, what kind? Silent or sound?”
“Silent.”
Gracefully raising his legs, which were clad in long thick socks, the script advisor overtook Ostap on the curve and shouted:
“Not interested!”
“What do you mean—not interested?” asked the grand strategist, losing the beat and starting to gallop.
“We’re not! Silent pictures are over. Talk to the sound people.”
They stopped for a brief moment, gave each other a startled look, and ran in opposite directions. Five minutes later, Bender was again racing in the right company, waving his manuscript, this time between two trotting consultants.
“A script!” offered Ostap, breathing heavily.
The consultants, trotting in unison, turned to Ostap:
“What kind of script?”
“With sound.”
“Not interested,” replied the consultants, speeding up.
The grand strategist lost his pace again and broke into an unseemly gallop.
“What do you mean—not interested?”
“We’re not, and that’s that. Talking pictures haven’t arrived yet.”
After thirty minutes of diligent trotting, Bender grasped the delicate state of affairs at Chernomorsk Film Studio No. 1: silent pictures were no longer being made, due to the advent of the era of talking pictures, while talking pictures were not yet being made either, due to unresolved administrative issues related to ending the era of silent pictures.
At the peak of the workday, when the assistants, consultants, experts, administrators, directors, their lieutenants, lighting people, scriptwriters, and keepers of the great cast-iron seal were all running at speeds worthy of the once-famous racehorse named Brawny, a rumor started spreading that somewhere, in some unspecified room, there was a man who was urgently developing talkies. Ostap barged into a large office at full speed and stopped, struck by the silence. A short man with a Bedouin beard and a gold pince-nez on a string sat sideways at his desk. Bending down, he was hard at work—pulling a shoe off his foot.
“How do you do, Comrade!” said the grand strategist loudly.
The man didn’t answer. He took the shoe off and started shaking sand out of it.
“How do you do!” repeated Ostap. “I brought you a script!”
The man with a Bedouin beard slowly put the shoe back on and started tying the laces silently. Having done that, he turned to his papers, closed one eye, and began scribbling in miniscule letters.
“Why aren’t you talking to me?” yelled Bender so loudly that the phone which sat on the movie boss’s desk tinkled.
Only then did the movie boss raise his head, glance at Ostap, and say:
“Please speak louder. I can’t hear you.”
“Write notes to him,” suggested a consultant in a colorful vest who happened to race by. “He’s deaf.”
Ostap sat down at the same desk and wrote on a piece of paper:
“Are you in talking pictures?”
“Yes,” answered the deaf man.
“I brought a script for a sound film. It’s called The Neck, a folk tragedy in six parts,” wrote Ostap hastily.
The deaf man looked at the note through his gold-rimmed pince-nez and said:
“Excellent! We’ll put you to work immediately. We’re looking for fresh new people.”
“Glad to help. How about an advance?” wrote Bender.
“The Neck is exactly what we need!” said the deaf man. “Wait here, I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere, it’ll take just one minute.”
The deaf man grabbed the script and slipped out of the room.
“We’ll put you in the sound group!” he shouted, disappearing behind the door. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Ostap sat in the office for an hour and a half, but the deaf man never came back. Only when Ostap stepped out into the hallway, and rejoined the race, did he learn that the deaf man had left in a car a long time ago and wasn’t coming back that day. Actually, he wasn’t ever coming back, because he was unexpectedly transferred to the town of Uman to raise the cultural awareness of horse cart drivers. The worst part was that the deaf man took the script of The Neck with him. The grand strategist extricated himself from the ever-accelerating whirl of the crowd and crashed onto a bench, stupefied, leaning on the shoulder of the doorman, who was already sitting there.
“Take me, for example!” the doorman said suddenly, apparently referring to a thought that had long been bothering him. “Terentyev, the assistant director, told me to grow a beard. Said I’d play Nebuchadnezzar, or Balthazar, in some film or other, can’t remember the name. So I went ahead and grew this beard. Look at it! A prophet’s beard! And now what am I supposed to do with it? The assistant director says there’ll be no more silent pictures, and as for the talking pictures, he says, I won’t do, my voice is unpleasant. So here I sit with this goddamn beard, like some kind of a goat! I feel funny in it, but how can I shave it off? So I just live with it.”
“Is anybody filming here?” asked Bender, slowly coming back to his senses.
“What filming, are you kidding?” replied the bearded doorman weightily. “Last year, they shot a silent picture about ancient Rome. They’re still in court over it, on account of criminal wrongdoing.”
“Then why are they all running like that?” inquired the grand strategist, pointing at the stairs.
“Not all of them are running,” said the doorman. “Comrade Suprugov, for example: he’s not running. He’s very businesslike. I keep thinking I should go ask him about the beard: is it going to be extra pay or a separate invoice . . .”
Hearing the word “invoice,” Ostap went to see Suprugov. The doorman was telling the truth. Suprugov wasn’t jumping up and down the stairs, he wasn’t wearing an Alpine beret, nor foreign-made golf breeches that looked like they belonged to a tsarist police lieutenant. Suprugov offered a pleasant respite to one’s eyes.
He was very abrupt with the grand strategist.
“I’m busy,” he said, sounding like a peacock, “I can give you no more than two minutes of my time.”
“That will do,” began Ostap. “My script, The Neck . . .”
“Get to the point,” said Suprugov.
“My script, The Neck . . .”
“Can’t you just tell me what you want?”
“The Neck . . .”
“More to the point! How much is due to you?”
“Some deaf man . . .”
“Comrade! If you don’t tell me right now how much is due to you, I’m going to ask you to leave. I’m very busy.”
“Nine hundred rubles,” mumbled the grand strategist.
“Three hundred!” said Suprugov firmly. “Take your money and leave. Keep in mind that you stole an extra ninety seconds from me.”
Suprugov wrote out a note to Accounting in a bold hand, handed it to Ostap, and reached for the phone.
Stepping out of the Accounting office, Ostap stuffed th
e money into his pocket and said:
“Nebuchadnezzar was right. There’s only one businesslike person here—and that’s Suprugov, God help us.”
Meanwhile, the running on the stairs, the whirling, the screaming, and the racket at Chernomorsk Film Studio No. 1 reached its peak. The lieutenants were snarling. Assistant directors were leading a black goat, marveling at how photogenic it was. Consultants, experts, and keepers of the cast-iron seal all bumped into one another and guffawed hoarsely. A woman messenger with a broom whisked by. The grand strategist even thought for a moment that he saw an assistant in light-blue pants soar above the crowd, skirt the chandelier, and settle on a ledge.
At that moment, the clock in the hallway struck.
“Bonnng!” went the clock.
Shrieks and screams shook the glass pavilion. Assistants, consultants, experts, and film editors were all streaming down the stairs. There was a wild scramble at the exit.
“Bonnng! Bonnng!” continued the clock.
Silence began emerging from the corners. The keepers of the cast-iron seal, the managers of commas, the administrators, and the lieutenants were all gone. The messenger’s broom flashed for the last time.
“Bonnng!” the clock struck for the fourth time.
The pavilion was already empty. And only the assistant in light-blue pants, whose jacket pocket had gotten snagged on the bronze handle, fluttered in the doorway, squealed pitifully, and stamped the marble floor with his little hoofs.
The workday was over.
The crowing of a rooster came from the fishing village by the sea.
After the Antelopeans’ coffers were replenished with cinematic cash, the captain’s standing, which had been somewhat shaky ever since Koreiko had escaped, was restored. Panikovsky received a small allowance to buy kefir and a promise of golden dentures. For Balaganov, Ostap bought a jacket and a leather wallet, which was squeaky like a new saddle. Even though the wallet was empty, Shura kept taking it out and looking inside. Kozlevich received fifty rubles for fuel.