by Ilya Ilf
“We no longer have this question,” said Palamidov.
“How is that possible—no Jewish question?” asked Hiram, surprised.
“No. None whatsoever.”
Mr. Berman became agitated. All his life, he’d been writing about the Jewish question for his paper, and it would have been hard for him to let it go.
“But there are Jews in Russia, aren’t there?” he asked cautiously.
“Correct,” replied Palamidov.
“Then there’s the Jewish question, right?”
“Wrong. Jews—yes, question—no.”
The appearance of Ukhudshansky eased the tension in the corridor somewhat. He was headed for the washroom with a towel around his neck.
“Talking?” he said, swaying on his feet—the train was moving fast. “Well, well . . .”
As he was coming back, clean and refreshed, with drops of water on his temples, the entire corridor was already engaged in an argument. The Soviet journalists came out of their compartments, a few factory workers showed up from the next car, and two more foreigners arrived—an Italian journalist with a Fascist Party badge that depicted a lictor bundle with an axe, and a German professor of Oriental studies, who was invited to the festivities by the Soviet Society for Cultural Ties With Foreign Countries. The subject of the argument ranged very broadly—from building socialism in the Soviet Union to men’s berets, which were then coming into style in the West. And no matter what the issue was, opinions clashed.
“Arguing? Well, well . . .” said Ukhudshansky, retreating into his compartment.
One could only make out individual cries above the general commotion.
“In that case,” Mr. Heinrich was saying, grabbing Suvorov, a worker from the Putilov Plant, by his tunic, “what have you been yammering about for the last thirteen years? Why aren’t you making the world revolution you talk about so much? Because you can’t? So stop yammering!”
“We’re not going to make revolution in your countries! You’ll do it yourselves.”
“Me? I’m not going to make any revolution.”
“So they’ll make it without you, and they won’t even ask for your opinion.”
Mr. Hiram Berman was leaning against a stamped-leather partition and watched the argument without much interest. The Jewish question had fallen through some crack in the discussion shortly after it began, and any other subject left him cold. A satirist, whose byline was Gargantua, left a group where the German professor was praising the advantages of civil marriage. He approached the pensive Hiram and started explaining something to him with gusto. Hiram tried to listen, but he soon realized that he couldn’t make out anything at all. Meanwhile Gargantua, who kept on adjusting Hiram’s clothing—straightening his necktie, removing a speck of something, doing up a button and then undoing it again—talked quite loudly and, on the face of it, even clearly. But he had some undefinable speech impediment that turned all his words into gibberish. The problem was aggravated by the fact that Gargantua was quite a talker, and that he demanded confirmation after every sentence.
“Isn’t that right?” he would say, moving his head as if he was about to peck some bird feed with his large, well-shaped nose. “Isn’t it true?”
These were the only words one could make out from Gargantua’s speech. The rest fused into a wonderfully persuasive rumble. At first, Mr. Berman agreed out of courtesy, but he soon fled. People always agreed with Gargantua, so he considered himself capable of proving anything to anybody.
“See,” he told Palamidov, “you just don’t know how to talk to people. And I convinced him. I just proved to him that we no longer have the Jewish question at all, and he agreed with me. Isn’t that right?”
Palamidov hadn’t understood a word, so he nodded in agreement and turned his attention to the exchange between the German Orientalist and the car’s attendant. The attendant had long been trying to insert himself into the conversation, but only now did he finally find somebody who was in his league and available. First he inquired about his counterpart’s position and full name, then he put his broom aside and slowly began:
“You may not know it, Citizen Professor, but there is this animal in Central Asia, it’s called a camel. It has two humps on its back. And I knew this railroad man, Comrade Bossyuk, a baggage handler, you’ve probably heard about him. So he climbs onto this camel, gets between its humps, and hits the camel with a whip. But the camel was mean, so it started squeezing him with its humps—almost squeezed him to death. Bossyuk managed to jump off, though. He was a tough guy, as you’ve probably heard. So now the camel spits all over his uniform, and it had just come back from the laundry . . .”
The evening’s conversation was dying down. The clash of the two worlds ended peacefully. Somehow it hadn’t ended in a fight. The two systems—capitalist and socialist—would have to coexist, willy-nilly, on the special train for about a month. Mr. Heinrich, an enemy of world revolution, told an ancient travel joke, and then everybody headed for the dining car. People walked from car to car over shuddering metal plates and squinted against the piercing wind. In the dining car, however, the passengers split into separate groups. During supper, the two sides sized each other up quietly. The outside world, as represented by the correspondents of the major newspapers and news agencies from around the globe, paid vodka its proper due and glanced with awful politeness at the factory workers in tall rough boots and at the Soviet journalists who showed up dressed casually in slippers and without their neckties.
All kinds of people sat in the dining car: Mr. Berman, a provincial from New York; a young Canadian woman, who had arrived from across the ocean just an hour before the train had departed, which was why she was still looking around in bewilderment as she hesitated over a cutlet on a long metal plate; a Japanese diplomat and another, younger Japanese man; Mr. Heinrich, whose yellow eyes were smirking for some reason; a young British diplomat with the slim waist of a tennis player; the German Orientalist who had listened so patiently to the car attendant’s story about an odd animal with two humps on its back; an American economist; a Czechoslovakian; a Pole; four American correspondents, including a pastor who wrote for the YMCA paper; a blue-blooded American woman from a distinguished family with a Dutch surname, who was famous because a year earlier she had missed a train in the resort town of Mineralnye Vody and, for publicity, had hidden in the station’s diner for a while, which caused an uproar in the American press. For three days, the headlines screamed “Girl from Old Family in Clutches of Wild Mountain Men” and “Ransom or Death.” There were many others as well. Some were simply hostile to anything Soviet, others were hoping to solve the mystery of the Asian soul overnight, and still others were honestly trying to understand what was going on in the land of the Soviets after all.
The Soviet side dined rowdily at its own tables. The workers brought food in paper bags and went all out for glasses of tea with lemon in stainless-steel holders. The journalists, who were better off, ordered schnitzels, while Lavoisian, in a sudden bout of Slavonic pride, decided not to lose face in front of the foreigners and demanded sautéed kidneys. He didn’t touch the kidneys, he had hated them since childhood, but he bristled with pride all the same and glanced defiantly at the foreign visitors. There were all kinds of people on the Soviet side as well. There was a worker from Sormovo, who had been selected for the trip at a general staff meeting; a construction worker from the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, who ten years earlier lay in the trenches opposite Baron Wrangel’s troops—in the same field where his factory was later built; and a textile worker from Serpukhov, who was interested in the Eastern Line because it was going to speed up the deliveries of cotton to the textile-producing regions.
There were metal workers from Leningrad, miners from the Donets Coal Basin, a mechanic from Ukraine, and the head of the delegation in a white Russian-style shirt with a large Bukhara Star that he had received for fighting against the Emir. The diplomat with the waistline of a tennis player would have been in
credulous to learn that Gargantua, the short, mild-mannered versifier, had been taken prisoner by various armed Ukrainian bands on as many as eight separate occasions, and once was even executed by Makhno’s anarchists. He really didn’t like to talk about it—his memories of climbing out of the mass grave with a bullet hole in his shoulder were most unpleasant.
The YMCA man would probably have gasped in horror were he to discover that the lighthearted Palamidov had chaired a Red Army tribunal; or that Lavoisian, while on assignment from his newspaper, had dressed as a woman and infiltrated a gathering of women Baptists, then wrote a lengthy anti-religious dispatch about it; or that none of the Soviets present had baptized their kids; or that as many as four of these fiends were writers.
All kinds of people sat in the dining car.
On the second day of the journey, one prediction the plush-nosed prophet had made came true. As the train was rumbling and whooping on the bridge across the Volga at Syzran, the passengers struck up the song about Razin the Volga legend in their annoying city voices. While they were at it, they tried not to look each other in the eye. The foreigners in the next car, who were unclear on the appropriate repertoire for the occasion, gave a rousing rendition of the Korobochka, with an equally peculiar chorus of “Ekh yukhnem!” No one sent a postcard to the plush-nosed man—they were too ashamed. Only Ukhudshansky held himself in check. He didn’t sing with the rest of them. While the train was overwhelmed by an orgy of singing, he alone kept quiet, clenched his teeth, and pretended to read A Complete Geographical Description of Our Land. His punishment was severe. He succumbed to a musical paroxysm late at night, way past Samara. Around midnight, when everyone else was already asleep, a shaky voice came from Ukhudshansky’s compartment: “There’s a cliff on the Volga, all covered with moss . . .” The journey had gotten the better of him in the end.
At an even later hour, when even Ukhudshansky was finally asleep, the door at the end of the car opened, momentarily admitting the unfettered thunder of the wheels, and Ostap Bender appeared in the empty, glittering corridor. He hesitated for a second, then sleepily waved off his doubts and opened the door to the first compartment he saw. Gargantua, Ukhudshansky, and the photojournalist Menshov were all asleep under the blue nightlight. The fourth bunk, an upper, was empty. The grand strategist didn’t hesitate. His legs weak from an arduous odyssey, irreparable losses, and two hours of standing on the car’s outside steps, Bender climbed onto the bunk. Then, he had a miraculous vision: a milky-white boiled chicken, its legs pointing up like the shafts of a horse cart, sat on the small table by the window.
“I’m following in the dubious footsteps of Panikovsky,” whispered Ostap.
With that, he lifted the chicken to his bunk and ate it whole, without bread or salt. He stuck the bones under the firm linen bolster and, inhaling the inimitable smell of railroad paint, fell happily asleep to the sound of creaking partitions.
CHAPTER 27
“MAY A CAPITALIST
LACKEY COME IN?”
In a dream that night, Ostap saw Zosya’s sad shadowy face, and then Panikovsky appeared. The violator of the pact wore a coachman’s hat with a feather in it, wrung his hands, and called out, “Bender! Bender! You don’t know what a chicken is! It’s a heavenly, juicy bird, the chicken!” Ostap was confused and irritated. “What chicken? I thought your specialty was goose!” But Panikovsky kept insisting, “Chicken, chicken, chicken!”
Then he woke up. Bender saw the ceiling, which curved like the top of an antique chest right above his head. The luggage net swayed in front of the grand strategist’s nose. Bright sunlight filled the car. The hot air of the Orenburg plains blew in through the half-open window.
“Chicken!” a voice called out. “What happened to my chicken? There’s nobody in here except us! Right? Now wait a minute, whose feet are these?”
Ostap covered his eyes with his hand and he immediately had the unpleasant thought that this was exactly what Panikovsky used to do when he sensed trouble. He lowered his hand and saw two heads next to his bunk.
“Sleeping? Well, well . . . ,” said the first head.
“Tell me, my friend,” said the second head good-naturedly, “you ate my chicken, right?”
Menshov the photojournalist was sitting on a lower bunk; both of his arms were up to their elbows in a black changing bag. He was reloading film.
“Yes,” replied Ostap cautiously, “I ate it.”
“Thank you so much!” exclaimed Gargantua, to Ostap’s surprise. “I had no idea what to do with it. It’s so hot in here, it could have gone bad, right? Would’ve been a shame to throw it away, right?”
“Of course,” said Ostap warily, “I’m glad I could do this small favor for you.”
“Which newspaper are you with?” asked the photojournalist, who, with a faint smile on his face, was still feeling around in the bag. “You didn’t get on in Moscow, did you?”
“I see you’re a photographer,” replied Ostap evasively. “I once knew a small-town photographer who’d only open cans of food under the red light. He was afraid they’d spoil otherwise.”
Menshov laughed. He appreciated the new passenger’s joke. And so for the rest of the morning, nobody asked the grand strategist any more tricky questions. Bender jumped off the bunk, stroked his stubble-covered cheeks—which made him look like an outlaw—and gave the kindly Gargantua an inquiring glance. The satirist opened his suitcase, took out a shaving kit and, handing it over to Ostap, started to explain something, all the while pecking at invisible bird feed and constantly demanding confirmation for what he was saying.
While Ostap shaved and washed, Menshov, decked out with camera straps, was spreading the word about a new small-town journalist in his compartment who caught up with the train by air the night before and polished off Gargantua’s chicken. The chicken story caused quite a stir. Almost all of them had brought food from home: shortbread cookies, meat patties, loaves of bread, and hard-boiled eggs. Nobody ate any of it. They preferred to go to the dining car.
And so the moment Bender finished his morning ritual, a portly writer in a soft casual jacket appeared in Bender’s compartment. He put twelve eggs on the table in front of Ostap and said:
“Eat up. These are eggs. As long as eggs exist, somebody has to eat them.”
Then the writer looked out the window, observed the warty-looking plain, and remarked sadly:
“The desert is so uninspiring! But it does exist, and one has to take that into account.”
He was a philosopher. After Ostap thanked him, he shook his head and went back to his own compartment to finish writing a story. A disciplined man, he had resolved to write one story every day, no matter what. He stuck to his resolution with the diligence of a valedictorian. He likely drew inspiration from the thought that as long as paper exists, somebody has to write on it.
Other passengers followed the philosopher’s lead. Navrotsky brought a jar of stuffed peppers. Lavoisian brought meat patties with shreds of newspaper clinging to them. Sapegin brought pickled herring and shortbread, and Dnestrov offered some apple jam. Others showed up, too, but Ostap was no longer granting favors.
“I can’t, my friends, I can’t,” he kept saying, “you do one person a favor, and the rest come begging.”
Ostap liked the journalists very much. He would have felt touched by their generosity, but he was so full that he was completely unable to experience any emotion whatsoever. He struggled back to his bunk and then slept for most of the day.
It was the third day of the journey. The passengers were desperate for something to happen. The Eastern Line was still far away, and nothing noteworthy was going on. The journalists from Moscow, exhausted from forced idleness, eyed each other suspiciously.
“Has anybody wired anything interesting to their office?”
Finally, Lavoisian couldn’t take it anymore and sent the following telegram:
“Passed orenburg stop smoke billows locomotive stack stop mood cheerful comma delegat
e cars talk eastern line only stop wire instructions aral sea lavoisian”
Word of the telegram got around, and a line formed at the telegraph counter in the next station. Everybody sent brief reports regarding the cheerful mood on board and the smoke billowing from the locomotive’s stack.
A window of opportunity opened for the foreigners right after Orenburg, when they spotted their first camel, their first yurt, and their first Kazakh in a pointy fur hat with a whip in his hand. At the small station where the train was delayed briefly, at least twenty cameras were aimed straight at a camel’s snout. This was the beginning of things exotic: ships of the desert, freedom-loving sons of the plains, and other romantic characters.
The blue-blooded American woman emerged from the train wearing dark, round sunglasses and holding a green parasol to protect herself from the sun. A gray-haired American pointed his Eyemo movie camera at her and filmed her in this outfit for a long time. First she stood next to the camel, then in front of it, and finally squeezed herself in between its humps, which had been so warmly described by the attendant. Short and nasty Heinrich weaved through the crowd saying:
“Keep a close eye on her, or she’ll accidentally get stuck here, and then there will be another sensation in the American press: ‘Fearless woman journalist in the clutches of deranged camel.’”
The Japanese diplomat stood right in front of a Kazakh. They eyed each other silently. They had absolutely identical, slightly flattened faces, bristly mustaches, smooth yellow skin, and eyes that were narrow and a bit puffy. They would have passed for twins, if the Kazakh hadn’t been wearing a rough sheepskin coat with a cloth sash, while the Japanese wore a gray London-tailored suit; and if the Kazakh hadn’t learned to read just the year before, while the Japanese had graduated from universities in Tokyo and Paris twenty years earlier. The diplomat took a step back, looked through his camera’s viewfinder, and pressed the button. The Kazakh laughed, climbed onto his small ungroomed horse, and rode off into the plains.