by Ilya Ilf
But at the very next stop the romantic story took an unexpected twist. Behind the station one could see bright red oil drums and a new yellow building made of wood. A long row of heavy machinery—their tracks pressed deep into the ground—stood in front of it. A young woman wearing black mechanic’s pants and felt boots was standing on a stack of railroad ties. The Soviet journalists took their turn. They slowly advanced toward the woman, holding their cameras at eye level. Menshov crept forward at the head of the pack. He held an aluminum film cartridge in his teeth and made a series of rushes, like a infantryman in an attacking line. But while the camel posed in front of the cameras as if he had a solid claim to celebrity, the girl was a lot more modest. She suffered quietly through a handful of shots, then blushed and left. The photographers then turned their attention to the machinery. As luck would have it, a small caravan of camels was passing near the horizon—directly behind the machines. Together they formed a perfect shot, which could be captioned “The old and the new” or “Who wins?”
Ostap woke up just before sundown. The train continued across the desert. Lavoisian wandered up and down the corridor, trying to talk his colleagues into putting out an onboard newsletter. He even came up with the name: Full Steam Ahead.
“What kind of a name is that?” said Ostap. “I once saw a fire brigade newsletter called Between Two Fires. Now that really nailed it.”
“You’re a real wordsmith!” gushed Lavoisian. “Why don’t you just admit that you’re too lazy to write for the voice of the onboard community?”
The grand strategist didn’t deny that he was a real wordsmith. If pressed, he was fully prepared to say exactly which publication he represented on this train, namely, the Chernomorsk Gazette. But nobody pressed him, since it was a special train and therefore didn’t have any stern conductors with their nickel-plated ticket punches. Lavoisian and his typewriter were already installed in the workers’ car, where his idea caused considerable excitement. The old man from the Trekhgorka Factory was already working on a piece that called for a meeting to discuss industrial practices and for a literary reading on board. Others were searching for a cartoonist, and Navrotsky was charged with distributing a questionnaire that sought to determine which of the factories represented on the train was the most successful at meeting its quotas.
In the evening, a large group of newspapermen gathered in the compartment shared by Gargantua, Menshov, Ukhudshansky and Bender. They were packed in, six men to a bunk. Feet and heads dangled from above. The cool night air refreshed the journalists who had suffered from the heat all day, and the rhythmic sound of the wheels on the tracks, which had gone on for three days, created a convivial atmosphere. They talked of the Eastern Line, of their editors and office managers, of funny typos, and together teased Ukhudshansky about his lack of journalistic drive. Ukhudshansky would raise his head and reply condescendingly:
“Gabbing? Well, well . . .”
At the height of the fun, Mr. Heinrich appeared.
“May a capitalist lackey come in?” he asked cheerfully.
Heinrich settled down in the lap of the portly writer who grunted and thought to himself stoically: “If I have a lap, somebody has to sit in it. And so he does.”
“So how goes the building of socialism?” asked the representative of the liberal newspaper cheekily.
It just so happened that all the foreigners on board were addressed courteously as Mister, Herr, or Signor So-and-so, and only the correspondent of the liberal newspaper was simply called Heinrich. Nobody took him seriously; they all thought he was a blowhard. So Palamidov replied to his question:
“Heinrich! You’re wasting your time! Now you’re going to start trashing the Soviet system again, which is boring and uninformative. We can hear all that from any nasty old woman waiting in line.”
“That’s not it at all,” said Heinrich, “I’d like to tell you the biblical story of Adam and Eve. May I?”
“Listen, Heinrich, how come you speak Russian so well?” asked Sapegin.
“I learned it in Odessa in 1918, when I was occupying that delightful city with the army of General von Beltz. I was a lieutenant back then. You probably heard of von Beltz?”
“Didn’t just hear,” replied Palamidov, “I saw your von Beltz laying in his gilded office at the palace of the commander of the Odessa Military District —with a bullet through his head. He shot himself when he heard there was a revolution in your country, Heinrich.”
At the word “revolution,” Mr. Heinrich smiled politely and said:
“The General was true to his oath.”
“And why didn’t you shoot yourself, Heinrich?” asked someone from the top bunk. “What happened to your oath?”
“Well, do you want to hear the biblical story or not?” asked the representative of the liberal newspaper testily.
They kept bugging him with questions about the oath for a while, and only when he got really upset and started to leave did they agree to listen to his story.
THE STORY OF ADAM AND EVE
AS TOLD BY MR. HEINRICH
“Well, gentlemen, there was this young man in Moscow, a member of the Young Communist League. His name was Adam. And there was this young woman, Eve, also in Moscow and also a member of the League. One day these two young people went for a walk in that Moscow paradise, the Park of Culture and Rest. I don’t know what they were talking about. Our young people normally talk about love. But your Adam and Eve were Marxists, so maybe they talked about world revolution. Be that as it may, it just so happened that, after a stroll, they sat down on the grass under a tree in the former Neskuchny Gardens. I don’t know what kind of a tree it was. Maybe it was the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. But Marxists, as you know, don’t care for mysticism. So they most likely thought it was an ordinary mountain ash. While they were talking, Eve broke a small branch off the tree and presented it to Adam. And then a man appeared. Lacking imagination, the young Marxists took him for a groundskeeper. Most likely, however, it was an angel with a flaming sword. Griping and grumbling, the angel escorted Adam and Eve to the park office, in order to file a report on the damage they had inflicted on garden property. This insignificant and mundane incident distracted the young people from their discussion of high politics. Adam suddenly noticed the lovely woman in front of him, and Eve saw the strong man in front of her. And so they fell in love with each other. Three years later, they already had two sons.”
At this point, Mr. Heinrich suddenly stopped and began tucking his soft striped cuffs into his sleeves.
“So what’s the point?” asked Lavoisian.
“The point is,” answered Heinrich emphatically, “that one son was named Cain, the other Abel, and that in due course Cain would kill Abel, Abraham would beget Isaac, Isaac would beget Jacob, and the whole story would start anew, and neither Marxism nor anything else will ever be able to change that. Everything will repeat itself. There will be a flood, there will be Noah with his three sons, and Ham will insult Noah. There will be the Tower of Babel, gentlemen, which will never be completed. And on and on and on. There won’t be anything new in the world. So don’t get too excited about your new life.”
Heinrich leaned back with satisfaction, squashing the kind, portly writer with his narrow, spiny body.
“All this would have been great,” remarked Palamidov, “had it been supported by evidence. But you can’t prove anything. You just wish it were true. There’s no point in trying to stop you from believing in miracles. Go on believing and praying.”
“Can you prove that it will be different?” exclaimed the representative of the liberal newspaper.
“Yes,” replied Palamidov, “we can. You will see proof of it the day after tomorrow at the joining of the Eastern Line.”
“Here you go again,” grumbled Heinrich. “Construction! Factories! The Five-Year Plan! Don’t wave your steel in my face. It’s the spirit that counts! Everything will repeat itself! There will be the Thirty Years War, and the Hundred Yea
rs War, and those with the audacity to claim that the Earth is round will be burned at the stake again. They’ll fool poor Jacob again, make him work seven years for nothing and then slip him the ugly, near-sighted Leah for a wife instead of the full-breasted Rachel. Everything, everything will repeat itself! And the Wandering Jew will continue to wander the earth . . .”
“The Wandering Jew will never wander again!” said the grand strategist suddenly, looking at the others with a playful smile.
“Are you saying you can prove this in two days as well?” protested Heinrich.
“I can do it right now,” said Ostap graciously. “If present company permits me, I will tell you what happened to the so-called Wandering Jew.”
The company gladly granted their permission. Everyone settled in to listen to the new passenger’s story, and even Ukhudshansky muttered, “Telling stories? Well, well . . .”
And so the grand strategist began.
THE STORY OF THE WANDERING JEW
AS TOLD BY OSTAP BENDER
“I’m not going to recount the long and boring story of the Wandering Hebrew. Suffice it to say that this vulgar old man walked the earth for nearly two thousand years. He didn’t register at the hotels, and he annoyed citizens with complaints about the exorbitant train fares that forced him to travel on foot. He was spotted on numerous occasions. He was present at the historic meeting at which Columbus ultimately failed to account for the funds that had been advanced to him to discover America. As a very young man, he witnessed the burning of Rome. For about a century and a half he lived in India, astounding the Yogis with his longevity and disagreeable character. In other words, the old man would have had a lot of interesting stories to tell, if he had written his memoirs at the end of each century. Alas, the Wandering Jew was illiterate, and on top of that, he had a memory like a sieve.
Not so long ago, the old man was residing in the wonderful city of Rio de Janeiro, sipping refreshments, watching ocean liners, and strolling under the palm trees in white pants. He had purchased the pants second-hand from a knight crusader in Palestine some eight hundred years earlier, but they still looked almost new. Suddenly the old man grew restless. He developed an urge to go to the Dnieper River in Russia. He had seen them all: the Rhine, the Ganges, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Niger, the Volga, but not the Dnieper. He decided he just had to take a peek at that mighty river as well.
And so right smack in the middle of 1919, the Wandering Jew crossed the Romanian border illegally in his crusader pants. Needless to say, he had eight pairs of silk stockings and a bottle of Parisian perfume on his stomach—a lady in Kishinev had asked him to take the stuff to her relatives in Kiev. In those tumultuous times, smuggling contraband on your stomach was known as “wearing bandages.” The old man mastered this trick in Kishinev in no time. After making the delivery, the Wandering Jew was standing on the bank of the Dnieper, his unkempt greenish beard hanging down. He was approached by a man with yellow and blue stripes on his pants and the epaulets of Petlyura’s Ukrainian army on his shoulders.
“Jew?” asked the man sternly.
“Jew,” replied the old man.
“Let’s go,” said the man with the stripes. And he took him to his battalion commander.
“Got a Jew,” he reported, pushing the old man forward with his knee.
“Jew?” asked the battalion commander with mock surprise.
“Jew,” replied the wanderer.
“Then take him to the firing squad,” said the commander with a pleasant smile.
“But I am supposed to be eternal!” cried the old man.
He had yearned for death for two thousand years, but at that moment he desperately wanted to live.
“Shut up, you dirty kike!” yelled the forelocked commander cheerfully. “Finish him off, boys!”
And the eternal wanderer was no more.
“So that’s the story,” concluded Ostap.
“I suppose, Mr. Heinrich, as a former lieutenant in the Austrian army, you are aware of the ways of your friends from Petlyura’s forces,” remarked Palamidov.
Heinrich got up and left without a word. At first everyone thought he was offended, but the next day they found out that the correspondent of the liberal newspaper had gone straight from the Soviets’ car to Mr. Hiram Berman and sold him the story of the Wandering Jew for forty dollars. Hiram had wired Bender’s story to his editor at the next station.
CHAPTER 28
A SWELTERING WAVE
OF INSPIRATION
On the morning of the fourth day, the train turned east. Passing along the snowy frontal ranges of the Himalayas, rumbling over man-made structures—bridges, culverts for the spring runoff, and the like—as well as casting its quivering shadow over mountain streams, the special train whizzed by a small town that was hidden under poplars and went on twisting and turning alongside a tall, snow-covered mountain. Unable to make it straight to the pass, the special rolled up to the mountain on the right, then on the left, turned back, huffed and puffed, returned again, rubbed its dusty-green sides against the mountain, wiggled this way and that—and finally broke free. Having worked its wheels hard, the train came to a spectacular halt at the last station before the beginning of the Eastern Line.
Wreathed by fantastic sunlight, a steam engine the color of new grass stood against the background of aluminum-colored mountains. It was a gift from the station’s personnel to the new rail line.
The situation with regard to gifts for anniversaries and special occasions has been problematic in this country for a fairly long time. A common gift was either a miniature steam engine, no bigger than a cat, or just the opposite—a chisel that was larger than a telegraph pole. This torturous transformation, of small objects into large ones and vice versa, cost a lot of time and money. The useless tiny steam engines would gather dust on top of office cabinets, while the giant chisel, delivered by two horse carts, would rust pointlessly and stupidly in the courtyard of the honored organization.
But the OV-class locomotive, whose complete overhaul was finished well ahead of schedule, was of perfectly normal dimensions, and the chisel that had been undoubtedly used in its overhaul was apparently also of a regular size. The handsome gift was immediately harnessed to the train, and the small ovechka—the little sheep—which is how the OV-class locomotives are commonly referred to inside the right-of-way, went rolling toward Mountain Station, the southern terminus of the new line, bearing a banner that read, ONWARD TO THE JOINING!
Exactly two years earlier, the first blueish-black rail, manufactured by a plant in the Urals, had been laid here. Glowing ribbons of rail had been continuously flying off the plant’s rolling mill ever since. The Line needed more and more of them. The track-laying trains that were heading toward each other had entered into a competition, on top of everything else, and were moving at such a pace that their suppliers found themselves in a bind.
The evening at Mountain Station, lit by pink and green fireworks, was so wonderful that the old-timers, had there been any, would definitely have observed that they couldn’t remember another evening like this. Luckily, Mountain Station had no old-timers. As recently as 1928, not only were there no old-timers, but there were no houses, no station buildings, no railroad tracks, and no wooden triumphal arch with banners and flags flapping over it, near which the special train had stopped.
While a rally was going on under the kerosene pressure lamps, and the entire population gathered around the podium, the photojournalist Menshov was circling the arch with two cameras, a tripod, and a magnesium flash lamp. The photographer thought the arch was perfect and would make a great shot. But the train, which stood some twenty paces away from the arch, would come out too small. If, however, he were to take the shot from the train’s side, then the arch would be too small. In cases like this, Mohammed would normally go to the mountain, fully aware that the mountain wouldn’t come to him. But Menshov did what seemed easiest to him. He asked the engineer to pull the train under the arch, in t
he same matter-of-fact manner a streetcar passenger might use to ask someone to move over a bit. In addition, he requested that some thick white smoke should billow from the locomotive’s stack. He also demanded that the engineer look fearlessly into the distance, shielding his eyes with his hand. The crew was unsure of what to make of these demands, but they assumed that they were perfectly normal and granted his wishes. The train screeched up to the arch, the requested smoke billowed from the stack, and the engineer stuck his head out the window and made a wild grimace. Then Menshov set off a flash of magnesium so powerful that the ground trembled and dogs for miles and miles around started barking. Finished with the shot, the photographer curtly thanked the train crew and promptly retired to his compartment.
Late that night, the special train was already traveling along the Eastern Line. As the passengers were getting into bed, the photojournalist Menshov stepped out into the corridor and said plaintively to no one in particular:
“What do you know! Turns out I was shooting this goddamn arch on an empty cassette! Nothing came out.”