by Ilya Ilf
Fifteen thousand horsemen kept moving back and forth, fording a cold stream dozens of times, until finally they settled behind the bleachers in cavalry formation. But some of them, too proud and shy, continued to hang around on the tops of the hills throughout the day, never venturing closer to the howling and roaring rally.
The builders of the Eastern Line celebrated their victory with gusto, shouting, playing music, and tossing their favorites and heroes into the air. The rails flew onto the track with a ringing sound. They were put into place in a minute, and the workmen, who had driven millions of spikes, ceded the honor of delivering the final blows to their superiors.
“In compliance with the laws of hospitality,” said the barman, who was sitting on the roof of the dining car with the cooks.
An engineer with the Order of the Red Banner on his chest pushed his large felt hat to the back of his head, grabbed a mallet with a long handle, grimaced, and hit the ground. The spike drivers, some of whom were so strong they could drive a spike with a single blow, greeted his efforts with friendly laughter. Soon, however, soft strikes on the ground began to alternate with clanging noises, indicating that, on occasion, the mallet was actually making contact with the spike. Next to take up the mallet was the regional Party Secretary, followed by members of the government, the directors of the North and the South, and several guests. It took a mere thirty minutes for the director of the Line to drive the final spike.
Then the speeches began. Each was delivered twice—in Kazakh and in Russian.
“Comrades,” said a distinguished spike driver slowly, trying not to look at the Order of the Red Banner that had just been pinned to his shirt, “what’s done is done, and there’s no need to talk about it. But our entire track-laying team has a request for the government: please send us to a new project immediately. We work together very well now, and we’ve been laying down three miles of track each day in recent months. We pledge to maintain this rate and even exceed it! And long live our world revolution! I also wanted to say, comrades, that too many ties were defective, we had to reject them. This needs to be fixed.”
The journalists could no longer complain about the lack of things to report. They jotted down the speeches. They grabbed the engineers by their waists and demanded information and precise figures. It became hot, dusty, and businesslike. The rally in the desert started smoking like a huge bonfire. After scribbling a dozen lines, Lavoisian would rush to the telegraph, send an urgent cable, and start scribbling again. Ukhudshansky wasn’t taking any notes or sending any cables. He had the Celebratory Kit in his pocket, which would make it possible to compose an excellent Asian-flavored dispatch in five minutes. Ukhudshansky’s future was secure. That’s why he had more sarcasm than usual in his voice as he said to his colleagues:
“Working hard? Well, well . . .”
Suddenly Leo Shirtikov and Ian Benchikov, the ones who had missed the train in Moscow, appeared among the Soviet journalists. They flew in on a plane that had landed early in the morning, six miles from Roaring Springs, on a natural airfield located behind a distant hill. The two journalist brothers made it from there on foot. Having barely said hello, Leo Shirtikov and Ian Benchikov pulled notebooks out of their pockets and started making up for lost time.
The foreigners’ cameras clicked incessantly. Throats went dry from the speeches and the sun. People glanced more and more frequently at the cold stream and the dining hall, where the striped shadows of the canopy lay on endless banquet tables that were crowded with green bottles of mineral water. Next to it were kiosks, where the revelers ran from time to time to have a drink. Koreiko was dying of thirst, but he continued to suffer under his childish tricorne. The grand strategist teased him from afar, raising a bottle of lemonade and the yellow folder with shoelace straps into the air.
They placed a little Young Pioneer girl on the table next to a water jug and a microphone.
“Well, little girl,” said the director of the Line cheerfully, “why don’t you tell us what you think about the Eastern Line?”
It wouldn’t have been surprising if the girl suddenly stamped her foot and began: “Comrades! Allow me to summarize the achievements which . . . ,” and so forth, because we have exemplary children who can make two-hour speeches with forlorn diligence. But the Young Pioneer from Roaring Springs took the bull by the horns with her little hands and belted out, in a funny, high-pitched voice:
“Long live the Five-Year Plan!”
Palamidov approached a foreign professor of economics and asked him for an interview.
“I am very impressed,” said the professor. “All the construction that I have seen in the Soviet Union is on a grand scale. I have no doubt that the Five-Year Plan will be successfully completed. I’ll be writing about it.”
And, indeed, six months later he published a book in which he argued for two hundred pages that the Five-Year Plan would be completed as scheduled, and that the USSR would become one of the world’s foremost industrial powers. On page 201, however, the professor explained that this was exactly why the Soviet Union should be crushed as soon as possible, before it brought about the death of capitalist society. The professor proved far more businesslike than the gassy Heinrich.
A white plane took off from behind a hill. The Kazakhs scattered in every direction. The plane’s large shadow leaped over the reviewing stand and, folding up and down, rushed off into the desert. Shouting and raising their whips, the Kazakhs gave chase. The cameramen perked up and began winding their contraptions. The scene became even more dusty and hectic. The rally was over.
“Listen, comrades,” said Palamidov, walking briskly to the diner with his fellow scribes, “let us agree that nobody will write anything banal.”
“Banality is awful!” echoed Lavoisian. “It’s disgusting.”
And so, on their way to the dining hall, the journalists unanimously agreed not to write about Uzun Kulak, which means “the Long Ear,” which in turn means “the desert telegraph.” Anybody who traveled to the East had already written about it, to the point that no one could bear reading about it anymore. No stories entitled “The Legend of Lake Issyk Kul.” Enough Oriental-flavored banality!
Koreiko was the only one left sitting in the empty bleachers, surrounded by cigarette butts, torn-up notes, and sand that had blown in from the desert. He couldn’t bring himself to come down.
“Come here, Alexander Ivanovich!” beckoned Ostap. “Have mercy on yourself! A sip of cold mineral water! What? You don’t want one? Fine, then at least have mercy on me! I’m hungry! I’m not going anywhere, you know that! Maybe you want me to sing Schubert’s Serenade to you? Come to me, my dear friend? I’ll do it!”
But Koreiko didn’t take him up on the offer. Even without the serenade, he knew that he’d have to part with the money this time. Slouching forward and lingering on each step, he started coming down.
“A tricorne sits low on your forehead?” Ostap continued playfully. “And where’s the gray travel coat? You won’t believe how much I missed you. Well, hello, hello! How about a kiss? Or shall we go straight to the vaults, to the Leichtweiss’ Cave where you keep your tugriks?”
“Dinner first,” said Koreiko, whose tongue was desiccated from thirst and scratched like a file.
“Fine, let’s have dinner. But none of your funny business this time. Actually, you haven’t got a chance. My boys are positioned behind the hills,” Ostap lied, just in case.
The thought of the boys dampened his spirits a bit.
Dinner for the builders and the guests was served in the Eurasian style. The Kazakhs settled on the rugs, sitting cross-legged, the way everyone does in the East but only tailors do in the West. The Kazakhs ate pilaf from small white bowls and washed it down with lemonade. The Europeans sat down at the tables.
The builders of the Eastern Line had endured many hardships, troubles, and worries during the two years of construction. But putting together a formal dinner in the middle of the desert was no small feat eith
er. The Asian and European menus were discussed at length. And the issue of alcoholic beverages had also been contentious. For a few days, the construction headquarters resembled the United States just before a presidential election. The dries and the wets locked their horns in battle. Finally, the party committee spoke out against alcohol. Then another issue came to the fore: foreigners, diplomats, people from Moscow! How do you feed them in style? After all, they’re used to various culinary excesses in their Londons and New Yorks. So they brought an old expert named Ivan Osipovich from Tashkent. Long ago, he was a maître d’ at the famous Martyanych’s in Moscow, and was living out his days as director of a state-owned diner near the Chicken Bazaar.
“So please, Ivan Osipovich,” they told him at the headquarters, “we’re counting on you. There will be foreigners, you know. It has to be special somehow—chic, if you will.”
“Trust me,” mumbled the old man with tears in his eyes, “the people I have fed! The Prince of Württemberg himself! You don’t even have to pay me anything. How can I not feed people properly one last time? I’ll feed them—and then I’ll die!”
Ivan Osipovich grew extremely anxious. When he was told that alcohol was ultimately rejected, he almost fell ill, but he didn’t have the heart to leave Europe without a dinner. The budget he submitted was substantially reduced, so the old man mumbled “I’ll feed them and I’ll die” to himself and added sixty rubles from his own savings. On the day of the dinner, Ivan Osipovich showed up wearing a tailcoat that smelled of mothballs. While the rally was going on, he was very nervous and kept glancing at the sun and scolding the nomads, who, out of simple curiosity, were trying to ride into the dining hall. The old man brandished a napkin at them and rattled:
“Go away, Genghis, can’t you see what’s going on? Oh my God! The sauce piquante will curdle! And the consommé with poached eggs isn’t ready yet!”
The hors d’oeuvres were already on the table; everything was arranged beautifully and with great skill. Starched napkins stood up vertically, butter, shaped into rosebuds, rested in ice on small plates, pickled herrings held hoops of onions and olives in their teeth. There were flowers, and even the rye bread looked quite presentable.
The guests finally arrived at the table. They were covered with dust, red from the heat, and ravenous. None of them resembled the Prince of Württemberg. Ivan Osipovich suddenly became uneasy.
“I’m hoping the guests will forgive me” he pleaded, “just five more minutes, and then we can start! Please do me a personal favor—don’t touch anything on the table before dinner, so we can do it properly.”
He ducked into the kitchen for a moment, prancing ceremoniously, but when he returned with some extra-special fish on a platter, he witnessed a horrifying scene of plunder. It was so unlike the elaborate dining ceremony Ivan Osipovich had envisioned that it made him stop in his tracks. The Englishman with the waist of a tennis player was blithely eating bread and butter, while Heinrich was bending over the table, pulling an olive out of a herring’s mouth with his fingers. Everything at the table was upside down. The guests were taking the edge off their hunger, chatting merrily.
“What’s all this?” asked the old man, stricken.
“Pops, where’s the soup?” shouted Heinrich with his mouth full.
Ivan Osipovich didn’t say anything. He just waved them off with his napkin and walked away. He left all further chores to his subordinates.
When the two strategists finally elbowed their way to the table, a fat man with a pendulous banana-shaped nose was making the first toast. To Ostap’s great surprise, it was the engineer Talmudovsky.
“Yes! We are heroes!” exclaimed Talmudovsky, holding up a glass of mineral water. “Hail to us, the builders of the Eastern Line! But think of our working conditions, citizens! Take the salaries, for example. Yes, they’re better than in other places, no argument there, but the cultural amenities! No theater! It’s a desert! No indoor facilities! No, I can’t work like this!”
“Who is he?” the builders were asking each other. “Do you know him?”
Meanwhile, Talmudovsky had already pulled his suitcases out from under the table.
“I don’t give a damn about the contract!” he yelled, heading for the exit. “What? Return the moving allowance? Sue me! Yes, sue me!”
And even as he was bumping his suitcases into the diners, he shouted “Sue me!” furiously, instead of “I’m sorry.”
Late that night, he was already cruising in a motorized section car, having joined the linemen who had some business at the southern end of the Line. Talmudovsky sat on his luggage, explaining to the workers the reasons why an honest professional couldn’t possibly work in this hellhole. Ivan Osipovich, the maître d’, rode home with them. In his grief, he hadn’t even taken off his tailcoat. He was very drunk.
“Barbarians!” he yelled, sticking his head out into the harsh wind and waving his fist in the direction of Roaring Springs. “The whole arrangement went to the bloody dogs! I fed Anton Pavlovich himself, the Prince of Württemberg! Now I’ll go home and die! Then they’ll miss Ivan Osipovich. Go, they’ll say, set up a banquet table for eighty-four people, to the bloody dogs. But nobody will know how! Ivan Osipovich Trikartov is gone! Passed away! Departed for a better place, where there is neither pain, nor sorrow, nor sighing, but life everlasting . . . Ete-e-rnal mem-m-ory!”
And as the old man officiated at his own funeral, the tails of his coat fluttered in the wind like pennants.
Ostap didn’t even let Koreiko finish his dessert before dragging him away from the table to settle their account. The two strategists climbed the small stepladder into the freight car that served as the office of the Northern Site and contained the timekeeper’s folding canvas cot. They locked the door behind them.
After dinner, when the special passengers were resting and gathering their strength for the evening’s program, Gargantua the satirist caught the two journalist brothers, who were engaging in unauthorized activities. Leo Shirtikov and Ian Benchikov were carrying two sheets of paper to the telegraph. One sheet contained a short dispatch:
“Urgent moscow desert telegraph dash uzun kulak quote long ear comma carried camps news of joining shirtikov.”
The second sheet was covered with writing. Here’s what it said:
THE LEGEND OF LAKE ISSYK KUL
An old Karakalpak named Ukhum Bukheev told me this legend, steeped in ancient lore. Two hundred thousand four hundred and eighty-five moons ago, the young Sumburun, a khan’s wife, light-footed as a jeiran (mountain sheep), fell deeply in love with a young guardsman named Ai-Bulak. The elderly khan was devastated when he learned that his beloved wife had been unfaithful. The old man prayed for twelve moons; then, with tears in his eyes, he had his beautiful wife sealed up in a wooden cask, attached to it a bullion of pure gold weighing seven jasasyn (39 lbs), and threw the precious cargo into a mountain lake. That’s how the lake received its name—Issyk Kul, which means “Beautiful women aren’t very faithful . . .”
—Ian Benchikov-Sarmatsky (The Piston)
“Isn’t that right?” Gargantua was asking, holding up the papers he had wrestled from the brothers. “Isn’t it true?”
“It’s an outrage!” said Palamidov. “How dare you write a legend after everything we talked about? So you think Issyk Kul translates as ‘Beautiful women aren’t very faithful?’ Really? Are you sure your phony Karakalpak wasn’t pulling your leg? Are you sure it doesn’t mean ‘Don’t throw young beauties into the lake, instead throw the gullible journalists who can’t resist the noxious spell of exoticism?’”
The writer in the casual jacket blushed. His notebook already contained Uzun Kulak, along with two flowery legends that were rich with Oriental flavor.
“I don’t see any crime in it,” he said. “As long as Uzun Kulak exists, shouldn’t someone be writing about it?”
“But it’s been done a thousand times!” said Lavoisian.
“But Uzun Kulak exists,” sighed the writer,
“and one has to take that into account.”
CHAPTER 30
ALEXANDER BIN IVANOVICH
The hot and dark freight car was filled with thick, stagnant air that smelled of leather and feet, like an old shoe. Koreiko turned on a conductor’s lantern and crawled under the bed. Ostap sat on an empty macaroni crate and watched him pensively. Both strategists were exhausted by their struggle and approached the event that Koreiko had greatly feared and that Bender had been waiting for his whole life with the indifference of government officials. It almost felt like it was taking place in a cooperative store: the customer asks for a hat, the salesperson lazily throws a fuzzy mud-colored cap on the counter. He couldn’t care less if the customer buys the cap or not. Actually, the customer himself doesn’t seem to be particularly engaged, and asks “Do you have anything else?” only because he’s expected to. And usually this elicits the response: “Take this one, or else it’ll be gone, too.” And both of them look at each other with complete lack of interest. Koreiko rummaged under the bed for a long time, apparently opening the suitcase and going through it blindly.
“Hey, there, on the schooner!” Ostap called out, tired. “Good thing you don’t smoke. It would be torture to ask a cheapskate like you for a cigarette. You’d never offer the whole box, fearing that they might take more than one. You’d fiddle in your pocket forever, you’d struggle to open the box, and then you’d drag out a lousy, bent cigarette. You’re a bad man. Why is it so hard to pull out the whole suitcase?”
“Not a chance!” growled Koreiko, suffocating under the bed.
He didn’t like being compared to a stingy smoker. At that very moment, he was fishing thick stacks of money out of his suitcase. The nickel-plated lock was scraping his arms, which were bare up to the elbows. To make things easier, he lay on his back and worked like a miner at a coal face. Husks and other plant debris, along with some kind of powder and grain bristles, were spilling out of the straw mattress right into the millionaire’s eyes.