The Twelve Chairs (9 page)

MOSCOW
BUN ARTEL
The sign depicted  a  young man wearing  a  tie and ankle-length French
trousers.  Ift  one  dislocated hand he held  the fabulous  cornucopia, from
which poured an avalanche of ochre-coloured  buns; whenever necessary, these
were passed off as Moscow rolls. The young man had a sexy smile on his face.
On  the  other  side,  the  Fastpack  packing  office  announced  itself  to
prospective clients by a black board with round gold lettering.
Despite the appreciable difference in the signs and also in the capital
possessed by  the two dissimilar enterprises, they both engaged in  the same
business,  namely, speculation in  all types of  fabrics: coarse wool,  fine
wool, cotton, and, whenever  silk of good  colour and design came their way,
silk as well.
Passing through the tunnel-like gateway and turning right into the yard
with  its  cement well, you could see two doorways without  porches,  giving
straight on to the angular flagstones of the yard. A dulled brass plate with
a name engraved in script was fixed to the right-hand door:

The left-hand door was fitted with a piece of whitish tin:

This was also only for show.
Inside the fashions-and-millinery workroom there was no esparterie,  no
trimmings, no headless dummies  with soldierly bearing, nor any large  heads
for elegant ladies' hats. Instead, the  three-room apartment was occupied by
an immaculately white parrot in red underpants. The parrot was riddled  with
fleas, but could not complain since it was unable to  talk. For days  on end
it used to crack sunflower seeds and spit  the husks through the bars of its
tall, circular  cage on to  the carpet. It only  needed a concertina and new
squeaky Wellingtons to resemble a peasant on a  spree.  Dark-brown patterned
curtains  flapped  at  the  window.  Dark-brown  hues  predominated  in  the
apartment. Above  the piano  was a reproduction of Boecklin's  "Isle  of the
Dead" in  a fancy frame of dark-green oak, covered with glass. One corner of
the glass had  been broken off some time before, and the flies  had added so
many finishing touches to the  picture at this  bared section that it merged
completely with the frame. What was going on in that section of the "Isle of
the Dead" was quite impossible to say.
The owner herself was  sitting in  the  bedroom  and laying  out cards,
resting  her  arms  on  an  octagonal  table  covered  by a  dirty Richelieu
tablecloth. In front of her sat Widow Gritsatsuyev, in a fluffy shawl.
"I should warn  you, young lady, that  I  don't  take  less than  fifty
kopeks per session,' said the fortune-teller.
The  widow, whose  anxiousness  to find a new husband  knew no  bounds,
agreed to pay the price.
"But  predict the  future as well, please,"  she said plaintively. "You
will be  represented by the  Queen of  Clubs." "I  was  always  the Queen of
Hearts," objected the widow. The fortune-teller consented  apathetically and
began manipulating  the  cards. A rough  estimation of the  widow's lot  was
ready in a  few minutes. Both  major and minor difficulties awaited her, but
near to her heart was  the King of  Clubs, who  had befriended the Queen  of
Diamonds.
A fair copy of the prediction was made from the widow's hand. The lines
of her hand were clean, powerful, and faultless. Her life line stretched  so
far that  it  ended  up at her pulse and,  if it told the  truth, the  widow
should  have lived till doomsday. The  head line and line of brilliancy gave
reason to believe that she would  give up  her  grocery business and present
mankind with masterpieces in the realm  of art, science, and social studies.
Her Mounts  of Venus  resembled Manchurian volcanoes and revealed incredible
reserves of love and affection. The fortune-teller explained all this to the
widow, using  the  words and  phrases current among graphologists, palmists,
and horse-traders.
"Thank you, madame," said the widow. "Now I  know who the King of Clubs
is. And I know who the Queen of  Diamonds is, too. But  what about the King?
Does that  mean  marriage?" "It does, young lady." The widow went home  in a
dream,  while  the  fortune-teller  threw the cards into a  drawer,  yawned,
displaying the mouth  of a fifty-year-old woman, and went into the  kitchen.
There  she busied herself  with the meal that was warming on a Graetz stove;
wiping her hands on  her apron like a cook, she took a  chipped-enamel  pail
and went into the yard to fetch water.
She  walked  across  the  yard, dragging  her  flat feet. Her  drooping
breasts wobbled lazily inside her dyed  blouse. Her  head  was  crowned with
greying hair. She  was an  old woman, she  was  dirty, she regarded everyone
with suspicion, and she had a sweet tooth. If Ippolit Matveyevich  had  seen
her  now,  he would never  have recognized Elena Bour, his former  mistress,
about whom the clerk of the court had once said in verse that "her lips were
inviting and she was so spritely!" At the well, Mrs. Bour was greeted by her
neighbour,  Victor Mikhailovich  Polesov, the mechanic-intellectual, who was
collecting water in an empty petrol tin. Polesov had the face of an operatic
Mephistopheles who is carefully rubbed with burnt cork just before  he  goes
on stage.
As  soon as they had exchanged greetings, the neighbours  got down to a
discussion of the affair concerning the whole of Stargorod.
"What times we live in!" said Polesov ironically. "Yesterday I went all
over the town but  couldn't find any three-eighths-inch dies anywhere. There
were none available. And to think-they're going to open a tramline!"
Elena Stanislavovna, who had as much idea about three-eighths-inch dies
as a student of the  Leonardo da Vinci ballet school, who  thinks that cream
comes from cream tarts, expressed her sympathy.
"The  shops we have now! Nothing but long queues.  And the names of the
shops are so dreadful. Stargiko!"
"But I'll tell you something  else, Elena Stanislavovna. They have four
General Electric engines left. And they just about work, although the bodies
are junk. The windows  haven't any shock absorbers. I've  seen  them myself.
The  whole lot rattles. Horrible! And the  other  engines are from  Kharkov.
Made entirely by the State Non-Ferrous Metallurgy Industry."
The mechanic stopped talking in irritation. His black face glistened in
the  sun. The whites of his eyes  were yellowish.  Among the artisans owning
cars in  Stargorod, of whom  there were many,  Victor Polesov  was  the most
gauche, and most frequently made an ass  of himself. The reason for this was
his  over-ebullient nature.  He  was  an  ebullient  idler. He  was  forever
effervescing. In his own workshop in the  second yard of no. 7 Pereleshinsky
Street,  he was never  to be  found. Extinguished  portable  furnaces  stood
deserted  in  the  middle of  his  stone shed, the  corners  of  which  were
cluttered up with punctured tyres, torn Triangle tyre covers, rusty padlocks
(so enormous you could have locked town gates with them), fuel cans with the
names  "Indian" and "Wanderer",  a  sprung  pram, a useless  dynamo,  rotted
rawhide belts, oil-stained rope, worn emery paper, an  Austrian bayonet, and
a great deal of other broken, bent and dented junk. Clients could never find
Victor Mikhailovich.  He  was  always out somewhere giving orders. He had no
time for work. It was impossible for him to stand by and watch a horse . and
cart drive  into his  or anyone else's  yard.  He immediately went  out and,
clasping his  hands  behind  his back,  watched the  carter's  actions  with
contempt. Finally he could bear it no longer.
"Where do  you  think you're going?"  he used to shout  in a  horrified
voice. "Move over!"
The startled carter would move the cart over.
"Where do you think you're  moving to, wretch?"  Victor Polesov  cried,
rushing up  to the  horse.  "In  the old days you would have got a slap  for
that, then you would have moved over."
Having given orders in this  way  for half an hour or so, Polesov would
be just about to return to his workshop, where a broken bicycle pump awaited
repair, when the peaceful life of the  town would be disturbed by some other
contretemps. Either two carts entangled their axles in the street and Victor
Mikhailovich  would  show the best  and  quickest  way to separate them,  or
workmen would be replacing a telegraph pole and  Polesov would check that it
was perpendicular  with  his  own  plumb-line  brought  specially  from  the
workshop; or, finally, the fire-engine would go past and Polesov, excited by
the noise of the siren and burned up with curiosity, would chase after it.
But  from time  to  time  Polesov was  seized  by  a mood  of practical
activity.  For several days he used to  shut himself up in  his workshop and
toil in  silence. Children ran freely  about the yard and shouted what  they
liked,  carters described  circles in the  yard,  carts  completely  stopped
entangling  their  axles  and  fire-engines  and hearses  sped  to  the fire
unaccompanied-Victor Mikhailovich was working. One day, after a bout of this
kind, he emerged from the workshop with a motor-cycle, pulling it like a ram
by   the   horns;  the   motor-cycle   was   made  up  of   parts  of  cars,
fire-extinguishers,  bicycles  and  typewriters.  It  had  a  one-and-a-half
horsepower Wanderer  engine and Davidson wheels, while  the  other essential
parts had lost the name of the original maker. A piece of cardboard with the
words "Trial Run" hung on a cord  from the saddle. A crowd gathered. Without
looking at anyone, Victor Mikhailovich gave the pedal a twist with his hand.
There  was  no  spark  for at  least ten minutes, but then  came  a metallic
splutter and  the contraption shuddered  and enveloped itself in  a cloud of
filthy   smoke.  Polesov  jumped  into  the  saddle,  and  the  motor-cycle,
accelerating  madly, carried him through the tunnel into the  middle  of the
roadway and  stopped dead. Polesov was about to get off and  investigate the
mysterious  vehicle when  it  suddenly  reversed  and,  whisking its creator
through the same tunnel, stopped  at its  original point of departure in the
yard, grunted  peevishly,  and  blew  up. Victor  Mikhailovich escaped  by a
miracle  and  during  the  next  bout  of  activity  used  the  bits of  the
motor-cycle to make  a stationary engine, very similar to a real  one-except
that it did not work.
The crowning glory of the mechanic-intellectual's academic activity was
the epic of the gates of building no. 5, next door. The housing co-operative
that owned the building signed a contract with Victor Polesov under which he
undertook to repair the iron gates and paint  them any colour  he liked. For
its part, the housing co-operative agreed to pay Victor Mikhailovich Polesov
the sum of twenty-one roubles, seventy-five kopeks, subject to approval by a
special committee. The official stamps were charged to the contractor.
Victor  Mikhailovich carried off the gates like Samson. He set  to work
in  his  shop with enthusiasm. It took several days  to un-rivet the  gates.
They were  taken  to pieces. Iron  curlicues  lay in the pram; iron bars and
spikes were piled under the work-bench. It took another few days to  inspect
the damage. Then a great disaster occurred in  the town. A water  main burst
on Drovyanaya Street, and Polesov spent the rest of the week at the scene of
the  misfortune, smiling ironically, shouting at the workmen,  and every few
minutes looking into the hole in the ground.
As soon as his  organizational  ardour  had  somewhat  abated,  Polesov
returned to his gates, but it was too late. The children from the yard  were
already playing with  the iron curlicues  and spikes of the gates of no.  5.
Seeing  the  wrathful  mechanic,  the children dropped their playthings  and
fled.  Half  the  curlicues were missing and were never  found.  After  that
Polesov lost interest in the gates.
But then  terrible things began to happen in no.  5, which was now wide
open to all. The wet  linen  was stolen from  the  attics,  and one  evening
someone  even carried  off  a samovar that was  singing in the yard. Polesov
himself took part  in the pursuit, but the  thief ran  at quite a pace, even
though he was holding the steaming samovar in front of him, and looking over
his shoulder,  covered Victor Mikhailovich, who was in the  lead,  with foul
abuse.  The one  who suffered most, however, was the yard-keeper from no. 5.
He lost his nightly wage since there were now no gates, there was nothing to
open, and  residents returning from a spree had no one to give  a tip to. At
first  the  yard-keeper kept  coming  to  ask if  the  gates  would  soon be
finished; then he tried praying, and finally resorted to vague threats.  The
housing cooperative  sent Polesov written  reminders, and there was talk  of
taking the matter to court. The situation had grown more and more tense.
Standing by  the well,  the fortune-teller and  the mechanic-enthusiast
continued their conversation.
"Given the absence of seasoned sleepers," cried Victor Mikhailovich for
the whole yard to hear, "it won't be a tramway, but sheer misery!"
"When  will  all this  end!"  said Elena  Stanislavovna. "We live  like
savages!"
"There's  no end  to  it. .  .  . Yes.  Do  you  know who I saw  today?
Vorobyaninov."
In  her  amazement  Elena  Stanislavovna   leaned  against   the  wall,
continuing to hold the full pail of water in mid-air.
"I had gone to the communal-services building to extend my contract for
the  hire of the workshop and was going down the corridor when suddenly  two
people  came  towards  me.  One of  them  seemed  familiar;  he looked  like
Vorobyaninov. Then they asked me what the building had been in the old days.
I told them  it used to be  a girls' secondary school,  and later became the
housing division. I asked them why they wanted to know, but they just  said,
Thanks' and  went off. Then I  saw clearly that it  really was Vorobyaninov,
only  without  his  moustache.  The other one  with him was  a  fine-looking
fellow. Obviously a former officer. And then I thought. . ."
At  that  moment  Victor  Mikhailovich  noticed  something  unpleasant.
Breaking off what  he was saying, he grabbed his can and promptly hid behind
the dustbin. Into the yard  sauntered the yard-keeper from no. 5. He stopped
by the well and  began looking round at the  buildings.  Not seeing  Polesov
anywhere, he asked sadly:
"Isn't Vick the mechanic here yet?"
"I really don't  know," said the fortune-teller. "I don't know at all."
And  with  unusual nervousness she hurried off  to  her  apartment, spilling
water from the pail.
The  yard-keeper stroked the  cement block at the  top of the well  and
went over to the workshop. Two paces beyond the sign: