The Twelve Chairs (7 page)

The Assistant Warden of  the Second  Home  of Stargorod Social Security
Administration  was a  shy little  thief.  His whole being protested against
stealing,  yet it  was impossible for  him not to  steal.  He  stole and was
ashamed  of  himself.  He stole  constantly and was  constantly  ashamed  of
himself, which was why his smoothly shaven cheeks always burned with a blush
of confusion, shame, bashfulness and embarrassment.  The assistant  warden's
name  was   Alexander  Yakovlevich,  and  his   wife's  name  was  Alexandra
Yakovlevna. He used  to call  her Sashchen, and she used to call him Alchen.
The world has never seen such a bashful chiseller as Alexander Yakovlevich.
He was not only  the  assistant warden, but also the chief warden.  The
previous  one  had been dismissed for rudeness to the inmates,  and had been
appointed conductor of a symphony orchestra. Alchen was completely different
from  his ill-bred boss. Under the system of  fuller  workdays, he took upon
himself  the  running  of  the  home, treating  the  pensioners with  marked
courtesy, and introducing important reforms and innovations.
Ostap Bender pulled  the heavy  oak door  of  the Vorobyaninov home and
found himself  in the  hall. There was a smell of  burnt porridge.  From the
upstairs rooms came  the confused sound of  voices, like a distant  "hooray"
from a line  of troops. There was no one  about and no one appeared.  An oak
staircase  with two flights  of once-lacquered stairs led upward.  Only  the
rings were now left; there was  no sign of the stair rods that had once held
the carpet in place.
"The Comanche chief  lived in vulgar luxury," thought Ostap  as he went
upstairs.
In the first  room, which was spacious  and light,  fifteen  or so  old
women in dresses made of the cheapest mouse-grey woollen cloth were  sitting
in a circle.
Craning their  necks and keeping their eyes on a healthy-looking man in
the middle, the old women were singing:
"We hear the sound of distant jingling,
The troika's on its round;
Far into the distant stretches
The sparkling snowy ground."
The choirmaster, wearing a  shirt and trousers  of the  same mouse-grey
material, was beating time with both  hands and, turning from side  to side,
kept shouting:
"Descants, softer! Kokushkin, not so loud!"
He caught sight  of Ostap, but  unable to restrain the movement  of his
hands, merely glanced  at  the newcomer and continued conducting. The  choir
increased its volume with an effort, as though singing through a pillow.
"Ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta,
Te-ro-rom, tu-ru-rum, tu-ru-rum . . ."
"Can  you tell me where I can find  the assistant warden?" asked Ostap,
breaking into the first pause.
"What do you want, Comrade?"
Ostap  shook  the conductor's  hand  and  inquired  amiably:  "National
folk-songs? Very interesting! I'm the fire inspector."
The assistant warden looked ashamed.
"Yes, yes,"  he  said,  with  embarrassment.  "Very  opportune.  I  was
actually going to write you a report."
"There's nothing to worry about," said Ostap magnanimously. "I'll write
the report myself. Let's take a look at the premises."
Alchen  dismissed the choir with a wave of his hand, and  the old women
made off with little steps of delight.
"Come this way," invited the assistant warden.
Before going  any further, Ostap scrutinized the furniture in the first
room.  It consisted of a table, two garden benches with  iron  legs (one  of
them had the name "Nicky" carved on the back), and a light-brown harmonium.
"Do they use primus stoves or anything of that kind in this room?"
"No, no. This is where our recreational activities are  held. We have a
choir, and drama, painting, drawing, and music circles."
When he reached the word "music"  Alexander Yakovlevich blushed.  First
his chin turned red, then his forehead and cheeks. Alchen felt very ashamed.
He had sold  all  the instruments  belonging to the wind section a long time
before.  The feeble  lungs of the old women had never produced anything more
than a puppy-like squeak from them, anyway. It was ridiculous  to see such a
mass of metal in so helpless a condition. Alchen had not been able to resist
selling the wind section, and now he felt very guilty.
A slogan  written in large  letters on  a piece  of the same mouse-grey
woollen cloth spanned the wall between the windows. It said:

TO COLLECTIVE CREATIVITY
"Very good,"  said Ostap. "This recreation room  does not  constitute a
fire hazard. Let's go on."
Passing through  the front rooms of Vorobyaninov's  house, Ostap  could
see  no  sign  of  a  walnut  chair with  curved  legs  and  English  chintz
upholstery. The  iron-smooth walls were plastered with directives  issued to
the  Second  Home.  Ostap   read  them   and,  from  time  to  time,   asked
enthusiastically:
"Are the chimneys swept regularly? Are the stoves working properly?"
And, receiving exhaustive answers, moved on.
The fire inspector made a  diligent  search  for at least one corner of
the  house  which  might constitute  a  fire  hazard,  but in  that  respect
everything seemed  to  be in  order.  His  second quest,  however, was  less
successful.  Ostap  went into the dormitories. As he appeared, the old women
stood up and  bowed low. The rooms contained  beds covered with blankets, as
hairy as a dog's coat, with the word "Feet" woven at one end. Below the beds
were trunks, which at the initiative of Alexander Yakovlevich, who  liked to
do  things  in a  military fashion,  projected exactly  one-third  of  their
length.
Everything in the Home was marked by its extreme modesty; the furniture
that consisted  solely of garden benches taken from Alexander Boulevard (now
renamed  in honour  of  the Proletarian  Voluntary Saturdays),  the paraffin
lamps  bought  at  the  local  market,  and  the  very  blankets  with  that
frightening word, "Feet". One feature of the  house, however,  had been made
to last and was developed on a grand scale-to wit, the door springs.
Door springs were Alexander  Yakovlevich's  passion. Sparing no effort,
he  fitted all  the doors  in the house with springs of  different types and
systems.  There  were  very  simple  ones  in  the  form  of  an  iron  rod;
compressed-air ones with  cylindrical brass pistons;  there  were  ones with
pulleys that raised and lowered heavy bags of shot. There were springs which
were so  complex in design that the local mechanic could only shake his head
in  wonder.  And  all  the cylinders,  springs  and counterweights were very
powerful, slamming doors shut with the  swiftness of  a mousetrap.  Whenever
the mechanisms  operated, the whole  house shook. With pitiful  squeals, the
old women tried to  escape the onslaught of the  doors, but not always  with
success. The doors gave  the fugitives  a thump in the back, and at the same
time, a counterweight shot past their ears with a dull rasping sound.
As Bender and the  assistant warden walked around the house, the  doors
fired a noisy salute.
But the  feudal  magnificence had  nothing to hide: the  chair was  not
there.  As the search progressed, the fire inspector  found  himself in  the
kitchen. Porridge was cooking  in a large copper pot  and gave off the smell
that  the  smooth operator had noticed in the hall. Ostap  wrinkled his nose
and said: "What is it cooking in?  Lubricating  oil?"  "It's pure  butter, I
swear it," said Alchen, blushing to the roots of his hair. "We buy it from a
farm." He felt very ashamed.
"Anyway, it's not a  fire risk," observed Ostap.  The  chair was not in
the kitchen, either. There was only a stool, occupied by the cook, wearing a
cap and apron of mouse-grey woollen material.
"Why  is everybody's clothing grey? That cloth  isn't even fit  to wipe
the  windows  with!"  The shy Alchen was even more  embarrassed.  "We  don't
receive enough funds." He was disgusted with himself.
Ostap looked at him disbelievingly and said: "That is no concern of the
fire brigade, which I am at present representing." Alchen was alarmed.
"We've taken all the necessary fire precautions," he declared. "We even
have a fire extinguisher. An Eclair."
The  fire inspector reluctantly proceeded in the direction of  the fire
extinguisher, peeping into the lumber rooms as he went. The red-iron nose of
the extinguisher caused the inspector particular annoyance, despite the fact
that it was the only  object in the house which had any connection with fire
precautions. "Where did you get it? At the market?" And without  waiting for
an  answer from  the  thunderstruck  Alexander Yakovlevich,  he  removed the
Eclair from the  rusty  nail  on  which it was  hanging,  broke the  capsule
without warning, and quickly pointed the nose in the air. But instead of the
expected stream of foam,  all that came out was a high-pitched hissing which
sounded like the ancient hymn "How Glorious Is Our Lord on Zion".
"You obviously  did get it  at  the  market," said Ostap,  his  earlier
opinion confirmed.  And he put back  the fire extinguisher,  which was still
hissing, in its place.
They moved on, accompanied by the hissing.
Where can it be?  wondered Ostap. I don't like  the look of things. And
he made up his mind not to leave the place until he had found out the truth.
While the fire inspector and the assistant warden were  crawling  about
the  attics, considering  fire  precautions  in  detail  and  examining  the
chimneys,  the Second Home  of the Stargorod Social  Security Administration
carried on its daily routine.
Dinner  was  ready.  The  smell   of  burnt  porridge  had  appreciably
increased, and it overpowered all the sourish  smells inhabiting the  house.
There  was a rustling in the corridors. Holding iron  bowls full of porridge
in front of them with both hands, the old women cautiously  emerged from the
kitchen and sat down at a  large table,  trying not to look at the refectory
slogans, composed  by  Alexander Yakolevich and  painted  by his  wife.  The
slogans read:

ONE EGG CONTAINS AS MUCH FAT AS A HALF-POUND OF MEAT
BY CAREFULLY MASTICATING YOUR FOOD YOU HELP SOCIETY
MEAT IS BAD FOR YOU
These sacred words aroused in the old ladies memories of teeth that had
disappeared before the revolution, eggs  that had been lost at approximately
the same time,  meat that was inferior to eggs in fat, and  perhaps even the
society that they were prevented from helping by careful mastication.
Seated  at table  in  addition to  the  old women were Isidor, Afanasy,
Cyril and Oleg, and also Pasha  Emilevich. Neither in age  nor sex did these
young men fit into the pattern of social security, but they were the younger
brothers of Alchen,  and Pasha Emilevich was  Alexandra Yakovlevna's cousin,
once removed. The young men, the  oldest of whom was the thirty-two-year-old
Pasha Emilevich, did  not consider their life in the pensioners' home in any
way abnormal.  They lived on the  same basis as the old  women; they too had
government-property beds and  blankets  with  the  word  "Feet";  they  were
clothed in  the same mouse-grey material as the old women, but on account of
their youth  and  strength  they  ate better than  the  latter.  They  stole
everything in the house  that  Alchen did not manage to steal himself. Pasha
could  put away four pounds of fish at one go, and he once  did  so, leaving
the home dinnerless.
Hardly had  the  old women had time to  taste  their porridge when  the
younger  brothers and  Pasha Emilevich rose from  the  table, having gobbled
down their share, and went, belching, into the kitchen to look for something
more digestible.
The meal continued. The old women began jabbering:
"Now they'll stuff themselves full and start bawling songs."
"Pasha Emilevich sold the chair  from the recreation room this morning.
A second-hand dealer took it away at the back door."
"Just you see. He'll come home drunk tonight."
At  this  moment  the  pensioners'  conversation  was interrupted by  a
trumpeting noise that even drowned the hissing of the fire extinguisher, and
a husky voice began:
'. . . vention .. ."
The old women hunched their shoulders and, ignoring  the loudspeaker in
the corner on the  floor, continued eating in the hope that fate would spare
them, but the loud-speaker cheerfully went on:
"Evecrashshsh . . . viduso . . . valuable  invention. Railwayman of the
Murmansk Railway,  Comrade  Sokutsky, S  Samara,  O Oriel, K  Kaliningrad, U
Urals, Ts Tsaritsina, K Kaliningrad, Y York. So-kuts-ky."
The trumpet wheezed and renewed the broadcast in a thick voice.
". . . vented a system of signal lights for snow ploughs. The invention
has been approved by Dorizul. . . ."
The  old women floated  away to their  rooms like grey  ducklings.  The
loud-speaker,  jigging up and  down  by its own power, blared  away into the
empty room:
"And we will now play some Novgorod folk music."
Far, far away, in the centre of the earth, someone strummed a balalaika
and a black-earth Battistini broke into song:
"On the wall the bugs were sitting,
Blinking at the sky;
Then they saw the tax inspector
And crawled away to die."
In  the  centre  of the  earth the  verses  brought  forth  a  storm of
activity.  A  horrible gurgling  was heard  from the  loud-speaker.  It  was
something between  thunderous applause and  the  eruption  of an underground
volcano.
Meanwhile the disheartened fire inspector had descended an attic ladder
backwards  and was  now  back  in the kitchen,  where  he  saw five citizens
digging  into a barrel  of  sauerkraut  and bolting it  down.  They  ate  in
silence. Pasha Emilevich alone waggled his head in the style of an epicurean
and, wiping some strings of cabbage from his moustache, observed:
"It's a sin to eat cabbage like this without vodka."
"Is this a new intake of women?" asked Ostap.
"They're orphans," replied Alchen, shouldering the inspector out of the
kitchen and surreptitiously shaking his fist at the orphans.
"Children of the Volga Region?"
Alchen was confused.
"A trying heritage from the Tsarist regime?"
Alchen spread his arms as much as to say: "There's nothing  you can  do
with a heritage like that."
"Co-education by the composite method?"
Without  further  hesitation   the  bashful  Alchen  invited  the  fire
inspector to take pot luck and lunch with him.
Pot  luck  that  day  happened  to  be  a  bottle  of  Zubrovka  vodka,
home-pickled  mushrooms, minced  herring,  Ukrainian  beet  soup  containing
first-grade meat, chicken and rice, and stewed apples.
"Sashchen," said Alexander  Yakovlevich,  "I want you to meet a comrade
from the province fire-precaution administration."
Ostap  made  his  hostess  a  theatrical  bow  and  paid  her  such  an
interminable and ambiguous compliment that he could hardly get to the end of
it.  Sashchen, a  buxom woman,  whose  good looks  were  somewhat  marred by
sideburns  of the kind  that Tsar Nicholas used to have, laughed  softly and
took a drink with the two men.
"Here's to your communal services," exclaimed Ostap.
The lunch went off gaily, and it was not until they reached  the stewed
fruit that Ostap remembered the point of his visit.
"Why  is it," he asked, "that  the  furnishings  are so  skimpy in your
establishment?"
"What do you mean?" said Alchen. "What about the harmonium?"
"Yes, I know, vox humana. But you have absolutely nothing at all of any
taste to sit on. Only garden benches."
"There's a  chair in the recreation room,"  said Alchen  in an offended
tone.  "An  English chair.  They say it  was  left  over from  the  original
furniture."
"By the way,  I  didn't see  your  recreation room. How  is it from the
point of view of  fire hazard? It won't let  you  down, I hope. I had better
see it."
"Certainly."
Ostap thanked his hostess for the lunch and left.
No  primus was used in the recreation room; there was no portable stove
of any  kind; the  chimneys were in a good state  of repair and were cleaned
regularly, but the  chair, to the  incredulity of Alchen, was missing.  They
ran to look for it. They  looked under the  beds  and under the trunks;  for
some reason or  other they moved back the harmonium; they questioned the old
women, who kept looking at Pasha Emilevich timidly,  but  the chair was just
not there.  Pasha Emilevich  himself showed great  enthusiasm in the search.
When  all had calmed down,  Pasha  still kept  wandering from room  to room,
looking under decanters, shifting iron teaspoons, and muttering:
"Where can it be? I saw it myself this morning. It's ridiculous !"
"It's depressing, girls," said Ostap in an icy voice.
"It's absolutely ridiculous!" repeated Pasha Emilevich impudently.
At this point,  however,  the  Eclair fire extinguisher, which had been
hissing the  whole  time,  took  a high F,  which  only the People's Artist,
Nezhdanova, can do, stopped for a second and  then emitted its  first stream
of foam, which soaked the ceiling and knocked the cook's cap off.  The first
stream of foam was  followed by another, mouse-grey in  colour, which bowled
over young  Isidor Yakovlevich. After that  the  extinguisher began  working
smoothly. Pasha Emilevich, Alchen  and  all the surviving brothers raced  to
the spot.
"Well done," said Ostap. "An idiotic invention!"
As soon as  the old women were  left alone  with Ostap and without  the
boss, they at once began complaining:
"He's brought his family into the home. They eat up everything."
"The piglets get milk and we get porridge."
"He's taken everything out of the house."
"Take it easy, girls," said  Ostap, retreating. "You need  someone from
the labour-inspection department. The Senate hasn't empowered me . . ."
The old women were not listening.
"And that Pasha Melentevich. He went  and sold a chair today. I saw him
myself."
"Who did he sell it to? " asked Ostap quickly.
"He sold it. . . that's all. He was going to steal my blanket. . ."
A  fierce struggle was  going  on  in the  corridor.  But  mind finally
triumphed over matter and the extinguisher, trampled under Pasha Emilevich's
feet of iron, gave a last dribble and was silent for ever.
The  old women were  sent  to  clean  the floor. Lowering  his head and
waddling slightly, the fire inspector went up to Pasha Emilevich.
"A  friend of  mine," began  Ostap  importantly,  "also  used  to  sell
government property. He now lives a monastic life in the penitentiary."
"I find  your groundless  accusations strange," said Pasha, who smelled
strongly of foam.
"Who did you sell the chair to?" asked Ostap in a ringing whisper.
Pasha  Emilevich,  who had supernatural understanding, realized at this
point he was about to be beaten, if not kicked.
"To a second-hand dealer."
"What's his address?"
"I'd never seen him before."
"Never?"
"No, honestly."
"I  ought  to  bust  you  in the  mouth," said  Ostap  dreamily,  "only
Zarathustra wouldn't allow it. Get to hell out of here!"
Pasha Emilevich grinned fawningly and began walking away.
"Come back, you abortion," cried Ostap haughtily. "What was  the dealer
like?"
Pasha  Emilevich  described  him   in  detail,  while   Ostap  listened
carefully.  The  interview was  concluded by  Ostap with  the  words:  "This
clearly has nothing to do with fire precautions."
In the corridor the bashful Alchen went up to Ostap and gave him a gold
piece.
"That comes under  Article  114  of  the Criminal  Code,"  said  Ostap.
"Bribing officials in the course of their duty."
Nevertheless  he  took  the  money  and, without  saying good-bye, went
towards the door. The door, which was fitted  with  a  powerful contraption,
opened  with  an  effort and  gave Ostap a  one-and-a-half-ton  shove in the
backside.
"Good  shot!"  said  Ostap, rubbing  the affected part. "The hearing is
continued."