The Twelve Chairs (35 page)

listened.  He  was  only half  conscious,  as  the watchman,  cackling  with
laughter,  told how he had once clambered  on  to the chair to put in  a new
bulb and missed his footing.
"I slipped off the chair and the coverin' was torn off. So I look round
and see bits of glass and beads on a string come pouring out."
"Beads?" repeated Ippolit Matveyevich.
"Beads!" hooted the old man with delight. "And I look, soldier boy, and
there are all  sorts of little boxes. I didn't touch 'em. I went straight to
Comrade Krasilnikov and reported it.  And that's  what I told the  committee
afterwards. I didn't touch the boxes, I didn't.  And a  good thing I didn't,
soldier boy. Because jewellery was found  in 'em, hidden by the bourgeois. .
. ."
"Where are the jewels?" cried the marshal.
"Where, where?" the watchman imitated him. "Here they are, soldier boy,
use your imagination! Here they are."
"Where?"
"Here  they are!"  cried  the ruddy-faced old man, enjoying the effect.
"Wipe your eyes. The club was  built with  them, soldier boy. You  see? It's
the club. Central heating, draughts with timing-clocks, a  buffet,  theatre;
you aren't allowed inside in your galoshes."
Ippolit Matveyevich stiffened and,  without moving, ran  his eyes  over
the ledges.
So that was where it was. Madame Petukhov's treasure. There. All of it.
A  hundred  and fifty thousand roubles, zero  zero kopeks, as Ostap Suleiman
Bertha Maria Bender used to say.
The jewels had turned  into a solid frontage of glass and ferroconcrete
floors. Cool gymnasiums had  been made  from the pearls. The diamond  diadem
had  become a theatre-auditorium with  a revolving stage; the ruby  pendants
had grown into chandeliers;  the serpent bracelets had been transformed into
a beautiful library, and the clasp had metamorphosed into a creche, a glider
workshop, a chess and billiards room.
The  treasures remained; it had been preserved  and had even grown.  It
could be touched with the hand, though not  taken away. It had gone into the
service of new  people. Ippolit Matveyevich  felt  the  granite  facing. The
coldness of the stone penetrated deep into his heart.
And he gave a cry.
It was an insane, impassioned wild cry-the cry of a vixen  shot through
the body-it flew into  the  centre of the square, streaked under the bridge,
and, rebuffed everywhere by the sounds of the waking city, began fading  and
died away  in a moment.  A marvellous  autumn  morning slipped from  the wet
roof-tops into the Moscow streets. The city set off on its daily routine.
______________________________________
ILYA  ARNOLDOVICH  ILF  (1897-1937)  and   YEVGENII  PETROVICH  KATAYEV
(1903-1942)
The writers who used  the  pen names "Ilf" and "Petrov" were natives of
Odessa. Ilf, born  into  a poor Jewish family named Fainzilberg, worked as a
machine-shop  assembler,  bookkeeper, and stable manager before  becoming  a
journalist. He began as  a humorist in 1919, at the height of the civil war.
Not long afterward he joined  the  staff  of the  Train  Whistle in  Moscow,
forming  his  partnership  with Petrov, another staff member. Still  another
member  of  the Train  Whistle  was  Petrov's  brother,  the famous novelist
Valeritin Katayev. Subsequently Ilf  and  Petrov joined Pravda,  winning  an
audience of millions for their satires " against bureaucratism written under
the  pen  names of Tolstoyevsky and the Chill Philosopher.  They wrote  film
scenarios as well as The  Little Golden Calf and The Twelve Chairs. In  1936
the  two made a  10,000-mile motor tour through the United States collecting
material for their book One-Storey-High America. Ilf died of tuberculosis in
1937 in Moscow, where his body  was cremated. Petrov edited several humorous
periodicals, as well as the popular Little Flame, a weekly which contributed
toward  making  the  U.S.A.  and Great  Britain  better  understood  by  the
Russians. During World War II he was a correspondent at the  front,  and was
killed at his post in 1942 during the  defence of Sebastopol. Concerning the
official Soviet attitude toward Ilf and Petrov, Bernard Guilbert Guerney has
said: "The most  painstaking  research  shows  no indication that  these two
satirists ever  received as  much as a slap  on  the wrist  throughout their
careers." [See  An Anthology of  Russian  Literature in  the  Soviet Period,
edited by B. G. Guerney.]

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