The grand strategist lost his pace again and broke into an unseemly gallop.
“What do you mean—not interested?”
“We’re not, and that’s that.
Talking pictures haven’t arrived yet.”
After thirty minutes of diligent trotting, Bender grasped the delicate state of affairs at Chernomorsk Film Studio No.
1: silent pictures were no longer being made, due to the advent of the era of talking pictures, while talking pictures were not yet being made either, due to unresolved administrative issues related to ending the era of silent pictures.
At the peak of the workday, when the assistants, consultants, experts, administrators, directors, their lieutenants, lighting people, scriptwriters, and keepers of the great cast-iron seal were all running at speeds worthy of the once-famous racehorse named Brawny, a rumor started spreading that somewhere, in some unspecified room, there was a man who was urgently developing talkies.
Ostap barged into a large office at full speed and stopped, struck by the silence.
A short man with a Bedouin beard and a gold pince-nez on a string sat sideways at his desk.
Bending down, he was hard at work—pulling a shoe off his foot.
“How do you do, Comrade!” said the grand strategist loudly.
The man didn’t answer.
He took the shoe off and started shaking sand out of it.
“How do you do!” repeated Ostap. “I brought you a script!”
The man with a Bedouin beard slowly put the shoe back on and started tying the laces silently.
Having done that, he turned to his papers, closed one eye, and began scribbling in miniscule letters.
“Why aren’t you talking to me?” yelled Bender so loudly that the phone which sat on the movie boss’s desk tinkled.
Only then did the movie boss raise his head, glance at Ostap, and say:
“Please speak louder.
I can’t hear you.”
“Write notes to him,” suggested a consultant in a colorful vest who happened to race by. “He’s deaf.”
Ostap sat down at the same desk and wrote on a piece of paper:
“Are you in talking pictures?”
“Yes,” answered the deaf man.
“I brought a script for a sound film.
It’s called The Neck, a folk tragedy in six parts,” wrote Ostap hastily.
The deaf man looked at the note through his gold-rimmed pince-nez and said:
“Excellent!
We’ll put you to work immediately.
We’re looking for fresh new people.”
“Glad to help.
How about an advance?” wrote Bender.
“The Neck is exactly what we need!” said the deaf man.
“Wait here, I’ll be right back.
Don’t go anywhere, it’ll take just one minute.”
The deaf man grabbed the script and slipped out of the room.
“We’ll put you in the sound group!” he shouted, disappearing behind the door. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Ostap sat in the office for an hour and a half, but the deaf man never came back.
Only when Ostap stepped out into the hallway, and rejoined the race, did he learn that the deaf man had left in a car a long time ago and wasn’t coming back that day.
Actually, he wasn’t ever coming back, because he was unexpectedly transferred to the town of Uman to raise the cultural awareness of horse cart drivers.
The worst part was that the deaf man took the script of The Neck with him.
The grand strategist extricated himself from the ever-accelerating whirl of the crowd and crashed onto a bench, stupefied, leaning on the shoulder of the doorman, who was already sitting there.
“Take me, for example!” the doorman said suddenly, apparently referring to a thought that had long been bothering him.
“Terentyev, the assistant director, told me to grow a beard.
Said I’d play Nebuchadnezzar, or Balthazar, in some film or other, can’t remember the name.
So I went ahead and grew this beard. Look at it! A prophet’s beard!
And now what am I supposed to do with it?
The assistant director says there’ll be no more silent pictures, and as for the talking pictures, he says, I won’t do, my voice is unpleasant.
So here I sit with this goddamn beard, like some kind of a goat!
I feel funny in it, but how can I shave it off?