He was a tough guy, as you’ve probably heard.
So now the camel spits all over his uniform, and it had just come back from the laundry . . .”
The evening’s conversation was dying down.
The clash of the two worlds ended peacefully.
Somehow it hadn’t ended in a fight.
The two systems—capitalist and socialist—would have to coexist, willy-nilly, on the special train for about a month.
Mr. Heinrich, an enemy of world revolution, told an ancient travel joke, and then everybody headed for the dining car. People walked from car to car over shuddering metal plates and squinted against the piercing wind.
In the dining car, however, the passengers split into separate groups.
During supper, the two sides sized each other up quietly.
The outside world, as represented by the correspondents of the major newspapers and news agencies from around the globe, paid vodka its proper due and glanced with awful politeness at the factory workers in tall rough boots and at the Soviet journalists who showed up dressed casually in slippers and without their neckties.
All kinds of people sat in the dining car: Mr. Berman, a provincial from New York; a young Canadian woman, who had arrived from across the ocean just an hour before the train had departed, which was why she was still looking around in bewilderment as she hesitated over a cutlet on a long metal plate; a Japanese diplomat and another, younger Japanese man; Mr. Heinrich, whose yellow eyes were smirking for some reason; a young British diplomat with the slim waist of a tennis player; the German Orientalist who had listened so patiently to the car attendant’s story about an odd animal with two humps on its back; an American economist; a Czechoslovakian; a Pole; four American correspondents, including a pastor who wrote for the YMCA paper; a blue-blooded American woman from a distinguished family with a Dutch surname, who was famous because a year earlier she had missed a train in the resort town of Mineralnye Vody and, for publicity, had hidden in the station’s diner for a while, which caused an uproar in the American press.
For three days, the headlines screamed
“Girl from Old Family in Clutches of Wild Mountain Men” and
“Ransom or Death.” There were many others as well.
Some were simply hostile to anything Soviet, others were hoping to solve the mystery of the Asian soul overnight, and still others were honestly trying to understand what was going on in the land of the Soviets after all.
The Soviet side dined rowdily at its own tables. The workers brought food in paper bags and went all out for glasses of tea with lemon in stainless-steel holders.
The journalists, who were better off, ordered schnitzels, while Lavoisian, in a sudden bout of Slavonic pride, decided not to lose face in front of the foreigners and demanded sauteed kidneys.
He didn’t touch the kidneys, he had hated them since childhood, but he bristled with pride all the same and glanced defiantly at the foreign visitors.
There were all kinds of people on the Soviet side as well.
There was a worker from Sormovo, who had been selected for the trip at a general staff meeting; a construction worker from the Stalingrad Tractor Factory, who ten years earlier lay in the trenches opposite Baron Wrangel’s troops—in the same field where his factory was later built; and a textile worker from Serpukhov, who was interested in the Eastern Line because it was going to speed up the deliveries of cotton to the textile-producing regions.
There were metal workers from Leningrad, miners from the Donets Coal Basin, a mechanic from Ukraine, and the head of the delegation in a white Russian-style shirt with a large Bukhara Star that he had received for fighting against the Emir.
The diplomat with the waistline of a tennis player would have been incredulous to learn that Gargantua, the short, mild-mannered versifier, had been taken prisoner by various armed Ukrainian bands on as many as eight separate occasions, and once was even executed by Makhno’s anarchists. He really didn’t like to talk about it—his memories of climbing out of the mass grave with a bullet hole in his shoulder were most unpleasant.
The YMCA man would probably have gasped in horror were he to discover that the lighthearted Palamidov had chaired a Red Army tribunal; or that Lavoisian, while on assignment from his newspaper, had dressed as a woman and infiltrated a gathering of women Baptists, then wrote a lengthy anti-religious dispatch about it; or that none of the Soviets present had baptized their kids; or that as many as four of these fiends were writers.
All kinds of people sat in the dining car.
On the second day of the journey, one prediction the plush-nosed prophet had made came true.
As the train was rumbling and whooping on the bridge across the Volga at Syzran, the passengers struck up the song about Razin the Volga legend in their annoying city voices.
While they were at it, they tried not to look each other in the eye.
The foreigners in the next car, who were unclear on the appropriate repertoire for the occasion, gave a rousing rendition of the Korobochka, with an equally peculiar chorus of
“Ekh yukhnem!” No one sent a postcard to the plush-nosed man—they were too ashamed.
Only Ukhudshansky held himself in check.
He didn’t sing with the rest of them.
While the train was overwhelmed by an orgy of singing, he alone kept quiet, clenched his teeth, and pretended to read A Complete Geographical Description of Our Land.
His punishment was severe.
He succumbed to a musical paroxysm late at night, way past Samara. Around midnight, when everyone else was already asleep, a shaky voice came from Ukhudshansky’s compartment:
“There’s a cliff on the Volga, all covered with moss . . .”
The journey had gotten the better of him in the end.
At an even later hour, when even Ukhudshansky was finally asleep, the door at the end of the car opened, momentarily admitting the unfettered thunder of the wheels, and Ostap Bender appeared in the empty, glittering corridor.
He hesitated for a second, then sleepily waved off his doubts and opened the door to the first compartment he saw.
Gargantua, Ukhudshansky, and the photojournalist Menshov were all asleep under the blue nightlight. The fourth bunk, an upper, was empty.
The grand strategist didn’t hesitate.
His legs weak from an arduous odyssey, irreparable losses, and two hours of standing on the car’s outside steps, Bender climbed onto the bunk.
Then, he had a miraculous vision: a milky-white boiled chicken, its legs pointing up like the shafts of a horse cart, sat on the small table by the window.
“I’m following in the dubious footsteps of Panikovsky,” whispered Ostap.
With that, he lifted the chicken to his bunk and ate it whole, without bread or salt.
He stuck the bones under the firm linen bolster and, inhaling the inimitable smell of railroad paint, fell happily asleep to the sound of creaking partitions.
CHAPTER 27 “MAY A CAPITALIST LACKEY COME IN?”
In a dream that night, Ostap saw Zosya’s sad shadowy face, and then Panikovsky appeared.
The violator of the pact wore a coachman’s hat with a feather in it, wrung his hands, and called out,
“Bender!
Bender!