Suffice it to say that this vulgar old man walked the earth for nearly two thousand years. He didn’t register at the hotels, and he annoyed citizens with complaints about the exorbitant train fares that forced him to travel on foot.
He was spotted on numerous occasions.
He was present at the historic meeting at which Columbus ultimately failed to account for the funds that had been advanced to him to discover America.
As a very young man, he witnessed the burning of Rome.
For about a century and a half he lived in India, astounding the Yogis with his longevity and disagreeable character.
In other words, the old man would have had a lot of interesting stories to tell, if he had written his memoirs at the end of each century.
Alas, the Wandering Jew was illiterate, and on top of that, he had a memory like a sieve.
Not so long ago, the old man was residing in the wonderful city of Rio de Janeiro, sipping refreshments, watching ocean liners, and strolling under the palm trees in white pants.
He had purchased the pants second-hand from a knight crusader in Palestine some eight hundred years earlier, but they still looked almost new.
Suddenly the old man grew restless.
He developed an urge to go to the Dnieper River in Russia. He had seen them all: the Rhine, the Ganges, the Mississippi, the Yangtze, the Niger, the Volga, but not the Dnieper.
He decided he just had to take a peek at that mighty river as well.
And so right smack in the middle of 1919, the Wandering Jew crossed the Romanian border illegally in his crusader pants.
Needless to say, he had eight pairs of silk stockings and a bottle of Parisian perfume on his stomach—a lady in Kishinev had asked him to take the stuff to her relatives in Kiev.
In those tumultuous times, smuggling contraband on your stomach was known as “wearing bandages.”
The old man mastered this trick in Kishinev in no time.
After making the delivery, the Wandering Jew was standing on the bank of the Dnieper, his unkempt greenish beard hanging down. He was approached by a man with yellow and blue stripes on his pants and the epaulets of Petlyura’s Ukrainian army on his shoulders. “Jew?” asked the man sternly.
“Jew,” replied the old man.
“Let’s go,” said the man with the stripes.
And he took him to his battalion commander.
“Got a Jew,” he reported, pushing the old man forward with his knee.
“Jew?” asked the battalion commander with mock surprise.
“Jew,” replied the wanderer.
“Then take him to the firing squad,” said the commander with a pleasant smile.
“But I am supposed to be eternal!” cried the old man.
He had yearned for death for two thousand years, but at that moment he desperately wanted to live.
“Shut up, you dirty kike!” yelled the forelocked commander cheerfully. “Finish him off, boys!”
And the eternal wanderer was no more.
“So that’s the story,” concluded Ostap.
“I suppose, Mr. Heinrich, as a former lieutenant in the Austrian army, you are aware of the ways of your friends from Petlyura’s forces,” remarked Palamidov.
Heinrich got up and left without a word.
At first everyone thought he was offended, but the next day they found out that the correspondent of the liberal newspaper had gone straight from the Soviets’ car to Mr. Hiram Berman and sold him the story of the Wandering Jew for forty dollars.
Hiram had wired Bender’s story to his editor at the next station.
CHAPTER 28 A SWELTERING WAVE OF INSPIRATION
On the morning of the fourth day, the train turned east.
Passing along the snowy frontal ranges of the Himalayas, rumbling over man-made structures—bridges, culverts for the spring runoff, and the like—as well as casting its quivering shadow over mountain streams, the special train whizzed by a small town that was hidden under poplars and went on twisting and turning alongside a tall, snow-covered mountain.
Unable to make it straight to the pass, the special rolled up to the mountain on the right, then on the left, turned back, huffed and puffed, returned again, rubbed its dusty-green sides against the mountain, wiggled this way and that—and finally broke free.
Having worked its wheels hard, the train came to a spectacular halt at the last station before the beginning of the Eastern Line.
Wreathed by fantastic sunlight, a steam engine the color of new grass stood against the background of aluminum-colored mountains.
It was a gift from the station’s personnel to the new rail line.
The situation with regard to gifts for anniversaries and special occasions has been problematic in this country for a fairly long time.
A common gift was either a miniature steam engine, no bigger than a cat, or just the opposite—a chisel that was larger than a telegraph pole.
This torturous transformation, of small objects into large ones and vice versa, cost a lot of time and money.
The useless tiny steam engines would gather dust on top of office cabinets, while the giant chisel, delivered by two horse carts, would rust pointlessly and stupidly in the courtyard of the honored organization.
But the OV-class locomotive, whose complete overhaul was finished well ahead of schedule, was of perfectly normal dimensions, and the chisel that had been undoubtedly used in its overhaul was apparently also of a regular size.
The handsome gift was immediately harnessed to the train, and the small ovechka—the little sheep—which is how the OV-class locomotives are commonly referred to inside the right-of-way, went rolling toward Mountain Station, the southern terminus of the new line, bearing a banner that read, ONWARD TO THE JOINING!
Exactly two years earlier, the first blueish-black rail, manufactured by a plant in the Urals, had been laid here.
Glowing ribbons of rail had been continuously flying off the plant’s rolling mill ever since.
The Line needed more and more of them.
The track-laying trains that were heading toward each other had entered into a competition, on top of everything else, and were moving at such a pace that their suppliers found themselves in a bind.