After scribbling a dozen lines, Lavoisian would rush to the telegraph, send an urgent cable, and start scribbling again.
Ukhudshansky wasn’t taking any notes or sending any cables.
He had the Celebratory Kit in his pocket, which would make it possible to compose an excellent Asian-flavored dispatch in five minutes.
Ukhudshansky’s future was secure. That’s why he had more sarcasm than usual in his voice as he said to his colleagues:
“Working hard?
Well, well . . .”
Suddenly Leo Shirtikov and Ian Benchikov, the ones who had missed the train in Moscow, appeared among the Soviet journalists.
They flew in on a plane that had landed early in the morning, six miles from Roaring Springs, on a natural airfield located behind a distant hill. The two journalist brothers made it from there on foot.
Having barely said hello, Leo Shirtikov and Ian Benchikov pulled notebooks out of their pockets and started making up for lost time.
The foreigners’ cameras clicked incessantly.
Throats went dry from the speeches and the sun.
People glanced more and more frequently at the cold stream and the dining hall, where the striped shadows of the canopy lay on endless banquet tables that were crowded with green bottles of mineral water.
Next to it were kiosks, where the revelers ran from time to time to have a drink.
Koreiko was dying of thirst, but he continued to suffer under his childish tricorne.
The grand strategist teased him from afar, raising a bottle of lemonade and the yellow folder with shoelace straps into the air.
They placed a little Young Pioneer girl on the table next to a water jug and a microphone.
“Well, little girl,” said the director of the Line cheerfully, “why don’t you tell us what you think about the Eastern Line?”
It wouldn’t have been surprising if the girl suddenly stamped her foot and began:
“Comrades!
Allow me to summarize the achievements which . . . ,” and so forth, because we have exemplary children who can make two-hour speeches with forlorn diligence.
But the Young Pioneer from Roaring Springs took the bull by the horns with her little hands and belted out, in a funny, high-pitched voice:
“Long live the Five-Year Plan!”
Palamidov approached a foreign professor of economics and asked him for an interview.
“I am very impressed,” said the professor. “All the construction that I have seen in the Soviet Union is on a grand scale.
I have no doubt that the Five-Year Plan will be successfully completed.
I’ll be writing about it.”
And, indeed, six months later he published a book in which he argued for two hundred pages that the Five-Year Plan would be completed as scheduled, and that the USSR would become one of the world’s foremost industrial powers.
On page 201, however, the professor explained that this was exactly why the Soviet Union should be crushed as soon as possible, before it brought about the death of capitalist society.
The professor proved far more businesslike than the gassy Heinrich.
A white plane took off from behind a hill.
The Kazakhs scattered in every direction.
The plane’s large shadow leaped over the reviewing stand and, folding up and down, rushed off into the desert.
Shouting and raising their whips, the Kazakhs gave chase.
The cameramen perked up and began winding their contraptions.
The scene became even more dusty and hectic.
The rally was over.
“Listen, comrades,” said Palamidov, walking briskly to the diner with his fellow scribes, “let us agree that nobody will write anything banal.”
“Banality is awful!” echoed Lavoisian.
“It’s disgusting.”
And so, on their way to the dining hall, the journalists unanimously agreed not to write about Uzun Kulak, which means “the Long Ear,” which in turn means “the desert telegraph.”
Anybody who traveled to the East had already written about it, to the point that no one could bear reading about it anymore.
No stories entitled
“The Legend of Lake Issyk Kul.”
Enough Oriental-flavored banality!
Koreiko was the only one left sitting in the empty bleachers, surrounded by cigarette butts, torn-up notes, and sand that had blown in from the desert.
He couldn’t bring himself to come down.
“Come here, Alexander Ivanovich!” beckoned Ostap.
“Have mercy on yourself!
A sip of cold mineral water!
What?