“Hello!” Ostap called out. “Are you searching for Pervertov?”
“Yessir,” confirmed the fat artist, looking plaintively at Ostap.
“Hurry!
Hurry!
Hurry!” cried Ostap. “Three artists are already ahead of you.
What’s going on here?
What happened?”
But the horse, banging its shoes on the cobblestones, had already carried away the fourth practitioner of fine arts.
“What a center of culture!” said Ostap. “You must have noticed, Balaganov, that of the four citizens we encountered thus far, all four were artists.
How curious.”
When the half-brothers stopped in front of a small hardware store, Balaganov whispered to Ostap:
“Aren’t you ashamed?”
“Of what?” asked Ostap.
“That you’re actually going to pay money for the paint.”
“Oh, I see,” said Ostap.
“Frankly, I am a little bit.
It’s silly, you’re right.
But what can you do?
We’re not going to run to the city council and ask them to supply the paint for Skylark Day.
They would, of course, but that could take us all day.”
The brilliant colors of the dry paint in jars, glass cylinders, sacks, caskets, and torn paper bags gave the hardware store a festive look.
The captain and the rally mechanic started the painstaking process of picking a color.
“Black is too mournful,” said Ostap. “Green won’t do: it’s the color of lost hope.
Purple, no.
Let the chief of police ride around in a purple car.
Pink is trashy, blue is banal, red is too conformist.
We’re going to have to paint the Antelope yellow.
A bit too bright, but pretty.”
“And what would you be?
Artists?” asked the salesman, whose chin was lightly powdered with cinnabar.
“Yes, artists,” answered Bender, “scenic and graphic.”
“Then you’re in the wrong place,” said the salesman, removing the jars and the bags from the counter.
“What do you mean, the wrong place?” exclaimed Ostap.
“What’s the right place?”
“Across the street.”
The clerk led the two friends to the door and pointed at the sky-blue sign across the street. It had a brown horse head and the words OATS AND HAY written in black letters.
“Right,” said Ostap, “soft and hard feed for livestock.
But what does it have to do with us artists?
I don’t see the connection.”
It turned out there was a connection, and a very meaningful one at that.
Ostap grasped it shortly after the clerk began his explanation.
The city had always loved fine paintings, and the four resident artists formed a group called the Dialectical Easelists.
They painted portraits of officials and sold them to the local fine arts museum.
With time, the pool of yet-unpainted officials grew smaller and smaller, and the income of the Dialectical Easelists had decreased accordingly, but they still managed to get by.
The truly lean years began when a new artist, Feofan Smarmeladov, came to the city.
His first painting made quite a stir.
It was a portrait of the director of the local hotel authority.
Feofan Smarmeladov left the Easelists in his dust.
The director of the hotel authority was not depicted in oil, watercolors, coal, crayons, gouache, or lead pencil; he was done in oats.
While Smarmeladov was taking the portrait to the museum in a horse cart, the horse looked back nervously and whinnied.