“Industrialisation,” he whispered in despair, wiggling his old-man’s lips, which were as pale as uncooked ground meat.
And then he divided the word into parts for the puzzle, like he always did:
“In. Dust. Rial. Is. Ation.”
Everything was wonderful.
Sinitsky was already picturing an elaborate word puzzle—rich in meaning, easy to read, yet hard to solve.
The only problem was the last part, ation.
“What in the world is ation?” struggled the old man. “If only it was action instead!
Then it would have been perfect: industrialisaction.”
Sinitsky agonized over the capricious ending for half an hour, but he couldn’t find a good solution. He then decided that it would come to him later on and got down to work.
He started his poem on a sheet of paper which had been torn from a ledger that had Debit printed at the top.
Through the white glass door of his balcony, he could see the acacias in bloom, patched-up roofs, and the sharp blue line of the horizon in the sea.
The Chernomorsk noon filled the city with a thick gooey heat.
The old man thought for a while and wrote down the opening lines:
My first one is a little word, It is a preposition, truly . . .
“It is a preposition, truly,” repeated the old man, satisfied.
He liked what he had so far, but he was struggling to find rhymes for word and truly.
The puzzle-maker walked around the room and fiddled with his beard.
And suddenly it came to him:
The second is the finest dirt That every maid expunges duly.
The rial and is weren’t too difficult either:
My third one lines the pockets of A Persian, if his God is kindly.
The fourth one is a simple verb, You see it everywhere, mind you.
Tired from this last effort, Sinitsky leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.
He was seventy years old.
For fifty of those years he had been composing puzzles, riddles, and other brainteasers.
But the good old puzzle-maker had never had such a hard time professionally.
He wasn’t up to date, he was politically ignorant, and his younger rivals were beating him hands down.
The puzzles they brought to their editors had such impeccable ideological underpinnings that the old man cried with envy just reading them.
How could he possibly compete with something like this:
The old man shook off his depressing thoughts, and was about to go back to his “debit” sheet, when a young woman, with wet bobbed hair and a black swimsuit hanging over her shoulder, entered the room.
Without saying a word, she stepped out onto the balcony, hung her soggy swimsuit on the chipped railing, and looked down.
She saw the same meager courtyard that she had been looking at for years—actually, it was a destitute-looking courtyard, with broken crates lying around, wandering cats covered with coal dust, and a tinsmith noisily fixing a bucket.
Housewives on the ground floor were talking about their hard lives.
It wasn’t the first time the young woman had heard these complaints. She also knew the cats by name, while the tinsmith had been fixing the same bucket for years—or so it seemed.
Zosya Sinitsky went back into the room.
“This ideology is killing me,” she heard her grandfather mumble. “What does puzzle-making have to do with ideology?
Puzzle-making . . .”
Zosya looked at the old man’s scribbles and exclaimed:
“What have you written here?
What is this?
‘A Persian, if his God is kindly.’
What God?
Weren’t you telling me that the editors no longer accept puzzles with religious expressions?”
Sinitsky gasped.
Crying,
“Where’s God?
There’s no God there!” he pulled his white-rimmed glasses onto his nose with shaking hands and picked up the sheet.
“There is a God,” he admitted brokenheartedly. “Snuck in . . .
I messed up again.
What a shame!