Such a good line wasted.”
“Why don’t you replace God with fate?” suggested Zosya.
But the frightened Sinitsky rejected fate.
“That’s mysticism too.
I know.
Oh, I messed up again!
What’s going to happen, Zosya sweetheart?”
Zosya gave her grandfather a cold look and advised him to start a new puzzle from scratch.
“Either way,” she said, “you always struggle with words that end in -tion.
Remember how you struggled with levitation?”
“Of course,” replied the old man. “I used ‘levit’ as the first part and wrote:
‘The first one will not challenge you, it is the last name of a Jew.’
They rejected that riddle:
‘Not up to snuff, won’t do.’
I messed up!”
Then the old man settled down at his desk and went to work on a large, ideologically correct picture puzzle.
First he sketched a goose holding a letter L in his beak.
The letter was large and heavy, like an upside down gallows.
The work proceeded smoothly.
Zosya began setting the table for dinner.
She moved between a china cabinet with mirrored portholes and the table, unloading the dishes.
She brought a glazed soup bowl with broken handles; plates, some decorated with little flowers and some not; forks, yellowed with age; and even a punch bowl, although punch wasn’t on the menu.
On the whole, the Sinitskys were in dire straits.
The riddles and puzzles brought home more worries than money.
The homemade dinners that the old puzzle-maker had been offering to his acquaintances were their chief source of income. But that was in trouble, too.
Subvysotsky and Bomze were away on vacation. Stoolian married a Greek woman and started eating at home. Pobirukhin was purged from his organization under Category Two. He was so upset that he lost his appetite and stopped coming to dinner.
He just wandered around the city, accosting his acquaintances and repeating the same sarcasm-laden question:
“Have you heard the news?
I got purged under Category Two.”
Some of his acquaintances commiserated with him:
“Look what they did, those bandits Marx and Engels!” Others wouldn’t say anything; they’d fix a fiery eye on Pobirukhin and race past him, rattling their briefcases.
In the end, there was only one diner left, and even he hadn’t paid for the whole week, blaming it on delayed wages.
Zosya shrugged her shoulders unhappily and went to the kitchen. When she came back, the only remaining diner was already sitting at the table. It was Alexander Ivanovich Koreiko.
Outside the office, Alexander Ivanovich did not act timid or servile.
Nevertheless, a vigilant expression never left his face even for a minute.
At the moment he was carefully studying Sinitsky’s new puzzle.
Its mysterious drawings included a sack spilling letter Ts, a fir tree with the sun rising behind it, and a sparrow sitting on a line from a musical score.
It all ended in an upside-down comma.
“This one won’t be easy to solve,” said Sinitsky, pacing slowly behind the diner’s back. “You’re going to have to sweat over it!”
“Right, right,” replied Koreiko with a smirk. “I’m just not sure about this goose.
What’s with the goose?
Ah!
Got it!
‘Through struggle you will attain your rights’?”
“That’s correct,” drawled the old man, disappointed. “How did you solve it so quickly?
You must be gifted.
No wonder you’re Bookkeeper First Class.”
“Second Class,” corrected Koreiko. “And what’s this puzzle for?
For publication?”
“Yes, for publication.”