Finally, Sevryugov did something that totally confused the newspaper which was close to the Polish foreign ministry.
He found the expedition lost in the ice ridges, radioed their exact location, and then disappeared himself.
The world exploded in a frenzy.
Sevryugov’s name was uttered in 320 different languages and dialects, including the language of the Blackfoot. Pictures of Sevryugov, clad in animal skins, were printed on every available sheet of paper.
Meeting with the press, Gabriele d’Annunzio announced that he had just finished his new novel and was immediately embarking on a search for the brave Russian.
A charleston named I’m Warm at the Pole with My Baby was released.
The old Moscow hacks Usyshkin-Werther, Leonid Trepetovsky, and Boris Ammiakov, who had been engaged in literary dumping for years, and periodically flooded the market with their production at throwaway prices, were already working on an article entitled
“Aren’t You Cold?”
In other words, the planet was living out a great sensation.
All this caused an even greater sensation in apartment No. 3 at 8 Lemon Lane, better known as the Rookery.
“Our tenant is missing,” cheerfully reported the retired janitor Nikita Pryakhin, who was drying a felt boot over a Primus stove. “He’s missing, that boy.
Well, who forced him to fly?
A man should walk, not fly.
Yes, walk, that’s right.”
And he repositioned the boot over the whooshing fire.
“That’s what you get for flying, goggle-face,” muttered an old grandma whose name nobody knew.
She lived in the loft over the kitchen, and although the entire apartment had electricity, the grandma used a kerosene lamp with a reflector in her loft.
She didn’t believe in electricity. “Now we’ve got a spare room, some spare footage!”
The grandma was the first to name what had long been burdening the hearts of everyone in the Rookery.
Everybody started talking about the missing pilot’s room, among them: a former Prince from the Caucasus mountains, lately a proletarian from the East, Citizen Hygienishvili; Dunya, a woman who was renting a bed in Auntie Pasha’s room; Auntie Pasha herself, a street vendor and a hopeless boozer; Alexander Dmitrievich Sukhoveiko, once Chamberlain at His Imperial Majesty’s Court, known to his neighbors simply as Mitrich; and other minor apartment characters, all headed by the chief leaseholder, Lucia Franzevna Pferd.
“Well,” said Mitrich, straightening his gold-rimmed glasses as the kitchen filled up with tenants, “since the comrade is missing, we have to divvy it up.
I, for example, have long been entitled to some extra footage.”
“Why should a man get the footage?” countered Dunya the bed renter. “Shouldn’t it be a woman?
This might be the only time in my life that a man suddenly goes missing.”
She continued lingering in the crowd for a long time, offering various arguments in her own favor and frequently repeating the word “man.”
The one thing all the tenants agreed upon was that the room had to be taken immediately.
That same day, the world was shaken by yet another sensation.
The brave Sevryugov was no longer missing. Nizhny Novgorod, Quebec City, and Reykjavik had heard his radio signals.
He was stranded at the eighty-fourth parallel with damaged landing gear.
The airwaves teemed with reports:
“The brave Russian is in excellent condition,”
“Sevryugov sends a message to the Society for Defense and Aviation,”
“Charles Lindbergh calls Sevryugov the world’s top pilot,”
“Seven icebreakers are on their way to rescue Sevryugov and the expedition he found.”
Apart from these reports, the newspapers printed nothing but photos of some icy shores and banks.
The following words were constantly repeated:
“Sevryugov,” “North Cape,” “parallel,” “Sevryugov,” “Franz Joseph Land,” “Spitsbergen,” “King’s Bay,” “sealskin boots,” “fuel,” “Sevryugov.”
The gloom that this news brought to the Rookery was soon replaced by quiet confidence.
The icebreakers were moving slowly, the ice fields were hard to crack.
“Let’s take the room—and that’s that,” said Nikita Pryakhin. “He’s sitting pretty on that ice over there, while Dunya here, for example, has all the rights.
Especially since, by law, a tenant cannot be absent for more than two months.”
“You should be ashamed of yourself, Citizen Pryakhin!” argued Barbara—still Mrs. Lokhankin at the time—waving a copy of Izvestiya. “He’s a hero!
He’s on the eighty-fourth parallel now!”
“Whatever that parallel is,” Mitrich responded vaguely. “Maybe it doesn’t even exist, that parallel.
We don’t know that.
We didn’t attend classical gymnasiums.”
Mitrich was telling the truth.
He hadn’t attended a gymnasium.
He had graduated from His Majesty’s Corps of Pages.
“Look here,” argued Barbara, putting the newspaper right in front of the Chamberlain’s nose.