Before submerging himself in the ocean’s depths, Ostap had worked hard on dry land.
The trail had led the grand strategist to the golden letters of the Hercules, and that was where he had been spending most of his time.
He was no longer amused by rooms with alcoves and sinks, or by the statues, or the doorman in a cap with a golden zigzag who liked to gab about the fiery ritual of cremation.
Berlaga’s desperate and muddled testimony brought to light the semi-executive figure of Comrade Sardinevich.
At the Hercules, he occupied a large room with two windows, the kind of room once favored by foreign boat captains, lion tamers, and rich students from Kiev.
Two telephones rang in the room often and irritably, sometimes separately, sometimes together.
But nobody answered the calls.
Even more often, the door would crack open, a closely cropped bureaucratic head would pop in, glance around perplexed, and disappear, only to make way for the next head, this one not closely cropped but with a mane of wild stiff hair, or simply bald and purple, like an onion.
But the onion skull wouldn’t linger in the doorway either.
The room was empty.
When the door opened for perhaps the fiftieth time that day, it was Bender who peeked into the room.
Like everybody else, he turned his head from left to right and from right to left and, like everybody else, realized that Comrade Sardinevich was not in.
Expressing his displeasure brazenly, the grand strategist started making the rounds of the departments, units, sections, and offices, inquiring about Comrade Sardinevich everywhere.
And, everywhere, the answer was always the same:
“He was here just a moment ago,” or,
“He just left.”
The semi-executive Yegor was one of those office dwellers who either “were here just a moment ago” or “have just left.”
Some of them never even make it to their office during the entire workday.
At 9 A.M. sharp, a person like this enters the building and, with the best of intentions, lifts his foot in order to put it on the first step.
Great deeds await him.
His schedule includes eight important appointments and two big meetings and a small one, all in his office.
On his desk, there’s a stack of papers, all requiring urgent action.
There’s so much to do and so little time.
So this executive, or semi-executive, purposefully lifts his foot toward the first marble step.
But setting it down is not that simple.
“Comrade Parusinov, just one second,” someone coos, “I just wanted to go over one small issue with you.”
Parusinov is gently taken by the arm and led into a corner.
From this moment on, the executive—or the semi-executive—is a complete loss to the country. He’s been taken over.
The moment he clears up the small issue and runs three steps up, he’s picked up again, taken to the window, or into a dark hallway, or to a secluded nook where the messy head of maintenance left some empty boxes lying around. People explain things to him, request things, urge him to do something, and plead with him to resolve certain matters urgently.
By 3 P.M., and against all the odds, he finally makes it up the first flight of stairs.
By 5 P.M., he even manages to break through to the second floor.
But as his own office is on the third floor, and the workday is already over, he promptly runs downstairs and leaves the building, in order to make it to an urgent regional meeting.
Meanwhile, the phones in his office are ringing off the hook, the scheduled appointments fall through, and his correspondence remains unanswered, while the attendees of the two big and one small meetings drink tea peacefully and chat about problems with public transportation.
The case of Yegor Sardinevich was particularly acute because of the extracurricular activities to which he dedicated himself with far too much zeal.
He was especially adept at exploiting the universal mutual fraud that had somehow become the norm at the Hercules, which was for some reason referred to as extracurricular duties.
Sometimes the Herculeans would spend three straight hours in these meetings, listening to Sardinevich’s demeaning blather.
They were all dying to grab Yegor by his plump thighs and throw him out a window from a considerable height.
Sometimes they even felt that all extracurricular activities everywhere have always been a fiction, even though they were aware of some real activities of this kind taking place outside the Hercules.
“What an asshole,” they thought dejectedly, fiddling with pencils and teaspoons, “a goddamn phony!” But catching Sardinevich, and exposing him, was beyond their reach.
Yegor gave all the right speeches about Soviet society, cultural pursuits, continuing education, and amateur art clubs.
But there wasn’t anything real behind this passionate rhetoric.
Fifteen of his clubs, dedicated to politics, music, and the performing arts, had all been developing strategic plans for the past two years. And the local branches of various societies—whose goals were to advance aviation, knowledge of chemistry, automotive transportation, equestrian sports, highway construction, as well as the prompt eradication of ethnic chauvinism—existed only in the sick imagination of the local union committee. As for the school of continuing education, of which Sardinevich was especially proud, it was constantly reorganizing itself, which, as anybody knows, means it wasn’t undertaking any useful activity whatsoever.
If Sardinevich were an honest man, he would probably have admitted that all these activities were essentially a mirage.
But the local union committee used this mirage to concoct its reports, so at the next level up nobody doubted the existence of all those musico-political clubs.
At that level, the school of continuing education was imagined as a large stone building filled with desks, where perky teachers draw graphs that show the rise of unemployment in the United States on their chalkboards, while mustachioed students develop political consciousness right in front of your eyes.
Out of this entire ring of volcanic extracurricular activity that Sardinevich built around the Hercules, only two fire-breathers were active: The Chairman’s Voice newsletter, which Sardinevich and Bomze put together during work hours each month, and a plywood board with a sign that read THOSE WHO QUIT DRINKING AND CHALLENGE OTHERS, but there wasn’t a single name listed on it.
Bender was sick and tired of chasing Sardinevich around the Hercules. The grand strategist couldn’t catch up with the distinguished activist no matter what.
Sardinevich eluded him every time.
He had just been talking on the phone in the union committee room,. The earpiece was still warm, while the shiny black receiver still had the mist of his breath on it.
Elsewhere, a man with whom Sardinevich had just been talking was still sitting on the window sill.