I’ve got so many things to do. Continuing education, for instance—we’re having so much trouble reorganizing.
Would you stay with the German and keep him busy somehow?
He costs big money, you know, hard currency.”
Bomze sniffed his daily meat patty for the last time, swallowed it, brushed off the crumbs, and went to meet the foreign guest.
During the next week Sause, under the guidance of the affable Adolf Nikolaevich, visited three museums, attended a performance of Sleeping Beauty, and sat for some ten hours at a welcoming meeting that was held in his honor.
The meeting was followed by a private celebration, during which select Herculeans had plenty of fun, raised their goblets and other glasses again and again, and challenged Sause with their usual
“Drink it up!”
“Dearest Tillie,” the engineer wrote to his fiancee in Aachen. “I’ve been in Chernomorsk for ten days now, but I haven’t started working at the Hercules Corporation yet.
I’m afraid I won’t get paid for this time.”
But the paymaster handed Sause his half-month’s salary promptly on the fifteenth.
“Don’t you think I’m getting paid for nothing?” he said to his new friend, Bomze.
“I’m not doing any work.”
“Don’t give it another thought, my friend!” protested Adolf Nikolaevich.
“But if you wish, we can set up a desk for you in my office.”
So Sause wrote the next letter to his fiancee at his own desk:
“Darling, My life here is strange and very unusual.
I do absolutely nothing, yet they pay me punctually, as stipulated in the contract.
I am surprised.
Tell this to our friend, Dr. Bernhard Gerngross.
He’d find it interesting.”
When Polykhaev returned from Moscow, he was happy to hear that Sause already had a desk.
“Perfect!” he said.
“Sardinevich should bring him up to speed.”
But Sardinevich, who at the time was devoting all his energies to the organization of a major accordion club, dumped the German back on Bomze.
Adolf Nikolaevich wasn’t happy.
The German interfered with his meals and generally refused to keep quiet, so Bomze dumped him on the Industrial Department.
At the time, however, that department was reorganizing, which boiled down to endlessly moving their desks around, so they got rid of Heinrich Maria by sending him to Finance and Accounting.
Here Arnikov, Dreyfus, Sakharkov, Koreiko, and Borisokhlebsky, who didn’t speak any German, decided that Sause was a tourist from Argentina, and spent entire days explaining the Hercules’s accounting system to him using sign language.
After a month, a distressed Sause caught up with Sardinevich in the dining room and started shouting:
“I don’t want to get paid for nothing!
Give me some work to do!
If it continues like this, I’ll complain to your boss!”
Sardinevich didn’t like this last part of the foreign specialist’s speech.
He called Bomze to his office.
“What’s with the German?” he asked.
“Why is he blowing his top?”
“You know,” said Bomze, “I think he’s just a troublemaker.
I’m telling you.
The man sits at his desk, does absolutely nothing, makes tons of money—and still complains!”
“He really is a troublemaker,” agreed Sardinevich, “a German, what can you expect?
We have to resort to punitive action.
I’ll tell Polykhaev when I get the chance.
He’ll stuff him into a bottle in no time.”
Heinrich Maria, however, himself decided to try to get to Polykhaev.
But because the Hercules director was one of those people who “were here just a moment ago” or who have “just left,” this attempt only led to the wait on the wooden bench and the explosion that the innocent sons of Lieutenant Schmidt fell victim to.
“Byurokratizmus!” shouted the German, switching to the difficult Russian language in agitation.
Ostap quietly took the European guest by the arm, brought him over to the complaints box that was hanging on the wall, and said, as if he was talking to a deaf person:
“Here!
Understand?
In the box.