A pickle the size of the leaning tower of Pisa appears on the horizon.
Platoons of wines, spirits and liqueurs march behind ramparts of salt and pepper.
Tottering along in the rear in a miserable bunch come the soft drinks: the non-combatant soda waters, lemonades and wire-encased syphons.
Who is this rosy-cheeked individual-a gourmand and a tosspot-with a sweet tooth?
Gargantua, King of the Dipsodes?
Silaf Voss?
The legendary soldier, Jacob Redshirt?
Lucullus?
It is not Lucullus.
It is Ivan Ivanovich Sidorov or Sidor Sidorovich Ivanov-an average citizen who consumes all the victuals described in the statistical table as an average throughout his life.
He is a normal consumer of calories and vitamins, a quiet forty-year-old bachelor, who works in a haberdashery and knitwear shop.
You can never hide from statistics.
They have exact information not only on the number of dentists, sausage shops, syringes, caretakers, film directors, prostitutes, thatched roofs, widows, cab-drivers and bells; they even know how many statisticians there are in the country.
But there is one thing that they do not know.
They do not know how many chairs there are in the USSR.
There are many chairs.
The census calculated the population of the Union Republics at a hundred and forty-three million people.
If we leave aside ninety million peasants who prefer benches, boards and earthen seats, and in the east of the country, shabby carpets and rugs, we still have fifty million people for whom chairs are objects of prime necessity in their everyday lives.
If we take into account possible errors in calculation and the habit of certain citizens in the Soviet Union of sitting on the fence, and then halve the figure just in case, we find that there cannot be less than twenty-six and a half million chairs in the country.
To make the figure truer we will take off another six and a half million.
The twenty million left is the minimum possible number.
Amid this sea of chairs made of walnut, oak, ash, rosewood, mahogany and Karelian birch, amid chairs made of fir and pine-wood, the heroes of this novel are to find one Hambs walnut chair with curved legs, containing Madame Petukhov's treasure inside its chintz-upholstered belly.
The concessionaires lay on the upper berths still asleep as the train cautiously crossed the Oka river and, increasing its speed, began nearing Moscow.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE BROTHER BERTHOLD SCHWARTZ HOSTEL
Leaning against one another, Ippolit Matveyevich and Ostap stood at the open window of the unupholstered railway carriage and gazed at the cows slowly descending the embankment, the pine needles and the plank platforms of the country stations.
The traveller's stories had all been told.
Tuesday's copy of the, Stargorod Truth had been read right through, including the advertisements, and was now covered in grease spots.
The chickens, eggs and olives had all been consumed.
All that remained was the most wearisome lap of the journey -the last hour before Moscow.
Merry little country houses came bounding up to the embankment from areas of sparse woodland and clumps of trees.
Some of them were wooden palaces with verandahs of shining glass and newly painted iron roofs.
Some were simple log cabins with tiny square windows, real box-traps for holiday-makers.
While the passengers scanned the horizon with the air of experts and told each other about the history of Moscow, muddling up what they vaguely remembered about the battle of Kalka, Ippolit Matveyevich was trying to picture the furniture museum.
He imagined a tremendously long corridor lined with chairs.
He saw himself walking rapidly along between them.
"We still don't know what the museum will be like . . . how things will turn out," he was saying nervously.
"It's time you had some shock treatment, Marshal.
Stop having premature hysterics!
If you can't help suffering, at least suffer in silence."
The train bounced over the switches and the signals opened their mouths as they watched it.
The railway tracks multiplied constantly and proclaimed the approach of a huge junction.
Grass disappeared from the sides and was replaced by cinder; goods trains whistled and signalmen hooted.
The din suddenly increased as the train dived in between two lines of empty goods trucks and, clicking like a turnstile, began counting them off.
The tracks kept dividing.
The train leapt out of the corridor of trucks and the sun came out.
Down below, by the very ground, point signals like hatchets moved rapidly backward and forward.
There came a shriek from a turntable where depot workers were herding a locomotive into its stall.
The train's joints creaked as the brakes were suddenly applied.
Everything squealed and set Ippolit Matveyevich's teeth on edge.