Free The Twelve Chairs by Ilya Ilf Page B

that had been lost at approximately
the same time, meat that was inferior to eggs in fat, and perhaps even the
society that they were prevented from helping by careful mastication.
     Seated at table in addition to the old women were Isidor, Afanasy,
Cyril and Oleg, and also Pasha Emilevich. Neither in age nor sex did these
young men fit into the pattern of social security, but they were the younger
brothers of Alchen, and Pasha Emilevich was Alexandra Yakovlevna's cousin,
once removed. The young men, the oldest of whom was the thirty-two-year-old
Pasha Emilevich, did not consider their life in the pensioners' home in any
way abnormal. They lived on the same basis as the old women; they too had
government-property beds and blankets with the word "Feet"; they were
clothed in the same mouse-grey material as the old women, but on account of
their youth and strength they ate better than the latter. They stole
everything in the house that Alchen did not manage to steal himself. Pasha
could put away four pounds of fish at one go, and he once did so, leaving
the home dinnerless.
     Hardly had the old women had time to taste their porridge when the
younger brothers and Pasha Emilevich rose from the table, having gobbled
down their share, and went, belching, into the kitchen to look for something
more digestible.
     The meal continued. The old women began jabbering:
     "Now they'll stuff themselves full and start bawling songs."
     "Pasha Emilevich sold the chair from the recreation room this morning.
A second-hand dealer took it away at the back door."
     "Just you see. He'll come home drunk tonight."
     At this moment the pensioners' conversation was interrupted by a
trumpeting noise that even drowned the hissing of the fire extinguisher, and
a husky voice began:
     '. . . vention .. ."
     The old women hunched their shoulders and, ignoring the loudspeaker in
the corner on the floor, continued eating in the hope that fate would spare
them, but the loud-speaker cheerfully went on:
     "Evecrashshsh . . . viduso . . . valuable invention. Railwayman of the
Murmansk Railway, Comrade Sokutsky, S Samara, O Oriel, K Kaliningrad, U
Urals, Ts Tsaritsina, K Kaliningrad, Y York. So-kuts-ky."
     The trumpet wheezed and renewed the broadcast in a thick voice.
     ". . . vented a system of signal lights for snow ploughs. The invention
has been approved by Dorizul. . . ."
     The old women floated away to their rooms like grey ducklings. The
loud-speaker, jigging up and down by its own power, blared away into the
empty room:
     "And we will now play some Novgorod folk music."
     Far, far away, in the centre of the earth, someone strummed a balalaika
and a black-earth Battistini broke into song:

     "On the wall the bugs were sitting,
     Blinking at the sky;
     Then they saw the tax inspector
     And crawled away to die."

     In the centre of the earth the verses brought forth a storm of
activity. A horrible gurgling was heard from the loud-speaker. It was
something between thunderous applause and the eruption of an underground
volcano.
     Meanwhile the disheartened fire inspector had descended an attic ladder
backwards and was now back in the kitchen, where he saw five citizens
digging into a barrel of sauerkraut and bolting it down. They ate in
silence. Pasha Emilevich alone waggled his head in the style of an epicurean
and, wiping some strings of cabbage from his moustache, observed:
     "It's a sin to eat cabbage like this without vodka."
     "Is this a new intake of women?" asked Ostap.
     "They're orphans," replied Alchen, shouldering the inspector out of the
kitchen and surreptitiously shaking his fist at the orphans.
     "Children of the Volga Region?"
     Alchen was confused.
     "A trying heritage from the Tsarist regime?"
     Alchen spread his arms as much as to say: "There's nothing you can do
with a heritage like that."
     "Co-education by the composite method?"
     Without further hesitation the bashful Alchen invited the fire
inspector to take pot luck and lunch with him.