Notes on the Cuff and Other Stories (6 page)

"But we need desks ... chairs ... and at least
some ink!"

The young man shouted excitedly:

"You'll get them! Good lad! You'll get
everything!"

He turned to the old man, winked at me and said:

"He means business, that lad!
Fancy
asking for desks straightaway.
He'll put things right for us."

*

Appt. Seer. Heavens!
ASS Lit.
In
Moscow
.
Maxim Gorky.
The Lower
Depths.
Sheherazade
.
Mother.

*

The young man untied the sack, spread a newspaper on
the table and poured about five pounds of lentils onto it. "That's for
you.
A quarter of the food ration."

Historians of literature, take note:

At the end of 1921 three people were engaged in
literature in the Republic: the old man (dramas; he turned out not to be Emile
Zola, of course, but someone I didn't know), the young man (the old man's
assistant, whom I didn't know either — poetry) and myself (who hadn't written a
thing).

Historians, also note: ASS Lit.
had
no chairs, desks, ink, light bulbs, books, writers or readers.
In short, nothing.

And me.
Yes, I rustled up from nowhere an antique mahogany writing-desk. Inside
I found an old, yellowing, gold-edged card with the words: "...ladies in
semi-
decollete
evening dress.
Officers
in frock-coats with epaulettes.
Civilians in uniform
tail-coats, with decorations.
Students in uniform.
Moscow
.
1899."

It smelt soft and sweet. A bottle of expensive French perfume
had once stood in the drawer. After the desk a chair arrived.
Then ink, paper, and finally a young lady, sad and pensive.

On my instructions she laid out everything that had
been in the cupboard on the desk: some brochures about "saboteurs",
12 issues of a
St. Petersburg
newspaper and a pile of green and red invitations to a congress of provincial
sections. It immediately began to look like an office. The old man and the
young man were delighted. They clapped me on the shoulder affectionately and vanished.

The sad young lady and I sat there for hours.
Me at the desk and she at the table.
I read
The Three Musketeers
by the inimitable
Dumas, which I had found on the floor in the bathroom. The young lady sat in
silence, occasionally heaving a deep sigh.

"Why are you crying?" I asked.

In reply she started sobbing and wringing her hands.
Then she said:

"I've found out that I married a bandit by
mistake."

I don't know if anything could surprise me after these
two years. But at this I just stared blankly at her...

"Don't cry. Things like that do happen."

And I asked her to tell me about it.

Wiping her eyes with a handkerchief, she told me she
had married a student, enlarged a photograph of him and hung it in the
drawing-room. Then a detective came, took one look at the photograph and said
it was not
Karasev
at all, but
Dolsky
,
alias
Gluzman
, alias
Senka
Moment.

"Mo-
ment
..." the
poor girl said, shuddering and wiping her eyes.

"So he's gone, has he? Well, good riddance to
him."

But this was the third day. And still nothing. Not a
soul had come.
Nothing at all.
Just me and the young
lady...

I suddenly realised today: ASS Lit.
isn't
plugged in. There's life overhead.
People walking about.
Next door too.
Typewriters clattering away and people
laughing.
They get clean-shaven visitors too.
Meyerhold's
fantastically popular in this building, but he's not here in person.

We have nothing. No papers, nothing. I decided to plug
ASS Lit.
in
.

A woman came upstairs with a pile of newspapers. The
top one was marked in red pencil "For ASS Fine Arts".

"What about one for ASS Lit.?"

She looked at me in fright and did not answer. I went
upstairs.
To the young lady sitting under a notice that said
"secretary".
She listened to me,
then
looked nervously at her neighbour.

"That's right, ASS Lit..." said the first
young lady
. "
There is a paper for them,
Lidochka
," said the second. "Then why didn't you
deliver it?" I asked in an icy tone. They both looked worried. "We
thought you weren't there."

*

ASS Lit.
is
plugged in. A second paper has arrived from
the young ladies upstairs. A woman in a kerchief brought it.
Asked
me to sign for it in a book.

Wrote a memo to the Service Department:
"Give me a car."

A man came two days later and shrugged his shoulders.

"Do you really need a car?"

"More than anyone else in this building, I should
say."

I managed to find the old man.
And
the young one too.
When the old man saw the car and I told him he had to
sign the papers, he gave me a long look, ruminating.

"There's something about you. You should apply
for an academician's food ration."

The bandit's wife and I started drafting an official
claim for payment of salary.
ASS Lit.
was
firmly plugged into the mainstream now.

N. B.
My future biographer: all this was done by me.

At 11 a. m. a young poet, obviously frozen to death,
came in and said quietly: "
Storn
."

"What can I do for you?"

"I'd like a job in ASS Lit."

I unrolled a sheet of paper headed "Staff".
ASS Lit.
was
allowed eighteen
members of staff. I was vaguely hoping to allocate these posts as follows:

Poetry instructors:
Bryusov
,
Bely
, etc.

Prose writers:
Gorky
,
Veresayev
,
Shmelyov
,
Zaitsev
,
Serafimovich
, etc.

But none of the afore-mentioned showed up.

So with a bold hand I scribbled on
Storn's
application: "
Pise
, appt."
instr
. pp. head."
Letter.
Squiggle.

"Go upstairs while he's still here."

Then the curly-headed, rosy-cheeked poet
Skartsev
arrived, full of joie de vivre.

"Go upstairs while he's still here."

A gloomy fellow in glasses, about twenty-five, so
thick-set he seemed to be made of bronze, arrived from
Siberia
.

"Go upstairs..."

But he replied:

"I'm not going anywhere."

He sat down in a corner on a rickety, broken chair,
pulled out a scrap of paper and started writing some short lines.
Obviously a very experienced fellow.

The door opened and in came a man wearing a nice warm
coat and a sealskin hat. It was a poet.
Sasha
.

The old man wrote the magic words.
Sasha
looked round the room carefully, fingered the dangling piece of broken wire
thoughtfully, and for some reason looked into the cupboard. He sighed.

Sitting down beside me, he asked confidentially:

"Will they pay cash?"

There was no room at the desks. We were all writing
slogans, with a new fellow, very active and noisy, in gold glasses, who called
himself the king of reporters. The king appeared the morning after we got an
advance, at 8.45 a. m. with the words:

"Is it true they paid out cash here?"

And joined the staff on the spot.

The episode of the slogans was like this.

A memo arrived from upstairs.

"ASS Lit.
urgently
requested to produce a set of slogans by 12 noon."

Theoretically this is what was supposed to happen: the
old man with my assistance would issue an order or summons to all places where
there were supposed to be writers. We would then receive thousands of slogans
from all over the country, by telegraph, letter and word of mouth. Then a
commission would select the best and present them by 12 noon on a certain date.
After that my secretarial staff (
i
. e., the bandit's
sad wife) and I would draw up a claim for payment, receive the monies concerned
and pay the most deserving for the best slogans.

But that was in theory.

In practice, however:

1) It was impossible to issue a summons, because there
was no one to summon. All the writers within the field of vision were: the
above-mentioned, plus the king.

2) Excluded by one: we could not possibly be flooded
with slogans.

3) The slogans could not be submitted by 12 noon on
such-and-such a date, because the memo arrived at 1.26 p. m. on the date in
question.

4) We needn't have written a claim for payment,
because there was no "slogan" allocation. But — the old man did have
a small, precious amount for travel allowances.

Therefore: a) The slogans shall be written as a matter
of urgency by all those present;

b)
a
commission to consider
the slogans shall be set up consisting of all those present to ensure complete
impartiality; and

c)
the
best slogans shall be
selected and the sum of fifteen thousand roubles paid for each of them.

We sat down at 1.50 p. m. and the slogans were ready
by 3 o'clock. Each of us managed to squeeze out five or six, with the exception
of the king who wrote nineteen in verse and prose.

The commission was fair and strict.

I, the writer of slogans, had nothing in common with the
other me who accepted and criticised them.

As a result the following were accepted:

three
slogans from the old man,

three
slogans from the young man,

three
slogans from me,

and
so on and so forth.

In short, forty-five thousand each.

Brrr
.
What a wind! And it's starting to drizzle. The meat pie in the
Truba
⁽¹⁸⁾
is wet from the rain, but delicious enough to drive you crazy.
A tube of saccharine and two pounds of white bread.

Caught up
Storn
.
He was chewing something too.

"It's all a dream, I swear. Can it be black
magic?"

I was two hours late for work today.

I turned the knob, opened the door, walked in and saw
the room was empty. Well and truly empty! Not only had the desks, the sad woman
and the typewriter gone, but even the electric wires.
Everything.

"So it was all a dream... I see ... I
see..."

For some time everything round me has seemed like a
mirage.
A vaporous mirage.
There, where yesterday...
But why yesterday, for
goodnees
sake?
A hundred years ago ... an eternity ... perhaps it never existed at all...
perhaps it doesn't now.
Kanatchikov
dacha!
⁽¹⁹⁾

So the kind old man ... the young man ... the sad
Storn
... the typewriter ... and the slogans ... didn't
exist at all?