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5. The Registrar’s Past
- Northwestern University Press
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✦ 43 ✦ 5 The Registrar’s Past during MASLENITSA of the year 1913, an event took place in Stargorod that outraged the community’s progressive circles. That Thursday evening, a grandiose program was in progress in the luxuriously finished halls of the café chantant Salve: The Drafir Sisters (there were three) dashed around the tiny stage with a backdrop depicting a view of Versailles and sang, in a Volga accent: Before you now we flit and float As light as birds, as gauze, The World-Famous Juggling Troupe 10 Arabs! With Staens, the Most Magnificent Phenomenon of the Twentieth Century: Mysterious! Inscrutable! Monstrous!!! Staens, the Human Puzzle! Inas, the Stupendous Spanish acrobats! Brezina, the Diva from the Parisian Theater Folies Bergère! The Drafir Sisters, and Other Numbers 44 ✦ the lion of stargorod We make our audiences gloat, The world gives us applause. After performing these couplets, the sisters flinched, took each other’s hands, and roared out the refrain as loud as they could to the ever-intensifying piano accompaniment: We flit about the stage, We know no sorrow or care. Be he idiot or sage, Every man knows who we are. The desperate dancing and bewitching smiles of the Drafir trio had not the slightest effect on the progressive circles of Stargorod society. These circles (represented in the café chantant by Charushnikov, a member of the town Duma, and his lady cousin; Angelov, a merchant of the first guild, sitting merrily with two lady cousins clothed in pale yellow; the town architect ; the town doctor; three landowners; and many other, less distinguished people, both with lady cousins and without) saw the Drafir trio off the stage with funereal smatterings of applause and then applied themselves once more to the delights of “a family-style gala dinner with Mumm Champagne Cordon Vert for two rubles per individual.” On the tables, attractive light-blue menus stuck up out of special silver-plated stands. The contents of the menus, which caused a drunken boredom to descend on the merchant Angelov , were seductive and unusual for the young man of about seventeen who was sitting right by the stage with an inexpensive , very mature lady cousin. The young man reread the menu again: “Zander paupiettes. Roast poussin. Pickles. Soufflé glacé Jeanne d’Arc. Mumm Champagne Cordon Vert. Live flowers for the ladies.” He mentally weighed various sums known only to himself, then timidly ordered supper for two individuals. It wasn’t half an hour later that the sobbing young man (whom the merchant Angelov loudly recognized as Dmitry Markelovich, the baker’s son, dressed in mufti instead of his gymnasium uniform) was being led out by the old lackey Pyotr. The lackey was muttering indignantly, “If you don’t have the money, why order fruit . . . It’s not listed in the menu, there’s a special price for it.” The lady cousin, coquettishly wrapped in her cat-fur stole with its black paws, walked behind him, swaying her bottom first to the right, then to the left. The merchant Angelov joyfully shouted “D student! You were held back a year! I’ll tell your papa! You’ll have a nice little benefit performance then!” after the disgraced student. The boredom cast over everyone by the Drafir Sisters’ performance vanished without a trace. The famous mademoiselle Brezina, with her shaved armpits and heavenly little face, slowly came out on stage. The diva was arrayed in ostrich feathers. She neither sang nor told stories. She didn’t even dance. She walked grandly around the stage looking sweetly at the audience , and gave piercing shrieks while simultaneously knocking a wire pince-nez off the nose of her partner, a colorless, mustached gentleman, with the tip of her divine foot. Angelov and the town architect, a shaven-headed little old man, were beside themselves. “Show us what you’ve got!” Angelov shouted in a terrible voice. Charushnikov, one of the town Duma members, was stung to the quick by the fairy from the Folies Bergère. Breathing heavily, he stood up from his table, aimed, and threw a coiled paper streamer at the stage. It uncoiled only halfway before it hit the lovely diva right in the chin. Unfeigned merriment took hold of the hall. Champagne was ordered. The town architect wept. The landowners insistently invited the town doctor to come hunt on their lands. The orchestra played a flourish. the registrar’s past ✦ 45 46 ✦ the lion of stargorod At the peak of joy, loud voices...