The Twelve Chairs: A Novel

16. Amid an Ocean of Chairs

✦ 191 ✦ 16 Amid an Ocean of Chairs statistics knows everything. Exact stock has been taken of the amount of arable land in the USSR, divided by subcategories into black earth, loam, and forest. All citizens of both sexes have been written down in the neat, fat books, the Office of Vital Statistics books, so well known to Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov. We know how much of which food the average citizen of the republic eats in a year. We know how much vodka, on average, that average citizen drinks, with an approximate indication of the accompanying zakuska. We know how many hunters, ballerinas, turret lathes, dogs of all breeds, bicycles, monuments, girls, lighthouses, and sewing machines there are in the land. How much life, full of fire, passion, and thought, gazes out at us from statistics tables! Who is he, this rosy-cheeked individual who sits at dinner with a napkin tucked into his shirt, annihilating the steaming food with an appetite? Herds of miniature bulls lie all around him. Fat pigs crowd into a corner of the statistics table. Countless sturgeons, burbots, and sabre carps splash in a special statistical pool. Chickens sit on the individual’s shoulders, arms, and head. Homegrown geese, ducks, and turkeys fly in feathery clouds. Two rabbits sit under the table. Pyramids and Babylons of bread loom on the horizon. A small fortress of jam is washed by a milky river. A cucumber the size of the Leaning Tower of Pisa stands on the horizon. Half companies of spir- its, vodkas, and fruit liqueurs march in behind ramparts made of salt and pepper. The rear guard is brought up by a pitiful clutch of nonalcoholic beverages: noncombatant Narzan mineral waters, lemonades, and seltzer bottles in string mesh. Who is this rosy-cheeked individual, this glutton and drunk with a sweet tooth? Gargantua, the king of the Dipsods? Strongman Voss? The legendary soldier Yashka Red-Shirt? Lucullus? It is not Lucullus. It is Ivan Ivanovich Sidorov, or Sidor Sidorovich Ivanov, an average citizen, who during his life will eat, on average, everything depicted on the statistical table. He is a normal consumer of calories and vitamins, a quiet forty-yearold bachelor who works in the state haberdashery and knitwear store. You can’t hide anywhere from statistics. It not only has exact information about the quantity of dentists, sausage stands, hypodermic needles, dvorniks, film directors, prostitutes, thatched roofs, widows, horse-cab drivers, and bells, it even knows how many statisticians the country has. But there is one thing it doesn’t know, doesn’t know and can’t find out: how many chairs there are in the USSR. There are a great many chairs. The last statistical census determined the size of the population of the Union republics to be 143 million. If you throw out 90 million peasants who instead of chairs prefer benches, plank platforms, and banks of earth outside their huts (and who, in the East, prefer worn rugs and carpets), then you still have 53 million people for whom chairs remain items of primary importance in the domestic sphere. If, though, you take into account possible errors in calculation and the habit of certain citizens of the Republic of falling between two chairs, then, by reducing the general figure in half, just in case, we find that there should be no less than 26.5 million chairs in the country. Just to be sure we’ll give up 6.5 million . The remaining 20 million will be the minimum figure. 192 ✦ in moscow Amid this ocean of chairs made of walnut, oak, ash, rosewood , mahogany, and Karelian birch, amid chairs made of fir and pine, the novel’s protagonists have to find a Gambs walnut chair upholstered in English calico with little bent legs hiding Madame Petukhova’s treasure in its belly. The concessionaires were still lying on their upper bunks, asleep, when the train carefully crossed the Oka, gathered speed, and began the approach to Moscow. amid an ocean of chairs ✦ 193 ...