The Twelve Chairs: A Novel

21. From Seville to Granada

✦ 241 ✦ 21 From Seville to Granada but wait just a minute—where is Father Fyodor? Where is the trim-shaven priest of the Frol and Lavr Church? It seems he’d been about to go see citizen Bruns in building No. 34 on Vinogradnaya Street? Where is this treasure-seeker in an angel’s image, this sworn enemy of Ippolit Matveevich Vorobyaninov (who is currently keeping watch in a dark hallway by a fireproof safe)? Father Fyodor has disappeared. The devil’s thrown him for a loop. People say they saw him at Popasnaya Station on the Donetsk lines. He was running down the platform with his teakettle of hot water . . . Father Fyodor’s got a hunger. He’s started to want riches. He’s been carried off all over Russia looking for Popova’s, the general’s widow’s, set of chairs (in which, we have to admit, there’s not a damn thing). The holy father’s going all over Russia. And all he does is write his wife letters. The letter of Father Fyodor, written by him at the Kharkov train station, to his wife in the provincial town of N. My dear little dove, Katerina Alexandrovna! I am entirely guilty before you. I left you all alone, poor thing, at a time like this. I have to tell you everything. You’ll understand me and, I dare hope, agree. Of course I haven’t gone off to any Living Churchists and never had the slightest intention of doing so, God save me. Now read carefully. Soon we’ll start to live differently. You remember, I used to tell you about the candle factory. We’ll have it, and we may well have a certain something else, too. And you won’t have to cook up dinners by yourself and feed boarders, to boot. We’ll go to Samara and hire a servant. Now there’s a deal I’m looking at here, but you keep it absolutely secret, don’t tell anybody, not even Marya Ivanovna. I’m looking for treasure. Remember the departed Claudia Ivanovna Petukhova, Vorobyaninov’s mother-in-law? Before she died, Claudia Ivanovna revealed to me that her diamonds were hidden in her house in Stargorod, in one of the parlor chairs (there’s only twelve of them). Now, Katenka, don’t you go thinking that I’m some kind of thief or something. She bequeathed those diamonds to me and ordered me to keep them safe from Ippolit Matveevich, her longtime tormentor. That’s why I left you so unexpectedly, poor thing. Just don’t hold anything against me. I arrived in Stargorod and, imagine, that old woman-chaser also turned up there. He found out somehow. Obviously, he tortured the old woman before her death. He’s a terrible man! And he’s got some criminal offender going around with him, he hired himself a bandit. They threw themselves on me, plain and simple, they wanted to get rid of me. But I’m not such an easy mark, you can’t trifle with me. I didn’t give in. At first I went down the wrong path. I only found one chair in Vorobyaninov’s house (now there’s a charitable institution there), and I was carrying my furniture back to my room at the Sorbonne when suddenly a fellow comes around the corner , throws himself at me like unto a lion, and grabs the chair. 242 ✦ in moscow It almost came down to a fight. Wanted to put me to shame. But then I got a good look, and I saw it was Vorobyaninov. He’d shaved his mustache off, if you can imagine that, and shorn his head bare, the crook, he’ll disgrace himself in his old age. We broke the chair, there was nothing there. It was only later that I understood I’d stumbled onto the wrong path. But at the time I was very upset. I was insulted, and I told that libertine the whole truth, right to his face. What a disgrace, I said, in your old age. What savagery has taken hold in Russia these days, I said, when a marshal of the nobility throws himself at a servant of the church, like unto a lion, and upbraids him for having no party affiliation. You are a low person, I said, Claudia Ivanovna’s tormentor, someone who chases after other people’s belongings, that belong to the state now...