The Twelve Chairs: A Novel

19. The Furniture Museum

✦ 219 ✦ 19 The Furniture Museum liza wiped her mouth with a hanky and brushed the crumbs off her blouse. She started to feel happier. She was standing in front of a sign reading: the museum of furniture craftsmanship. Going home would be too awkward. There were twenty kopeks in her pocket. So Liza decided to begin her independent life with a visit to the museum. Liza double-checked her money and went into the entrance hall. Theresheimmediatelybumpedintoamanwithawornbeard. He was staring oppressively at a malachite column. Through his mustache he forced out, “People used to live real good!” Liza gave the column a respectful glance and went up. She wandered around for ten minutes in small square rooms with such low ceilings that every person who went in them felt like a giant. These were rooms furnished with stern, wonderful , military furniture in the Pauline Empire style of mahogany and Karelian birch. Two rectangular cupboards whose glass doors were covered with crossed spears stood opposite a desk. The desk was immense. Sitting at it would be like sitting at Theater Square, and the Bolshoi Theater with its colonnade and four bronze draft horses pulling Apollo to the premiere of Red Poppy would have looked like an inkwell on the table. At least, that’s how it seemed to Liza, who was being raised on carrots like some kind of rabbit. Armchairs with tall backs, the tops of which were curved to look like ram’s horns, stood in the corners. The sun lay on the armchairs’ peach upholstery. One felt like sitting right down in an armchair like that, but sitting was forbidden. Liza did a mental comparison of how the priceless Pauline Empire armchair would look next to her red-striped mattress. Not half-bad, as it happened. She read the little sign on the wall giving the scientific and ideological foundation of the Pauline Empire style, grew sad that she and Kolya didn’t have a room in the palace, and went into an unexpected corridor. Low semicircular windows ran along the left-hand side at floor level. Through them, under her feet, Liza saw an enormous white-columned hall, trimmed in two colors. Furniture stood in it too, and visitors wandered around. Liza came to a halt. She’d never seen a hall under her feet before. Amazed and delighted, she looked down for a long time. Suddenly she noticed that the people she’d met earlier that day, Comrade Bender and his companion, the imposing, shavenheaded old man, were walking from some armchairs over to a writing desk. “That’s good,” Liza said. “It won’t be as boring.” She was very happy. She ran downstairs and immediately got lost. She ended up in a red parlor with about forty exhibits in it. They were pieces of walnut furniture with little bent legs. There was no exit from the parlor. She had to run back, through a round room lit from above and furnished exclusively , it seemed, with flowered pillows. She ran past brocade armchairs of the Italian Renaissance, Dutch cupboards, a large Gothic bed with a canopy on four twisted columns. A person in that bed would look no bigger than a peanut. The hall was somewhere under her feet, maybe off to the right, but it was impossible to find. Finally Liza caught the buzzing of sightseers listening inattentively as the tour guide un220 ✦ in moscow masked Catherine the Great’s imperialist bent, as revealed in the deceased empress’s love for Louis XVI furniture. It was that same large two-toned hall with columns. Liza walked through it to the other end, where her new acquaintance , Comrade Bender, was conversing hotly with his shavenheaded traveling companion. As she approached, Liza heard a sonorous voice saying, “Furniture in the chic-moderne style. But I believe that’s not what we need.” “No, but there are other halls here too, obviously. We need to look everything over systematically.” “Hello,” Liza said. Both turned around and immediately frowned. “Hello, Comrade Bender. It’s good I found you. It would’ve been really boring by myself. Let’s look at everything together.” The concessionaires exchanged glances. Ippolit Matveevich assumed a dignified air, even though he was annoyed that Liza might hinder them in the important matter of their search for the diamond furniture. “We’re typical provincials,” Bender said impatiently, “but how did you, a Muscovite, end up here?” “Completely by chance. Kolya and I had a fight...