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28. The Excellent Jailhouse Basket
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✦ 321 ✦ 28 The Excellent Jailhouse Basket the stargorod division of the ephemeral “Sword and Plowshare ,” along with the fine young men from Quickpack, had formed quite a long line outside the Grainproduct flour and meal shop. Passersby stopped. “What’s the line for?” citizens asked. In a boring line at a store, there is always one person whose loquacity increases the farther he stands from the store’s front door. Polesov was standing furthest of all. “Oh, what we’ve come to!” the fire chief was saying. “Soon we’ll all be living on oilcakes. It wasn’t even this bad in ’19. There’s only four days’ worth of flour in the whole town.” The citizens twisted their mustaches mistrustfully, started arguing with Polesov, and cited Stargorod Pravda. Having proved sure as two and two is four that the town had all the flour it could ever need and that there was no reason to cause a panic, the citizens ran home, got all their cash, and formed a line for flour. Once they’d bought out all the flour in the shop, the fine young men from Quickpack switched to the grocery store and formed a line for tea and sugar. In three days Stargorod was racked by crisis-level deficits of provisions and goods. Representatives of co-ops and government stores suggested limiting the sale of goods to a pound of sugar and five pounds of flour per person until the provisions that were en route could reach town. An antidote to this was discovered the very next day. The first person in the sugar line was Alkhen. Behind him was his wife Sashkhen, Pasha Emilevich, the four Yakovleviches, and all fifteen of the old charity cases, in their toile du nord finery . After wresting twenty pounds of sugar from the Stargaico store, Alkhen took his line over to the other co-op, bowing along the way to Pasha Emilevich, who had already managed to eat up his allotted pound of sugar. Pasha poured the sugar into a little mound on the palm of his hand and tossed it into his wide maw. Alkhen was busy all day. To cut down on losses from his wares drying out or settling during shipment, he took Pasha Emilevich out of the line and used him for hauling their purchases to the market. There Alkhen shyly resold his sugar, flour, tea, and cotton voile to private vendors. Polesov was standing in line mostly out of principle. He didn’t have any money and couldn’t buy anything anyway. He wandered from line to line listening to conversations, making biting remarks, raising his eyebrows significantly, and prophesying . As a result of his hints and allusions the town filled with rumors that some kind of underground organization having to do with a sward and a cow fair was coming to town. Governor Dyadyev made ten thousand in one day. No one knew how much the chairman of the stock exchange committee made, not even his wife. The thought that he belonged to a secret society gave him no peace. The rumors going through town had him utterly terrified. After a sleepless night, the chairman of the stock exchange committee decided that only a clean confession could shorten his jail time. “Listen, Henrietta,” he said to his wife. “It’s time to transfer the textile factory to your brother.” “Why, are they really going to come?” Henrietta Kislyarskaya asked. 322 ✦ in moscow “They might. Seeing as how there’s no free trade in this country, I’m going to have to go to jail at some point, right?” “So is it time to get your underclothes ready? Oh, my unhappy life. I’ll have to be bringing you packages all the time. Why don’t you become a government office worker? My brother is a union member, and he’s fine! But no, this one just has to be a red merchant!” Henrietta didn’t know that fate had elected her husband chairman of the stock exchange committee. So she was calm. “I might not come home tonight,” Kislyarsky said. “In that case, come tomorrow with a package. Just don’t bring any vareniki , please. How enjoyable is it going to be for me to eat cold vareniki?” “Maybe you could take a primus stove with you?” “As if they’d let me keep a primus in my cell! Give me my basket.” Kislyarsky had a special jailhouse basket. It was made-toorder...