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✦ 383 ✦ 33 A Magical Night on the Volga the smooth operator and his friend and closest assistant, Kisa Vorobyaninov, stood to the left of the State Volga Riverboat Line’s landing stages, under a sign reading tie up to rings, watch out for fence, don’t touch walls. The suffering cries of steamships frightened the marshal. Lately he’d gotten as jumpy as a rabbit. The sleepless night Ippolit Matveevich spent in the third-class car of the Moscow– Nizhny Novgorod mail train had left shadows, blotches, and dusty wrinkles all over his face. Flags popped on the pier. Smoke, curly as cauliflower, poured out of ships’ smokestacks. The steamer Anton Rubinstein, at landing stage No. 2, was being loaded. Stevedores thrust their iron claws into cotton bales; cast-iron pots stood arranged in a bataillon carré; and wet-salted hides, coils of wire, boxes of plate glass, balls of binding twine, millstones, bony, two-toned agricultural machinery, wooden pitchforks, baskets of new cherries sewn up with sacking, and barrels of sardines were everywhere. The motor ship The Paris Commune was docked at landing stage No. 4. According to schedule, it was only supposed to set off downriver at six that evening, but the passengers who’d arrived that morning from Moscow had begun strolling its neat white decks by ten. But the Scriabin wasn’t there. This worried Ippolit Matveevich a great deal. “What are you so worried about?” Ostap asked. “And just imagine that the Scriabin was here. How would you get on board? Even if we had the money to buy a ticket, nothing would come of it. That steamship isn’t taking any passengers.” In the train, Ostap had managed to have a chat with Mechnikov , the fitter who was working the hydraulic press. He found out everything. The steamer Scriabin had been chartered by the People’s Commissariat of Finances and was to complete a trip from Nizhny Novgorod to Tsaritsyno, stopping at every dock and printing up and issuing rounds of lottery bonds. To effect this, an entire institution had come out from Moscow: the lottery commission, a business office, a brass band, a cameraman , correspondents from the main newspapers, and the Columbus Theater. The theater was to perform shows demonstrating the benefits of government bonds along the way. The theater was fully provisioned by the lottery commission up to Tsaritsyno, and after that it was going to take its Marriage on a wide-ranging tour of the Caucasus and Crimea at its own risk. The Scriabin was late. It was in the boatyard undergoing the final preparations for the trip, and they could only promise that it would arrive by evening. Therefore all the Moscow personnel were bivouacked on the pier to await loading. Gentle creatures with little suitcases and carryalls were sitting on coils of wire, guarding their Underwoods and looking fearfully at the stevedores. A citizen with a purple goatee was perched on a millstone. A pile of little enameled doorplates sat on his lap. On the top one, a curious bystander could have read mutual settlements department. Pedestal tables and other, more modest tables stood piled on top of each other. A sentry strolled to and fro by the sealed safe. The TASS correspondent had ensconced himself on the edge of the pier and was dangling his legs over the side, fishing. The fish weren’t biting, and the correspondent grunted, an384 ✦ madame petukhova’s treasure noyed, as he changed the bait. Persitsky, representing The Lathe, looked at the market through a pair of Zeiss binoculars with a magnification factor of eight. Then he shifted his feet restlessly, found out that it would be another five hours or so until the Scriabin’s arrival, and went up to town on the Kremlin elevator . He could get a heap of material together in the remaining free time and submit an essay about the city, Bonch-Bruevich’s radio laboratory, and the aftermath of the flood. Agafya Tikhonovna was sitting on one of Vorobyaninov’s chairs in the shade of the hydraulic press, flirting with the balalaika virtuoso, a proper young man with a European bearing. The virtuoso felt marvelous in his native environs. He sat down graciously on one of Vorobyaninov’s chairs, paying absolutely no attention to the fact that all five of Galkin, Palkin, Malkin, Chalkin, and Zalkind were then forced to make do with just two chairs. The concessionaires stalked in circles around the chairs like jackals. Ostap...

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