Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America. Илья Ильф
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must have been thus, no doubt, that the ruthless fighters of Mohammed imagined their paradise – food on the table, a warm place, and houris performing their ancient tasks.
Later the girls ran out again a number of times: in the interval between the first and the second course, before coffee, and during coffee. The proprietor of the Hollywood would not let them be idle.
This joining of primitive American cooking with the passion of service somewhat upset us.
The restaurant was full of people. The dinner cost about two dollars per person. That means that the average New Yorker can come here about once a month or less frequently. But then his pleasure is complete. He listens to jazz, he eats a cutlet, he looks at the houris, and he himself dances.
The faces of some of the dancers were stupid, others were pathetic, still others were cruel, but all were equally weary.
Three blocks away from the restaurant a black poodle with gay eyes was watching Dos Passos’ old machine.
We parted. We had become saddened by New York’s happiness.
“Good-bye, until Moscow,” said the nice Dos.
“Good-bye, until Moscow,” we replied.
8. A New York Arena
THE MEMBERS of the Dutch Treat Club meet every Tuesday in a white salon of the New York Hotel Ambassador.
The very name of the club gives a precise conception of the rights and duties of its members. Everyone pays for himself. On this powerful economic basis quite a number of journalists and writers joined together. Yet there is an exception. Guests of honour do not pay. But they are obliged to deliver an amusing speech. It does not matter what the subject is, so long as the speech is amusing and brief. If it turns out not to be funny, then at any rate it must be short, because the meeting is at lunch-time and the entire celebration lasts only one hour.
In reward for his speech the guest receives a light lunch and a large plaster-of-Paris medal of the club on which is portrayed a reveller, in a crushed top-hat, who has fallen asleep under the club’s initials.
While all applaud, the medal is hung around the neck of the guest, and all quickly depart. Tuesday is a business day. All the members of the Dutch Treat Club are business people. At the stroke of two they are already sitting in their offices and doing business. They advance culture or simply make money.
At such a gathering we met the manager of Madison Square Garden, the largest New York arena, where boxing matches of importance are held, where the very biggest meetings and the very biggest of everything take place.
On this particular Tuesday the guests were ourselves, the newly arrived Soviet authors, a famous American motion-picture actor, and the manager of Madison Square Garden whom we have just mentioned.
We prepared a speech, emphasizing chiefly not its humour but its brevity, and we attained the latter completely. The speech was translated into English and one of us, in no way embarrassed by the fact that he found himself in such a large gathering of experts of the English language, read it from a sheet of paper.
Here it is:
“Mr. Chairman, Gentlemen:
“We have come on a great journey from Moscow to see America. Besides New York we have had time to be in Washington and in Hartford. After living a month in New York we felt the pangs of love for your great and purely American city.
“Suddenly we were doused with cold water.
“’New York is not America,’ we were told by our New York friends. ‘New York is only the bridge betweenEurope and America. You are still on the bridge.’
“Then we went to Washington, District of Columbia, the capital of the United States, assuming thoughtlessly that surely this city was America. By the evening of the second day we felt with satisfaction that we were beginning to discriminate a little in matters American.
“’Washington is not America,’ we were told. ‘It is a city of government officials. If you really want to see America, you are wasting your time here.’
“We dutifully put our scratched suitcases into an automobile and went to Hartford, in the state of Connecticut, where the great American writer, Mark Twain, spent his mature years.
“Here we were again honestly warned:
“’Bear in mind that Hartford is not yet America.’
“When we began to ask about the location of America, the Hartfordites pointed vaguely to the side.
“Now we have come to you, Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen, and ask you to show where America really is located, because we have come here in order to learn as much as we can about it.”
The speech was a great success. The members of the Dutch Treat Club applauded it a long time. Only much later we learned that most of the members of the club did not understand a single word of this speech, because the strange Russo-English accent of the orator drowned out completely the profound thoughts concealed in it.
Mr. Chairman, however, who sat near us, had evidently caught the sense of the speech. Turning his thin and clever face to us, he struck his little gavel and, stopping thus the storm of applause, said in the ensuing silence:
“I regret very much that I myself cannot tell you at the moment where America is located. Come here again on the sixth of November, 1936, for it will be clear then what is America and where it is located.”
This was a witty and the only correct answer to our question. On November 6th was to be held the presidential election, and Americans felt that it would determine the path along which America was to proceed.
Then the tall man whom the chairman called “Colonel” was given the floor. The colonel began to bark at once, looking ironically at those forgathered here.
“My business,” he said, “consists of renting Madison Square Garden to all-comers, and anything in the world that may happen there suits me. The Communists want it for a meeting against Hitler, so I rent the hall to the Communists. The Hitlerites want a meeting against the Communists, I rent the hall to the Hitlerites. In my building the Democrats may be cursing the Republicans today, but tomorrow the Republicans contend from the same platform that Mr. Roosevelt is a Bolshevik and leads America to anarchy. My hall is for everybody. I do my business. I nevertheless do have my convictions. Not long ago the defenders of Bruno Hauptmann, who killed the Lindbergh baby, wanted to rent my hall for agitation in favour of Hauptmann. I refused to rent my hall to those people. But anybody else is welcome to come. Pay your money and take your places, no matter who you are, Bolsheviks, anarchists, reactionaries, Baptists, it’s all the same to me.”
Having roared this out. the manly colonel sat down and took to finishing his coffee.
In Madison Square Garden, in this “hall for all,” to use the colonel’s expression, we saw a feature boxing match between the former world champion, the Italian Carnera, and a German boxer, not the best but a first-rate one.
The arena of Madison Square Garden is not a circle like the usual circus arenas, but an elongated rectangle. At a very sharp incline around the rectangle rise rows of chairs. Even before the match begins the eyes of the onlooker are presented with an inspiring spectacle – he sees twenty-five thousand chairs at once, he sees twenty-five thousand seats in one theatre. In the event of a boxing match, chairs are placed also in the arena, surrounding the entire ring.
A strong white light fell on the platform of the ring. The rest of the place was in twilight. Raucous cries of vendors in white two-horned caps resounded throughout the huge building. The vendors, making their way between the rows of chairs, offered salted nuts, salted biscuits, chewing gum, and small bottles of whisky. Americans are by their nature a chewing people: they chew gum, candy, the ends of cigars; their jaws are always moving, clicking, and snapping.
Camera appeared in the next to the last match. Amid deafening greetings he walked into the ring and looked around with that sullen and apprehensive glance which is the attribute of all extremely tall and exceedingly strong men. It is the look of a man who is constantly fearful of crushing something or of mangling it.
Carnera