metasketching by Zoshchenko

At Night from Before Sunrise . . .

On my pillow lie some letters to the editor of The Red Gazette. They are complaints about mismanagement in public baths. These letters were given to me so that I could write a feuilleton. I look the letters over. They are helpless, comical. But at the same time they are serious. Very much so.

They discuss a human concern of no little importance-- baths.

I draw an outline and begin writing.

Even the first lines amuse me. I laugh. I laugh louder and louder. I finally guffaw until the pencil and pad drop from my hands.

I write again. And again my body shakes with laughter.

No, later on when I'm recopying the story, I won't laugh like that. But the first draft always amuses me uncommonly.

My stomach hurts from laughing.

My neighbor is knocking on the wall. He is a bookkeeper. He has to get up early tomorrow. I'm keeping him awake. Today he's pounding with his fist. I must have waked him up. It's annoying.

I shout, "Excuse me, Pyotr Alekseyevich . . ."

I turn to my writing pad again. Again I laugh, this time burying my face in a pillow.

In twenty minutes the story is finished. I'm sorry I wrote it so fast.

I go over to my desk and copy the story in a beautiful, even hand. While copying, I go on laughing softly.

But tomorrow, when I read the story aloud in the editor's office, I won't laugh. I'll read it gloomily and even morosely.

It's two in the morning. I go to bed. But I can't fall asleep for a long time. I'm thinking over themes for new stories.

It begins to grow light. I take a bromide to fall asleep.

More from Mikhail Mikhailovich

I Go on Leave, from Before Sunrise . . .

I am holding a suitcase. I am standing on the platform at the Zalesye station. The train will be here in a minute, and then I will return to Petrograd via Minsk and Dno.

The cars roll up. They are all heated freight cars with one regular passenger car. Everyone dashes for the train.

Suddenly there are shots. They sound like anti-aircraft guns. German airplanes appear in the sky.

There are three of them. They circle above the station. Soldiers shoot haphazardly at them with their rifles.

Two bombs fall from a plane with an oppressive whine and explode near the station.

We all run out into a field. In the field are vegetable gardens, a hospital with a red cross on its roof, and further off some fences.

I lie down on the ground by a fence.

After circling over the station and dropping one more bomb, the planes turn their course toward the hospital. Three bombs fall near the fences almost simultaneously, hurling up earth. That's pure swinishness. There is an enormous cross on the roof. Impossible not to notice it.

Three more bombs. I see them break loose from the planes. I see the beginning of their fall. Then there is only the whine and the whistling in the air.

Our anti-aircraft guns are firing again. Now pieces of shrapnel and shell cases bestrew the field. I press close to the fence. And suddenly I see through a crack that on the other side of the fence there is an ammunition dump.

Hundreds of cases of artillery shells stand under the open sky.

A watchman is sitting on top of the cases and gaping at the airplanes.

I rise slowly and try to spot a place to go. But there's no place to go. If a single bomb hit those cases everything would be blown up for several kilometers around.

After dropping a few more bombs, the planes depart.

I walk slowly toward the train, inwardly blessing their bad aim. War will become an absurdity, I think, when technology achieves perfect aim. I would have been killed at least forty times this year.

more Z.

Twelve Days from Before Sunrise . . .

I am traveling from Viatka to Kazan to get reinforcements for my regiment. I am using post horses. There is no other means of transportation. I ride in a covered wagon, wrapped in blankets and fur coats.

The three horses gallop over the snow. The landscape is bare. There is a cruel forest. Next to me is Ensign S. We are going for the reinforcements together.

We have been traveling for two days. Everything has been said. All our reminiscenses have been repeated. We are incredibly bored. Pulling his revolver from its holster, Ensign S. shoots at the white insulators on the telegraph poles.

These shots irritate me. I get angry at Ensign S. I rudely tell him, "Cut it out, you idiot!"

I expect a scene, shouts. But instead I hear a plaintive voice in reply. He says, "Sub-lieutenant Zoshchenko . . . don't stop me. Let me do what I want. I'll get to the front and they'll kill me."

I gaze at his snub nose, I look into his piteous bluish eyes. Now, almost thirty years later, I can remember his face. He really was killed the second day after we got to our position.

In that war sub-lieutenants lived, on an average, not more than twelve days.

What is it that Stanton always says?

Life is much easier if you don't do drugs.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/11/30/MNG263BHKR1.DTL

A Clever Little Trick, by Mikhail Zoshchenko

I don't know how it is in Moscow, but here in Leningrad they sell only powerful electric light bulbs. Something like one hundred and fifty, two hundred, or four hundred candle power.

And as for consumers who dream of obtaining a light bulb of ten or maybe fifteen candle power, theirs prove to be truly senseless dreams. Such light bulbs are not for sale.

Well, I thought, they send these small bulbs to the provinces for use in the villages. And that calmed me down.

Now my old bulbs had burned out. I got three new ones of four hundred candle power each and basked in this bright light. Of course, it's annoying. It's very bright. The main thing is, I'm not a draftsman. It's so ridiculously bright in the hall and the bathroom that you just start to feel bad. But I stood it.

But this month the meter reader came. Started to check how much electricity I had burned up.

"Oho!" he says. "Your bill gets higher every month. What are you doing, frying potatoes in the electricity?"

I say, "No, I've got powerful bulbs. And I just don't know what to do. It's a hopeless situation."

Well, I got to talking with the meter reader. A lot of chit-chat. He had a glass of tea with me. Ate a roll. And then he says, "You know why there aren't any small bulbs? Shall I tell you?"

I say, "Tell me, but it'll hardly make me feel any better."

He says, "There's a big trick being played with the small bulbs. The whole thing has to do with the financial-industrial plan."

"I'm afraid I don't quite get you," I said.

He says, "The factory had to fulfill its plan. Well, so they went and fulfilled it."

"No," I say, "Ever since so much light has been beating down on me in this apartment, my bean doesn't work so well. I don't understand you."

"What is there," he says, "to understand? Well let's suppose that according to the plan they had to fulfill a production quota of a million candle power. Well, now just imagine-- are they going to start producing this million in small bulbs? They wouldn't make it in two years, the devils. So they decided to get there with big bulbs. Whether you make small bulbs or big ones, the work is the same. But you don't need nearly so many. And so, those devils have settled on big bulbs. They're turning them out like pancakes."

I said, "But that's a filthy trick! And also it's no joy to us that the government is wasting a lot of valuable electric power. Take me-- I have four hundred candle power in the toilet. I really feel guilty about going in there."

He said, "Be grateful that they didn't settle on the biggest bulbs of all. Next year they'll probably start turning out bulbs with a thousand candle power."

At this point I suddenly got mad.

"Instead of shooting off your mouth to me," I said, "you should tell me where I can get some small bulbs."

He said, "Even though I work for the electric service, I haven't laid eyes on any small bulbs for two years now."

With these words he said good-bye and departed. And I turned off the lights in the room, lay down on the bed, and in the darkness started thinking about what tricks people resort to in order to balance their office accounts.