To begin with, they sent for some carriers like they use in field hospitals, and piled stuff on those to take it out. It stank to high heaven – the neighbors rued the day they went to court. But alright, you gotta do what you gotta do. Somewhere in the middle of this cultural layer, so to speak, they came across a giant-sized valenok6 with a hole burnt through it, and inside it – 400,000 rubles in hundred- and fifty-ruble bills. They called the Colonel, and began addressing the old man politely as “Grandfather.”
They kept cleaning, and eventually made their way to a couch – they uncovered one in the corner. By this time, obviously, the police sent the neighbors back to their rooms. And in the couch, sewn into the seat were these hefty little sausages: stacks of Imperial ten-ruble coins, a thousand of them altogether. I’ll let you do the math. At the very end, when they cleared the floor, the old man himself showed them a spot under a floorboard where he had hid a small jewelry box, which was filled with pearls and precious stones. We, personally, saw neither the inventory nor the protocol, only know that there was a lot, so much that our Colonel was soon handpicked for a promotion to Moscow. What do you imagine the going rate these days is for a General’s star if the regular 15-kopek-a-glass apple juice sells for twice that much in the co-op? This is what I’m saying.
And the other thing – grandfather’s family did turn up after all, direct heirs, but all they came to say was, “We know nothing, and have no claims.” It might be there was blood on that treasure, or maybe they really just got it all from the old man’s father. Matvei Semyonovich’s father, you now, owned a hardware store back in the NEP7 days, and Matvei Semyonovich himself spent most of his life in the kerosene stand in the Old Market – a nice spot to be sure, but not the pearls-and-gems kind of nice! I’ll let you do the math: how long did NEP last? And how long have the new co-ops been around? There, you see the difference? That’s what I’m talking about. There’s more to it, of course: people didn’t start from scratch back then, and they didn’t, old-timers say, use to drink as hard and as deep as they do now, at the Riflemen’s Izba, and the caviar didn’t cost what it does today...
Where do we get all this? From the same Anatoly Kretov, of course – back when this all happened, he had just come back from the army and enlisted as a private in the Criminal Unit, which is how he was able to be personally present at that famous search and property transfer. He only moved to the detox job later: “The criminal life,” he used to say, “is not for me – too nerve-racking.” Well, one can certainly see it that way: he has a family, small children, and they promised him an apartment. Only his nerves are no good anyway; any little thing can start him screaming, and his breath smells of alcohol, like that character in Gogol, you know (and he probably gives the same excuse for it too – that he was born that way).
“You could have snatched a rock for yourself in a blink,” Anatoly once told us. “They all went into a stupor when I pulled out that box.”
But he didn’t take anything. His conscience wouldn’t let him. He turned out to be an honest man, young Criminal Unit officer Anatoly Kretov, and that’s why they made him a sergeant. And honest people don’t make good stories – everyone knows everything about them anyway. One day, maybe, we’ll mention him again – he is an interesting soul, after all, as is any soul, so unique and individual from the moment it comes to this world. But now we’d rather tell you a different story: the one about a dishonest policeman and the clever Elsa.
Listen then:
Elsa Pavlovna Goff came to Stargorod after the war. One way or another, she came to possess a small house on the Right Bank near Kopanka, where our sectarians live. One way or another, she also acquired a son. She went to work as proofreader at the city’s paper, worked there until she retired, and sent her son to the army.
People knew she was German; people also knew she came from somewhere in the Urals or Siberia, or maybe even from Kazakhstan – somewhere far, anyway – but they didn’t pry, and Elsa was German in every way: quiet, neat, her house, albeit decrepit, always painted some happy color, and the gooseberries and raspberries in her orchard, people said, were big as a fist. And her flowers – no one else has such glorious flowerbeds: there were asters – the plain reed kind, and the fancy tubular kind, in yellow, and purple, and red, and some others, terry ones; and chrysanthemums – Betsy, and Golden Star, and Measure, and Slogan, and Sunset (purple with pale white), and Elegy, and Stakhanovite, and Svetlana, and Mariana, and I’m not even going to talk about her sweet peas, and tobaccos, mums, nasturtiums, pansies and lilacs – the plain ones and the Persian ones. You couldn’t possibly count them all. And the apple trees – she had about a dozen of those: late Chinese, early Antonov, Cinnamon, Pippin, Baltic Gold and White Gold – plus a smattering of currants along the fence: black ones to eat, red ones for the jelly – but that’s about it.
Elsa fed herself from her garden, of course, but she never sold much – just a bit here and there, enough to buy tea and sugar, and some potatoes; no one ever held a particular grudge against her, which must mean she was never rich. She didn’t have much time to go to the market anyway: she worked all day, and after work she had her son and her garden to tend. She was just... German, you know? No one envied her, and it was too much trouble competing with her at flowers and stuff. Everyone knew, for example, that she would happily share her seeds or cuttings with her neighbors, and would even come over and show them how to tend her plants, and her little tricks, so that the neighbors came to take a sort of family pride in her and would boast to the downtowners and the folks from the other side of the lake: “Our Elsa – she’s really clever!” But as far as chatting or gossiping went, she never had the time for that; as we say around here, different strokes for different folks.
And so everyone was just getting along fine until one summer a gentleman paid a visit to Kosmodemyanskaya Street. You couldn’t call him anything else – this was an honest-to-goodness capitalist: you would have said so too if you’d seen his trousers, and his jacket, his gold-rimmed glasses, his boots – atop real white India-rubber soles! – and his mustache, oh, his mustache was absolutely not how we do things around here. He went here and there, asked a few questions, and sort of filtered himself through Elsa’s gate. This, then, was her cousin, come all the way from West Germany.
I won’t even waste my breath telling you Elsa was terrified. Put yourself in her shoes: not a peep, not a trace, everything’s forgotten, water under the bridge, and here he is, and it all comes back like in her nightmares: the barge sailing down the Volga, and Kazakhstan... No! And yet – there he is: a living, breathing, flesh-and-blood (and quite well fed) gentleman, and presents his passport issued to one Erik Hoff, and brings out old family photos. Even their family name got passed on, and imagine this – he tracked her down through the Red Cross, bought himself a proper ticket, obtained a tourist visa, and there you have it: “Uncle Peter died in Bonn three years ago. He was ill at the end, didn’t feel well, you know, his mind was... he began to remember Russia a lot, his brother Paul, and you... he made us promise we would find either you or Paul, and...” Basically, she, Frau Elsa-Katarina Hoff was entitled to 10,000 American dollars, her Uncle’s diamond ring, the family silver, and, most importantly, a villa with a lake view and a Mercedes-230 automobile. There was, however, one condition: should she and her family be unwilling to move to Germany, all of the above, except the money and the diamond ring, would be inherited by her German relatives. And before Frau Hoff could even open her mouth, her cousin added that there were quite a few relatives indeed, and it was unlikely that she could ever win a lawsuit over the villa and the lake with the family silver, given that her Uncle was not quite altogether well in his last years.