“Oh Eustachius the Long Lost! Oh Ineffable Eustachius!” called out a clarion voice behind his back. Melkior broke out in goose bumps: he had a sudden feeling of standing stark naked on the scale watched by all the passersby. He pretended the cries had nothing to do with him: he went on talking with the blind man.
“Defies the imagination, gentlemen, defies the imagination!” The man with the clarion voice was laughing an ugly laugh, baring front teeth pocked with large dark fillings. “An intellectual, a Schweik, speculating on the weighing machine. Look at him! Take a good look, all you sharp-eyed people! The military speculator! Heh, heh, heh … Going to the blind man! Good-looking people!”
Passersby stopped and watched with interest. Somebody asked his neighbor: What did he steal? You were here when it started, weren’t you?
No one knew anything about the curious incident, nor was anyone able to make sense of it. Was there going to be a brawl?
The drunkard had come right up to Melkior and was touching his ears, his chin, displaying him to the audience as if he were a carnival barker showing off a freak dwarf, a two-headed pig, a shark that had devoured a Swedish tourist …
The blind man extended both hands to fend off the drunkard, but the other pressed a two-dinar coin into each: “Not a lot, but it’s the gesture that counts,” and patted them.
The audience was now expecting an amusing spectacle: the man was totally drunk. … Having got his first laughs, the drunkard went on with his makeshift show.
“So, dear bard,” he addressed the blind man, “how heavily does the fear of war weigh upon the mind of this Eustachius the Peaceable?”
“What’s this nonsense? You’re mad!” Melkior whispered in his ear.
“How about you, Monsieur Boulechite?” the drunkard addressed a short stout man who was grinning with glee and stroking his ear with pleasure. “What do you think of my madness?”
“Listen, you …!” the short fatty took offense. “Watch it or I’ll box your ears in, you …!”
“Oh, that I will, you … Stroking your ear, I see? Is that ear your breadwinner by any chance, working in the capacity of eldest son for May I See Your ID Card Ltd? If so, please treat it paternally; such an ear is worth more than seven plump cows. Also, by all means protect it from contact with heavy fists wearing bulky rings.”
Fatty had not been able to pull the right strand out from that tangle of words: he was thrown off by “ID card” and “heavy hands.” He plunged sensibly in among the overcoats and umbrellas, muttering unlikely threats.
The drunkard meanwhile leapt onto the platform of the weighing machine, waved his hat and shouted: “Drive on, izvoshchik!” He had one arm around Melkior’s neck, waving with the other and clucking his tongue: driving horses … and, closing his eyes, enraptured, he began reciting Yesenin:
… a troika is dashing across the field
but I’m not on it — someone else is instead …
My joy and my happiness, where have you fled? …
and tears welled in his eyes. He kept repeating “My joy and my happiness, where have you fled?” as tears streamed down his cheeks.
The onlookers watched as he wildly drove the troika on the weighing machine, tears flowing from his eyes, and someone whispered respectfully, “He’s crying.” And he, perhaps having heard the whisper of sympathy with his grief, suddenly jumped off the machine and bared his dark fillings in a grin.
“Eustachius Equivalentovich, I haven’t got a kopeck to my name, you pay the izvoshchik,” he said to Melkior. “Citizen Ferdyshchenko, I think it’s time to shut up shop,” and on the overcoat button of a curious passerby who had just stopped to see what was going on he surreptitiously hung a CLOSED sign he had kept tucked under his overcoat, having apparently lifted it from a shop door. The curious citizen had no idea anything was hanging down his belly and was laughing with the others. Meanwhile Melkior was still standing on the scale sweating in dismay. He’ll slink away as soon as Ferdyshchenko spots the sign, and then Ferdyshchenko will take it out on me …
“Tell me, Ugo,” he said pleasantly, “where might I find you later on?”
“Ugo, quoth he! Have you forgot my Giventakian moniker?”
“Parampion, I mean. Where will you be later this evening?” Melkior corrected himself patiently.
“Now you’re talking! At Hotel Pimodan, dear Eustachius, of course, at Hotel Pimodan … or, in our parlance, at the Give’nTake. Everybody will be there. They are looking for you. … Maestro the Mad Bug has been asking after you for months. Over and over he asks: where’s our sagacious Eustachius? Don Fernando will be there, too, for a change. Do come.”
“I’ll be right behind you. There’s just a thing or two I …”
But Ugo was no longer listening. He had already turned around to face the audience and was bowing to someone in Spanish ceremonial style:
“My humble respects to the noble hidalgo!” It was the choleric tobacconist who was busily closing his little corner kiosk for the night and had looked back to see what the monkey business was all about. “Your generosity, señor, will surely harvest a cigarette on the tobacco island o’er which you rule?”
The tobacconist took this as an insult. He resolutely dropped his keys into his pocket, muttering angrily, “Damned spongers.” And spat as he left.
“But, sir, what if the tuberculosis you just spat out comes back to your daughter on the eve of her marriage as her paternal dowry? You cannot be too careful. Therefore, no spitting on the floor, gentlemen! Right, Comrade?” he said to a man with a bicycle putting up posters.
“Right,” said the cyclist, proud at being addressed.
“And what are these, swastika posters? Not by any chance working for the German consulate, are you, von Velocitas? Dropping hooks among us, eh?”
“No,” the cyclist laughed artlessly, “I work for Franck-O.”
“For Franco? Well, well! I said you were up to some Fascist business. Working for the Caudillo himself! So how’s General Queipo de Llano? Getting old, isn’t he? Hemorrhoids, confession, come over all holy?”
“Listen, you!” the bill-sticker went serious. “A joke is a joke, but this …! Me and the Fascists? Think I’m crazy, do you?” The last sentence was directly linked with his right hand, which had already handed the bicycle to the left …
But Parampion … was his grinning mug to be punished for the mischievous little game of the harlequin who was performing his silly show inside his head?
“Bicycletissime!” he cried with delight and went on in a sober, bright, and solemn tone, “May I, before the honorable folk of this ancient, royal, free, capital city, firmly shake your hand for your proud and manly revulsion at the idea of being in any way connected with mankind’s greatest enemy, illiterate Fascism!” and he grabbed the cyclist’s abovementioned right hand, all ready to do a job of another kind, and pumped it thoroughly to mark “eternal friendship.” There was even a kiss to the man’s brow, the seal on the covenant.
The well-pleased employee of Franck-O, whose job it was to stick up posters advertising the Franck factory’s chicory coffee substitute, was happily excited over the public proclamation of his political integrity.
“And now, gentlemen,” Ugo addressed the audience, “I’m off … perhaps to Pampeluna. This concludes our Street Treat Show for today. We wish our listeners a very pleasant goodnight. The anthem — and we’re done. A propos, bicycletissime, would Your Velocipederasty happen to have a cigarette to spare?”