“Yes, I’m considering it,” I replied, and right then and there we came to an agreement. He agreed to hire me as soon as a certain elderly staff member retired.
I spent the next month wandering along the city’s deserted beaches, trying to put my not very happy reflections into verse. She had not answered either of my two letters, and pride prevented me from writing a third. I did, however, write to one of my friends at the youth newspaper, making casual reference to the fact that I had gotten a job with a genuine, adult newspaper. I asked him to drop me a line in care of the paper whenever he had a chance. And by the way, I added, if you happen to run into a certain someone, and if the subject should happen to come up, you can tell her about my new job. In closing, I asked him to convey my best regards to everyone in the office, the editor included. The tone of the letter was, I think, calm and dignified, with perhaps a slight overlay of worldly condescension.
The air of my native land, saturated with the sharp aroma of the sea and with the soft, feminine fragrance of blooming wisteria, gradually soothed and comforted me. Perhaps the iodine dissolved in the sea air has a healing effect on emotional as well as physical wounds. At any rate, for days at a time I lay sunbathing on the beach, which was still deserted except for a few young men who would occasionally stroll past in small groups. These local Don Juans would cast a proprietary eye over the entire beach, studying its terrain like a general scrutinizing the site where momentous battles are soon to take place.
The man who was supposed to retire finally agreed to do so, not because he wanted to, but because a campaign had recently been launched to encourage people of retirement age actually to retire. In the past he had always tried to make light of his age, but now he was more or less forced to give in. His colleagues gave him a festive farewell and even presented him with an inflatable rubber boat. Although he had also hinted at some fancy fishing tackle, no one had caught the hint; the inflatable boat alone was enough to bankrupt our union treasury. Later on he began telling everyone that he had been made to retire against his will and had even been deprived of his promised fishing tackle. Of course this was all utter nonsense. He had been promised an inflatable boat and had gotten it; but as for the fishing tackle, it had not even been mentioned.
I go into all this in such detail because to a certain extent it looked as if I were the one who was taking his place. Actually, however, the terms of my employment were different from his, since I was being hired as a local employee for whom no apartment would have to be provided.
I had been acquainted with the paper’s editorial staff since my student days when during summer vacations at home I had tried to interest them in some of my poems. While my efforts in this direction had met with little success, I had learned something about the staff members themselves. Among other things, I knew for a fact that the paper’s editor-in-chief, Avtandil Avtandilovich, had never written a poem in his life and had no intention of doing so. In fact, during the whole period of his employment with the paper he had to the best of my knowledge never written anything at all.
Avtandil Avtandilovich was a born leader and man of many talents. Like most Abkhazians he had a natural gift for making speeches and toasts. Not only was he an expert at the banquet table, but his height, curly hair and masculine appearance made his presence equally desirable and even indispensable at important meetings and conferences. He spoke all of the Caucasian languages fluently, and his toasts never had to be translated.
Before his editorial post he had headed a local industry— naturally, one on a scale appropriate to our small, but charming, autonomous Republic. Apparently he had managed the industry quite well — perhaps even too well, since the need had arisen to promote him, and when the opportunity presented itself, he was made editor-in-chief of the city newspaper.
As a man of great ability and resourcefulness he quickly mastered this new enterprise. His operational talents were truly phenomenal. Editorials would frequently appear in our paper on the very same day as in the Moscow papers, and sometimes even a day earlier.
As I had hoped, I was assigned to the paper’s agricultural section. This was a period of radical reform for Soviet agriculture. Experiments were taking place right and left, and I wanted to see for myself what was going on, find out what it was all about, and eventually become an expert in my own right.
The paper’s agricultural section was headed by Platon Samsonovich. If one wonders at the name, I should point out that in our region such names are as plentiful as fish in the sea. Apparently they are a holdover from the Greek and Roman colonization of the Black Sea coast.
I was already acquainted with Platon Samsonovich and had often gone fishing with him in the past. He was a quiet, peaceful individual and one of the most capable and experienced fishermen I had ever run across.
By the time I came to work for him, however, Platonov Samsonovich had completely changed. Not only had he lost all interest in fishing, but he had even sold his small boat. Gone too was his former peaceful exterior. With pursed lips and a certain purposeful glitter in his gloomy eyes, he would pace feverishly from one end of the office to the other. He had always been on the short side, but now he seemed to have shriveled up completely. He had grown even wirier than before and was absolutely charged with energy.
The cause of this sudden transformation was the goatibex-breeding campaign which had recently been launched in our region. Platon Samsonovich had initiated this campaign and was its main promoter.
Some two years before, Platon Samsonovich had paid a visit to one of our mountain game preserves and come back with a short news item on a certain breeding specialist who had succeeded in crossing a mountain ibex with a common goat. As a result of his experiment there appeared the world’s first goatibex. Grazing peacefully among a herd of goats, the new animal could hardly suspect the glorious future that awaited it.
No one paid any attention to Platon Samsonovich’s article — no one, that is, except for a certain very important individual who always spent his vacations at Cape Orange on the shores of our Republic. This individual, who was not exactly a minister but no less important than a minister, read the article and, upon reading it, exclaimed, “An interesting undertaking, to say the least.”
At this point it would be difficult to ascertain whether he addressed these words to anyone in particular or merely uttered aloud the first thought that came into his head. In any case, the very next day Avtandil Avtandilovich received a phone call and was told by the voice at the other end of the receiver, “Our congratulations, Avtandil Avtandilovich. He said it’s an interesting undertaking, to say the least.”
Avtandil Avtandilovich promptly called a staff meeting and in an atmosphere of general rejoicing expressed his gratitude to Platon Samsonovich. At the same time he instructed the latter along with our staff photographer to set off immediately for the game preserve and this time to bring back a full-length article on the life and habits of the goatibex.
“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that the goatibex will some day play a significant role in our national economy,” declared Avtandil Avtandilovich.
A week later our paper published a feature article entitled “An Interesting Undertaking, to Say the Least.” The article took up a whole half page and was supplemented by two large photographs of the goatibex. Seen in profile, the animal’s lower lip seemed to curl skeptically to the side, like that of some decadent aristocrat. In the second photograph the goatibex was shown fullface with his powerful and splendidly curved horns. Here his expression seemed to be one of bewilderment, as if he himself could not decide who he really was and which was better: to become a goat or remain an ibex.