In the afternoon Holmes left for Heathrow, and after dinner I occupied myself with his papers. Comforting myself in my old armchair, I took a leather file from the table and started to rummage through its content curiously. Notes – for the beginning. Some of them, the most brief, I will cite here.
Note №1. May 15, 1976. “Weekly news” reported that an obstetrician named Triplett had delivered triplets three times already.
Note №2. December 5, 1664, an English ship “Maney” drown in Pas de Calais; only one crewmember was saved, and his name was Hugo Williams. 121 years later on that very date, December 5, 1785, another ship has drowned in Irish Sea near Man Island. And only one sailor has survived, and his name was Hugo Williams.
Note №3. In 1883 some Texas scoundrel named Henry Siegland left his beloved; she couldn’t get through this and laid hands on herself. Her brother decided to take revenge on the offender. But the bullet he fired only rubbed Siegland’s face against and got stuck in the trunk of the tree. Siegland has fallen down on the ground, and the brother thinking that the revenge was complete shot himself immediately… 30 years later, in 1913, Siegland, still alive, was going to saw down the tree where the bullet has stuck. The tree was rather tough, and Siegland tried to explode it with dynamite. When he did so, the bullet fired out from the trunk and struck him in the head. The girl was revenged at last!
Note №4. 1975, a little child fell down from the window on 14th (!) storey in Detroit and landed right on the head of someone named Mr. Joseph Figlock… The next year on the same date Mr. Figlock was strolling by the same place, and surely the same child dived on his head. And though little fidget became rather heavier than a year ago, this time all was OK too.
Note №5. In XVII century all Japan was talking about an evil fate dominating on some child kimono. Each of three girls which had it as a present or a simply purchase has died before putting it on for the first time. February 1657, a Japan priest decided that it would be better to burn the “unhappy” kimono. But hardly had he burnt it, suddenly the strong gust of the wind fanned the fire, and soon it was entirely uncontrolled… And that’s the result: three quarters of Tokyo were burnt, there were destroyed: 300 churches, 500 palaces, 9000 stores and 61 bridges, 100 thousands of people were killed…
About dozen of more lengthy, but not less interesting notes proved rather convincingly the rightness of Pushkin’s statement: “the chance” indeed is mighty and immediate instrument of Providence. Having finished reading, I pondered about that “above”-world reality of which existence common western people think only while visiting a church under the pressure of circumstances. And curious coincidences attracting my friend’s Holmes attention do make us remember about lots of “chances” in human history, when plans of acting, thoroughly organized and well equipped with all necessary things, just couldn’t come true. Sometimes, due to them, the current of events changed its tend or got a new quality entirely by accident.
So, thinking about the role of a chance as an instrument of Providence, which every man has ever encountered this way or that in his short life, I looked at last at the page with the first “picnic”. It was copy from the last page of the newspaper of Leningrad union of journalists, named “Chas Pick”, dated by 24.06.1991, and its loud title claimed: “Historical Picnic”. I knew that many cities in Russia have changed their names after 1991, as well as after 1917. Then Petersburg was called Leningrad, and now Leningrad is Petersburg again. The pictures of “picnic” resembled cartoon drawings, and there were five of them. It was the theme of ancient Egypt that caught the eye firstly, and it seemed to me for my first impression that it was artificially summoned to events in Russia.
At the beginning I was trying to translate the text of the pictures, basing on the lexicon, which I obtained during three years in Afghanistan. But I understood very soon, that I wouldn’t cope without special Russian-English dictionary. Text of the first picture was as following:
“Political passions of ancient Egypt still strike the imagination of common electors. The struggle for the throne between Amenkhotep IV (Ehnaton) and young Tutanhamon is a struggle of two great party religions of Amen and Aten. These unforgettable 40-centuries-ago events of fight for the power in the epoch of XVIII dynasty of Egypt Pharaohs we tried to recover in our memory, for there were no historical sources at hand. If something isn’t correct enough, we’re not to blame, so many years passed, it’s impossible to recollect everything…”
The last, and the lowest, picture was added with text strange as welclass="underline"
“For reaching the top of hierarchic pyramid, it’s necessary to capture someone, to eliminate someone, to blackmail, to buy, to provoke, to exile, to betray, to compromise, to deceive, to isolate, to assure, to frighten, to discredit, to distract, to take out, to delete, to bury, to strike, to make to do, to sell, and etc. Or to be intelligent, to have an authority and always tell the truth, but in this case you get to category of “someone”…
If you suddenly felt a desire to achieve the peak and you had proper stones at hand (they’re drawn) for building the stairs of social carrier staircase, then in what succession would you pile them one on another? May be, you know the other ways for reaching the top of power, where you can see far and spit from on high?”
Under this text there were the figures of five young and five old men, standing with their backs to each other. Between them was printed some strange word (its meaning in Russian isn’t clear) – “churiki”[22]. On every picture, on the first ground there were two palm trees (on the first, the upper, one of the palms was covered by some other drawing). The picnic was strangely called “in a name of Artemis”, and on the second upper picture – with the delta of Nile, to the channel of the river there was added a branch called “Nilovna”[23]. On the third – central – picture in big letters it was printed “CAMEL” – a well-known in England mark of cigarettes; to the right of this inscription the figure in ancient Egypt Pharaoh attire was crawling out of the TV screen, and under him there were eight figures with the inscription – “zhretses of OMON”. Some other inscriptions, such as: “Barracks leading to Rome”, collective farm “The lighthouse of Alexandria”, “Sarcophagus with the former Pharaoh”, “Colossus of Rhodes”. To cut the long story short, both pictures and inscriptions for them were full of nonsense, which didn’t belong to history, as well as geography, if
trying to understand them directly. But how many times did I try to complete some coherent mosaic out of these strange “stones”, which could reveal the concealed sense of the “picnic”! It all was for nothing. I was lacking of some keys to this rebus –
the most probable, information about Russian and Egyptian history.
There was also an application to the “Historical Picnic”: the list of films which apparently might be on the screens of some Leningrad cinemas during the period of 24-26 of June, 1991, but I had no ideas what should I do with it.
Moving away the first “picnic”, I put the second – “Defence Picnic” – next to me, and started researching.
The pictures were not so numerous here, and all of them were devoted to military theme (that’s why, perhaps, it was called the “Defence Picnic”). However, texts were strange as welclass="underline"
“Reminder for the soldier and sailor, present and future”
“The song about marshals. Verses by Michel Bezrodny[24]. Music by Alfred Karasinov[25]”. And after that notes and verses of the song with such strange words followed:
One, two, one, two,
Tremble and quiver