Читать книгу Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America - Илья Ильф, Саша Бло - Страница 12

WE STOPPED in a small town and dined in a drug-store.

It is necessary to explain here the nature of a small American town, and what sort of drug-store it is in which one may dine. That story might be entitled “Pharmacist Without Mysticism, or The Secret of the American Drug-store”.

When America’s big business men, in search of profit, directed their attention to the drug business, they were first of all curious to find out what pharmacists were really doing behind their partitions.

What were they grinding there with their pestles in those thick china mortars, while frowning importantly? Was it medicines? Well, now, how many medicines are there in the world? Let’s say fifty – a hundred – well, a hundred and twenty at the most! A hundred and twenty febrifugal, stimulant, or sedative medicines! Why then prepare them in an amateurish way in drug-stores? They should be produced in mass quantity in factories.

The fact that medicines began to be prepared in factories didn’t make it any easier for the sick man – the medicines were no cheaper. But the pharmacists lost their income. That was taken over by drug manufacturers.

To recoup their lost incomes the outsmarted pharmacists began to sell ice-cream, thirst-quenching waters, small notions, toys, cigarettes, kitchen utensils – in a word, they went in for anything at all.

And so the present-day American drug-store is a large bar with a high counter and revolving grand piano stools before it. Behind the counter, back and forth, run red-headed young men with white sailor caps cocked on the sides of their heads, and coquettish young women, with permanent waves that will last for years, who look like the latest and at the moment the most fashionable movie star. At times they resemble Kay Francis, at other times Greta Garbo; before that they all looked likeGloria Swanson. The girls whip cream, open highly polished nickel taps out of which emerge noisy streams of seltzer water, roast chickens, and throw pieces of ice into a glass with a resounding tinkle.

Although the drug-store has been long ago converted into an eating establishment, its proprietor is nevertheless obliged to be a pharmacist and have a certain baggage of learning, which is insistently indispensable while serving coffee, ice-cream, toasted bread, and other drug-store merchandise.

In the most distant corner of this lively establishment is a small glass closet with little jars, boxes, and bottles. One has to spend at least a half-hour in a drug-store before one notices this little closet. In it are stored the drugs.

There is not one drug-store left in New York where the pharmacist himself prepares medicines. Oh, this remarkable establishment is wrapped in the aureole of medical mysteries! To prove that here medicines are actually prepared by hand, the proprietor of the drug-store displays in the window a pile of old yellowed prescriptions. It all looks like the den of a medieval alchemist. This is no ordinary drug-store. In the latter you can eat, buy a pocket watch or an alarm clock, a pot or a toy; you can even buy or rent a book.

We looked sadly at the menu. Dinner #1, Dinner #2, Dinner #3, Dinner #4—Dinner Number One, Dinner Number Two, Dinner Number Three, Dinner Number Four! Dinner #4 costs twice as much as Dinner #2, but that doesn’t mean that it is twice as good. No! There is simply twice as much of it. If in Dinner #2 a course called “country sausage” consists of three chopped off sausages, then in Dinner #4 there will be six chopped off sausages, but the taste will be exactly the same.

After dinner we become interested in the spiritual fare in which the drug-store traded. Here were wildly decorated picture postcards with views of local sights – very cheap, two for five cents. Black ones cost five cents apiece. The difference in price was right. The black postcards were excellent, while the coloured, ones were a lot of trash. We examined the shelf of books. They were all novels: Sinning is Man’s Game, The Flame of Burnt-Out Love, First Might, Affairs of the Married.

“You must not be shocked, gentlemen,” said Mr.Adams. “You are in a small American town.”

Many people think that America is a land of skyscrapers, that day and night one hears the clatter of elevated and underground railways, the hellish roar of automobiles and the overwhelming desperate cries of stock exchange dealers who rush among the skyscrapers, constantly waving their constantly falling stocks and bonds. This conception is firm, ancient, and customary.

Of course, it’s all there – the skyscrapers, the elevated railways, and the falling stocks. But those are the attributes only of New York and Chicago. And even there the stockbrokers don’t rush around sidewalks, throwing American citizens off their feet, but, entirely unnoticed by the population of America, they abide in their stock exchanges, performing all their machinations inside those monumental buildings.

New York has many skyscrapers; Chicago has a few less; but in the other large cities they are few in number – maybe two or three per city. They tower there in a lonely fashion, in the manner of a waterworks or a firehouse tower. In small towns there are no skyscrapers.

America is preponderantly a country of one-story and two-story houses. The majority of the American population lives in small cities where the population is three, five, ten, fifteen thousand.

What traveller has not experienced that first and unrepeatable feeling of excited expectation that possesses the soul upon entering a city where he has never been before? Every street and every lane open new and newer mysteries to the thirsty eyes of the traveller. Toward evening it begins to seem to him that he has fallen in love with that city. The sight of the street mob, the architecture of the buildings, the smell of the market, and finally the colour peculiar only to that city, compose the traveller’s first and truest impressions. He can live in the city a year, explore its nooks and corners, make friends, then forget the names of all those friends, forget all that he had so conscientiously learned, yet he will never forget his first impressions.

Nothing of the kind can be said about American cities. Of course, even in America there are a few cities that have their inimitable personalities – San Francisco, New York, New Orleans, Santa Fe. One can be enthusiastic about them, one can be amazed by them, love them or detest them – at any rate, they evoke some definite feeling – but almost all other American cities resemble each other like the Canadian quintuplets, whom even their tender mother mistakes for each other. This colourless and depersonalized gathering of brick, asphalt, automobiles, and bill-boards evokes in the traveller only a sense of annoyance and disappointment.

And if the traveller drives into the first small town with a feeling of excited expectation, then in the next town this feeling cools considerably, in the third it is exceeded by astonishment, in the fourth by an ironic smile, in the fifth, seventeenth, eighty-sixth, and hundred and fiftieth it is transformed into indifference – as if the speeding automobile were being met not by the new and unknown cities of an unexplored country, but rather by ordinary railroad sidings with the inevitable bell, hot-water boiler, and the watchman in the red cap.

The city’s principal street passes right through the city. It is called Main Street (which means the principal street) or State Street (the street of the state) or Broadway.

Every small town wants to be like New York. There are New Yorks of two thousand population, there are New Yorks of eighteen hundred. We even found one New York consisting of nine hundred inhabitants, and it was a real city. Its inhabitants walked on their Broadway, their noses high in the air. They weren’t quite sure which Broadway was generally regarded as the more important, theirs or New York’s.

The architecture of the buildings in the principal street cannot present the eye with artistic delights. It consists of brick, the frankest kind of brick, laid in two-story cubes. Here people make money, so there is no room for abstract embellishments.

The lower part of the city (downtown) is called the business centre. Here are the trading establishments, business offices, the motion-picture theatres. There are no people on the sidewalks, but the streets are full of automobiles. They occupy all the free places at the side. They are forbidden to stop only before fire hydrants or driveways, which is indicated by the sign “No Parking”.

It becomes at times a task of torment to find a place where you may leave your machine or, as the Russians in America say, where you can “park” it. One evening we were in San Diego, a city on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. We had to park our machine in order to have our dinner, so we drove a full hour through the city, consumed with the desire to park. The city was so full of machines that there wasn’t room for just one additional machine.

An American small town acquires its character not from its buildings, but from its automobiles and everything that is connected with them— petrol stations, repair stations, Ford stores, or General Motors stores. These attributes apply to all American cities. You may drive a thousand miles, two thousand, three thousand, natural phenomena will change and the climate, the watch will have to be moved ahead, but the little town in which you stop for the night will be exactly the same as the one which you had seen somewhere two weeks before. Like the previous one, it will have no pedestrians, there will be as many if not more automobiles parking at the side-walk, the signs of drug-stores and garages will shine with the same neons or argons, the principal street will be called, as before, Broadway, Main Street, or State Street, the only possible difference being that some of the houses may be built of different materials.

The residential part, or the uptown, is always utterly deserted. The silence there is broken only by the rustle of the hoods of passing automobiles. While the men work in the business centre, the housewives are busy house-cleaning. In the one- or two-storied houses vacuum cleaners hiss, furniture is moved, and the gold frames of photographic portraits are dusted. There is much work, for there are six or seven rooms in each house. It is enough to be in one of them in order to know what furniture will be found in millions of other such houses, to know even how it would be arranged. In the disposition of the rooms, of the placing of the furniture, in all those respects, there is amazing similarity.

The houses and the yards – in which there is the inevitable light garage made of boards, which is never locked – are never separated by fences. A cement strip leads from the door of the house to the sidewalk. A thick layer of fallen leaves lies on the squares of the lawns. The neat little houses shine under the light of the autumn sun.

At times that section of the residential part where well-to-do people live produces an astonishing impression. Here is such an idyllic haven of wealth that it seems as if it were possible only in a fairy-tale. Black nurses in white aprons and caps walk with little gentlemen. Red-haired girls with blue eyes roll light yellow hoops. Splendid sedans stand beside wealthy houses.

But beside this higher world, quite close, is located the severe iron and brick business centre, the ever-frightful American centre of business, where all the houses look like fire stations, where money is made in order to provide for the idyllic haven just described. There is such a cruel difference between these two parts that at first one does not believe they actually are located in the same city. Alas, they are always together! This is precisely why the business centre is so frightful – because all its strength goes to the creation of an idyllic haven for people of wealth. One can come to understand quite a lot after a sojourn in a small town. It does not matter where you see it, whether in the East, the West, or the South. It will be the same.

The machine flies down the road. Little cities flash by. What pretentious names! Syracuse, Pompeii, Batavia,Warsaw, Caledonia, Waterloo, Geneva, Moscow – a lovely little Moscow, where you can get lunch #2 in a drug-store, griddle cakes covered with maple syrup, and where for dinner you are entitled to sweet-salty pickles, where in the motion-picture theatre a film of bandit life is unreeled – a purely American Moscow.

There are several Parises, Londons, there is a Shanghai, a Harbin, and a score of Petersburgs. There is a Moscow in the state of Ohio, and there are eighteen other Moscows, in other states. One of the Petersburgs has a hundred thousand population. There are Odessas. It doesn’t matter that near the Odessas there is not only no Black Sea but not any sea at all. One is located in the state of Texas. Who was the Odessaite who had wandered so far? Did he find his happiness there? No one, of course, will ever know that. There are Naples and Florence. Near Naples, instead of Vesuvius, is the smokestack of a canning factory, while in Florence it is undoubtedly quite useless to venture a conversation about frescoes and similar subjects of little interest and devoid of all possibility of producing a definite income.

But then, in all these cities you can buy the latest model automobile and electric refrigerator (the dream of the newly-weds), there is hot and cold water in all the taps of all the houses, and, if the little town is of slightly better grade, it has a decent hotel, where in your room you will have three kinds of water: hot, cold, and iced.

Each city has several churches – Methodist,Congregational, Baptist. There will inevitably be a many-columned building of the Christian Science Church. But if you are not a Baptist or a Methodist and do not believe in Christian Science, then there is nothing for you to do but to go to a “movie pitcher,” to look at a beautifully photographed;, beautifully sounding motion picture, the contents of which befog your senses with their foolishness.

In every small town are the excellent buildings ofelementary and middle schools. It may even be regarded as a rule that the best building in a small town will inevitably be a school building. But after school the boys go to the motion-picture theatre, where they watch the adventures of gangsters, play gangsters in the streets, and tirelessly wield revolvers and machine-guns manufactured in incredible quantities by toy factories.

Everlasting is the automobile and petrol tedium of small cities.

Many of the rebellious writers of America have come from the small towns of the Middle West. Theirs is a revolt against sameness, against the deadly and futile quest of the dollar.

Some of the towns make heroic efforts to distinguish themselves from their brethren of the same type. Signs are hung at the entrance to the town, quite, let us say, like signs over the entrance to a store, so that the customer may know what is being sold there.

“Redwood City!”

And under it in verse is written: “Climate best bygovernment test!” Here they trade in climate.

The climate may be the best, but the life is the same as in the cities that have no splendid climate.

Main Street. In large show windows stand automobiles wrapped, for the occasion of the approaching New Year, in cellophane and tied with coloured ribbons. Behind somewhat smaller windows learned druggists squeeze the juice out of oranges, or fry eggs with bacon, and through the heart of the city, not on a mound or over a bridge, but right through the main street, a long freight train passes at full-speed. The engine bell swings and rings out sonorously.

Such is the small town, be it Paris or Moscow or Cairo or one of the innumerable American Springfields.