Twelve Chairs

One of the most popular Soviet novels of all time is Ilf and Petrov's Twelve Chairs.  This satirical farce revolves around the harried search for twelve identical chairs after Mother-in-Law reveals on her deathbed that in one of them is stashed the family jewelry: she tucked this fortune away from the confiscation-happy Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution.  So, the search breaks out, it's roulette, in which chair is the loot hidden?  Through the process of elimination -- eleven down, one to go --  the last chair is finally tracked down. But it turns out that the jewels have already been retrieved from the chair and sold, with the proceeds being used to finance the erection of a new public building. Upon hearing the devastating news, the lead character in the pursuit goes insane.


Meanwhile, Actress Larissa and I have left her warm, food-filled apartment and gone down to the street to meet, ahem, Prince. Larissa does a lot of serious acting, but she also makes money on the side with things like children's birthday parties and weddings. So she's now going to be the Master of Ceremonies for a private holiday event taking place on 23 December, the theme of which is exactly these Twelve Chairs. Her regular DJ can't make it, so her agent hooked her up with Prince. He's from Nigeria and is a hefty black guy who speaks somewhat understandable Russian.  We're sitting in his car -- a Mercedes, although I have no idea if it is new or old -- because Prince did not want to meet in a cafe (Larissa surmises that he most likely didn't want to spring for our coffee).


Prince has never heard of Twelve Chairs before and I'm not surprised. Why should he have?  Larissa asks him to watch the movie version online to get an understanding of the mood of the event, but I can't imagine this actually happening.  She says she needs music from the the 30s, like the Charleston and the Foxtrot.  I am not sure if Prince is getting this.


In fact, Prince seems more interested in America.  He says to me "You from New York? I be so jealous. Only good thing about Russia is beautiful women. Russia is shit. Why you here?"


Well, that's a long story which I prefer to avoid. So I say,"Prince, try for Green Card Lotto. You might be lucky. It's like roulette!"


[originally published 12 December 2011]