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1 PART ONE Chapter Three PART TWO A note to fans of Little Golden America: as of issue No. 22, Admit Two adopted a PDF format, which means you will have to access individual back issues to get to further chapters of Ilf and Petrov's American adventure. |
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Chapter
Three… …What
Can Be Seen from a Hotel Window OUR
FIRST HOURS in New York –
the walk through the city at night and then
the return to the hotel – will always remain with us as a memora- ble
event. Yet, as a matter of fact, nothing
unusual had occurred. We walked into the very ordinary
marble vestibule of the hotel. To the
right, behind a smooth wooden railing, worked two young clerks. Both
of them had pale, smoothly shaven cheeks and black little narrow mustaches.
Beyond them sat a girl cashier at a calculating machine. On the
left was located the tobacco stand. In its glass case open wooden boxes
of cigars stood next to each other. On the white gleaming sur- face
of the inside covers of the boxes were displayed old-fashioned hand- some
men with thick mustaches and pink cheeks, gold and silver medals, scutcheons,
green palms and Negresses gathering tobacco. In the cor- ners
stood the prices: 5, 10, or 15 cents apiece, or 15 cents for two, or 10 cents
for three. Even more tightly than the cigars lay small packages of cigarettes
in soft covers also wrapped in cellophane. Americans seem to
smoke mostly “Lucky Strike,” a dark green package with a red circle in
the middle; “Chesterfield,” a white package with a gold inscription; and
“Camel,” a yellowish package bearing the picture of a brown camel. The entire wall opposite the
entrance to the vestibule was occupied by
spacious elevators with gilded doors. The doors opened on the right, on
the left, or in the middle, disclosing inside the elevator the Negro who
held on with his hand to the iron steering gear and who was dressed
in bright colored trousers with gold braid and in a green jacket with
ornate twisted shoulder straps. Just as at the Northern Railway Station
in Moscow the train announcer loudly informs people going to
summer resorts that the next train iy bound without stops for My- tishchi,
but beyond that will make all the stops, so here the Negroes announced
that the elevator was going to the sixteenth floor, or to the thirty-second
floor, with the first stop likewise at the sixteenth floor. Eventually
we fathomed this little ruse of the management’s – on the sixteenth
floor was located its restaurant and cafeteria. We walked into the elevator, and it
rushed up. On the way the ele- vator
stopped, the Negro opened the door, cried “Up!” and the pas- sengers
called out the numbers of their floors. A woman entered. All the
men removed their hats and traveled on without hats. We followed suit.
That was the first American custom we learned. But acquaintance with
the customs of a foreign country are not so easy and are almost always
accompanied by confusion. Several days later we were going up
in an elevator to our publishers. A woman entered, and with the expeditiousness
of old experienced New Yorkers we took off our hats. The
other men did not follow our knightly example, however, and even
regarded us with curiosity. We learned that hats should be taken off
only in private and hotel elevators; whereas, in buildings where peo- ple
transact business one may keep his hat on. At the twenty-seventh story we left
the elevator and walked along a narrow
corridor to our rooms. The large second-rate New York hotels in
the center of the city are built very economically. Their corridors are narrow,
their rooms, although expensive, are small, and their ceilings are
of standard height – that is, rather low. The client poses before the builder
the problem of squeezing into a skyscraper as many rooms as possible.
These small rooms, however, are clean and comfortable. They always
have hot and cold water, a shower, stationery, telegraph blanks, postcards
with views of the hotel, laundry bags, and printed laundry blanks
on which you merely place figures indicating the number of pieces
of soiled laundry being sent out. Laundering is done quickly and unusually
well in America. The ironed shirts look better than new ones
on display in a store window. And each one of them is placed in a
paper pocket, around which is a paper ribbon with the trademark of the
laundry, and all of it is neatly pinned together, with pins even around
the sleeves. Moreover, the laundry is brought back mended and the
socks darned. In America such comforts are not at all a sign of luxury.
They are standardized and accessible.
Upon entering the room we began to
look for the switch, and for a long
time could not understand how electricity is turned on here. At first
we wandered through the rooms in the dark, then we struck matches, felt
our way along the walls, investigated the doors and windows, but there
was no switch anywhere. Several times in sheer desperation we would
sit down to rest in the darkness. At last we found it. Near every
lamp hung a short thin chain with a little ball on the end. A pull
on the little chain and the electricity is lighted. Another pull and it
is out. The beds had not been made up for the night, so we began to
look for the button of the bell to summon the maid. But there was no
button. We looked everywhere. We pulled all the likely strings, but that
did us no good. Then we understood that the servants must be called
by telephone. We rang for the porter and called for the maid. In the room was furniture which
subsequently we saw in all the hotels
of America without
exception – in the East, the West and the South.
We did not visit the North. But there is every reason to sup- pose
that even there we would have found exactly the same furniture as
in New York: a brown commode with a mirror, metal bedsteads trickily
painted to look like wood, several soft easy chairs, a rocking chair,
portable plug lamps (bridge lamps), on high thin legs with large cardboard
lampshades. On the commode we found a fat
little book in a black cover. On the
book was the gold trademark of the hotel. The book proved to be a
Bible. This ancient composition had been adapted for business people whose
time is limited. On the first page was a table of contents espe- cially
composed by the solicitous management of the hotel: “For allaying spiritual doubts
– page so and so, text so and so. “For family troubles – page so
and so, text so and so. “For financial troubles – page
…, text … “For success in business – page
…, text … That page was somewhat greasy. We opened the windows. They had to
be opened in a peculiar Ameri- can
way, not at all as in Europe. They had to be raised, like windows in
a railway carriage. The windows of our little rooms
looked out on three sides. Below lay
New York at night. What can be more alluring than a
strange city’s lights thickly sown throughout
that immense and foreign world which had gone to sleep on
the shores of the Atlantic Ocean! From over there, from the side of
the ocean, a warm wind wafted. Quite close rose several skyscrapers. It
seemed as though one could touch them with his hand. Their lighted windows
could be counted. Farther away the lights became more and more
dense. Among them were especially bright ones, which stretched out
in straight and in bent chains (these must have been street lamps). Beyond
gleamed a sheer gold dust of tiny lights, and then a dark un- lighted
swath. (The Hudson? Or was that the East River?) And again the
gold mists of boroughs, constellations of unknown streets and squares.
In that world of lights, which at first seemed stationary, one could
note a certain movement. Now
down the river slowly floated the
red light of a cutter. A tiny automobile passed down the street. At
times, suddenly, somewhere on the other shore of the river, a light as
little as a tiny particle of dust would flash and go out. Surely one of the
seven million denizens of New York had turned off the light and gone
to bed! Who was he? A clerk? An employee of the elevated railroad?
Perhaps a lonely girl had gone to sleep – some salesgirl (there are
so many of them in New York). And at this very moment, lying under
two thin blankets, stirred by the steamer whistles of the Hudson, was
she seeing in her dreams a million dollars? New York was asleep, and a million
Edison lamps were guarding its slumber.
Immigrants from Scotland, from Ireland, from Hamburg and Vienna,
from Kovno and Bialystok, from Naples and Madrid, from Texas,
Dakota, and Arizona, were asleep. Asleep were also immigrants from
Latin America, from Australia, from Africa and China. Black, white,
and yellow people were asleep. Looking at the scarcely trembling lights,
we wanted to find out as soon as possible how these people work, how
they amuse themselves, what they dream of, what they hope for, what
they eat. Finally, utterly exhausted, we,
too, went to bed. We had had alto- gether
too many impressions for the first day. New York cannot be taken
in such large doses. It is a frightful, yet at the same time pleasant, experience
to have one’s body lie in a comfortable American bed, in a state
of complete rest, while the mind continues to rock on the Nor- mandie,
to ride in a wedding-carriage taxi, to run along Broadway, to travel.
In the morning, having awakened on
our twenty-seventh story and having
looked out of the window, we saw New York in a pellucid morn- ing
mist. We beheld what might be called a
peaceful pastoral scene. A few white
threads of smoke rose to the sky, while to the spire of a small twenty-story
hut was even attached an idyllic and all-metal cockerel. Sixty-storied
skyscrapers, which yesterday evening seemed so close, were separated
from us by at least ten red iron roofs and a hundred high stack
and skylights, among which laundry hung and the most ordi- nary
cats wandered about. On the walls could be seen advertisements. The
walls of the skyscrapers were full of brick dullness. Most of the buildings
in New York are made of red brick. New York opened at once on several
planes. The upper plane was occupied
by the tops of those skyscrapers which were higher than ours. They
were crowned with spires – glass or gold cupolas gleaming in the sun,
or towers with large clocks. The towers themselves were the height of
a four-story house. On the next plane, open in its entirety to our gaze,
in addition to stacks, skylights, and tomcats one could see flat roofs
on which were small one-storied houses with gardens, skimpy trees,
little brick paths, a small fountain, and even rattan chairs. Here one
could pass the time of day to perfection, almost as at Klyazma, in- haling
the gasoline perfume of flowers, and listening to the melodic bay- ing
of the elevated railway. That
monstrosity was on the next plane of New
York City. The railway lines of the elevated rest on iron poles and
pass on the level of the second and third stories, and only in cer- tain
parts of the city do they rise to the fifth or sixth story. This anti- quated
structure discharges from time to time a horrible clatter that numbs
the brain. It causes healthy people to become nervous and the nervous
to lose their minds, while the insane jump at the sound in their padded
cells and roar like lions. In order to see the last and funda- mental
plane, the plane of the street, one had to bend out of the window and
look down at a right angle. There, as in a reversed binoculars, one could
see a tiny crossing with tiny automobiles, pedestrians, newspapers strewn
on the pavement, and even two rows of shining buttons attached to
the lanes where pedestrians are allowed to cross the street. From the other window one could see
the Hudson River, which sep- arates
the state of New York from the state of New Jersey. The houses that
go down to the Hudson are in New York, while the houses on the tther
side of the river are in Jersey City. We were told that what at first
glance seems a strange administrative division has its compensa- tions.
One can, for example, live in one state and work in another. One could
also indulge in speculations in New York while paying taxes in Jersey.
There, by the way, the taxes are not so high. This seems to add color
to the gray monotonous life of a stockbroker. Or one can get mar- ried
in New York and get divorced in New Jersey, or the other way around.
It all depends upon where the divorce laws are easier and where
the marriage-braking process is cheaper. We, for example, when buying
the automobile for our journey through the country, insured it in New Jersey, which charges a few dollars less than New York.
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