The Prank, page 8
PHLEGMATIC TEMPERAMENT IN A FEMALE
The phlegmatic female is a weepy, bug-eyed, fat, lumpy, fleshy German. She looks like a sack of flour. She is born in order to become a mother-in-law. That is her whole ambition.
MELANCHOLIC TEMPERAMENT IN A MALE
The male melancholic’s eyes are gray-blue in color and ever ready to shed a tear. Tiny wrinkles crease his forehead and the sides of his nose. His mouth is a bit crooked. His teeth are black. He is prone to hypochondria. He’s always complaining about stomachaches, that stabbing feeling in his side, and poor digestion. He loves to stand before a mirror and examine his flaccid tongue. His chest is weak, he’s sure, and he’s much too high-strung, so he drinks decoctum instead of tea, and aqua vitae instead of vodka. In a voice charged with tears and regret, he informs his relatives that valerian and bay rum drops no longer do him any good. He says it’s advisable to administer a laxative once a week. Long ago, he decided that doctors just don’t understand him. Faith healers, wisewomen, whisperers, drunken medical assistants, and sometimes midwives are his greatest benefactors. He puts on his fur coat in September and takes it off in May. He suspects every dog of having rabies, and after a friend told him that a cat can smother a sleeping man, he regards cats as sworn enemies to mankind. He worked out his last will and testament ages ago. He swears by all that’s sacred that he doesn’t drink but sometimes he does drink warm beer. He marries an orphan. His mother-in-law—if he has one—is the most wonderful and wisest woman. He hears her out in silence, his head tilted to the side, and he takes it as his holy duty to kiss her pudgy, sweaty hands that smell of pickle brine. He maintains a busy correspondence with uncles, aunts, his godmother, and childhood friends. He doesn’t read newspapers. On the sly, he reads Debay and Jozin.* When the plague broke out in Vetlianka,† he fasted and took communion five times. He suffers from watery eyes and nightmares. He is not particularly successful at work and will never be promoted above chief clerk. He loves the song “Luchinushka.”‡ In an orchestra he plays the flute or the cello. He groans and moans day and night, which is why sharing a room with him is not recommended. He anticipates floods, earthquakes, wars, the final collapse of morality, and his own death from a horrible disease. He dies of heart disease, of faith-healers’ remedies, and often of nothing but hypochondria.
MELANCHOLIC TEMPERAMENT IN A FEMALE
An absolutely impossible, restless creature. As a wife, she stupefies her husband until he falls into a state of despondency and commits suicide. The only good thing about her is that she is easy to get rid of: give her some money and send her on a pilgrimage.
* Christoph Wilhelm Friedrich Hufeland (1762–1836) was a German biologist-physician whose most famous treatise, Macrobiotics, or the Art of Prolonging Human Life (1796), was translated into many languages.
† Babe (French); rascal (German).
‡ Paraphrase of a line from Jacques Offenbach’s opéra bouffe La belle Hélène (1864).
§ Like is cured by like (Latin) (i.e., more alcohol to “cure” a hangover).
* “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity” (Latin).
* Niva (The Grain Field) was a weekly magazine of literature, politics, and modern life, one of the most popular weeklies in nineteenth-century Russia.
† In order to eat (French).
* Auguste Debay (1802–1890) and Antoine Émile Jozan (1817–1892) were writers of popular books on the subjects of the physiology of marriage, diseases of the “generative organs,” etc.
† An outbreak of the plague in the Vetlianka Cossack village occurred in 1878.
‡ A sad Russian folk song.
FLYING ISLANDS BY JULES VERNE
(A Parody)
CHAPTER I: THE SPEECH
“GENTLEMEN, I have finished!” announced Mr. John Lund, a young member of the Royal Geographical Society. Exhausted, he sank back into his armchair. Deafening applause filled the assembly hall along with cries of “Bravo.” The dazzled audience rose. One by one, the gentlemen approached John Lund to grip his hand. Seventeen gentlemen smashed their chairs in token of their amazement, eight of them spraining their craning necks as they did so. One of these gentlemen was the captain of a 100,009-ton yacht, The Pandemonium.
“Gentlemen!” uttered Mr. Lund, deeply moved. “I consider it my sacred duty to express my gratitude for that inhuman patience with which you listened to a speech lasting forty hours, thirty-two minutes, and fourteen seconds! Tom Snipe,” he said, turning to his old servant, “wake me in five minutes. I shall sleep; these gentlemen shall pardon me for the audacity of doing so in their presence!”
“Yes, sir!” said old Tom Snipe.
Throwing his head back, John Lund slept immediately.
John Lund was a Scotsman by birth. He had received no education whatsoever and he had never studied anything, yet he knew everything there was to know. He was one of those fortunate people who gain a knowledge of all that is splendid and beautiful by figuring everything out on their own. The rapture that had greeted his speech was quite justified. Over those forty hours, he presented for the consideration of messieurs gentlemen a proposal for a project of immense proportion, the fulfillment of which would garner fame for England and prove the illimitable reach of the human mind. The subject of Lund’s speech was nothing less than “Boring Through the Moon with a Colossal Borer!”
CHAPTER II: THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
But Sir John wasn’t to be allowed to sleep even three minutes. A heavy hand descended upon his shoulder. He awoke. Before him stood a gentleman 7.073 feet tall, as thin as a beanpole and as skinny as a dried-out snake. Completely bald, he was dressed entirely in black and wore four pairs of glasses on his nose. He carried a thermometer on his chest and a thermometer on his back.
“Follow me!” said the bald-headed man in a sepulchral voice.
“Where to?”
“Follow me, John Lund!”
“And if I won’t?”
“Then the moon must be bored by me before it is bored by you!”
“In that case, sir, I’m at your service.”
“Have your servant follow!”
Mr. Lund, the bald man, and Tom Snipe left the assembly hall and together set off through the well-lit streets of London. They walked and walked.
“Sir,” said Snipe to Lund, “if our walk is as long as this gentleman is tall, then in accordance with the law of friction we shall wear out our soles!”
The two gentlemen considered. Ten minutes later they decided Snipe’s remark was witty and broke out in loud laughter.
“With whom do I have the honor of laughing, sir?” Lund asked of the bald-headed man.
“You have the honor of walking, talking, and laughing with a member of every single geographical, archaeological, and ethnographical society in existence, who possesses a master’s degree in all the sciences that exist or ever will, a member too of the Moscow Art Club, honorary trustee of the School of Bovine Midwifery at Southampton, subscriber to Demon Illustrated, professor of yellow-green magic and elementary gastronomy at the future University of New Zealand, and director of the Nameless Observatory, William Bolvanius. Sir, I am escorting you to—”
John Lund and Tom Snipe went down on their knees before the great man and lowered their heads in respect. They had heard so much of him.
“I am escorting you, sir, to my observatory, which is located twenty miles hence. Sir! I need a partner for my undertaking, the significance of which you must necessarily utilize the two hemispheres of your cerebrum to comprehend. You, sir, are the chosen one. After delivering your speech for forty hours, no doubt you have little desire for conversation, and I, sir, love nothing so much as to commune at length with my telescope and silence! You will oblige your servant to hold his tongue, I trust. Hurrah for silence! I am escorting you to . . . You have no objections?”
“None, sir! I only regret that we are not trained to race and that our boots have soles, which to replace costs money, and—”
“I shall buy you new boots.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Those readers who burn with desire to be better acquainted with Mr. William Bolvanius can read his remarkable treatise Did the Moon Exist Before the Flood and if It Did, Why Didn’t It Drown? As an added bonus, they will receive another pamphlet, banned, published a year before his death, and entitled How to Wipe Out the Universe and Escape with One’s Life at the Same Time. Between them, these two works convey the personality of this most remarkable man far better than anything else.
Incidentally, the treatise describes the two years Bolvanius spent in the marshes of Australia, where it was impossible to light a fire, subsisting entirely on crayfish, pond scum, and crocodile eggs. While living in the marshes, he invented a microscope that looks and works exactly like our microscope and discovered the vertebral column of the fish of the species Fishus. On returning from this long trip, he settled a few miles outside of London and devoted himself to astronomy. A tremendous misogynist (three times married, he was the owner of three magnificent, many-branched pairs of cuckold’s horns) who liked his privacy, he led an ascetic life. Thanks to his keen and subtle mind, his observatory and his writings on astronomy remained completely obscure. It is to the sorrow and misfortune of all right-thinking Englishmen that this great man is no longer with us. He quietly passed away last year, devoured by three crocodiles while swimming in the Nile.
CHAPTER III: THE MYSTERIOUS SPOTS
The observatory to which Bolvanius escorted Lund and old Tom Snipe . . .(Here follows an extremely lengthy and extremely dull description of the observatory, which the translator has decided to omit in order to save time and space.) There stood the telescope perfected by Bolvanius. Lund went over to the telescope and directed his gaze at the moon.
“What do you see there, sir?”
“The moon, sir.”
“But what do you see beside the moon, Mr. Lund?”
“I have the honor of seeing the moon and the moon alone.”
“And what about that handful of pale spots close to the moon?”
“By heavens, sir! I see them! Call me an ass, if I don’t see them! What are they?”
“Spots that are uniquely visible through my telescope. But enough! Leave the telescope alone! What I want to know, what I must know, is the nature of those spots! And soon I shall! I intend to travel to those spots! And you will come with me!”
“Long live the spots!” shouted John Lund and Tom Snipe.
CHAPTER IV: TROUBLE IN THE SKY
Half an hour later, Mr. William Bolvanius, John Lund, and the Scotsman Tom Snipe, transported by eighteen aerostatic balloons, were flying towards these mysterious spots. They sat in a hermetically sealed cube filled with compressed air and containing a machine to manufacture oxygen.* This awesome, unprecedented flight had commenced on the night of March 13, 1870. The wind was blowing from the southwest. The compass needle pointed NWW. (An extremely boring description of the cube and the eighteen aerostatic balloons follows.) Deep silence enveloped the cube. The gentlemen huddled in their capes and smoked cigars. Tom Snipe, stretched out on the floor, slept as if in his own bed. The thermometer† registered a temperature below zero. For the first twenty hours, not a word was spoken and nothing of note occurred. The balloons had entered the clouds. Several lightning bolts pursued them but failed to overtake them, since the balloons belonged to an Englishman. On the third day, John Lund came down with diphtheria and Tom Snipe was in the throes of depression. The cube collided with an aerolite and received a terrible jolt. The thermometer registered seventy-six degrees.
“How are you feeling, sir?” Bolvanius asked Sir John on the fifth day, breaking the silence at last.
“Thank you, sir,” replied Lund. He was touched. “I’m touched by your kindness. I’m suffering terribly . . . and where is my faithful Tom?”
“Sitting in the corner, chewing tobacco, and trying to look like a man who had married ten women at once.”
“Very funny, Sir William!”
“I thank you, sir!”
The two of them were about to shake hands when a terrible event took place. With a horrifying noise something cracked, a thousand cannon shots rang out at once, a boom followed, and furious whistling filled the air. The internal pressure of the copper tube had caused it to explode in that rarefied atmosphere. Its fragments were now flying through endless space.
A horrifying moment, unique in the history of the universe!
Bolvanius grabbed Snipe by the legs, Snipe grabbed Lund by the legs, and with lightning speed the three were hurtled into a mysterious abyss. No longer weighed down, the balloons pirouetted about before bursting with a tremendous bang.
“Where are we, sir?”
“In the ether.”
“If we’re in the ether, what will we breathe?”
“What, Sir John, has happened to your willpower?”
“Gentlemen!” shouted Snipe. “I have the honor to inform you that we’re flying up not down!”
“What the devil! That means we’ve escaped the gravitational pull of the earth. Our target is pulling us in! Huzzah! Sir John, how do you feel now?”
“I appreciate you asking. Sir, I can see land just above us!”
“Not land. A spot! We’re going to crash into it now!”
Crrrrrash!
CHAPTER V: JOHANN HOFF’S* ISLAND
The first to regain consciousness was Tom Snipe. He rubbed his eyes. He surveyed the place where he, Bolvanius, and Lund lay sprawled. He removed one of his socks and wiped the gentlemen’s faces with it. The gentlemen came to at once.
“Where are we?” asked Lund.
“On one of the flying islands! Huzzah!”
“Huzzah! Look, sir. We have outdone Columbus.”
Several other islands floated overhead. (A description follows of a scene that is comprehensible only to the English.) They proceeded to tour the island. Its width was —— and its length was —— (Numbers and more numbers! The hell with them!) Tom Snipe found a tree whose sap resembled Russian vodka. Oddly, the trees were even shorter than the grass. (?) The island was uninhabited. Up to now, no living creature had ever set foot on it.
“Look, sir, what’s this?” Lund asked Sir William, picking up a sheaf of paper.
“Strange! Astonishing! Astounding!” muttered Bolvanius.
It was a sheaf of ads sponsored by a man named Johann Hoff, penned in a barbaric language: Russian, apparently.
How could these writings have come to be there?
“Damnation!” shouted Bolvanius. “Was someone here before us? Who could it be? Tell me—who, who? Damnation! Aaaargh! May a bolt of lightning blow apart my illustrious brains! Let me get my hands on him! Just let me! I’ll swallow him whole, along with his ads!”
Mr. Bolvanius threw up his arms and gave a dreadful laugh. A strange light flickered in his eyes. He had gone mad.
CHAPTER VI: THE RETURN
“Huzzah!” shouted the inhabitants of Le Havre, as they crowded onto the piers of the town. Shouts of joy, bells, and music rang out everywhere. The black object that had threatened universal destruction was dropping not on the city but into the harbor. Ships were in a hurry to escape out to sea. Having blocked the sun for so many days, the black object plopped heavily (pesamment) into the harbor to triumphant shouts and thunderous music, splashing the entire pier. Once in the harbor, it sank. A minute later the harbor was open again. Waves furrowed the surface in all directions. Three men flailed about in the middle of the harbor: crazy Bolvanius, John Lund, and Tom Snipe. They were soon rescued.
“We haven’t eaten in fifty-seven days!” muttered Lund, who was as thin as a starving artist. He explained what had happened.
Johann Hoff’s Island no longer exists. These three brave men weighed it down until it fell out of the neutral zone, was drawn toward the earth, and sank in the harbor of Le Havre.
CONCLUSION
John Lund is now busy with his project of drilling through the moon. Soon the moon will be adorned by a hole. The hole will belong to the English. Tom Snipe lives in Ireland and has taken up farming. He raises chickens and beats his only daughter, whom he is bringing up like a Spartan. Science still interests him, and he is furious at himself for forgetting to take some seeds from those trees on the flying island, with the sap that tastes like Russian vodka.
*A gas made up by the chemists. They say that one can’t live without it. What rubbish. The only thing that one can’t live without is money. (Translator’s note—Chekhonte.)
†There really is such an instrument. (Translator’s note—Chekhonte.)
*Johann Hoff was a widely advertised manufacturer of beer, malt extract, etc.
BEFORE THE WEDDING
LAST THURSDAY, the worthy Podzatylkins announced the engagement of their daughter to the collegiate assessor Nazariev. The betrothal took place at the Podzatylkin residence and went off without a hitch. Refreshments consumed included two bottles of Lanin’s so-called “champagne”* and a bucket and a half of vodka; the young ladies polished off a bottle of Château Lafite. The parents of the bride and the groom cried at just the right moment. The groom and bride kissed with gusto. An eighth grader made a toast that included the phrases “O tempora! O mores!”† and “Salvete, boni future conjuges!”†—both uttered with panache. The red-haired Vanya Smyslomalov, who was doing absolutely nothing as he waited for the die to be cast, went crazy with grief at precisely the right moment, right on cue, so to speak: he ran his hands through the hair on his big head, pounded his knee with his fist, and cried out, “Dammit, I loved her and I love her still!” This afforded inexpressible pleasure to the young ladies.
