Twelve Chairs
Well, back to that old April Fools’ Day, I can say this is too big an event for a small paragraph. The most important thing about it, I believe, was that I didn’t feel like a fool after all. Vice versa, it reminded me of the greatest pieces of literature and some renowned characters, which I had read a while before and it really made me want to go back over those books again. Why think about
apartments in Odessa! There were scores of Ostap Benders and Kissa Vorobyaninovs marching down the street and carrying the ‘Twelve Chairs’… no, there were more chairs definitely. Joseph de Ribas and Duke Richelieu were there too, each with a bunch of colored balloons trailing behind them. Among the tremendous profusion of funny things and thunderbolts of laughter, I was trying my hardest to memorize at least one thing, which was not easy at all. When I realized that was ‘mission impossible’, I felt it was high time for me to fool myself a little. I bought a tin-can of Odessa air, which looked exactly like a piece of tinned food, except there was nothing but the Odessa air inside of it…
