Hurrah! Got it! Found it! I set off tomorrow! Oh, but I’m clever, damn it! Such a little town has been found on the regional map. I got hold of the address after all. How?
Very simple.
Had breakfast, sat on the little sofa, turned Hans’s message this way and that and worked it out. The little lead did its work.
Industrial plant!
Stung by a sudden guess, I leapt off the sofa, flew out onto the street like a bullet and made for Basmannaya, for the institute of chemical engineering. There I sidled casually up to two girls. Quite the flashy pair they turned out to be. Both a metre eighty, with springy little backsides in jeans, a cynical depth in their eyes and cigarettes in their manicured fingers – fifth years stomping off to their assessments. I got the sweeties into a conversation about the weather, then switched over to their remarkable appearance. Wow! What legs! What eyes! At the end of the conversation, naturally, I laid out my trumps. Namely, that I’m not a local lad, I’m from abroad… yes, yes, from the centre of Europe, from the merry city of Hamburg, if you’re interested, but at the same time I have an extraordinary interest in the Russian chemical industry. I’m planning, as it were, to cook up a joint venture, and therefore I’m interested in the locations of the centres of chemical industry outside Moscow. The answer, accompanied by pleasant smiles, I received without delay and, still not believing my good fortune, gave the girls a little wave. Bye-bye, babies, see you soon! I was so delighted I didn’t even ask the girls for their numbers. And what would I want them for? I fished an unshorn postgraduate out of the crowd of academic types and got him talking about the wretched life of a junior research fellow, the dearness of prices for the working man, and also about the coming job allocations. And what do you know? Bullseye!
Extremely pleased with myself, I had another two or three conversations with people and satisfied myself that on graduating from the institute, all the out-of-town youth who hadn’t arranged a personal life in the white-stone capital moves off in orderly ranks and columns in the direction of the town of Kushchino. There, two research institutes and a pilot factory forge all sorts of chemical nastiness for the country. «The countryside around Kushchino, by the way, is wonderful,» I was told. I willingly believe it.