Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America

Yet, our plan included a journey across the entire continent, from ocean to ocean.

That was a fine, but essentially a quite indefinite, plan. We had made it up in Moscow and had discussed it ardently all the way to America.

We paced scores of kilometres over the decks of the Normandie damp with ocean spray, arguing about the details of that journey and dousing each other with geographic nomenclature. At dinner, drinking the pure but weak wine from the cellars of the General Transatlantic Company, we muttered almost senselessly, “Kahleeforneeya,” “Tyekhas,” or something equally beautiful and enticing.

The plan was astounding because of its simplicity. We were to arrive in New York, buy an automobile, and ride, ride, ride until we arrived in California. Then we would turn around and ride, ride, ride until we arrived in New York. It was all simple and wonderful, like an Andersen fairy-tale. “Tra-ta-ta” sounds the klaxon, “tru-tu-tu” sounds the motor, we ride across the prairie, we swing over mountain chains, we quench the thirst of our trusty machine with the icy water of the Cordilleras, and the great Pacific sun casts its blinding brilliance on our tanned faces.

In short, you can see for yourself that we were a bit “touched,” and roared at each other like chained dogs: “Sierra Nevada,” “Rocky Mountains,” and the like.

But when we stepped on American soil everything proved not so simple and not so romantic.

In the first place, Tyekhas is not called Tyekas, but Texas.

But that was only half the trouble.

None of our new friends in New York offered any objections to our purchasing an automobile. Travel in one’s own automobile is the cheapest and most interesting means of transportation in the States. Railroad travel would cost several times as much. Besides, you cannot see America from a train window. It is not a writer’s business to do anything of the kind. So, as for the automobile idea, our suppositions met with approval.

The difficulty was in finding a man who could go with us. We could not go by ourselves. We knew the English language well enough to engage a room in a hotel, to order a dinner in a restaurant, to go to a cinema and understand the meaning of a picture – knew it even to the extent of conversing about this or that or the other thing with some indulgent person who was not in a hurry to go anywhere— but we knew no more. Yet more was precisely what we needed.