< Previous | Table of Contents | Next >
After making the vegetable pancakes, all kitchen duties were handed over to Zhang Sushang which he was very happy about, mainly because neither of them wanted to eat any more boiled potatoes.
After cleaning up an entire floor of the library, Alexei sat at a remote table and opened his lunchbox. Inside were several slices of lieba which sandwiched sour shredded potato and boiled radish slices.
As the saying went, poor people were vegetarians. Zhang Sushang had heard the elders in his family say that they couldn’t afford meat when they were young and even an occasional piece of tofu was a luxury, their daily meals usually consisting of fruit and vegetables. Now that he had to live like this himself, he finally understood just how bad it was; in contrast, Alexei liked it quite a lot.
He had never eaten such flavourful food before, it was mouthwatering.
As Alexei happily took a bite, his senior Mikhail approached with a few bottles. “Here, the things you wanted. All our floor’s empty glass bottles are here.”
Food was very precious these days and luxuries like alcohol were even rarer. If it weren’t for having some extra savings, Mikhail wouldn’t even be able to afford these few bottles.
“I’ve finished calculating the data you gave me,” Alexei said in thanks.
Mikhail took his notebook and immediately threw himself into research, and after a while, he patted his junior’s shoulder in admiration. “You really should come over to our side. Although fundamental research1A type of scientific research aimed at improving theories for better understanding & prediction of phenomena; contrasts with applied research. is important, it’s too hard to get results and there’s barely any funding.”
“I know about your project,” Alexei said as he bit into a piece of lieba, “I predict that it will only see results in twenty years at the least. Since that’s the case, I might as well do fundamental research.”
Anyways, his goal was to stay in the university and become a lecturer; if that didn’t work out then he would be a high school teacher. As for the research group Mikhail was part of, although its principal theory was developed back in 1914, Alexei truly wasn’t interested.
Mikhail sighed. “Fine, I’ll look forward to the day that you change your mind.”
As he said this, he stuffed a piece of pork from his own lunchbox into Alexei’s then forked a piece of his junior’s lieba and some potato strips into his mouth. Half a beat later, his eyes widened.
“Lord above, this is so good! Where did you buy it?”
Alexei lowered his head and lazily flipped through a textbook that was meant for someone who had been in university for much longer than him. “My flatmate made it.”
Being able to have a flatmate with good cooking skills was the best thing that happened to Alexei since the year began. Moreover, this flatmate wouldn’t get into drunken fights, could get up early in the morning to bash the door open together with him, and didn’t have much body odour, so the house was unlikely to stink in summer. Alexei was very satisfied.
His last flatmate was a troublemaker who had finally been forced to drop out after getting into a fight at the end of the previous semester. Before Zhang Sushang had come, Alexei had been ready to deal with another troublesome one, but Zhang Sushang turned out to bring a pile of benefits with him!
He finally had the peace to concentrate on his studies. And as the school term approached, Chyushka had begun reading through his textbooks; he didn’t know if his flatmate had something like dyslexia, he should help him when he went back.
Zhang Sushang’s Russian was very good — not only did he not have dyslexia, he was gearing up to make a fortune.
What the St. Petersburg Morning Post wanted was something to attract an audience. After looking through the requirements, Zhang Sushang concluded that they wanted a story that would retain readers and leave them hungry for more; further analysis revealed that the plot should be interesting and the endings should have sequel hooks or cliffhangers.
Didn’t mystery novels perfectly fulfil all these?
From the mid-19th century when Edgar Allen Poe pioneered the detective novels’ plotline to the 20th century when the three household name authors Agatha Christie, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr flourished, the appeal of detective novels has never faltered even well into the 21st century.
Zhang Sushang was currently living in the 1920s, which was a time of many possibilities. He didn’t ask to be wildly successful, but he had his own ideas.
Alexei placed Zhang Sushang’s snow-soaked shoes next to the stove to dry. When he turned, he saw his flatmate spread out pen and paper, then bite at his pen, as if thinking about something.
Since he was submitting this story to a Soviet newspaper, the protagonist should naturally be someone from the local area. After rummaging through his mind, Zhang Sushang made up his mind and set the protagonist’s name as Ilya.
After burying his mother’s body, in order to fulfil her last wish and to find his father who had been missing for many years, Ilya left the Ural Mountains on a donkey called Boris. He rode for a day and a night before arriving at Yekaterinburg’s train station, and his destination was St. Petersburg.
The train was extremely crowded. Ilya followed his ticket number to his seat and said to the man sitting there, “Sir, this is my seat.”
The man raised his head, revealing a face as exquisite as a rose; he rose to his feet, revealing a body as broad and strong as two Ilyas. “No, this is my seat,” he replied arrogantly.
The above was the first meeting between the protagonist, Ilya, and his partner, Vasily. The two started talking because of a seat — Ilya wanted to seize the seat by force, but was too afraid of Vasily’s strong muscles.
Zhang Sushang made sure to write in detail here, mainly by describing how Vasily’s chest muscles bulged, how thick his arms were, and how intimidating his figure was.
After a ‘friendly’ conversation to establish Ilya as a coward and Vasily as a beautiful yet strong person, Vasily discovered that he had read the numbers on his ticket wrong and apologised to Ilya. Their argument had also attracted a whole bunch of spectators.
Then a donkey’s bray and a woman’s scream rang out simultaneously.
The case had arrived.
After writing up to here, Zhang Sushang felt that his buttocks were a little sore from sitting too long, so he got up and did a few stretches. This body’s flexibility wasn’t bad, especially its waist. He thought that if he kept stretching for a few more months, he could try to do the splits.
But a backbend was a possibility right now.
Zhang Sushang breathed out, slowly leaned back, and once he reached a suitable angle, placed both hands on the floor. There wasn’t any discomfort at all except for a sense of stretching in his waist and abdomen muscles.
One had to keep in mind that this body didn’t practise dance since childhood as his original body did — this flexibility was all natural. And it was at the peak of flexibility for males, at that. Zhang Sushang, still in his contorted posture, thought that if this guy was born a hundred years in the future and his granduncle saw this talent, he would definitely be dragged away to learn how to do a Biellmann spin.2One of the most iconic figure skating moves, which few men have achieved, in which the skater’s body forms a teardrop shape; see Wikipedia.
With that in mind, he began ‘walking’ forward on all fours. Although the movement looked strange, it was an effective way to train his posterior chain muscles.
All the muscles on the back of the body — the erector spinae and latissimus dorsi along his spine, and the gluteus muscles, hamstrings, and calf muscles of his legs — were part of the posterior chain, and exercising these could provide better protection for his spine and improve control over movements of his neck, as well as preventing bad posture such as sagging shoulders or a hunched back.
Zhang Sushang, having started as a figure skater, had received specialised posture training since he was four years old. His granduncle was a master at helping athletes gain muscles so his skill at bringing out posterior chain muscles was also unparalleled.
He became tired after exercising for a while. But just as he was getting up, he heard a crash. A pile of firewood lay on the floor while Alexei stared at him with obvious shock, as if he could rush out the door in the next second.
As soon as he stepped through the door he saw someone crawling on the floor in a strange posture. Slavs were humans too, they also felt fear.
Zhang Sushang: “Alexei, I can explain!”
“I-Is this another of your ways to lose weight?” Alexei asked, trembling.
It was.
Zhang Sushang rolled to his feet and helped the big bear who was scared silly to pick up the firewood, then they lit the stove again. Zhang Sushang squatted and said, “When I was making the pancakes a few of them had some lard flakes inside. They must be very tasty after frying, why don’t you have all of them?”
“No need, we’ll split them equally,” Alexei said blankly.
He really is a good flatmate.
Zhang Sushang carefully brushed the pan with a thin layer of oil then placed the pancake dough on the sides to let them slowly cook. This kind of vegetable pancake actually had a very thick texture, so it was good that the fillings inside were tasty.
His chopping skills were very good, and although oil was regarded as an unhealthy food in the future, it made food delicious.
Two young men crouched next to the stove as they ate every pancake crumb they could get their hands on, then drank hot water afterwards to wash it all down. Zhang Sushang casually handed what he had just written to Alexei.
“Help me take a look,” he said, then walked off to write the rest.
Alexei took the papers and was confused at first, then after reading a bit he became interested. “Is it a novel?”
Zhang Sushang didn’t even look up as he replied, “Yeah, a detective novel.”
“Ilya is the detective? He doesn’t seem very brave,” Alexei said.
“There are way too many brave detectives, isn’t it interesting to have a coward for a change? It’s fine as long as he doesn’t drop the ball at critical moments.”
Didn’t he also arrange a brawny bodyguard for him in the form of Vasily? Nothing much could go wrong.
“Then what’s going to happen next?” Alexei asked curiously.
“Wait a bit.”
Zhang Sushang panted through another two hundred jumping jacks and fifty burpees before sitting down again.
This story that Zhang Sushang named A Donkey on the Railway was a typical short story written in concise words, and was the culmination of the lessons learnt from Arthur Conan Doyle’s dozen rejected manuscripts before his iconic A Study in Scarlet; the rejections weren’t because his story wasn’t exciting, but because the word count was too high for serialisation, yet too low for a one-time publication…
Zhang Sushang definitely wanted his story to be continuously published, but if it wasn’t picked up, earning a small sum for the one article wasn’t bad either. Thus he should keep the length under control, and the plot shouldn’t be too complicated.
The entire case could be summed up as a murder out of love. The victim had an extramarital affair. Detective Ilya looked at the corpse and the crime scene with trembling eyes, and at first he suspected the wife — after all, in later generations police would always investigate the victim’s close relations first when there was a crime. If a husband was harmed they would look at the wife, and if a wife was harmed they would look at the husband. However, in the end this was not the case.
The perpetrator was the victim’s father — because the victim’s father had also been cuckolded earlier in life, he had always suspected that the victim wasn’t his own child, and he deeply resented the victim’s cheating behaviour.
Just looking at the case developments, it was quite good for this era but could only be considered above average for future generations; however, this short story was just an introduction to Detective Ilya and his brilliant punchlines. It was enough for it to set up Ilya and Vasily’s characters.
At the very least, Alexei couldn’t stop laughing at Ilya and Vasily’s bickering as they investigated the case. Zhang Sushang concluded that he didn’t know how good this story was, but at least people could relax while reading it.
At the end, when the murderer’s identity was revealed, the murderer angrily rushed at Detective Ilya but was stopped with a single punch from Vasily. After the train reached the station, the two of them and a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers dragged the murderer to a police station, then they exchanged contact information.
Ilya led his donkey to the residence he had arranged in advance. Unexpectedly, three days later, Vasily knocked on his door and asked for his help in investigating another case.
Done, the sequel hook is set.
Zhang Sushang stretched, wrote out a copy of the story, then went out with Alexei to buy bread for dinner and mailed the letter on the way.
While affixing the stamps, Zhang Sushang muttered, “I don’t know if this story can be published.”
“Of course it can, this is the most interesting thing I’ve read all year!” Alexei said firmly, looking at him. “Chyushka, you’re a genius.”
The praise was very embarrassing for Zhang Sushang to hear. He shook his head. “No no no, I haven’t done my best yet.”
Translator:
Extra update tomorrow to celebrate Lunar New Year!
< Previous | Table of Contents | Next >
- 1A type of scientific research aimed at improving theories for better understanding & prediction of phenomena; contrasts with applied research.
- 2One of the most iconic figure skating moves, which few men have achieved, in which the skater’s body forms a teardrop shape; see Wikipedia.
