Chapter One
Ivan Gorchev, sailor on the freight ship 'Rangoon', was not yet twenty-one when he won the Nobel Prize in physics. To win a scientific award at such a romantically young age is unprecedented, though some people might consider the means by which it was achieved a flaw. For Ivan Gorchev won the Nobel Prize in physics in a card game, called macao, from a Professor Bertinus, on whom the honour had been bestowed in Stockholm by the King of Sweden a few days earlier. But those who are always finding fault don't like to face facts, and the fact of the matter is that Ivan Gorchev did win the Nobel Prize at the age of twenty-one.
Professor Bertinus, with the Nobel Prize in his briefcase, had boarded ship in Göteborg, and before the ship sailed, the Swedish Franklin Society assembled on deck to present him with the big gold medal for his successful experiments in the splitting of the atom. The ship then departed, and the worthy professor was all impatience to arrive in Bordeaux, where he owned a few acres of vintage, as elderly French civil servants generally did, from the executioner's assistant, to the director of the museum.
Ivan Gorchev, on the other hand, boarded ship in Southampton, to cross the Channel for reasons unknown even to himself. It's true that he had been fired from a freight ship (the Rangoon) because he had used a four-pointed boat hook to beat up the navigator. But as to why anyone who had beaten up a navigator and been fired from a freight ship would want to cross the Channel, we do not understand any more than so many of our hero's actions.
Another perplexing fact is how this frivolous young man was able to become acquainted with the world-famous scientist; what is particularly obscure is how he was able to convince the aged and reticent professor to play, even for very small stakes, macao, a game of chance prohibited in many countries. We must resign ourselves to ignorance of these details. Allegedly the whole thing began when the professor became seasick on deck. Gorchev offered him a pleasant-tasting lemon-cognac-sodium bicarbonate drink of his own concoction. The professor recovered, and asked the young man who he was, and from where he had come.
"My name is Ivan Gorchev, twenty-one-year-old by profession, and son of the brother of Baron Gorchev of the Tsar's Chamber, from the family of Nasya Goryodin. My father was a captain in the guard and my uncle, as the military commander of the Yustvesti Verstkov, defended Odessa against the rebellious naval forces."
Naturally, not one word of all this was true. But the gullibility of very young girls and aged scientists is apparently boundless. The professor put on his pince-nez. "So, you are an emigrant."
"Definitely Professorovitch Uncleushka," Gorchev answered, with a sigh. "Once in high spirits, my father gave ten thousand roubles to the Tsar's ballet... And he was flown to Tsarskoe Selo in a troika with a gold escutcheon on it... Oh, kontusovka! Oh, Volga, if only I could be there once again..."
"But listen, you can't remember Russia if you are only twenty-one!"
"That makes it all the more difficult, Uncleushka Professorovska! Just imagine! I have never once seen that magnificent snowy land which so unforgettably lives in my memory..."
"And where are you en route to now, Mr. Gorchev?"
"I'm travelling for political purposes, disguised as a sailor."
If we have observed our hero scrupulously, then we will have noted something peculiar about him: he never told the truth, but then he never lied either. It was just that he said, without hesitation, anything and everything that came into his mind - a habit that plunged him into many astounding situations. His words rarely followed a logical line; nor, for that matter, did his actions.
"Unfortunately I'm travelling with very little money," he went on. "A scoundrel cheated me of everything."
"How on earth did it happen?"
"I was unsuspecting and stupid. One becomes acquainted with all sorts of shifty characters, without ever thinking of the consequences. It just happened that in London a crook taught me to play macao, and won all my money."
"Forgive me for saying so, but that really wasn't very clever of you. What sort of game is this macao?"
Gorchev sighed again, and pulled out a pack of cards from his pocket.
"Well, you see... we deduct the tens column from the total value of the cards, whereby in all cases, nine is the highest possible count..."
The professor tried his luck, on a five-centime basis, and won ten francs. Later, after he had lost two thousand, they raised the stakes. Then they raised them a number of times, and by the time they reached Bordeaux, Ivan Gorchev had won the entire Nobel Prize to the last centime, from the professor. And had the professor been going as far as Nice the ambitious young man would probably have won the large gold medal of the Swedish Franklin Society itself. (This precious medal was awarded to an elite for successful experiments in the field of atom splitting.)
At the age of twenty-one this, too, would have been an unprecedented achievement on the part of our hero. Unfortunately, the professor departed at Bordeaux with the large gold medal of the Swedish Franklin Society and with some sad ponderings on the wastefulness of French colleges, whose syllabuses did not include the teaching of the game of chance called macao. Gorchev stood by the rail of the ship, deeply moved, and waved after the professor for a long time, with a handkerchief.
All twenty one chapters You can read here.
A review about it:
The 14 Carat Roadster (Jenő Rejtő, 1940) A madcap caper of a book, few things can compete for pure enjoyment. A farce, a romance, a dashing adventure, a parody of the military in the face of the French Foreign Legion, and a mocking love letter for the Aristocratic Europe of Biarritzes and Monacos. Imagine if the Good Soldier Svejk, without being any less the Good Soldier Svejk, was also Ostap Bender and a romantic hero, and you start to see what this book is like. It starts like this:
quote of first paragraph
Can you beat that? You can’t, and if you think you can, you’re wrong. And then you realize this romp, where any fool who takes anything seriously is committing the most grievous blunder and is cause for endless hilarity, was being written by a man who knew he wouldn’t be able to publish it under his own name, being a Jew. A man who was going to die in a forced labour camp less than three years later. I don’t know what that means about life.