Little Apples

A PROBLEM

Iwould like to present the following problem for the reader to solve:

At two o’clock in the morning my wife, my mother-in-law, and I left the house where we had been celebrating the marriage of a distant cousin. At the feast, needless to say, we had eaten and drunk our fill.

“In my condition I can’t go on foot,” my wife announced, turning to me. “Kirill, darling, can you get us a cab?”

“A cab? What will you think of next, Dasha!” my mother-in-law protested. “With the price of everything these days, and us having to scrimp and save for every loaf of bread! We don’t have a stick of wood for the stove, and you want a cab? Ignore her, Kirill!”

But valuing my wife’s health and the fruit of our unhappy love (the reader will already have guessed that my wife was expecting), and finding myself at that stage of blissful tipsiness when walking provides an excellent impetus for understanding Copernicus’ theory of the earth’s rotation, I ignored my mother-in-law’s entreaties and called to a cabbie. The cab pulled up . . . and this is the problem:

We all know the measurements of an average cab. I am a man of letters, from which it follows that I am thin and underfed. My wife, too, is thin, though somewhat broader than I am, since the will of fate has widened her diameter. My mother-in-law’s diameter, on the other hand, is immense, her length equaling her width, her weight close to four hundred pounds.

“We won’t all fit in a single cab,” I said. “We’ll have to take two.”

“Are you stark raving mad?” my mother-in-law gasped. “We have no money to pay the rent, and you want to hire two cabs? I won’t allow this! I withhold my blessing! A curse on this scheme!”

“But dearest mamasha,” I said to my mother-in-law in as reverential a tone as I could muster, “you must see that the three of us simply cannot squeeze into this cab. Once you take a seat, by God’s bounty, the cab will be full. Thin as I am, I might possibly be able to squeeze in next to you, but owing to her delicate condition our Dasha simply won’t be able to squeeze in beside you. Where would she sit?”

“Do as you please!” my mother-in-law snapped, waving her hand dismissively. “The Lord has clearly sent you to torment me. But I withhold my blessing in the matter of a second cab!”

“Well, let me see . . .” I began, thinking aloud. “Thin as I am, I could sit with you, though then there would be no place for Dasha . . . and if I sit with Dasha, there’ll be no place for you . . . Wait a minute! If, say, I sat with you, Dasha could sit on our knees. Although now that I think of it, that’s physically impossible, since these cabs are so damned narrow. Well, if, say, I sit with you, Mother, and you, Dasha, sit up on the box next to the cabbie . . . Dasha, how about sitting next to the cabbie?”

“Next to the cabbie?” my mother-in-law gasped. “I am a widow of high social standing! I will not allow a daughter of mine to seat herself next to some provincial lout! Has anyone ever heard the like? A lady sitting up on the box next to a cabbie!”

“In that case, how about this,” my resourceful wife ventured. “Mother will sit in the back, as is proper, and I’ll sit on the floor at her feet. I can huddle up and steady myself on the empty spot next to Mother, while you, Kirill, can sit with the cabbie . . . Your family has no standing worth mentioning, so there’s no harm in your sitting up on the box.”

“Yes, that might work. And yet,” I said, scratching my head, “as I admit to being slightly tipsy, what happens if I fall off the box?”

“Slightly tipsy? Ha!” my mother-in-law countered. “Well, if you’re so afraid of falling off, why not stand on the footboard and hold on to the back of the cab. We’ll go slowly—you won’t fall off.”

Inebriated though I was, I could only spurn this shameful suggestion. A Russian man of letters clinging willy-nilly to the back of a cab! That would be the end of civilization as we know it! Exhausted from all the drinking and the perplexing puzzle I was facing, I was ready to throw up my hands and go home on foot when the cabbie leaned down to us and said:

“How about trying this . . .”

He offered us a solution to the problem that we all accepted.

What was this solution?

P.S. As an aid to the less nimble-minded among my readers, the cabbie’s solution had me sitting next to my mother-in-law, while my wife was close enough to be able to whisper in my ear, “Kirill, you’re jabbing me with your elbow. Move back a little!” The cabbie was sitting in his place. Surely the reader can now guess our configuration.

The solution:

I sat next to my mother-in-law with my back to the cabbie, my legs dangling out the back of the cab. My wife stood in the cab in the space where my legs would have been if I had been sitting like a normal human being, and steadied herself by holding on to my shoulders.