When the Director left for Tashkent the TV men came to make an advertising film. After breakfast the cameramen started shooting it according to the script written by Pukhtiyerkhan.
Before the shooting began he had warned the elderly people to behave well and not to touch the fruits. If they asked them question about food they should say that they were fed four times a day and had bananas, pineapples, coconuts, tangerines, apples, lemons and grapes for dessert.
When the shooting began the bearded producer in a baseball cap, took the tin funnel of the loudspeaker and began ordering people about. The clapper, a red haired girl, who was already in front of the camera with the clapperboard in hand, looking like a checkerboard stripe of a taxicab, slapped it shut and called "marker!"
The cameraman began to walk around the elderly people who had their faces made up for the occasion.
Pukhtiyerkhan started giving an interview to reporters:
- As you can see, everything is well organized, and things are going on like clockwork. Our aged people live comfortably here. They have hot water and are fed five times a day. The medical service is free. They are examined by highly qualified doctors in consulting rooms equipped with modern medical facilities. Our dear grannies make themselves at home here. They are better off here than at home. We do cultural work for them arranging concerts, discos, excursions and meetings with outstanding poets who read poems about our wise General Secretary.
With this optimistic note in his voice Pukhtiyerkhan finished his speech. The producers, newspaper reporters and cameramen took a business lunch and had a drink or two. Then, picking their teeth, they started shooting the elderly people sitting at table and eating. Matvey Zakharich, wishing to look like a bourgeois, grasped a pineapple and bit into it. At this point something extraordinary happened. His teeth clutched at the ill-fated fruit, and he couldn"t pull them off. They had to call in an ambulance. The ambulance men arrived with a dentist. The latter had long messed about with it and finally saved Matvey Zakharich from the fruit. From then on he felt fear whenever someone offered him a pine-apple. He would stare at it as if it was a bomb or something. The point was that fruits were made of paraffin. It was Pukhtiyerkhan who had brought the plaster cast fruits from the Museum of Nature.