Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997)
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© Mikhail Bulgakov
© Translated from the russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
OCR: Scout
Spellcheck: Chaim Ash
Origin: "Master i Margarita"
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TRANSLATED AND WITH NOTES BY RICHARD PEVEAR
AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY RICHARD PEVEAR
This translation published in PENGUIN BOOKS 1997
OCR: Scout
Introduction
A Note on the Text and Acknowledgements
BOOK ONE
Never Talk with Strangers
Pontius Pilate
The Seventh Proof
The Chase
There were Doings at Griboedov's
Schizophrenia, as was Said
A Naughty Apartment
The Combat between the Professor and the Poet
Koroviev's Stunts
News From Yalta
Ivan Splits in Two
Black Magic and Its Exposure
The Hero Enters
Glory to the Cock!
Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream
The Execution
An Unquiet Day
Hapless Visitors
BOOK TWO
Margarita
Azazello's Cream
Flight
By Candlelight
The Great Ball at Satan's
The Extraction of the Master
How the Procurator Tried to Save Judas of Kiriath
The Burial
The End of Apartment No.50
The Last Adventures of Koroviev and Behemoth
The Fate of the Master and Margarita is Decided
It's Time! It's Time!
On Sparrow Hills
Forgiveness and Eternal Refuge
Epilogue
Notes
Mikhail Bulgakov worked on this luminous book throughout one of the
darkest decades of the century. His last revisions were dictated to his wife
a few weeks before his death in 1940 at the age of forty-nine. For him,
there was never any question of publishing the novel. The mere existence of
the manuscript, had it come to the knowledge of Stalin's police, would
almost certainly have led to the permanent disappearance of its author. Yet
the book was of great importance to him, and he clearly believed that a time
would come when it could be published. Another twenty-six years had to pass
before events bore out that belief and The Master and Margarita, by what
seems a surprising oversight in Soviet literary politics, finally appeared
in print. The effect was electrifying.
The monthly magazine Moskva, otherwise a rather cautious and quiet
publication, carried the first part of The Master and Margarita in its
November 1966 issue. The 150,000 copies sold out within hours. In the weeks
that followed, group readings were held, people meeting each other would
quote and compare favourite passages, there was talk of little else. Certain
sentences from the novel immediately became proverbial. The very language of
the novel was a contradiction of everything wooden, official, imposed. It
was a joy to speak.
When the second part appeared in the January 1967 issue of Moskva, it
was greeted with the same enthusiasm. Yet this was not the excitement caused
by the emergence of a new writer, as when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich appeared in the magazine Novy Mir in 1962.
Bulgakov was neither unknown nor forgotten. His plays had begun to be
revived in theatres during the late fifties and were published in 1962. His
superb Life of Monsieur de Moliere came out in that same year. His early
stories were reprinted. Then, in 1965, came the Theatrical Novel, based on
his years of experience with Stanislavsky's renowned Moscow Art Theatre. And
finally in 1966 a volume of Selected Prose was published, containing the
complete text of Bulgakov's first novel. The White Guard, written in the
twenties and dealing with nearly contemporary events of the Russian civil
war in his native Kiev and the Ukraine, a book which in its clear-sighted
portrayal of human courage and weakness ranks among the truest depictions of
war in all of literature.
Bulgakov was known well enough, then. But, outside a very small group,
the existence of The Master and Margarita was completely unsuspected. That
certainly accounts for some of the amazement caused by its publication. It
was thought that virtually all of Bulgakov had found its way into print. And
here was not some minor literary remains but a major novel, the author's
crowning work. Then there were the qualities of the novel itself-- its
formal originality, its devastating satire of Soviet life, and of Soviet
literary life in particular, its 'theatrical' rendering of the Great Terror
of the thirties, the audacity of its portrayal of Jesus Christ and Pontius
Pilate, not to mention Satan. But, above all, the novel breathed an air of
freedom, artistic and spiritual, which had become rare indeed, not only in
Soviet Russia. We sense it in the special tone of Bulgakov's writing, a
combination of laughter (satire, caricature, buffoonery) and the most
unguarded vulnerability. Two aphorisms detachable from the novel may suggest
something of the complex nature of this freedom and how it may have struck
the novel's first readers. One is the much-quoted 'Manuscripts don't burn',
which seems to express an absolute trust in the triumph of poetry,
imagination, the free word, over terror and oppression, and could thus
become a watchword of the intelligentsia. The publication of The Master and
Margarita was taken as a proof of the assertion. In fact, during a moment of
fear early in his work on the novel, Bulgakov did burn what he had written.
And yet, as we see, it refused to stay burned. This moment of fear, however,
brings me to the second aphorism - 'Cowardice is the most terrible of vices'
- which is repeated with slight variations several times in the novel. More
penetrating than the defiant 'Manuscripts don't burn', this word touched the
inner experience of generations of Russians. To portray that experience with
such candour required another sort of freedom and a love for something more
than 'culture'. Gratitude for such perfect expression of this other, deeper
freedom must surely have been part of the enthusiastic response of readers
to the novel's first appearance.
And then there was the sheer unlikeliness of its publication. By 1966
the 'thaw' that had followed Stalin's death was over and a new freeze was
coming. The hopes awakened by the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich, the first public acknowledgement of the existence of the Gulag,
had been disappointed. In 1964 came the notorious trial of the poet Joseph
Brodsky, and a year later the trial of the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli
Daniel, both sentenced to terms in that same Gulag. Solzhenitsyn saw a new
Stalinization approaching, made worse by the terrible sense of repetition,
stagnation and helplessness. Such was the monotonously grim atmosphere of
the Brezhnev era. And in the midst of it there suddenly burst The Master and
Margarita, not only an anomaly but an impossibility, a sort of cosmic error,
evidence of some hidden but fatal crack in the system of Soviet power.
People kept asking, how could they have let it happen?
Bulgakov began work on the first version of the novel early in 1929, or
possibly at the end of 1928. It was abandoned, taken up again, burned,
resurrected, recast and revised many times. It accompanied Bulgakov through
the period of greatest suffering for his people -- the period of forced
collectivization and the first five-year plan, which decimated Russia's
peasantry and destroyed her agriculture, the period of expansion of the
system of 'corrective labour camps', of the penetration of the secret police
into all areas of life, of the liquidation of the intelligentsia, of vast
party purges and the Moscow 'show trials'. In literature the same struggle
went on in miniature, and with the same results. Bulgakov was not arrested,
but by 1930 he found himself so far excluded that he could no longer publish
or produce his work. In an extraordinarily forthright letter to the central
government, he asked for permission to emigrate, since the hostility of the
literary powers made it impossible for him to live. If emigration was not
permitted, 'and if I am condemned to keep silent in the Soviet Union for the
rest of my days, then I ask the Soviet government to give me a job in my
speciality and assign me to a theatre as a titular director.' Stalin himself
answered this letter by telephone on 17 April, and shortly afterwards the
Moscow Art Theatre hired Bulgakov as an assistant director and literary
consultant. However, during the thirties only his stage adaptations of
Gogol's Dead Souls and Cervantes' Don Quixote were granted a normal run. His
own plays either were not staged at all or were quickly withdrawn, and his
Life of Monsieur de Moliere, written in 1932--5 for the collection Lives of
Illustrious Men, was rejected by the publisher. These circumstances are
everywhere present in The Master and Margarita, which was in part Bulgakov's
challenge to the rule of terror in literature. The successive stages of his
work on the novel, his changing evaluations of the nature of the book and
its characters, reflect events in his life and his deepening grasp of what
was at stake in the struggle. I will briefly sketch what the study of his
archives has made known of this process.
The novel in its definitive version is composed of two distinct but
interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient
Jerusalem (called Yershalaim). Its central characters are Woland (Satan) and
his retinue, the poet Ivan Homeless, Pontius Pilate, an unnamed writer known
as 'the master', and Margarita. The Pilate story is condensed into four
chapters and focused on four or five large-scale figures. The Moscow story
includes a whole array of minor characters. The Pilate story, which passes
through a succession of narrators, finally joins the Moscow story at the
end, when the fates of Pilate and the master are simultaneously decided. The
earliest version, narrated by a first-person 'chronicler' and entitled The
Engineer's Hoof, was written in the first few months of 1929. It contained
no trace of Margarita and only a faint hint of the master in a minor
character representing the old intelligentsia. The Pilate story was confined
to a single chapter. This version included the essentials of the Moscow
satire, which afterwards underwent only minor revisions and rearrangements.
It began in much the same way as the definitive version, with a dialogue
between a people's poet and an editor (here of an anti-religious magazine.
The Godless) on the correct portrayal of Christ as an exploiter of the
proletariat. A stranger (Woland) appears and, surprised at their unbelief,
astounds them with an eyewitness account of Christ's crucifixion. This
account forms the second chapter, entitled 'The Gospel of Woland'.
Clearly, what first spurred Bulgakov to write the novel was his outrage
at the portrayals of Christ in Soviet anti-religious propaganda (The Godless
was an actual monthly magazine of atheism, published from 1922 to 1940). His
response was based on a simple reversal -- a vivid circumstantial narrative
of what was thought to be a 'myth' invented by the ruling class, and a
breaking down of the self-evident reality of Moscow life by the intrusion of
the 'stranger'. This device, fundamental to the novel, would be more fully
elaborated in its final form. Literary satire was also present from the
start. The fifth chapter of the definitive version, entitled There were
Doings at Griboedov's', already appeared intact in this earliest draft,
where it was entitled 'Mania Furibunda'. In May of 1929, Bulgakov sent this
chapter to a publisher, who rejected it. This was his only attempt to
publish anything from the novel.
The second version, from later in the same year, was a reworking of the
first four chapters, filling out certain episodes and adding the death of
Judas to the second chapter, which also began to detach itself from Woland
and become a more autonomous narrative. According to the author's wife,
Elena Sergeevna, Bulgakov partially destroyed these two versions in the
spring of 1930 -- 'threw them in the fire', in the writer's own words. What
survived were two large notebooks with many pages torn out. This was at the
height of the attacks on Bulgakov . in the press, the moment of his letter
to the government.
After that came some scattered notes in two notebooks, kept
intermittently over the next two years, which was a very difficult time for
Bulgakov. In the upper-right-hand corner of the second, he wrote:
'Lord, help me to finish my novel, 1931.' In a fragment of a later
chapter, entitled 'Woland's Flight', there is a reference to someone
addressed familiarly as ty, who is told that he 'will meet with Schubert and
clear mornings'. This is obviously the master, though he is not called so.
There is also the first mention of the name of Margarita. In Bulgakov's
mind, the main outlines of a new conception of the novel were evidently
already clear.
This new version he began to write in earnest in October of 1932,
during a visit to Leningrad with Elena Sergeevna, whom he had just married.
(The 'model' for Margarita, who had now entered the composition, she was
previously married to a high-ranking military official, who for some time
opposed her wish to leave him for the writer, leading Bulgakov to think he
would never see her again.) His wife was surprised that he could set to work
without having any notes or earlier drafts with him, but Bulgakov explained,
'I know it by heart.' He continued working, not without long interruptions,
until 1936. Various new tides occurred to him, all still referring to Satan
as the central figure -- The Great Chancellor, Satan, Here I Am, The Black
Theologian, He Has Come, The Hoofed Consultant. As in the earliest version,
the time of the action is 24-- 5 June, the feast of St John, traditionally a
time of magic enchantments (later it was moved to the time of the spring
full moon). The nameless friend of Margarita is called 'Faust' in some
notes, though not in the text itself. He is also called 'the poet', and is
made the author of a novel which corresponds to the 'Gospel of Woland' from
the first drafts. This historical section is now broken up and moved to a
later place in the novel, coming closer to what would be the arrangement in
the final version.
Bulgakov laboured especially over the conclusion of the novel and what
reward to give the master. The ending appears for the first time in a
chapter entitled 'Last Flight', dating from July 1956. It differs little
from the final version. In it, however, the master is told explicitly and
directly:
The house on Sadovaya and the horrible Bosoy will vanish from your
memory, but with them will go Ha-Nozri and the forgiven hegemon. These
things are not for your spirit. You will never raise yourself higher, you
will not see Yeshua, you will never leave your refuge.
In an earlier note, Bulgakov had written even more tellingly: 'You will
not hear the liturgy. But you will listen to the romantics . . .' These
words, which do not appear in the definitive text, tell us how painfully
Bulgakov weighed the question of cowardice and guilt in considering the fate
of his hero, and how we should understand the ending of the final version.
They also indicate a thematic link between Pilate, the master, and the
author himself, connecting the historical and contemporary parts of the
novel.
In a brief reworking from 1936--7, Bulgakov brought the beginning of
the Pilate story back to the second chapter, where it would remain, and in
another reworking from 1937-8 he finally found the definitive tide for the
novel. In this version, the original narrator, a characterized 'chronicler',
is removed. The new narrator is that fluid voice -- moving freely from
detached observation to ironic double voicing, to the most personal
interjection - which is perhaps the finest achievement of Bulgakov's art.
The first typescript of The Master and Margarita, dating to 1958, was
dictated to the typist by Bulgakov from this last revision, with many
changes along the way. In 1939 he made further alterations in the
typescript, the most important of which concerns the fate of the hero and
heroine. In the last manuscript version, the fate of the master and
Margarita, announced to them by Woland, is to follow Pilate up the path of
moonlight to find Yeshua and peace. In the typescript, the fate of the
master, announced to Woland by Matthew Levi, speaking for Yeshua, is not to
follow Pilate but to go to his 'eternal refuge' with Margarita, in a rather
German-Romantic setting, with Schubert's music and blossoming cherry trees.
Asked by Woland, 'But why don't you take him with you into the light?' Levi
replies in a sorrowful voice, 'He does not deserve the light, he deserves
peace.' Bulgakov, still pondering the problem of the master's guilt (and his
own, for what he considered various compromises, including his work on a
play about Stalin's youth), went back to his notes and revisions from 1936,
but lightened their severity with an enigmatic irony. This was to be the
definitive resolution. Clearly, the master is not to be seen as a heroic
martyr for art or a 'Christ-figure'. Bulgakov's gentle irony is a warning
against the mistake, more common in our time than we might think, of
equating artistic mastery with a sort of saintliness, or, in Kierkegaard's
terms, of confusing the aesthetic with the ethical.
In the evolution of The Master and Margarita, the Moscow satire of
Woland and his retinue versus the literary powers and the imposed normality
of Soviet life in general is there from the first, and comes to involve the
master when he appears, acquiring details from the writer's own life and
with them a more personal tone alongside the bantering irreverence of the
demonic retinue. The Pilate story, on the other hand, the story of an act of
cowardice and an interrupted dialogue, gains in weight and independence as
Bulgakov's work progresses. From a single inset episode, it becomes the
centrepiece of the novel, setting off the contemporary events and serving as
their measure. In style and form it is a counterpoint to the rest of the
book. Finally, rather late in the process, the master and Margarita appear,
with Margarita coming to dominate the second part of the novel. Her story is
a romance in the old sense - the celebration of a beautiful woman, of a true
love, and of personal courage.
These three stories, in form as well as content, embrace virtually all
that was excluded from official Soviet ideology and its literature. But if
the confines of 'socialist realism' are utterly exploded, so are the
confines of more traditional novelistic realism. The Master and Margarita as
a whole is a consistently free verbal construction which, true to its own
premises, can re-create ancient Jerusalem in the smallest physical detail,
but can also alter the specifics of the New Testament and play variations on
its principal figures, can combine the realities of Moscow life with
witchcraft, vampirism, the tearing off and replacing of heads, can describe
for several pages the sensation of flight on a broomstick or the gathering
of the infamous dead at Satan's annual spring ball, can combine the most
acute sense of the fragility of human life with confidence in its
indestructibility. Bulgakov underscores the continuity of this verbal world
by having certain phrases -- 'Oh, gods, my gods', 'Bring me poison', 'Even
by moonlight I have no peace' -- migrate from one character to another, or
to the narrator. A more conspicuous case is the Pilate story itself,
successive parts of which are told by Woland, dreamed by the poet Homeless,
written by the master, and read by Margarita, while the whole preserves its
stylistic unity. Narrow notions of the 'imitation of reality' break down
here. But The Master and Margarita is true to the broader sense of the novel
as a freely developing form embodied in the works of Dostoevsky and Gogol,
of Swift and Sterne, of Cervantes, Rabelais and Apuleius. The mobile but
personal narrative voice of the novel, the closest model for which Bulgakov
may have found in Gogol's Dead Souls, is the perfect medium for this
continuous verbal construction. There is no multiplicity of narrators in the
novel. The voice is always the same. But it has unusual range, picking up,
parodying, or ironically undercutting the tones of the novel's many
characters, with undertones of lyric and epic poetry and old popular tales.
Bulgakov always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that
irony and buffoonery are expressions of 'the deepest contemplation of life
in all its conditionality'. It is not by chance that his stage adaptations
of the comic masterpieces of Gogol and Cervantes coincided with the writing
of The Master and Margarita. Behind such specific 'influences' stands the
age-old tradition of folk humour with its carnivalized world-view, its
reversals and dethronings, its relativizing of worldly absolutes -- a
tradition that was the subject of a monumental study by Bulgakov's
countryman and contemporary Mikhail Bakhtin. Bakhtin's Rabelais and His
World, which in its way was as much an explosion of Soviet reality as
Bulgakov's novel, appeared in 1965, a year before The Master and Margarita.
The coincidence was not lost on Russian readers. Commenting on it,
Bulgakov's wife noted that, while there had never been any direct link
between the two men, they were both responding to the same historical
situation from the same cultural basis.
Many observations from Bakhtin's study seem to be aimed directly at
Bulgakov's intentions, none more so than his comment on Rabelais's travesty
of the 'hidden meaning', the 'secret', the 'terrifying mysteries' of
religion, politics and economics: 'Laughter must liberate the gay truth of
the world from the veils of gloomy lies spun by the seriousness of fear,
suffering, and violence.' The settling of scores is also part of the
tradition of carnival laughter. Perhaps the most pure example is the
Testament of the poet Francois Villon, who in the liveliest verse handed out
appropriate 'legacies' to all his enemies, thus entering into tradition and
even earning himself a place in the fourth book of Rabelais's Gargantua and
Pantagruel. So, too, Bakhtin says of Rabelais:
In his novel ... he uses the popular-festive system of images with its
charter of freedoms consecrated by many centuries; and he uses it to inflict
a severe punishment upon his foe, the Gothic age ... In this setting of
consecrated rights Rabelais attacks the fundamental dogmas and sacraments,
the holy of holies of medieval ideology.
And he comments further on the broad nature of this tradition:
For thousands of years the people have used these festive comic images
to express their criticism, their deep distrust of official truth, and their
highest hopes and aspirations. Freedom was not so much an exterior right as
it was the inner content of these images. It was the thousand-year-old
language of feariessness, a language with no reservations and omissions,
about the world and about power.
Bulgakov drew on this same source in settling his scores with the
custodians of official literature and official reality.
The novel's form excludes psychological analysis and historical
commentary. Hence the quickness and pungency of Bulgakov's writing. At the
same time, it allows Bulgakov to exploit all the theatricality of its great
scenes -- storms, flight, the attack of vampires, all the antics of the
demons Koroviev and Behemoth, the seance in the Variety theatre, the ball at
Satan's, but also the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, the crucifixion as
witnessed by Matthew Levi, the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden of
Gethsemane.
Bulgakov's treatment of Gospel figures is the most controversial aspect
of The Master and Margarita and has met with the greatest incomprehension.
Yet his premises are made clear in the very first pages of the novel, in the
dialogue between Woland and the atheist Berlioz. By the deepest irony of
all, the 'prince of this world' stands as guarantor of the 'other' world. It
exists, since he exists. But he says nothing directly about it. Apart from
divine revelation, the only language able to speak of the 'other' world is
the language of parable. Of this language Kafka wrote, in his parable 'On
Parables':
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and
of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says:
'Go over,' he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which
we could do anyhow if it was worth the trouble; he means some fabulous
yonder, something unknown to us, something, too, that he cannot designate
more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the least. All these
parables really set out to say simply that the incomprehensible is
incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to
struggle with every day: that is a different matter.
Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only
followed the parables, you yourselves would become parables and with that nd
of all your daily cares.
Another said: I bet that is also a parable.
The first said: You win.
The second said: But unfortunately only in parable.
The first said: No, in reality. In parable you lose.
A similar dialogue lies at the heart of Bulgakov's novel. In it there
are those who belong to parable and those who belong to reality. There are
those who go over and those who do not. There are those who win in parable
and become parables themselves, and there are those who win in reality. But
this reality belongs to Woland. Its nature is made chillingly clear in the
brief scene when he and Margarita contemplate his special globe. Woland
says:
'For instance, do you see this chunk of land, washed on one side by the
ocean? Look, it's filling with fire. A war has started there. If you look
closer, you'll see the details.'
Margarita leaned towards the globe and saw the little square of land
spread out, get painted in many colours, and turn as it were into a relief
map. And then she saw the little ribbon of a river, and some village near
it. A little house the size of a pea grew and became the size of a matchbox.
Suddenly and noiselessly the roof of this house flew up along with a cloud
of black smoke, and the walls collapsed, so that nothing was left of the
little two-storey box except a small heap with black smoke pouring from it.
Bringing her eye stffl closer, Margarita made out a small female figure
lying on the ground, and next to her, in a pool of blood, a little child
with outstretched arms.
That's it,' Woland said, smiling, 'he had no time to sin. Abaddon's
work is impeccable.'
When Margarita asks which side this Abaddon is on, Woland replies:
'He is of a rare impartiality and sympathizes equally with both sides
of the fight. Owing to that, the results are always the same for both
sides.'
There are others who dispute Woland's claim to the power of this world.
They are absent or all but absent from The Master and Margarita. But the
reality of the world seems to be at their disposal, to be shaped by them and
to bear their imprint. Their names are Caesar and Stalin. Though absent in
person, they are omnipresent. Their imposed will has become the measure of
normality and self-evidence. In other words, the normality of this world is
imposed terror. And, as the story of Pilate shows, this is by no means a
twentieth-century phenomenon. Once terror is identified with the world, it
becomes invisible. Bulgakov's portrayal of Moscow under Stalin's terror is
remarkable precisely for its weightless, circus-like theatricality and lack
of pathos. It is a sub-stanceless reality, an empty suit writing at a desk.
The citizens have adjusted to it and learned to play along as they always
do. The mechanism of this forced adjustment is revealed in the chapter
recounting 'Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream', in which prison, denunciation and
betrayal become yet another theatre with a kindly and helpful master of
ceremonies. Berlioz, the comparatist, is the spokesman for this 'normal'
state of affairs, which is what makes his conversation with Woland so
interesting. In it he is confronted with another reality which he cannot
recognize. He becomes 'unexpectedly mortal'. In the story of Pilate,
however, a moment of recognition does come. It occurs during Pilate's
conversation with Yeshua, when he sees the wandering philosopher's head
float off and in its place the toothless head of the aged Tiberius Caesar.
This is the pivotal moment of the novel. Pilate breaks off his dialogue with
Yeshua, he does not 'go over', and afterwards must sit like a stone for two
thousand years waiting to continue their conversation.
Parable cuts through the normality of this world only at moments.
These moments are preceded by a sense of dread, or else by a
presentiment of something good. The first variation is Berlioz's meeting
with Woland. The second is Pilate's meeting with Yeshua. The third is the
'self-baptism' of the poet Ivan Homeless before he goes in pursuit of the
mysterious stranger. The fourth is the meeting of the master and Margarita.
These chance encounters have eternal consequences, depending on the response
of the person, who must act without foreknowledge and then becomes the
consequences of that action.
The touchstone character of the novel is Ivan Homeless, who is there at
the start, is radically changed by his encounters with Woland and the
master, becomes the latter's 'disciple' and continues his work, is present
at almost every turn of the novel's action, and appears finally in the
epilogue. He remains an uneasy inhabitant of 'normal' reality, as a
historian who 'knows everything', but each year, with the coming of the
spring full moon, he returns to the parable which for this world looks like
folly.
Richard Pevear
A Note on the Text and Acknowledgements
At his death, Bulgakov left The Master and Margarita in a slightly
unfinished state. It contains, for instance, certain inconsistencies - two
versions of the 'departure' of the master and Margarita, two versions of
Yeshua's entry into Yershalaim, two names for Yeshua's native town. His
final revisions, undertaken in October of 1939, broke off near the start of
Book Two. Later he dictated some additions to his wife, Elena Sergeevna,
notably the opening paragraph of Chapter 32 ('Gods, my gods! How sad the
evening earth!'). Shortly after his death in 1940, Elena Sergeevna made a
new typescript of the novel. In 1965, she prepared another typescript for
publication, which differs slightly from her 1940 text. This 1965 text was
published by Moskva in November 1966 and January 1967. However, the editors
of the magazine made cuts in it amounting to some sixty typed pages. These
cut portions immediately appeared in samizdat (unofficial Soviet
'self-publishing'), were published by Scherz Verlag in Switzerland in 1967,
and were then included in the Possev Verlag edition (Frankfurt-am-Main,
1969) and the YMCA-Press edition (Paris, 1969). In 1975 a new and now
complete edition came out in Russia, the result of a comparison of the
already published editions with materials in the Bulgakov archive. It
included additions and changes taken from written corrections on other
existing typescripts. The latest Russian edition (1990) has removed the most
important of those additions, bringing the text close once again to Elena
Sergeevna's 1965 typescript. Given the absence of a definitive authorial
text, this process of revision is virtually endless. However, it involves
changes that in most cases have little bearing for a translator.
The present translation has been made from the text of the original
magazine publication, based on Elena Sergeevna's 1965 typescript, with all
cuts restored as in the Possev and YMCA-Press editions. It is complete and
unabridged.
The translators wish to express their gratitude to M. 0. Chudakova for
her advice on the text and to Irina Kronrod for her help in preparing the
Further Reading.
R. P., L. V.
The Master and Margarita
'... who are you, then?'
'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works
good.'
Goethe, Faust
CHAPTER 1. Never Talk with Strangers
At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the
Patriarch's Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a
grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his
respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with
black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a
broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap
cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers
and black sneakers.
The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, [2] editor
of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the major
Moscow literary associations, called Massolit [3] for short, and his young
companion was the poet Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the
pseudonym of Homeless. [4]
Once in the shade of the barely greening lindens, the writers dashed
first thing to a brightly painted stand with the sign: `Beer and Soft
Drinks.'
Ah, yes, note must be made of the first oddity of this dreadful May
evening. There was not a single person to be seen, not only by the stand,
but also along the whole walk parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street. At that
hour when it seemed no longer possible to breathe, when the sun, having
scorched Moscow, was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere beyond Sadovoye
Ring, no one came under the lindens, no one sat on a bench, the walk was
empty.
'Give us seltzer,' Berlioz asked.
'There is no seltzer,' the woman in the stand said, and for some reason
became offended.
'Is there beer?' Homeless inquired in a rasping voice.
`Beer'll be delivered towards evening,' the woman replied.
'Then what is there?' asked Berlioz.
'Apricot soda, only warm,' said the woman.
'Well, let's have it, let's have it! ...'
The soda produced an abundance of yellow foam, and the air began to
smell of a barber-shop. Having finished drinking, the writers immediately
started to hiccup, paid, and sat down on a bench face to the pond and back
to Bronnaya.
Here the second oddity occurred, touching Berlioz alone. He suddenly
stopped hiccupping, his heart gave a thump and dropped away somewhere for an
instant, then came back, but with a blunt needle lodged in it. Besides that,
Berlioz was gripped by fear, groundless, yet so strong that he wanted to
flee the Ponds at once without looking back.
Berlioz looked around in anguish, not understanding what had frightened
him. He paled, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, thought:
"What's the matter with me? This has never happened before. My heart's
acting up... I'm overworked... Maybe it's time to send it all to the devil
and go to Kislovodsk...'[5]
And here the sweltering air thickened before him, and a transparent
citizen of the strangest appearance wove himself out of it. A peaked
jockey's cap on his little head, a short checkered jacket also made of air.
... A citizen seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders,
unbelievably thin, and, kindly note, with a jeering physiognomy.
The life of Berlioz had taken such a course that he was unaccustomed to
extraordinary phenomena. Turning paler still, he goggled his eyes and
thought in consternation:
'This can't be! ...'
But, alas, it was, and the long, see-through citizen was swaying before
him to the left and to the right without touching the ground.
Here terror took such possession of Berlioz that he shut his eyes. When
he opened them again, he saw that it was all over, the phantasm had
dissolved, the checkered one had vanished, and with that the blunt needle
had popped out of his heart.
'Pah, the devil!' exclaimed the editor. 'You know, Ivan, I nearly had
heat stroke just now! There was even something like a hallucination...' He
attempted to smile, but alarm still jumped in his eyes and his hands
trembled. However, he gradually calmed down, fanned himself with his
handkerchief and, having said rather cheerfully: 'Well, and so...' went on
with the conversation interrupted by their soda-drinking.
This conversation, as was learned afterwards, was about Jesus Christ.
The thing was that the editor had commissioned from the poet a long
anti-religious poem for the next issue of his journal. Ivan Nikolaevich had
written this poem, and in a very short time, but unfortunately the editor
was not at all satisfied with it. Homeless had portrayed the main character
of his poem - that is, Jesus - in very dark colours, but nevertheless the
whole poem, in the editor's opinion, had to be written over again. And so
the editor was now giving the poet something of a lecture on Jesus, with the
aim of underscoring the poet's essential error.
It is hard to say what precisely had let Ivan Nikolaevich down - the
descriptive powers of his talent or a total unfamiliarity with the question
he was writing about - but his Jesus came out, well, completely alive, the
once-existing Jesus, though, true, a Jesus furnished with all negative
features.
Now, Berlioz wanted to prove to the poet that the main thing was not
how Jesus was, good or bad, but that this same Jesus, as a person, simply
never existed in the world, and all the stories about him were mere fiction,
the most ordinary mythology.
It must be noted that the editor was a well-read man and in his
conversation very skillfully pointed to ancient historians - for instance,
the famous Philo of Alexandria [6] and the brilliantly educated Flavius
Josephus [7] - who never said a word about the existence of Jesus.
Displaying a solid erudition, Mikhail Alexandrovich also informed the poet,
among other things, that the passage in the fifteenth book of Tacitus's
famous Annals [8], the forty-fourth chapter, where mention is made of the
execution of Jesus, was nothing but a later spurious interpolation.
The poet, for whom everything the editor was telling him was new,
listened attentively to Mikhail Alexandrovich, fixing his pert green eyes on
him, and merely hiccupped from time to time, cursing the apricot soda under
his breath.
There's not a single Eastern religion,' Berlioz was saying, 'in which,
as a rule, an immaculate virgin did not give birth to a god. And in just the
same way, without inventing anything new, the Christians created their
Jesus, who in fact never lived. It's on this that the main emphasis should
be placed...'
Berlioz's high tenor rang out in the deserted walk, and as Mikhail
Alexandrovich went deeper into the maze, which only a highly educated man
can go into without risking a broken neck, the poet learned more and more
interesting and useful things about the Egyptian Osiris, [9] a benevolent
god and the son of Heaven and Earth, and about the Phoenician god Tammoz,
[10] and about Marduk, [11] and even about a lesser known, terrible god,
Vitzliputzli,'[12] once greatly venerated by the Aztecs in Mexico. And just
at the moment when Mikhail Alexandrovich was telling the poet how the Aztecs
used to fashion figurines of Vitzli-putzli out of dough - the first man
appeared in the walk.
Afterwards, when, frankly speaking, it was already too late, various
institutions presented reports describing this man. A comparison of them
cannot but cause amazement. Thus, the first of them said that the man was
short, had gold teeth, and limped on his right leg. The second, that the man
was enormously tall, had platinum crowns, and limped on his left leg. The
third laconically averred that the man had no distinguishing marks. It must
be acknowledged that none of these reports is of any value.
First of all, the man described did not limp on any leg, and was
neither short nor enormous, but simply tall. As for his teeth, he had
platinum crowns on the left side and gold on the right. He was wearing an
expensive grey suit and imported shoes of a matching colour. His grey beret
was cocked rakishly over one ear; under his arm he carried a stick with a
black knob shaped like a poodle's head. [13] He looked to be a little over
forty. Mouth somehow twisted. Clean-shaven. Dark-haired. Right eye black,
left - for some reason - green. Dark eyebrows, but one higher than the
other. In short, a foreigner. [14]
Having passed by the bench on which the editor and the poet were
placed, the foreigner gave them a sidelong look, stopped, and suddenly sat
down on the next bench, two steps away from the friends.
`A German...' thought Berlioz. `An Englishman...' thought Homeless.
'My, he must be hot in those gloves.'
And the foreigner gazed around at the tall buildings that rectangularly
framed the pond, making it obvious that he was seeing the place for the
first time and that it interested him. He rested his glance on the upper
floors, where the glass dazzlingly reflected the broken-up sun which was for
ever departing from Mikhail Alexandrovich, then shifted it lower down to
where the windows were beginning to darken before evening, smiled
condescendingly at something, narrowed his eves, put his hands on the knob
and his chin on his hands.
'For instance, Ivan,' Berlioz was saying, `you portrayed the birth of
Jesus, the son of God, very well and satirically, but the gist of it is that
a whole series of sons of God were born before Jesus, like, say, the
Phoenician Adonis, [15] the Phrygian Atris, [16] the Persian Mithras. [17]
And, to put it briefly, not one of them was born or ever existed, Jesus
included, and what's necessary is that, instead of portraying his birth or,
suppose, the coming of the Magi,'[18] you portray the absurd rumours of
their coming. Otherwise it follows from your story that he really was born!
...'
Here Homeless made an attempt to stop his painful hiccupping by holding
his breath, which caused him to hiccup more painfully and loudly, and at
that same moment Berlioz interrupted his speech, because the foreigner
suddenly got up and walked towards the writers. They looked at him in
surprise.
'Excuse me, please,' the approaching man began speaking, with a foreign
accent but without distorting the words, 'if, not being your acquaintance, I
allow myself... but the subject of your learned conversation is so
interesting that...'
Here he politely took off his beret and the friends had nothing left
but to stand up and make their bows.
'No, rather a Frenchman ....' thought Berlioz.
'A Pole? ...' thought Homeless.
It must be added that from his first words the foreigner made a
repellent impression on the poet, but Berlioz rather liked him - that is,
not liked but ... how to put it ... was interested, or whatever.
'May I sit down?' the foreigner asked politely, and the friends somehow
involuntarily moved apart; the foreigner adroitly sat down between them and
at once entered into the conversation:
'Unless I heard wrong, you were pleased to say that Jesus never
existed?' the foreigner asked, turning his green left eye to Berlioz.
'No, you did not hear wrong,' Berlioz replied courteously, 'that is
precisely what I was saying.'
'Ah, how interesting!' exclaimed the foreigner.
'What the devil does he want?' thought Homeless, frowning.
'And you were agreeing with your interlocutor?' inquired the stranger,
turning to Homeless on his right.
'A hundred per cent!' confirmed the man, who was fond of whimsical and
figurative expressions.
'Amazing!' exclaimed the uninvited interlocutor and, casting a thievish
glance around and muffling his low voice for some reason, he said:
'Forgive my importunity, but, as I understand, along with everything
else, you also do not believe in God?' he made frightened eyes and added:
'I swear I won't tell anyone!'
'No, we don't believe in God,' Berlioz replied, smiling slightly at the
foreign tourist's fright, but we can speak of it quite freely.'
The foreigner sat back on the bench and asked, even with a slight
shriek of curiosity:
'You are - atheists?!'
Yes, we're atheists,' Berlioz smilingly replied, and Homeless thought,
getting angry: 'Latched on to us, the foreign goose!'
'Oh, how lovely!' the astonishing foreigner cried out and began
swiveling his head, looking from one writer to the other.
'In our country atheism does not surprise anyone,' Berlioz said with
diplomatic politeness. 'The majority of our population consciously and long
ago ceased believing in the fairytales about God.'
Here the foreigner pulled the following stunt: he got up and shook the
amazed editor's hand, accompanying it with these words:
'Allow me to thank you with all my heart!'
'What are you thanking him for?' Homeless inquired, blinking.
'For some very important information, which is of great interest to me
as a traveler,' the outlandish fellow explained, raising his finger
significantly.
The important information apparendy had indeed produced a strong
impression on the traveler, because he passed his frightened glance over the
buildings, as if afraid of seeing an atheist in every window.
'No, he's not an Englishman ...' thought Berlioz, and Homeless thought:
'Where'd he pick up his Russian, that's the interesting thing!' and
frowned again.
'But, allow me to ask you,' the foreign visitor spoke after some
anxious reflection, 'what, then, about the proofs of God's existence, of
which, as is known, there are exactly five?'
'Alas!' Berlioz said with regret. 'Not one of these proofs is worth
anything, and mankind shelved them long ago. You must agree that in the
realm of reason there can be no proof of God's existence.'
'Bravo!' cried the foreigner. 'Bravo! You have perfectly repeated
restless old Immanuel's [19] thought in this regard. But here's the hitch:
he roundly demolished all five proofs, and then, as if mocking himself,
constructed a sixth of his own.'
'Kant's proof,' the learned editor objected with a subtle smile, 'is
equally unconvincing. Not for nothing did Schiller say that the Kantian
reasoning on this question can satisfy only slaves and Strauss simply
laughed at this proof.' Berlioz spoke, thinking all the while: 'But, anyhow,
who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?'
They ought to take this Kant and give him a three-year stretch in
Solovki [22] for such proofs!' Ivan Nikolaevich plumped quite unexpectedly.
'Ivan!' Berlioz whispered, embarrassed.
But the suggestion of sending Kant to Solovki not only did not shock
the foreigner, but even sent him into raptures.
'Precisely, precisely,' he cried, and his green left eye, turned to
Berlioz, flashed. 'Just the place for him! Didn't I tell him that time at
breakfast?
"As you will, Professor, but what you've thought up doesn't hang
together. It's clever, maybe, but mighty unclear. You'll be laughed at."'
Berlioz goggled his eyes. 'At breakfast... to Kant? ... What is this
drivel?' he thought.
'But,' the outlander went on, unembarrassed by Berlioz's amazement and
addressing the poet, 'sending him to Solovki is unfeasible, for the simple
reason that he has been abiding for over a hundred years now in places
considerably more remote than Solovki, and to extract him from there is in
no way possible, I assure you.'
'Too bad!' the feisty poet responded.
'Yes, too bad!' the stranger agreed, his eye flashing, and went on:
'But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then,
one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of
things on earth?'
'Man governs it himself,' Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this
admittedly none-too-clear question. `Pardon me,' the stranger responded
gently, 'but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise
plan for certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask
you, then, how man can govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity
of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period - well, say, a
thousand years - but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?
`And in fact,' here the stranger turned to Berlioz, 'imagine that you,
for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself,
generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get
...hem... hem ... lung cancer...' - here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and
if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure - 'yes, cancer' - narrowing
his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word - 'and so your governing
is over!
'You are no longer interested in anyone's fate but your own. Your
family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to
learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well.
Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you
understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he
was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box,
and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good
for anything, burn him in an oven.
'And sometimes it's worse still: the man has just decided to go to
Kislovodsk' - here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz - 'a trifling matter,
it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows
why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who
governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was
governed by someone else entirely?' And here the unknown man burst into a
strange little laugh.
Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about the
cancer and the tram-car, and certain alarming thoughts began to torment him.
'He's not a foreigner... He's not a foreigner...' he thought, 'he's a
most peculiar specimen ... but, excuse me, who is he then? ...'
You'd like to smoke, I see?' the stranger addressed Homeless
unexpectedly. "Which kind do you prefer?'
'What, have you got several?' the poet, who had run out of cigarettes,
asked glumly.
'Which do you prefer?' the stranger repeated.
'Okay - Our Brand,' Homeless replied spitefully.
The unknown man immediately took a cigarette case from his pocket and
offered it to Homeless:
'Our Brand...'
Editor and poet were both struck, not so much by Our Brand precisely
turning up in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was of
huge size, made of pure gold, and, as it was opened, a diamond triangle
flashed white and blue fire on its lid.
Here the writers thought differently. Berlioz: 'No, a foreigner!', and
Homeless: 'Well, devil take him, eh! ...'
The poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, but the non-smoker
Berlioz declined.
'I must counter him like this,' Berlioz decided, 'yes, man is mortal,
no one disputes that. But the thing is...'
However, before he managed to utter these words, the foreigner spoke:
'Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst
of it is that he's sometimes unexpectedly mortal - there's the trick! And
generally he's unable to say what he's going to do this same evening.'
`What an absurd way of putting the question ...' Berlioz thought and
objected:
'Well, there's some exaggeration here. About this same evening I do
know more or less certainly. It goes without saying, if a brick should fall
on my head on Bronnaya. . '
'No brick,' the stranger interrupted imposingly, `will ever fall on
anyone's head just out of the blue. In this particular case, I assure you,
you are not in danger of that at all. You will die a different death.'
'Maybe you know what kind precisely?' Berlioz inquired with perfectly
natural irony, getting drawn into an utterly absurd conversation. 'And will
tell me?'
'Willingly,' the unknown man responded. He looked Berlioz up and down
as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something
like: 'One, two ... Mercury in the second house ... moon gone ... six -
disaster... evening - seven...' then announced loudly and joyfully:
'Your head will be cut off!'
Homeless goggled his eyes wildly and spitefully at the insouciant
stranger, and Berlioz asked, grinning crookedly:
'By whom precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?'[23]
'No,' replied his interlocutor, 'by a Russian woman, a Komsomol [24]
girl.'
`Hm...' Berlioz mumbled, vexed at the stranger's little joke, `well,
excuse me, but that's not very likely.'
'And I beg you to excuse me,' the foreigner replied, 'but it's so. Ah,
yes, I wanted to ask you, what are you going to do tonight, if it's not a
secret?'
`It's not a secret. Right now I'll stop by my place on Sadovaya, and
then at ten this evening there will be a meeting at Massolit, and I will
chair it.'
'No, that simply cannot be,' the foreigner objected firmly.
'Why not?'
`Because,' the foreigner replied and, narrowing his eyes, looked into
the sky, where, anticipating the cool of the evening, black birds were
tracing noiselessly, 'Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has
not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take
place.'
Here, quite understandably, silence fell under the lindens.
`Forgive me,' Berlioz spoke after a pause, glancing at the
drivel-spouting foreigner, 'but what has sunflower oil got to do with it ...
and which Annushka?'
'Sunflower oil has got this to do with it,' Homeless suddenly spoke,
obviously deciding to declare war on the uninvited interlocutor. 'Have you
ever happened, citizen, to be in a hospital for the mentally ill?'
'Ivan! ...' Mikhail Alexandrovich exclaimed quietly. But the foreigner
was not a bit offended and burst into the merriest laughter.
'I have, I have, and more than once!' he cried out, laughing, but
without taking his unlaughing eye off the poet. 'Where haven't I been! Only
it's too bad I didn't get around to asking the professor what schizophrenia
is. So you will have to find that out from him yourself, Ivan Nikolaevich!'
'How do you know my name?'
'Gracious, Ivan Nikolaevich, who doesn't know you?' Here the foreigner
took out of his pocket the previous day's issue of the Literary Gazette, and
Ivan Nikolaevich saw his own picture on the very first page and under it his
very own verses. But the proof of fame and popularity, which yesterday had
delighted the poet, this time did not delight him a bit.
'Excuse me,' he said, and his face darkened, 'could you wait one little
moment? I want to say a couple of words to my friend.'
'Oh, with pleasure!' exclaimed the stranger. 'It's so nice here under
the lindens, and, by the way, I'm not in any hurry.'
'Listen here, Misha,' the poet whispered, drawing Berlioz aside, 'he's
no foreign tourist, he's a spy. A Russian emigre [25] who has crossed back
over. Ask for his papers before he gets away...'
'YOU think so?' Berlioz whispered worriedly, and thought: 'Why, he's
right...'
'Believe me,' the poet rasped into his ear, `he's pretending to be a
fool in order to find out something or other. Just hear how he speaks
Russian.' As he spoke, the poet kept glancing sideways, to make sure the
stranger did not escape. 'Let's go and detain him, or he'll get away...'
And the poet pulled Berlioz back to the bench by the arm.
The unknown man was not sitting, but was standing near it, holding in
his hands some booklet in a dark-grey binding, a sturdy envelope made of
good paper, and a visiting card.
`Excuse me for having forgotten, in the heat of our dispute, to
introduce myself. Here is my card, my passport, and an invitation to come to
Moscow for a consultation,' the stranger said weightily, giving both writers
a penetrating glance.
They were embarrassed. 'The devil, he heard everything...' Berlioz
thought, and with a polite gesture indicated that there was no need to show
papers. While the foreigner was pushing them at the editor, the poet managed
to make out the word `Professor' printed in foreign type on the card, and
the initial letter of the last name - a double 'V' - 'W'.
`My pleasure,' the editor meanwhile muttered in embarrassment, and the
foreigner put the papers back in his pocket.
Relations were thus restored, and all three sat down on the bench
again.
'You've been invited here as a consultant, Professor?' asked Berlioz.
'Yes, as a consultant.'
"You're German?' Homeless inquired.
'I? ...' the professor repeated and suddenly fell to thinking. 'Yes,
perhaps I am German ...' he said.
'YOU speak real good Russian,' Homeless observed.
'Oh, I'm generally a polyglot and know a great number of languages,'
the professor replied.
'And what is your field?' Berlioz inquired.
'I am a specialist in black magic.'
There he goes!...' struck in Mikhail Alexandrovich's head.
'And ... and you've been invited here in that capacity?' he asked,
stammering.
'Yes, in that capacity,' the professor confirmed, and explained: 'In a
state library here some original manuscripts of the tenth-century
necromancer Gerbert of Aurillac [26] have been found. So it is necessary for
me to sort them out. I am the only specialist in the world.'
'Aha! You're a historian?' Berlioz asked with great relief and respect.
'I am a historian,' the scholar confirmed, and added with no rhyme or
reason: This evening there will be an interesting story at the Ponds!'
Once again editor and poet were extremely surprised, but the professor
beckoned them both to him, and when they leaned towards him, whispered:
'Bear in mind that Jesus did exist.'
`You see. Professor,' Berlioz responded with a forced smile, `we
respect your great learning, but on this question we hold to a different
point of view.'
`There's no need for any points of view,' the strange professor
replied, 'he simply existed, that's all.'
'But there's need for some proof...' Berlioz began.
"There's no need for any proofs,' replied the professor, and he began
to speak softly, while his accent for some reason disappeared: 'It's all
very simple: In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait
of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring
month of Nissan...'[27]
CHAPTER 2. Pontius Pilate
In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a
cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month
of Nisan, there came out to the covered colonnade between the two wings of
the palace of Herod the Great' the procurator of Judea, [2] Pontius Pilate.
[3]
More than anything in the world the procurator hated the smell of rose
oil, and now everything foreboded a bad day, because this smell had been
pursuing the procurator since dawn.
It seemed to the procurator that a rosy smell exuded from the cypresses
and palms in the garden, that the smell of leather trappings and sweat from
the convoy was mingled with the cursed rosy flux.
From the outbuildings at the back of the palace, where the first cohort
of the Twelfth Lightning legion, [4] which had come to Yershalaim [5] with
the procurator, was quartered, a whiff of smoke reached the colonnade across
the upper terrace of the palace, and this slightly acrid smoke, which
testified that the centuries' mess cooks had begun to prepare dinner, was
mingled with the same thick rosy scent.
'Oh, gods, gods, why do you punish me? ... Yes, no doubt, this is it,
this is it again, the invincible, terrible illness... hemicrania, when half
of the head aches ... there's no remedy for it, no escape ... I'll try not
to move my head...'
On the mosaic floor by the fountain a chair was already prepared, and
the procurator, without looking at anyone, sat in it and reached his hand
out to one side. His secretary deferentially placed a sheet of parchment in
this hand. Unable to suppress a painful grimace, the procurator ran a
cursory, sidelong glance over the writing, returned the parchment to the
secretary, and said with difficulty:
"The accused is from Galilee? [6] Was the case sent to the tetrarch?'
'Yes, Procurator,' replied the secretary.
'And what then?'
'He refused to make a decision on the case and sent the Sanhedrin's [7]
death sentence to you for confirmation,' the secretary explained.
The procurator twitched his cheek and said quietly:
'Bring in the accused.'
And at once two legionaries brought a man of about twenty-seven from
the garden terrace to the balcony under the columns and stood him before the
procurator's chair. The man was dressed in an old and torn light-blue
chiton. His head was covered by a white cloth with a leather band around the
forehead, and his hands were bound behind his back. Under the man's left eye
there was a large bruise, in the corner of his mouth a cut caked with blood.
The man gazed at the procurator with anxious curiosity.
The latter paused, then asked quietly in Aramaic: [8]
`So it was you who incited the people to destroy the temple of
Yershalaim?'[9]
The procurator sat as if made of stone while he spoke, and only his
lips moved slightly as he pronounced the words. The procurator was as if
made of stone because he was afraid to move his head, aflame with infernal
pain.
The man with bound hands leaned forward somewhat and began to speak:
'Good man! Believe me ...'
But me procurator, motionless as before and not raising his voice in
the least, straight away interrupted him:
'Is it me that you are calling a good man? You are mistaken. It is
whispered about me in Yershalaim that I am a fierce monster, and that is
perfectly correct.' And he added in the same monotone: 'Bring the centurion
Ratslayer.'
It seemed to everyone that it became darker on the balcony when the
centurion of the first century, Mark, nicknamed Ratslayer, presented himself
before the procurator. Ratslayer was a head taller than the tallest soldier
of the legion and so broad in the shoulders that he completely blocked out
the still-low sun.
The procurator addressed the centurion in Latin:
`The criminal calls me "good man". Take him outside for a moment,
explain to him how I ought to be spoken to. But no maiming.'
And everyone except the motionless procurator followed Mark Ratslayer
with their eyes as he motioned to the arrested man, indicating that he
should go with him. Everyone generally followed Ratslayer with their eyes
wherever he appeared, because of his height, and those who were seeing him
for the first time also because the centurion's face was disfigured: his
nose had once been smashed by a blow from a Germanic club.
Mark's heavy boots thudded across the mosaic, the bound man noiselessly
went out with him, complete silence fell in the colonnade, and one could
hear pigeons cooing on the garden terrace near the balcony and water singing
an intricate, pleasant song in the fountain.
The procurator would have liked to get up, put his temple under the
spout, and stay standing that way. But he knew that even that would not help
him.
Having brought the arrested man from under the columns out to the
garden, Ratslayer took a whip from the hands of a legionary who was standing
at the foot of a bronze statue and, swinging easily, struck the arrested man
across the shoulders. The centurion's movement was casual and light, yet the
bound man instantly collapsed on the ground as if his legs had been cut from
under him; he gasped for air, the colour drained from his face, and his eyes
went vacant.
With his left hand only Mark heaved the fallen man into the air like an
empty sack, set him on his feet, and spoke nasally, in poorly pronounced
Aramaic:
The Roman procurator is called Hegemon. [10] Use no other words. Stand
at attention. Do you understand me, or do I hit you?'
The arrested man swayed, but got hold of himself, his colour returned,
he caught his breath and answered hoarsely:
I understand. Don't beat me.'
A moment later he was again standing before the procurator.
A lusterless, sick voice sounded:
'Name?'
'Mine?' the arrested man hastily responded, his whole being expressing
a readiness to answer sensibly, without provoking further wrath.
The procurator said softly:
'I know my own. Don't pretend to be stupider than you are. Yours.'
'Yeshua,'[11] the prisoner replied promptly.
'Any surname?'
'Ha-Nozri.'
'Where do you come from?'
The town of Gamala,'[12] replied the prisoner, indicating with his head
that there, somewhere far off to his right, in the north, was the town of
Gamala.
'Who are you by blood?'
'I don't know exactly,' the arrested man replied animatedly, `I don't
remember my parents. I was told that my father was a Syrian...'
"Where is your permanent residence?'
'I have no permanent home,' the prisoner answered shyly, 'I travel from
town to town.'
That can be put more briefly, in a word - a vagrant,' the procurator
said, and asked:
'Any family?'
"None. I'm alone in the world.'
'Can you read and write?'
'Yes.'
'Do you know any language besides Aramaic?'
'Yes. Greek.'
A swollen eyelid rose, an eye clouded with suffering fixed the arrested
man. The other eye remained shut.
Pilate spoke in Greek.
'So it was you who was going to destroy the temple building and called
on the people to do that?'
Here the prisoner again became animated, his eyes ceased to show fear,
and he spoke in Greek:
'Never, goo...' Here terror flashed in the prisoner's eyes, because he
had nearly made a slip. 'Never, Hegemon, never in my life was I going to
destroy the temple building, nor did I incite anyone to this senseless act.'
Surprise showed on the face of the secretary, hunched over a low table
and writing down the testimony. He raised his head, but immediately bent it
to the parchment again.
'All sorts of people gather in this town for the feast. Among them
there are magicians, astrologers, diviners and murderers,' the procurator
spoke in monotone, `and occasionally also liars. You, for instance, are a
liar. It is written clearly: "Incited to destroy the temple". People have
testified to it.'
These good people,' the prisoner spoke and, hastily adding `Hegemon',
went on: '... haven't any learning and have confused everything I told them.
Generally, I'm beginning to be afraid that this confusion may go on for a
very long time. And all because he writes down the things I say
incorrectly.'
Silence fell. By now both sick eyes rested heavily on the prisoner.
'I repeat to you, but for the last time, stop pretending that you're a
madman, robber,' Pilate said softly and monotonously, `there's not much
written in your record, but what there is enough to hang you.'
'No, no, Hegemon,' the arrested man said, straining all over in his
wish to convince, `there's one with a goatskin parchment who follows me,
follows me and keeps writing all the time. But once I peeked into this
parchment and was horrified. I said decidedly nothing of what's written
there. I implored him: "Burn your parchment, I beg you!" But he tore it out
of my hands and ran away.'
'Who is that?' Pilate asked squeamishly and touched his temple with his
hand.
'Matthew Levi,'[13] the prisoner explained willingly. 'He used to be a
tax collector, and I first met him on the road in Bethphage,'[14] where a
fig grove juts out at an angle, and I got to talking with him. He treated me
hostilely at first and even insulted me - that is, thought he insulted me -
by calling me a dog.' Here the prisoner smiled. `I personally see nothing
bad about this animal, that I should be offended by this word...'
The secretary stopped writing and stealthily cast a surprised glance,
not at the arrested man, but at the procurator.
'... However, after listening to me, he began to soften,' Yeshua went
on, `finally threw the money down in the road and said he would go
journeying with me...'
Pilate grinned with one cheek, baring yellow teeth, and said, turning
his whole body towards the secretary:
'Oh, city of Yershalaim! What does one not hear in it! A tax collector,
do you hear, threw money down in the road!'
Not knowing how to reply to that, the secretary found it necessary to
repeat Pilate's smile.
`He said that henceforth money had become hateful to him,' Yeshua
explained Matthew Levi's strange action and added: 'And since then he has
been my companion.'
His teeth still bared, the procurator glanced at the arrested man, then
at the sun, steadily rising over the equestrian statues of the hippodrome,
which lay far below to the right, and suddenly, in some sickening anguish,
thought that the simplest thing would be to drive this strange robber off
the balcony by uttering just two words: 'Hang him.' To drive the convoy away
as well, to leave the colonnade, go into the palace, order the room
darkened, collapse on the bed, send for cold water, call in a plaintive
voice for his dog Banga, and complain to him about the hemicrania. And the
thought of poison suddenly flashed temptingly in the procurator's sick head.
He gazed with dull eyes at the arrested man and was silent for a time,
painfully trying to remember why there stood before him in the pitiless
morning sunlight of Yershalaim this prisoner with his face disfigured by
beating, and what other utterly unnecessary questions he had to ask him.
'Matthew Levi?' the sick man asked in a hoarse voice and closed his
eyes.
'Yes, Matthew Levi,' the high, tormenting voice came to him.
`And what was it in any case that you said about the temple to the
crowd in the bazaar?'
The responding voice seemed to stab at Pilate's temple, was
inexpressibly painful, and this voice was saying:
'I said, Hegemon, that the temple of the old faith would fall and a new
temple of truth would be built. I said it that way so as to make it more
understandable.'
'And why did you stir up the people in the bazaar, you vagrant, talking
about the truth, of which you have no notion? What is truth?'[15]
And here the procurator thought: 'Oh, my gods! I'm asking him about
something unnecessary at a trial... my reason no longer serves me...' And
again he pictured a cup of dark liquid. 'Poison, bring me poison...'
And again he heard the voice:
The truth is, first of all, that your head aches, and aches so badly
that you're having faint-hearted thoughts of death. You're not only unable
to speak to me, but it is even hard for you to look at me. And I am now your
unwilling torturer, which upsets me. You can't even think about anything and
only dream that your dog should come, apparently the one being you are
attached to. But your suffering will soon be over, your headache will go
away.'
The secretary goggled his eyes at the prisoner and stopped writing in
mid-word.
Pilate raised his tormented eyes to the prisoner and saw that the sun
already stood quite high over the hippodrome, that a ray had penetrated the
colonnade and was stealing towards Yeshua's worn sandals, and that the man
was trying to step out of the sun's way.
Here the procurator rose from his chair, clutched his head with his
hands, and his yellowish, shaven face expressed dread. But he instantly
suppressed it with his will and lowered himself into his chair again.
The prisoner meanwhile continued his speech, but the secretary was no
longer writing it down, and only stretched his neck like a goose, trying not
to let drop a single word.
'Well, there, it's all over,' the arrested man said, glancing
benevolently at Pilate, `and I'm extremely glad of it. I'd advise you,
Hegemon, to leave the palace for a while and go for a stroll somewhere in
the vicinity - say, in the gardens on the Mount of Olives. [16] A storm will
come...' the prisoner turned, narrowing his eyes at the sun, '...later on,
towards evening. A stroll would do you much good, and I would be glad to
accompany you. Certain new thoughts have occurred to me, which I think you
might find interesting, and I'd willingly share them with you, the more so
as you give the impression of being a very intelligent man.'
The secretary turned deathly pale and dropped the scroll on the floor.
'The trouble is,' the bound man went on, not stopped by anyone, 'that
you are too closed off and have definitively lost faith in people. You must
agree, one can't place all one's affection in a dog. Your life is
impoverished, Hegemon.' And here the speaker allowed himself to smile.
The secretary now thought of only one thing, whether to believe his
ears or not. He had to believe. Then he tried to imagine precisely what
whimsical form the wrath of the hot-tempered procurator would take at this
unheard-of impudence from the prisoner. And this the secretary was unable to
imagine, though he knew the procurator well.
Then came the cracked, hoarse voice of the procurator, who said in
Latin:
'Unbind his hands.'
One of the convoy legionaries rapped with his spear, handed it to
another, went over and took the ropes off the prisoner. The secretary picked
up his scroll, having decided to record nothing for now, and to be surprised
at nothing.
`Admit,' Pilate asked softly in Greek, `that you are a great
physician?'
'No, Procurator, I am not a physician,' the prisoner replied,
delightedly rubbing a crimped and swollen purple wrist.
Scowling deeply, Pilate bored the prisoner with his eyes, and these
eyes were no longer dull, but flashed with sparks familiar to all.
'I didn't ask you,' Pilate said, 'maybe you also know Latin?'
'Yes, I do,' the prisoner replied.
Colour came to Pilate's yellowish cheeks, and he asked in Latin:
'How did you know I wanted to call my dog?'
'It's very simple,' the prisoner replied in Latin. `You were moving
your hand in the air' - and the prisoner repeated Pilate's gesture - `as if
you wanted to stroke something, and your lips...'
'Yes,' said Pilate.
There was silence. Then Pilate asked a question in Greek:
'And so, you are a physician?'
'No, no,' the prisoner replied animatedly, `believe me, I'm not a
physician.'
Very well, then, if you want to keep it a secret, do so. It has no
direct bearing on the case. So you maintain that you did not incite anyone
to destroy ... or set fire to, or in any other way demolish the temple?'
`I repeat, I did not incite anyone to such acts, Hegemon. Do I look
like a halfwit?'
'Oh, no, you don't look like a halfwit,' the procurator replied quietly
and smiled some strange smile. 'Swear, then, that it wasn't so.'
`By what do you want me to swear?' the unbound man asked, very
animated.
'Well, let's say, by your life,' the procurator replied. 'It's high
time you swore by it, since it's hanging by a hair, I can tell you.'
'You don't think it was you who hung it, Hegemon?' the prisoner asked.
'If so, you are very mistaken.'
Pilate gave a start and replied through his teeth:
'I can cut that hair.'
`In that, too, you are mistaken,' the prisoner retorted, smiling
brightly and shielding himself from the sun with his hand. 'YOU must agree
that surely only he who hung it can cut the hair?'
'So, so,' Pilate said, smiling, 'now I have no doubts that the idle
loafers of Yershalaim followed at your heels. I don't know who hung such a
tongue on you, but he hung it well. Incidentally, tell me, is it true that
you entered Yershalaim by the Susa gate [17] riding on an ass, [18]
accompanied by a crowd of riff-raff who shouted greetings to you as some
kind of prophet?' Here the procurator pointed to the parchment scroll.
The prisoner glanced at the procurator in perplexity.
'I don't even have an ass, Hegemon,' he said. `I did enter Yershalaim
by the Susa gate, but on foot, accompanied only by Matthew Levi, and no one
shouted anything to me, because no one in Yershalaim knew me then.'
'Do you happen to know,' Pilate continued without taking his eyes off
the prisoner, `such men as a certain Dysmas, another named Gestas, and a
third named Bar-Rabban?'[19]
'I do not know these good people,' the prisoner replied.
Truly?'
Truly.'
'And now tell me, why is it that you use me words "good people" all the
time? Do you call everyone that, or what?'
'Everyone,' the prisoner replied. There are no evil people in the
world.'
The first I hear of it,' Pilate said, grinning. 'But perhaps I know too
little of life! ...
You needn't record any more,' he addressed the secretary, who had not
recorded anything anyway, and went on talking with the prisoner. 'YOU read
that in some Greek book?'
'No, I figured it out for myself.'
'And you preach it?'
'Yes.'
`But take, for instance, the centurion Mark, the one known as Ratslayer
- is he good?'
'Yes,' replied the prisoner. True, he's an unhappy man. Since the good
people disfigured him, he has become cruel and hard. I'd be curious to know
who maimed him.'
'I can willingly tell you that,' Pilate responded, 'for I was a witness
to it. The good people fell on him like dogs on a bear. There were Germans
fastened on his neck, his arms, his legs. The infantry maniple was
encircled, and if one flank hadn't been cut by a cavalry turmae, of which I
was the commander - you, philosopher, would not have had the chance to speak
with the Rat-slayer. That was at the battle of Idistaviso, [20] in the
Valley of the Virgins.'
`If I could speak with him,' the prisoner suddenly said musingly, 'I'm
sure he'd change sharply.'
'I don't suppose,' Pilate responded, 'that you'd bring much joy to the
legate of the legion if you decided to talk with any of his officers or
soldiers. Anyhow, it's also not going to happen, fortunately for everyone,
and I will be the first to see to it.'
At that moment a swallow swiftly flitted into the colonnade, described
a circle under the golden ceiling, swooped down, almost brushed the face of
a bronze statue in a niche with its pointed wing, and disappeared behind the
capital of a column. It may be that it thought of nesting there.
During its flight, a formula took shape in the now light and lucid head
of the procurator. It went like this: the hegemon has looked into the case
of the vagrant philosopher Yeshua, alias Ha-Nozri, and found in it no
grounds for indictment. In particular, he has found not the slightest
connection between the acts of Yeshua and the disorders that have lately
taken place in Yershalaim. The vagrant philosopher has proved to be mentally
ill. Consequently, the procurator has not confirmed the death sentence on
Ha-Nozri passed by the Lesser Sanhedrin. But seeing that Ha-Nozri's mad
utopian talk might cause disturbances in Yershalaim, the procurator is
removing Yeshua from Yershalaim and putting him under confinement in
Stratonian Caesarea on the Mediterranean - that is, precisely where the
procurator's residence was.
It remained to dictate it to the secretary.
The swallow's wings whiffled right over the hegemon's head, the bird
darted to the fountain basin and then flew out into freedom. The procurator
raised his eyes to the prisoner and saw the dust blaze up in a pillar around
him.
'Is that all about him?' Pilate asked the secretary.
'Unfortunately not,' the secretary replied unexpectedly and handed
Pilate another piece of parchment.
'What's this now?' Pilate asked and frowned.
Having read what had been handed to him, he changed countenance even
more: Either the dark blood rose to his neck and face, or something else
happened, only his skin lost its yellow tinge, turned brown, and his eyes
seemed to sink.
Again it was probably owing to the blood rising to his temples and
throbbing in them, only something happened to the procurator's vision. Thus,
he imagined that the prisoner's head floated off somewhere, and another
appeared in its place. [21] On this bald head sat a scant-pointed golden
diadem. On the forehead was a round canker, eating into the skin and smeared
with ointment. A sunken, toothless mouth with a pendulous, capricious lower
lip. It seemed to Pilate that the pink columns of the balcony and the
rooftops of Yershalaim far below, beyond the garden, vanished, and
everything was drowned in the thickest green of Caprean gardens. And
something strange also happened to his hearing: it was as if trumpets
sounded far away, muted and menacing, and a nasal voice was very clearly
heard, arrogantly drawling: 'The law of lese-majesty...'
Thoughts raced, short, incoherent and extraordinary: 'I'm lost! ...'
then: 'We're lost! ...' And among them a totally absurd one, about some
immortality, which immortality for some reason provoked unendurable anguish.
Pilate strained, drove the apparition away, his gaze returned to the
balcony, and again the prisoner's eyes were before him.
'Listen, Ha-Nozri,' the procurator spoke, looking at Yeshua somehow
strangely: the procurator's face was menacing, but his eyes were alarmed,
'did you ever say anything about the great Caesar? Answer! Did you?...Yes
... or ... no?' Pilate drew the word 'no' out somewhat longer than is done
in court, and his glance sent Yeshua some thought that he wished as if to
instill in the prisoner.
To speak the truth is easy and pleasant,' the prisoner observed.
`I have no need to know,' Pilate responded in a stifled, angry voice,
'whether it is pleasant or unpleasant for you to speak the truth. You will
have to speak it anyway. But, as you speak, weigh every word, unless you
want a not only inevitable but also painful death.'
No one knew what had happened with the procurator of Judea, but he
allowed himself to raise his hand as if to protect himself from a ray of
sunlight, and from behind his hand, as from behind a shield, to send the
prisoner some sort of prompting look.
'Answer, then,' he went on speaking, `do you know a certain Judas from
Kiriath, [22] and what precisely did you say to him about Caesar, if you
said anything?'
'It was like this,' the prisoner began talking eagerly. The evening
before last, near the temple, I made the acquaintance of a young man who
called himself Judas, from the town of Kiriath. He invited me to his place
in the Lower City and treated me to...'
'A good man?' Pilate asked, and a devilish fire flashed in his eyes.
'A very good man and an inquisitive one,' the prisoner confirmed. 'He
showed the greatest interest in my thoughts and received me very
cordially...'
'Lit the lamps...'[23] Pilate spoke through his teeth, in the same tone
as the prisoner, and his eyes glinted.
Yes,' Yeshua went on, slightly surprised that the procurator was so
well informed, 'and asked me to give my view of state authority. He was
extremely interested in this question.'
'And what did you say?' asked Pilate. 'Or are you going to reply that
you've forgotten what you said?' But there was already hopelessness in
Pilate's tone.
`Among other things,' the prisoner recounted, `I said that all
authority is violence over people, and that a time will come when there will
be no authority of the Caesars, nor any other authority. Man will pass into
the kingdom of truth and justice, where generally there will be no need for
any authority.'
'Go on!'
'I didn't go on,' said the prisoner. 'Here men ran in, bound me, and
took me away to prison.'
The secretary, trying not to let drop a single word, rapidly traced the
words on his parchment.
'There never has been, is not, and never will be any authority in this
world greater or better for people than the authority of the emperor
Tiberius!' Pilate's cracked and sick voice swelled. For some reason the
procurator looked at the secretary and the convoy with hatred.
`And it is not for you, insane criminal, to reason about it!' Here
Pilate shouted: 'Convoy, off the balcony!' And turning to the secretary, he
added: 'Leave me alone with the criminal, this is a state matter!'
The convoy raised their spears and with a measured tramp of hobnailed
caligae walked off the balcony into the garden, and the secretary followed
the convoy.
For some time the silence on the balcony was broken only by the water
singing in the fountain. Pilate saw how the watery dish blew up over the
spout, how its edges broke off, how it fell down in streams.
The prisoner was the first to speak.
'I see that some misfortune has come about because I talked with that
young man from Kiriath. I have a foreboding, Hegemon, that he will come to
grief, and I am very sorry for him.'
'I think,' the procurator replied, grinning strangely, `that there is
now someone else in the world for whom you ought to feel sorrier than' for
Judas of Kiriath, and who is going to have it much worse than Judas! ...
So, then, Mark Rat-slayer, a cold and convinced torturer, the people
who, as I see,' the procurator pointed to Yeshua's disfigured face, `beat
you for your preaching, the robbers Dysmas and Gestas, who with their
confreres killed four soldiers, and, finally, the dirty traitor Judas - are
all good people?'
'Yes,' said the prisoner.
'And the kingdom of truth will come?'
'It will, Hegemon,' Yeshua answered with conviction.
'It will never come!' Pilate suddenly cried out in such a terrible
voice that Yeshua drew back. Thus, many years before, in the Valley of the
Virgins, Pilate had cried to his horsemen the words: 'Cut them down! Cut
them down! The giant Rat-slayer is trapped!' He raised his voice, cracked
with commanding, still more, and called out so that his words could be heard
in the garden: 'Criminal! Criminal! Criminal!' And then, lowering his voice,
he asked: 'Yeshua Ha-Nozri, do you believe in any gods?'
'God is one,' replied Yeshua, 'I believe in him.'
Then pray to him! Pray hard! However...' here Pilate's voice gave out,
'that won't help. No wife?' Pilate asked with anguish for some reason, not
understanding what was happening to him.
`No, I'm alone.'
'Hateful city...' the procurator suddenly muttered for some reason,
shaking his shoulders as if he were cold, and rubbing his hands as though
washing them, 'if they'd put a knife in you before your meeting with Judas
of Kiriath, it really would have been better.'
`Why don't you let me go, Hegemon?' the prisoner asked unexpectedly,
and his voice became anxious. 'I see they want to kill me.'
A spasm contorted Pilate's face, he turned to Yeshua the inflamed,
red-veined whites of his eyes and said:
`Do you suppose, wretch, that the Roman procurator will let a man go
who has said what you have said? Oh, gods, gods! Or do you think I'm ready
to take your place? I don't share your thoughts! And listen to me: if from
this moment on you say even one word, if you speak to anyone at all, beware
of me! I repeat to you - beware!'
`Hegemon...'
'Silence!' cried Pilate, and his furious gaze followed the swallow that
had again fluttered on to the balcony. 'To me!' Pilate shouted.
And when the secretary and the convoy returned to their places, Pilate
announced that he confirmed the death sentence passed at the meeting of the
Lesser Sanhedrin on the criminal Yeshua Ha-Nozri, and the secretary wrote
down what Pilate said.
A moment later Mark Rat-slayer stood before the procurator. The
procurator ordered him to hand the criminal over to the head of the secret
service, along with the procurator's directive that Yeshua Ha-Nozri was to
be separated from the other condemned men, and also that the soldiers of the
secret service were to be forbidden, on pain of severe punishment, to talk
with Yeshua about anything at all or to answer any of his questions.
At a sign from Mark, the convoy closed around Yeshua and led him from
the balcony.
Next there stood before the procurator a handsome, light-bearded man
with eagle feathers on the crest of his helmet, golden lions' heads shining
on his chest, and golden plaques on his sword belt, wearing triple-soled
boots laced to the knees, and with a purple cloak thrown over his left
shoulder. This was the legate in command of the legion.
The procurator asked him where the Sebastean cohort was stationed at
the moment. The legate told him that the Sebasteans had cordoned off the
square in front of the hippodrome, where the sentencing of the criminals was
to be announced to the people.
Then the procurator ordered the legate to detach two centuries from the
Roman cohort. One of them, under the command of Rat-slayer, was to convoy
the criminals, the carts with the implements for the execution and the
executioners as they were transported to Bald Mountain, [24] and on arrival
was to join the upper cordon. The other was to be sent at once to Bald
Mountain and immediately start forming the cordon. For the same purpose,
that is, to guard the mountain, the procurator asked the legate to send an
auxiliary cavalry regiment - the Syrian ala.
After the legate left the balcony, the procurator ordered the secretary
to summon to the palace the president of the Sanhedrin, two of its members,
and the head of the temple guard in Yershalaim, adding that he asked things
to be so arranged that before conferring with all these people, he could
speak with the president previously and alone.
The procurator's order was executed quickly and precisely, and the sun,
which in those days was scorching Yershalaim with an extraordinary
fierceness, had not yet had time to approach its highest point when, on the
upper terrace of the garden, by the two white marble lions that guarded the
stairs, a meeting took place between the procurator and the man fulfilling
the duties of president of the Sanhedrin, the high priest of the Jews,
Joseph Kaifa. [25]
It was quiet in the garden. But when he came out from under the
colonnade to the sun-drenched upper level of the garden with its palm trees
on monstrous elephant legs, from which there spread before the procurator
the whole of hateful Yershalaim, with its hanging bridges, fortresses, and,
above all, that utterly indescribable heap of marble with golden dragon
scales for a roof - the temple of Yershalaim - the procurator's sharp ear
caught, far below, where the stone wall separated the lower terraces of the
palace garden from the city square, a low rumble over which from time to
time there soared feeble, thin moans or cries.
The procurator understood that there, on the square, a numberless crowd
of Yershalaim citizens, agitated by the recent disorders, had already
gathered, that this crowd was waiting impatiently for the announcement of
the sentences, and that restless water sellers were crying in its midst.
The procurator began by inviting the high priest on to the balcony, to
take shelter from the merciless heat, but Kaifa politely apologized [26] and
explained that he could not do that on the eve of the feast.
Pilate covered his slightly balding head with a hood and began the
conversation. This conversation took place in Greek.
Pilate said that he had looked into the case of Yeshua Ha-Nozri and
confirmed the death sentence.
Thus, three robbers - Dysmas, Gestas and Bar-Rabban - and this Yeshua
Ha-Nozri besides, were condemned to be executed, and it was to be done that
day. The first two, who had ventured to incite the people to rebel against
Caesar, had been taken in armed struggle by the Roman authorities, were
accounted to the procurator, and, consequently, would not be talked about
here. But the second two, Bar-Rabban and Ha-Nozri, had been seized by the
local authorities and condemned by the Sanhedrin. According to the law,
according to custom, one of these two criminals had to be released in honour
of the great feast of Passover, which would begin that day. And so the
procurator wished to know which of the two criminals the Sanhedrin intended
to set free: Bar-Rabban or Ha-Nozri? [27]
Kaifa inclined his head to signify that the question was clear to him,
and replied:
`The Sanhedrin asks that Bar-Rabban be released.' The procurator knew
very well that the high priest would give precisely that answer, but his
task consisted in showing that this answer provoked his astonishment.
This Pilate did with great artfulness. The eyebrows on the arrogant
face rose, the procurator looked with amazement straight into the high
priest's eyes.
'I confess, this answer stuns me,' the procurator began softly, `I'm
afraid there may be some misunderstanding here.'
Pilate explained himself. Roman authority does not encroach in the
least upon the rights of the local spiritual authorities, the high priest
knows that very well, but in the present case we are faced with an obvious
error. And this error Roman authority is, of course, interested in
correcting.
In fact, the crimes of Bar-Rabban and Ha-Nozri are quite incomparable
in their gravity. If the latter, obviously an insane person, is guilty of
uttering preposterous things in Yershalaim and some other places, the
former's burden of guilt is more considerable. Not only did he allow himself
to call directly for rebellion, but he also killed a guard during the
attempt to arrest him. Bar-Rabban is incomparably more dangerous than
Ha-Nozri.
On the strength of all the foregoing, the procurator asks the high
priest to reconsider the decision and release the less harmful of the two
condemned men, and that is without doubt Ha-Nozri. And so? ...
Kaifa said in a quiet but firm voice that the Sanhedrin had thoroughly
familiarized itself with the case and informed him a second time that it
intended to free Bar-Rabban.
'What? Even after my intercession? The intercession of him through
whose person Roman authority speaks? Repeat it a third time, High Priest.'
'And a third time I repeat that we are setting Bar-Rabban free,' Kaifa
said softly.
It was all over, and there was nothing more to talk about. Ha-Nozri was
departing for ever, and there was no one to cure the dreadful, wicked pains
of the procurator, there was no remedy for them except death. But it was not
this thought which now struck Pilate. The same incomprehensible anguish that
had already visited him on the balcony pierced his whole being. He tried at
once to explain it, and the explanation was a strange one: it seemed vaguely
to the procurator that there was something he had not finished saying to the
condemned man, and perhaps something he had not finished hearing.
Pilate drove this thought away, and it flew off as instantly as it had
come flying. It flew off, and the anguish remained unexplained, for it could
not well be explained by another brief thought that flashed like lightning
and at once went out - 'Immortality... immortality has come...' Whose
immortality had come? That the procurator did not understand, but the
thought of this enigmatic immortality made him grow cold in the scorching
sun.
'Very well,' said Pilate, 'let it be so.'
Here he turned, gazed around at the world visible to him, and was
surprised at the change that had taken place. The bush laden with roses had
vanished, vanished were the cypresses bordering the upper terrace, and the
pomegranate tree, and the white statue amidst the greenery, and the greenery
itself. In place of it all there floated some purple mass, [28] water weeds
swayed in it and began moving off somewhere, and Pilate himself began moving
with them. He was carried along now, smothered and burned, by the most
terrible wrath - the wrath of impotence.
'Cramped,' said Pilate, 'I feel cramped!'
With a cold, moist hand he tore at the clasp on the collar of his
cloak, and it fell to the sand.
'It's sultry today, there's a storm somewhere,' Kaifa responded, not
taking his eyes off the procurator's reddened face, and foreseeing all the
torments that still lay ahead, he thought: 'Oh, what a terrible month of
Nisan we're having this year!'
'No,' said Pilate, 'it's not because of the sultriness, I feel cramped
with you here, Kaifa.' And, narrowing his eyes, Pilate smiled and added:
"Watch out for yourself, High Priest.'
The high priest's dark eyes glinted, and with his face - no less
artfully than the procurator had done earlier - he expressed amazement.
'What do I hear, Procurator?' Kaifa replied proudly and calmly. "You
threaten me after you yourself have confirmed the sentence passed? Can that
be? We are accustomed to the Roman procurator choosing his words before he
says something. What if we should be overheard, Hegemon?'
Pilate looked at the high priest with dead eyes and, baring his teeth,
produced a smile.
'What's your trouble, High Priest? Who can hear us where we are now? Do
you think I'm like that young vagrant holy fool who is to be executed today?
Am I a boy, Kaifa? I know what I say and where I say it. There is a cordon
around the garden, a cordon around the palace, so that a mouse couldn't get
through any crack! Not only a mouse, but even that one, what's his name...
from the town of Kiriath, couldn't get through. Incidentally, High Priest,
do you know him? Yes... if that one got in here, he'd feel bitterly sorry
for himself, in this you will, of course, believe me? Know, then, that from
now on, High Priest, you will have no peace! Neither you nor your people' -
and Pilate pointed far off to the right, where the temple blazed on high
-'it is I who tell you so, Pontius Pilate, equestrian of the Golden
Spear!'[29]
'I know, I know!' the black-bearded Kaifa fearlessly replied, and his
eyes flashed. He raised his arm to heaven and went on: "The Jewish people
know that you hate them with a cruel hatred, and will cause them much
suffering, but you will not destroy them utterly! God will protect them! He
will hear us, the almighty Caesar will hear, he will protect us from Pilate
the destroyer!'
'Oh, no!' Pilate exclaimed, and he felt lighter and lighter with every
word: there was no more need to pretend, no more need to choose his words,
`you have complained about me too much to Caesar, and now my hour has come,
Kaifa! Now the message will fly from me, and not to the governor in Antioch,
and not to Rome, but directly to Capreae, to the emperor himself, the
message of how you in Yershalaim are sheltering known criminals from death.
And then it will not be water from Solomon's Pool that I give Yershalaim to
drink, as I wanted to do for your own good! No, not water! Remember how on
account of you I had to remove the shields with the emperor's insignia from
the walls, had to transfer troops, had, as you see, to come in person to
look into what goes on with you here! Remember my words: it is not just one
cohort that you will see here in Yershalaim, High Priest - no! The whole
Fulminata legion will come under the city walls, the Arabian cavalry will
arrive, and then you will hear bitter weeping and wailing! You will remember
Bar-Rabban then, whom you saved, and you will regret having sent to his
death a philosopher with his peaceful preaching!'
The high priest's face became covered with blotches, his eyes burned.
Like the procurator, he smiled, baring his teeth, and replied:
`Do you yourself believe what you are saying now, Procurator? No, you
do not! It is not peace, not peace, that the seducer of the people of
Yershalaim brought us, and you, equestrian, understand that perfectly well.
You wanted to release him so that he could disturb the people, outrage the
faith, and bring the people under Roman swords! But I, the high priest of
the Jews, as long as I live, will not allow the faith to be outraged and
will protect the people! Do you hear, Pilate?' And Kaifa raised his arm
menacingly: 'Listen, Procurator!'
Kaifa fell silent, and the procurator again heard a noise as if of the
sea, rolling up to the very walls of the garden of Herod the Great. The
noise rose from below to the feet and into the face of the procurator. And
behind his back, there, beyond the wings of the palace, came alarming
trumpet calls, the heavy crunch of hundreds of feet, the clanking of iron.
The procurator understood that the Roman infantry was already setting
out, on his orders, speeding to the parade of death so terrible for rebels
and robbers.
`Do you hear, Procurator?' the high priest repeated quietly. 'Are you
going to tell me that all this' - here the high priest raised both arms and
the dark hood fell from his head - 'has been caused by the wretched robber
Bar-Rabban?'
The procurator wiped his wet, cold forehead with the back of his hand,
looked at the ground, then, squinting at the sky, saw that the red-hot ball
was almost over his head and that Kaifa's shadow had shrunk to nothing by
the lion's tail, and said quietly and indifferently:
'It's nearly noon. We got carried away by our conversation, and yet we
must proceed.'
Having apologized in refined terms before the high priest, he invited
him to sit down on a bench in the shade of a magnolia and wait until he
summoned the other persons needed for the last brief conference and gave one
more instruction connected with the execution.
Kaifa bowed politely, placing his hand on his heart, and stayed in the
garden while Pilate returned to the balcony. There he told the secretary,
who had been waiting for him, to invite to the garden the legate of the
legion and the tribune of the cohort, as well as the two members of the
Sanhedrin and the head of the temple guard, who had been awaiting his
summons on the lower garden terrace, in a round gazebo with a fountain. To
this Pilate added that he himself would come out to the garden at once, and
withdrew into the palace.
While the secretary was gathering the conference, the procurator met,
in a room shielded from the sun by dark curtains, with a certain man, whose
face was half covered by a hood, though he could not have been bothered by
the sun's rays in this room. The meeting was a very short one. The
procurator quietly spoke a few words to the man, after which he withdrew and
Pilate walked out through the colonnade to the garden.
There, in the presence of all those he had desired to see, the
procurator solemnly and dryly stated that he confirmed the death sentence on
Yeshua Ha-Nozri, and officially inquired of the members of the Sanhedrin as
to whom among the criminals they would like to grant life. Having received
the reply that it was Bar-Rabban, the procurator said:
Very well,' and told the secretary to put it into the record at once,
clutched in his hand the clasp that the secretary had picked up from the
sand, and said solemnly: It is time!'
Here all those present started down the wide marble stairway between
walls of roses that exuded a stupefying aroma, descending lower and lower
towards the palace wall, to the gates opening on to the big, smoothly paved
square, at the end of which could be seen the columns and statues of the
Yershalaim stadium.
As soon as the group entered the square from the garden and mounted the
spacious stone platform that dominated the square, Pilate, looking around
through narrowed eyelids, assessed the situation.
The space he had just traversed, that is, the space from the palace
wall to the platform, was empty, but before him Pilate could no longer see
the square - it had been swallowed up by the crowd, which would have poured
over the platform and the cleared space as well, had it not been kept at bay
by a triple row of Sebastean soldiers to the left of Pilate and soldiers of
the auxiliary Iturean cohort to his right.
And so, Pilate mounted the platform, mechanically clutching the useless
clasp in his fist and squinting his eyes. The procurator was squinting not
because the sun burned his eyes - no! For some reason he did not want to see
the group of condemned men who, as he knew perfectly well, were now being
brought on to the platform behind him.
As soon as the white cloak with crimson lining appeared high up on the
stone cliff over the verge of the human sea, the unseeing Pilate was struck
in the ears by a wave of sound: 'Ha-a-a...' It started mutedly, arising
somewhere far away by the hippodrome, then became thunderous and, having
held out for a few seconds, began to subside. They've seen me,' the
procurator thought. The wave had not reached its lowest point before it
started swelling again unexpectedly and, swaying, rose higher than the
first, and as foam boils up on the billows of the sea, so a whistling boiled
up on this second wave and, separate, distinguishable from the thunder, the
wails of women. They've been led on to the platform,' thought Pilate, `and
the wails mean that several women got crushed as the crowd surged forward.'
He waited for some time, knowing that no power could silence the crowd
before it exhaled all that was pent up in it and fell silent of itself.
And when this moment came, the procurator threw up his right arm, and
the last noise was blown away from the crowd.
Then Pilate drew into his breast as much of the hot air as he could and
shouted, and his cracked voice carried over thousands of heads:
'In the name of the emperor Caesar! ...'
Here his ears were struck several times by a clipped iron shout: the
cohorts of soldiers raised high their spears and standards and shouted out
terribly:
'Long live Caesar!'
Pilate lifted his face and thrust it straight into the sun. Green fire
flared up behind his eyelids, his brain took flame from it, and hoarse
Aramaic words went flying over the crowd:
`Four criminals, arrested in Yershalaim for murder, incitement to
rebellion, and outrages against the laws and the faith, have been sentenced
to a shameful execution - by hanging on posts! And this execution will
presently be carried out on Bald Mountain! The names of the criminals are
Dysmas, Gestas, Bar-Rabban and Ha-Nozri. Here they stand before you!'
Pilate pointed to his right, not seeing any criminals, but knowing they
were there, in place, where they ought to be.
The crowd responded with a long rumble as if of surprise or relief.
When it died down, Pilate continued:
'But only three of them will be executed, for, in accordance with law
and custom, in honour of the feast of Passover, to one of the condemned, as
chosen by the Lesser Sanhedrin and confirmed by Roman authority, the
magnanimous emperor Caesar will return his contemptible life!'
Pilate cried out the words and at the same time listened as the rumble
was replaced by a great silence. Not a sigh, not a rustle reached his ears
now, and there was even a moment when it seemed to Pilate that everything
around him had vanished altogether. The hated city died, and he alone is
standing there, scorched by the sheer rays, his face set against the sky.
Pilate held the silence a little longer, and then began to cry out:
'The name of the one who will now be set free before you is...' He made
one more pause, holding back the name, making sure he had said all, because
he knew that the dead city would resurrect once the name of the lucky man
was spoken, and no further words would be heard. 'All?' Pilate whispered
soundlessly to himself. 'All. The name!' And, rolling the letter 'r' over
the silent city, he cried:
'Bar-Rabban!'
Here it seemed to him that the sun, clanging, burst over him and
flooded his ears with fire. This fire raged with roars, shrieks, wails,
guffaws and whistles.
Pilate turned and walked back across the platform to the stairs,
looking at nothing except the multicoloured squares of the flooring under
his feet, so as not to trip. He knew that behind his back the platform was
being showered with bronze coins, dates, that people in the howling mob were
climbing on shoulders, crushing each other, to see the miracle with their
own eyes - how a man already in the grip of death escaped that grip! How the
legionaries take the ropes off him, involuntarily causing him burning pain
in his arms, dislocated during his interrogation; how he, wincing and
groaning, nevertheless smiles a senseless, crazed smile.
He knew that at the same time the convoy was already leading the three
men with bound arms to the side stairs, so as to take them to the road going
west from the city, towards Bald Mountain. Only when he was off the
platform, to the rear of it, did Pilate open his eyes, knowing that he was
now safe - he could no longer see the condemned men.
Mingled with the wails of the quieting crowd, yet distinguishable from
them, were the piercing cries of heralds repeating, some in Aramaic, others
in Greek, all that the procurator had cried out from the platform. Besides
that, there came to his ears the tapping, clattering and approaching thud of
hoofs, and a trumpet calling out something brief and merry. These sounds
were answered by the drilling whistles of boys on the roofs of houses along
the street that led from the bazaar to the hippodrome square, and by cries
of 'Look out!'
A soldier, standing alone in the cleared space of the square with a
standard in his hand, waved it anxiously, and then the procurator, the
legate of the legion, the secretary and the convoy stopped.
A cavalry ala, at an ever-lengthening trot, flew out into the square,
so as to cross it at one side, bypassing the mass of people, and ride down a
lane under a stone wall covered with creeping vines, taking the shortest
route to Bald Mountain.
At a flying trot, small as a boy, dark as a mulatto, the commander of
the ala, a Syrian, coming abreast of Pilate, shouted something in a high
voice and snatched his sword from its sheath. The angry, sweating black
horse shied and reared. Thrusting his sword back into its sheath, the
commander struck the horse's neck with his crop, brought him down, and rode
off into the lane, breaking into a gallop. After him, three by three,
horsemen flew in a cloud of dust, the tips of their light bamboo lances
bobbing, and faces dashed past the procurator - looking especially swarthy
under their white turbans - with merrily bared, gleaming teeth.
Raising dust to the sky, the ala burst into the lane, and the last to
ride past Pilate was a soldier with a trumpet slung on his back, blazing in
the sun.
Shielding himself from the dust with his hand and wrinkling his face
discontentedly, Pilate started on in the direction of the gates to the
palace garden, and after him came the legate, the secretary, and the convoy.
It was around ten o'clock in the morning.
CHAPTER 3. The Seventh Proof
'Yes, it was around ten o'clock in the morning, my esteemed Ivan
Nikolaevich,' said the professor.
The poet passed his hand over his face like a man just coming to his
senses, and saw that it was evening at the Patriarch's Ponds. The water in
the pond had turned black, and a light boat was now gliding on it, and one
could hear the splash of oars and the giggles of some citizeness in the
little boat. The public appeared on the benches along the walks, but again
on the other three sides of the square, and not on the side where our
interlocutors were.
The sky over Moscow seemed to lose colour, and the full moon could be
seen quite distinctly high above, not yet golden but white. It was much
easier to breathe, and the voices under the lindens now sounded softer,
eveningish.
`How is it I didn't notice that he'd managed to spin a whole story?...'
Homeless thought in amazement. 'It's already evening! ... Or maybe he wasn't
telling it, but I simply fell asleep and dreamed it all?'
But it must be supposed that the professor did tell the story after
all, otherwise it would have to be assumed that Berlioz had had the same
dream, because he said, studying the foreigner's face attentively:
'Your story is extremely interesting, Professor, though it does not
coincide at all with the Gospel stories.'
'Good heavens,' the professor responded, smiling condescendingly, 'you
of all people should know that precisely nothing of what is written in the
Gospels ever actually took place, and if we start referring to the Gospels
as a historical source...' he smiled once more, and Berlioz stopped short,
because this was literally the same thing he had been saying to Homeless as
they walked down Bronnaya towards the Patriarch's Ponds.
'That's so,' Berlioz replied, 'but I'm afraid no one can confirm that
what you've just told us actually took place either.'
'Oh, yes! That there is one who can!' the professor, beginning to speak
in broken language, said with great assurance, and with unexpected
mysteriousness he motioned the two friends to move closer.
They leaned towards him from both sides, and he said, but again without
any accent, which with him, devil knows why, now appeared, now disappeared:
The thing is...' here the professor looked around fearfully and spoke
in a whisper, `that I was personally present at it all. I was on Pontius
Pilate's balcony, and in the garden when he talked with Kaifa, and on the
platform, only secretly, incognito, so to speak, and therefore I beg you -
not a word to anyone, total secrecy, shh...'
Silence fell, and Berlioz paled.
'YOU ... how long have you been in Moscow?' he asked in a quavering
voice.
'I just arrived in Moscow this very minute,' the professor said
perplexedly, and only here did it occur to the friends to take a good look
in his eyes, at which they became convinced that his left eye, the green
one, was totally insane, while the right one was empty, black and dead.
'There's the whole explanation for you!' Berlioz thought in
bewilderment. 'A mad German has turned up, or just went crazy at the Ponds.
What a story!'
Yes, indeed, that explained the whole thing: the strangest breakfast
with the late philosopher Kant, the foolish talk about sunflower oil and
Annushka, the predictions about his head being cut off and all the rest -
the professor was mad.
Berlioz realized at once what had to be done. Leaning back on the
bench, he winked to Homeless behind the professor's back - meaning, don't
contradict him - but the perplexed poet did not understand these signals.
'Yes, yes, yes,' Berlioz said excitedly, `incidentally it's all
possible... even very possible, Pontius Pilate, and the balcony, and so
forth... Did you come alone or with your wife?'
'Alone, alone, I'm always alone,' the professor replied bitterly.
'And where are your things, Professor?' Berlioz asked insinuatingly.
'At the Metropol?* Where are you staying?'
'I? ... Nowhere,' the half-witted German answered, his green eye
wandering in wild anguish over the Patriarch's Ponds.
'How's that? But ... where are you going to live?'
'In your apartment,' the madman suddenly said brashly, and winked.
'I ... I'm very glad ...' Berlioz began muttering, 'but, really, you
won't be comfortable at my place ... and they have wonderful rooms at the
Metropol, it's a first-class hotel...'
'And there's no devil either?' the sick man suddenly inquired merrily
of Ivan Nikolaevich.
'No devil...'
'Don't contradict him,' Berlioz whispered with his lips only, dropping
behind the professor's back and making faces.
There isn't any devil!' Ivan Nikolaevich, at a loss from all this
balderdash, cried out not what he ought. 'What a punishment! Stop playing
the psycho!'
Here the insane man burst into such laughter that a sparrow flew out of
the linden over the seated men's heads.
'Well, now that is positively interesting!' the professor said, shaking
with laughter. 'What is it with you - no matter what one asks for, there
isn't any!' He suddenly stopped laughing and, quite understandably for a
mentally ill person, fell into the opposite extreme after laughing, became
vexed and cried sternly: 'So you mean there just simply isn't any?'
'Calm down, calm down, calm down, Professor,' Berlioz muttered, for
fear of agitating the sick man. 'You sit here for a little minute with
comrade Homeless, and I'll just run to the corner to make a phone call, and
then we'll take you wherever you like. You don't know the city...'
Berlioz's plan must be acknowledged as correct: he had to run to the
nearest public telephone and inform the foreigners' bureau, thus and so,
there's some consultant from abroad sitting at the Patriarch's Ponds in an
obviously abnormal state. So it was necessary to take measures, lest some
unpleasant nonsense result.
To make a call? Well, then make your call,' the sick man agreed sadly,
and suddenly begged passionately: `But I implore you, before you go, at
least believe that the devil exists! I no longer ask you for anything more.
Mind you, there exists a seventh proof of it, the surest of all! And it
is going to be presented to you right now!'
'Very good, very good,' Berlioz said with false tenderness and, winking
to the upset poet, who did not relish at all the idea of guarding the mad
German, set out for the exit from the Ponds at the corner of Bronnaya and
Yermolaevsky Lane.
And the professor seemed to recover his health and brighten up at once.
'Mikhail Alexandrovich!' he shouted after Berlioz.
The latter gave a start, looked back, but reassured himself with the
thought that the professor had also learned his name and patronymic from
some newspaper.
Then the professor called out, cupping his hands like a megaphone:
`Would you like me to have a telegram sent at once to your uncle in
Kiev?'
And again Berlioz winced. How does the madman know about the existence
of a Kievan uncle? That has certainly never been mentioned in any
newspapers. Oh-oh, maybe Homeless is right after all? And suppose his papers
are phoney? Ah, what a strange specimen ... Call, call! Call at once!
They'll quickly explain him!
And, no longer listening to anything, Berlioz ran on.
Here, just at the exit to Bronnaya, there rose from a bench to meet the
editor exactly the same citizen who in the sunlight earlier had formed
himself out of the thick swelter. Only now he was no longer made of air, but
ordinary, fleshly, and Berlioz clearly distinguished in the beginning
twilight that he had a little moustache like chicken feathers, tiny eyes,
ironic and half drunk, and checkered trousers pulled up so high that his
dirty white socks showed.
Mikhail Alexandrovich drew back, but reassured himself by reflecting
that it was a stupid coincidence and that generally there was no time to
think about it now.
'Looking for the turnstile, citizen?' the checkered type inquired in a
cracked tenor. This way, please! Straight on and you'll get where you're
going. How about a little pint pot for my information ... to set up an
ex-choirmaster!...' Mugging, the specimen swept his jockey's cap from his
head.
Berlioz, not stopping to listen to the cadging and clowning
choirmaster, ran up to the turnstile and took hold of it with his hand. He
turned it and was just about to step across the rails when red and white
light splashed in his face. A sign lit up in a glass box: 'Caution
Tram-Car!'
And right then this tram-car came racing along, turning down the newly
laid line from Yermolaevsky to Bronnaya. Having turned, and coming to the
straight stretch, it suddenly lit up inside with electricity, whined, and
put on speed.
The prudent Berlioz, though he was standing in a safe place, decided to
retreat behind the stile, moved his hand on the crossbar, and stepped back.
And right then his hand slipped and slid, one foot, unimpeded, as if on
ice, went down the cobbled slope leading to the rails, the other was thrust
into the air, and Berlioz was thrown on to the rails.
Trying to get hold of something, Berlioz fell backwards, the back of
his head lightly striking the cobbles, and had time to see high up - but
whether to right or left he no longer knew - the gold-tinged moon. He
managed to turn on his side, at the same moment drawing his legs to his
stomach in a frenzied movement, and, while turning, to make out the face,
completely white with horror, and the crimson armband of the woman driver
bearing down on him with irresistible force. Berlioz did not cry out, but
around him the whole street screamed with desperate female voices.
The woman driver tore at the electric brake, the car dug its nose into
the ground, then instantly jumped up, and glass flew from the windows with a
crash and a jingle. Here someone in Berlioz's brain cried desperately: 'Can
it be?...' Once more, and for the last time, the moon flashed, but now
breaking to pieces, and then it became dark.
The tram-car went over Berlioz, and a round dark object was thrown up
the cobbled slope below the fence of the Patriarch's walk. Having rolled
back down this slope, it went bouncing along the cobblestones of the street.
It was the severed head of Berlioz.
The hysterical women's cries died down, the police whistles stopped
drilling, two ambulances drove off - one with the headless body and severed
head, to the morgue, the other with the beautiful driver, wounded by broken
glass; street sweepers in white aprons removed the broken glass and poured
sand on the pools of blood, but Ivan Nikolaevich just stayed on the bench as
he had dropped on to it before reaching the turnstile. He tried several
times to get up, but his legs would not obey him - something akin to
paralysis had occurred with Homeless.
The poet had rushed to the turnstile as soon as he heard the first
scream, and had seen the head go bouncing along the pavement. With that he
so lost his senses that, having dropped on to the bench, he bit his hand
until it bled. Of course, he forgot about the mad German and tried to figure
out one thing only: how it could be that he had just been talking with
Berlioz, and a moment later - the head...
Agitated people went running down the walk past the poet, exclaiming
something, but Ivan Nikolaevich was insensible to their words. However, two
women unexpectedly ran into each other near him, and one of them,
sharp-nosed and bare-headed, shouted the following to the other, right next
to the poet's ear:
'...Annushka, our Annushka! From Sadovaya! It's her work... She bought
sunflower oil at the grocery, and went and broke the whole litre-bottle on
the turnstile! Messed her skirt all up, and swore and swore!
... And he, poor man, must have slipped and - right on to the rails...'
Of all that the woman shouted, one word lodged itself in Ivan
Nikolaevich's upset brain: 'Annushka'...
'Annushka... Annushka?' the poet muttered, looking around anxiously.
Wait a minute, wait a minute...'
The word 'Annushka' got strung together with the words 'sunflower oil',
and then for some reason with 'Pontius Pilate'. The poet dismissed Pilate
and began linking up the chain that started from the word `Annushka'. And
this chain got very quickly linked up and led at once to the mad professor.
`Excuse me! But he did say the meeting wouldn't take place because
Annushka had spilled the oil. And, if you please, it won't take place!
What's more, he said straight out that Berlioz's head would be cut off by a
woman?! Yes, yes, yes! And the driver was a woman! What is all this, eh?!'
There was not a grain of doubt left that the mysterious consultant had
known beforehand the exact picture of the terrible death of Berlioz. Here
two thoughts pierced the poet's brain. The first: 'He's not mad in the
least, that's all nonsense!' And the second: Then didn't he set it all up
himself?'
'But in what manner, may we ask?! Ah, no, this we're going to find
out!'
Making a great effort, Ivan Nikolaevich got up from the bench and
rushed back to where he had been talking with the professor. And,
fortunately, it turned out that the man had not left yet.
The street lights were already lit on Bronnaya, and over the Ponds the
golden moon shone, and in the ever-deceptive light of the moon it seemed to
Ivan Nikolaevich that he stood holding a sword, not a walking stick, under
his arm.
The ex-choirmaster was sitting in the very place where Ivan Nikolaevich
had sat just recently. Now the busybody had perched on his nose an obviously
unnecessary pince-nez, in which one lens was missing altogether and the
other was cracked. This made the checkered citizen even more repulsive than
he had been when he showed Berlioz the way to the rails.
With a chill in his heart, Ivan approached the professor and, glancing
into his face, became convinced that there were not and never had been any
signs of madness in that face.
'Confess, who are you?' Ivan asked in a hollow voice.
The foreigner scowled, looked at the poet as if he were seeing him for
the first time, and answered inimically:
'No understand ... no speak Russian. ..'
The gent don't understand,' the choirmaster mixed in from the bench,
though no one had asked him to explain the foreigner's words.
'Don't pretend!' Ivan said threateningly, and felt cold in the pit of
his stomach. 'You spoke excellent Russian just now. You're not a German and
you're not a professor! You're a murderer and a spy!... Your papers!' Ivan
cried fiercely.
The mysterious professor squeamishly twisted his mouth, which was
twisted to begin with, then shrugged his shoulders.
'Citizen!' the loathsome choirmaster butted in again. "What're you
doing bothering a foreign tourist? For that you'll incur severe punishment!'
And the suspicious professor made an arrogant face, turned, and walked
away from Ivan. Ivan felt himself at a loss. Breathless, he addressed the
choirmaster:
'Hey, citizen, help me to detain the criminal! It's your duty!'
The choirmaster became extraordinarily animated, jumped up and
hollered:
`What criminal? Where is he? A foreign criminal?' The choirmaster's
eyes sparkled gleefully. That one? If he's a criminal, the first thing to do
is shout "Help!" Or else he'll get away. Come on, together now, one, two!'
-- and here the choirmaster opened his maw.
Totally at a loss, Ivan obeyed the trickster and shouted 'Help!' but
the choirmaster bluffed him and did not shout anything.
Ivan's solitary, hoarse cry did not produce any good results. Two girls
shied away from him, and he heard the word 'drunk'.
'Ah, so you're in with him!' Ivan cried out, waxing wroth. "What are
you doing, jeering at me? Out of my way!'
Ivan dashed to the right, and so did the choirmaster; Ivan dashed to
the left, and the scoundrel did the same.
`Getting under my feet on purpose?' Ivan cried, turning ferocious.
'I'll hand you over to the police!'
Ivan attempted to grab the blackguard by the sleeve, but missed and
caught precisely nothing: it was as if the choirmaster fell through the
earth.
Ivan gasped, looked into the distance, and saw the hateful stranger. He
was already at the exit to Patriarch's Lane; moreover, he was not alone. The
more than dubious choirmaster had managed to join him. But that was still
not all: the third in this company proved to be a tom-cat, who appeared out
of nowhere, huge as a hog, black as soot or as a rook, and with a desperate
cavalryman's whiskers. The trio set off down Patriarch's Lane, the cat
walking on his hind legs.
Ivan sped after the villains and became convinced at once that it -
would be very difficult to catch up with them.
The trio shot down the lane in an instant and came out on Spiridonovka.
No matter how Ivan quickened his pace, the distance between him and his
quarry never diminished. And before the poet knew it, he emerged, after the
quiet of Spiridonovka, by the Nikitsky Gate, where his situation worsened.
The place was swarming with people. Besides, the gang of villains decided to
apply the favourite trick of bandits here: a scattered getaway.
The choirmaster, with great dexterity, bored his way on to a bus
speeding towards the Arbat Square and slipped away. Having lost one of his
quarries, Ivan focused his attention on the cat and saw this strange cat go
up to the footboard of an 'A' tram waiting at a stop, brazenly elbow aside a
woman, who screamed, grab hold of the handrail, and even make an attempt to
shove a ten-kopeck piece into the conductress's hand through the window,
open on account of the stuffiness.
Ivan was so struck by the cat's behaviour that he froze motionless by
the grocery store on the corner, and here he was struck for a second time,
but much more strongly, by the conductress's behaviour. As soon as she saw
the cat getting into the tram-car, she shouted with a malice that even made
her shake:
'No cats allowed! Nobody with cats allowed! Scat! Get off, or I'll call
the police!'
Neither the conductress nor the passengers were struck by the essence
of the matter: not just that a cat was boarding a tram-car, which would have
been good enough, but that he was going to pay!
The cat turned out to be not only a solvent but also a disciplined
animal. At the very first shout from the conductress, he halted his advance,
got off the footboard, and sat down at the stop, rubbing his whiskers with
the ten-kopeck piece. But as soon as the conductress yanked the cord and the
tram-car started moving off, the cat acted like anyone who has been expelled
from a tram-car but still needs a ride. Letting all three cars go by, the
cat jumped on to the rear coupling-pin of the last one, wrapped its paws
around some hose sticking out of the side, and rode off, thus saving himself
ten kopecks.
Occupied with the obnoxious cat, Ivan almost lost the main one of the
three - the professor. But, fortunately, the man had not managed to slip
away. Ivan saw the grey beret in the throng at the head of Bolshaya
Nikitskaya, now Herzen, Street. In the twinkling of an eye, Ivan arrived
there himself. However, he had no luck. The poet would quicken his pace,
break into a trot, shove passers-by, yet not get an inch closer to the
professor.
Upset as he was, Ivan was still struck by the supernatural speed of the
chase. Twenty seconds had not gone by when, after the Nikitsky Gate, Ivan
Nikolayevich was already dazzled by the lights of the Arbat Square. Another
few seconds, and here was some dark lane with slanting sidewalks, where Ivan
Nikolaevich took a tumble and hurt his knee. Again a lit-up thoroughfare -
Kropotkin Street - then a lane, then Ostozhenka, then another lane, dismal,
vile and sparsely lit. And it was here that Ivan Nikolaevich definitively
lost him whom he needed so much. The professor disappeared.
Ivan Nikolaevich was perplexed, but not for long, because he suddenly
realized that the professor must unfailingly be found in house no. 15, and
most assuredly in apartment 47.
Bursting into the entrance, Ivan Nikolaevich flew up to the second
floor, immediately found the apartment, and rang impatiently. He did not
have to wait long. Some little girl of about five opened the door for Ivan
and, without asking him anything, immediately went away somewhere.
In the huge, extremely neglected front hall, weakly lit by a tiny
carbon arc lamp under the high ceiling, black with grime, a bicycle without
tyres hung on the wall, a huge iron-bound trunk stood, and on a shelf over
the coat rack a winter hat lay, its long ear-flaps hanging down. Behind one
of the doors, a resonant male voice was angrily shouting something in verse
from a radio set.
Ivan Nikolaevich was not the least at a loss in the unfamiliar
surroundings and rushed straight into the corridor, reasoning thus: 'Of
course, he's hiding in the bathroom.' The corridor was dark. Having bumped
into the wall a few times, Ivan saw a faint streak of light under a door,
felt for the handle, and pulled it gently. The hook popped out, and Ivan
found himself precisely in the bathroom and thought how lucky he was.
However, his luck was not all it might have been! Ivan met with a wave
of humid heat and, by the light of the coals smouldering in the boiler, made
out big basins hanging on the walls, and a bath tub, all black frightful
blotches where the enamel had chipped off. And there, in this bath tub,
stood a naked citizeness, all soapy and with a scrubber in her hand. She
squinted near-sightedly at the bursting-in Ivan and, obviously mistaking him
in the infernal light, said softly and gaily:
'Kiriushka! Stop this tomfoolery! Have you lost your mind?... Fyodor
Ivanych will be back any minute. Get out right now!' and she waved at Ivan
with the scrubber.
The misunderstanding was evident, and Ivan Nikolaevich was, of course,
to blame for it. But he did not want to admit it and, exclaiming
reproachfully: 'Ah, wanton creature! ...', at once found himself for some
reason in the kitchen. No one was there, and on the oven in the
semi-darkness silently stood about a dozen extinguished primuses [1].' A
single moonbeam, having seeped through the dusty, perennially unwashed
window, shone sparsely into the corner where, in dust and cobwebs, a
forgotten icon hung, with the ends of two wedding candles [2] peeking out
from behind its casing. Under the big icon, pinned to it, hung a little one
made of paper.
No one knows what thought took hold of Ivan here, but before running
out the back door, he appropriated one of these candles, as well as the
paper icon. With these objects, he left the unknown apartment, muttering
something, embarrassed at the thought of what he had just experienced in the
bathroom, involuntarily trying to guess who this impudent Kiriushka might be
and whether the disgusting hat with ear-flaps belonged to him.
In the desolate, joyless lane the poet looked around, searching for the
fugitive, but he was nowhere to be seen. Then Ivan said firmly to himself:
'Why, of course, he's at the Moscow River! Onward!'
Someone ought, perhaps, to have asked Ivan Nikolaevich why he supposed
that the professor was precisely at the Moscow River and not in some other
place. But the trouble was that there was no one to ask him. The loathsome
lane was completely empty.
In the very shortest time, Ivan Nikolaevich could be seen on the
granite steps of the Moscow River amphitheatre. [3]
Having taken off his clothes, Ivan entrusted them to a pleasant,
bearded fellow who was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, sitting beside a
torn white Tolstoy blouse and a pair of unlaced, worn boots. After waving
his arms to cool off, Ivan dived swallow-fashion into the water.
It took his breath away, so cold the water was, and the thought even
flashed in him that he might not manage to come up to the surface. However,
he did manage to come up, and, puffing and snorting, his eyes rounded in
terror, Ivan Nikolaevich began swimming through the black, oil-smelling
water among the broken zigzags of street lights on the bank.
When the wet Ivan came dancing back up the steps to the place where the
bearded fellow was guarding his clothes, it became clear that not only the
latter, but also the former - that is, the bearded fellow himself - had been
stolen. In the exact spot where the pile of clothes had been, a pair of
striped drawers, the torn Tolstoy blouse, the candle, the icon and a box of
matches had been left. After threatening someone in the distance with his
fist in powerless anger, Ivan put on what was left for him.
Here two considerations began to trouble him: first, that his Massolit
identification card, which he never parted with, was gone, and, second,
whether he could manage to get through Moscow unhindered looking the way he
did now? In striped drawers, after all ... True, it was nobody's business,
but still there might be some hitch or delay.
Ivan tore off the buttons where the drawers fastened at the ankle,
figuring that this way they might pass for summer trousers, gathered up the
icon, the candle and the matches, and started off, saying to himself:
'To Griboedov's! Beyond all doubt, he's there.'
The city was already living its evening life. Trucks flew through the
dust, chains clanking, and on their platforms men lay sprawled belly up on
sacks. All windows were open. In each of these windows a light burned under
an orange lampshade, and from every window, every door, every gateway, roof,
and attic, basement and courtyard blared the hoarse roar of the polonaise
from the opera Evgeny Onegin. [4]
Ivan Nikolaevich's apprehensions proved fully justified: passers-by did
pay attention to him and turned their heads. As a result, he took the
decision to leave the main streets and make his way through back lanes,
where people are not so importunate, where there were fewer chances of them
picking on a barefoot man, pestering him with questions about his drawers,
which stubbornly refused to look like trousers.
This Ivan did, and, penetrating the mysterious network of lanes around
the Arbat, he began making his way along the walls, casting fearful sidelong
glances, turning around every moment, hiding in gateways from time to time,
avoiding intersections with traffic lights and the grand entrances of
embassy mansions.
And all along his difficult way, he was for some reason inexpressibly
tormented by the ubiquitous orchestra that accompanied the heavy basso
singing about his love for Tatiana.
CHAPTER 5. There were Doings at Griboedov's
The old, two-storeyed, cream-coloured house stood on the ring
boulevard, in the depths of a seedy garden, separated from the sidewalk by a
fancy cast-iron fence. The small terrace in front of the house was paved
with asphalt, and in wintertime was dominated by a snow pile with a shovel
stuck in it, but in summertime turned into the most magnificent section of
the summer restaurant under a canvas tent.
The house was called `The House of Griboedov' on the grounds that it
was alleged to have once belonged to an aunt of the writer Alexander
Sergeevich Griboedov. [1] Now, whether it did or did not belong to her, we
do not exactly know. On recollection, it even seems that Griboedov never had
any such house-owning aunt... Nevertheless, that was what the house was
called. Moreover, one Moscow liar had it that there, on the second floor, in
a round hall with columns, the famous writer had supposedly read passages
from Woe From Wit to this very aunt while she reclined on a sofa.
However, devil knows, maybe he did, it's of no importance.
What is important is that at the present time this house was owned by
that same Massolit which had been headed by the unfortunate Mikhail
Alexandrovich Berlioz before his appearance at the Patriarch's Ponds.
In the casual manner of Massolit members, no one called the house The
House of Griboedov', everyone simply said 'Griboedov's': 'I spent two hours
yesterday knocking about Griboedov's.' 'Well, and so?' `Got myself a month
in Yalta.' 'Bravo!' Or: 'Go to Berlioz, he receives today from four to five
at Griboedov's...' and so on.
Massolit had settled itself at Griboedov's in the best and cosiest way
imaginable. Anyone entering Griboedov's first of all became involuntarily
acquainted with the announcements of various sports clubs, and with group as
well as individual photographs of the members of Massolit, hanging (the
photographs) on the walls of the staircase leading to the second floor.
On the door to the very first room of this upper floor one could see a
big sign: 'Fishing and Vacation Section', along with the picture of a carp
caught on a line.
On the door of room no. 2 something not quite comprehensible was
written: 'One-day Creative Trips. Apply to M. V. Spurioznaya.'
The next door bore a brief but now totally incomprehensible
inscription: 'Perelygino'. [2] After which the chance visitor to Griboedov's
would not know where to look from the motley inscriptions on the aunt's
walnut doors: `Sign up for Paper with Poklevkina', `Cashier', 'Personal
Accounts of Sketch-Writers'...
If one cut through the longest line, which already went downstairs and
out to the doorman's lodge, one could see the sign 'Housing Question' on a
door which people were crashing every second.
Beyond the housing question there opened out a luxurious poster on
which a cliff was depicted and, riding on its crest, a horseman in a felt
cloak with a rifle on his shoulder. A little lower - palm trees and a
balcony; on the balcony - a seated young man with a forelock, gazing
somewhere aloft with very lively eyes, holding a fountain pen in his hand.
The inscription: 'Full-scale Creative Vacations from Two Weeks
(Story/Novella) to One Year (Novel/Trilogy). Yalta, Suuk-Su, Borovoe,
Tsikhidziri, Makhindzhauri, Leningrad (Winter Palace).'[3] There was also a
line at this door, but not an excessive one - some hundred and fifty people.
Next, obedient to the whimsical curves, ascents and descents of the
Griboedov house, came the `Massolit Executive Board', 'Cashiers nos. 2, 3,
4, 5', 'Editorial Board', 'Chairman of Massolit', 'Billiard Room', various
auxiliary institutions and, finally, that same hall with the colonnade where
the aunt had delighted in the comedy other genius nephew.
Any visitor finding himself in Griboedov's, unless of course he was a
total dim-wit, would realize at once what a good life those lucky fellows,
the Massolit members, were having, and black envy would immediately start
gnawing at him. And he would immediately address bitter reproaches to heaven
for not having endowed him at birth with literary talent, lacking which
there was naturally no dreaming of owning a Massolit membership card, brown,
smelling of costly leather, with a wide gold border - a card known to all
Moscow.
Who will speak in defence of envy? This feeling belongs to the nasty
category, but all the same one must put oneself in the visitor's position.
For what he had seen on the upper floor was not all, and was far from
all.
The entire ground floor of the aunt's house was occupied by a
restaurant, and what a restaurant! It was justly considered the best in
Moscow. And not only because it took up two vast halls with arched ceilings,
painted with violet, Assyrian-maned horses, not only because on each table
there stood a lamp shaded with a shawl, not only because it was not
accessible to just anybody coming in off the street, but because in the
quality of its fare Griboedov's beat any restaurant in Moscow up and down,
and this fare was available at the most reasonable, by no means onerous,
price.
Hence there was nothing surprising, for instance, in the following
conversation, which the author of these most truthful lines once heard near
the cast-iron fence of Griboedov's:
'Where are you dining today, Amvrosy?'
`What a question! Why, here, of course, my dear Foka! Archibald
Archibaldovich whispered to me today that there will be perch au naturel
done to order. A virtuoso little treat!'
`You sure know how to live, Amvrosy!' skinny, run-down Foka, with a
carbuncle on his neck, replied with a sigh to the ruddy-lipped giant,
golden-haired, plump-cheeked Amvrosy-the-poet.
`I have no special knowledge,' Amvrosy protested, 'just the ordinary
wish to live like a human being. You mean to say, Foka that perch can be met
with at the Coliseum as well. But at the Coliseum a portion of perch costs
thirteen roubles fifteen kopecks, and here - five-fifty! Besides, at the
Coliseum they serve three-day-old perch, and, besides, there's no guarantee
you won't get slapped in the mug with a bunch of grapes at the Coliseum by
the first young man who bursts in from Theatre Alley. No, I'm categorically
opposed to the Coliseum,' the gastronome Amvrosy boomed for the whole
boulevard to hear. 'Don't try to convince me, Foka!'
'I'm not trying to convince you, Amvrosy,' Foka squeaked. 'One can also
dine at home.'
`I humbly thank you,' trumpeted Amvrosy, 'but I can imagine your wife,
in the communal kitchen at home, trying to do perch au naturel to order in a
saucepan! Hee, hee, hee! ... Aurevwar, Foka!' And, humming, Amvrosy directed
his steps to the veranda under the tent.
Ahh, yes! ... Yes, there was a time! ... Old Muscovites will remember
the renowned Griboedov's! What is poached perch done to order!
Cheap stuff, my dear Amvrosy! But sterlet, sterlet in a silvery chafing
dish, sterlet slices interlaid with crayfish tails and fresh caviar? And
eggs en cocotte with mushroom puree in little dishes? And how did you like
the fillets of thrush? With truffles? Quail a la genoise? Nine-fifty! And
the jazz, and the courteous service! And in July, when the whole family is
in the country, and you are kept in the city by urgent literary business -
on the veranda, in the shade of the creeping vines, in a golden spot on the
cleanest of tablecloths, a bowl of soup printanier? Remember, Amvrosy? But
why ask! I can see by your lips that you do. What is your whitefish, your
perch! But the snipe, the great snipe, the jack snipe, the woodcock in their
season, the quail, the curlew? Cool seltzer fizzing in your throat?! But
enough, you are getting distracted, reader! Follow me!...
At half past ten on the evening when Berlioz died at the Patriarch's
Ponds, only one room was lit upstairs at Griboedov's, and in it languished
twelve writers who had gathered for a meeting and were waiting for Mikhail
Alexandrovich.
Sitting on chairs, and on tables, and even on the two window-sills in
the office of the Massolit executive board, they suffered seriously from the
heat. Not a single breath of fresh air came through the open windows. Moscow
was releasing the heat accumulated in the asphalt all day, and it was clear
that night would bring no relief. The smell of onions came from the basement
of the aunt's house, where the restaurant kitchen was at work, they were all
thirsty, they were all nervous and angry.
The belletrist Beskudnikov - a quiet, decently dressed man with
attentive and at the same time elusive eyes - took out his watch. The hand
was crawling towards eleven. Beskudnikov tapped his finger on the face and
showed it to the poet Dvubratsky, who was sitting next to him on the table
and in boredom dangling his feet shod in yellow shoes with rubber treads.
'Anyhow,' grumbled Dvubratsky.
"The laddie must've got stuck on the Klyazma,' came the thick-voiced
response of Nastasya Lukinishna Nepremenova, orphan of a Moscow merchant,
who had become a writer and wrote stories about sea battles under the
pen-name of Bos'n George.
'Excuse me!' boldly exclaimed Zagrivov, an author of popular sketches,
'but I personally would prefer a spot of tea on the balcony to stewing in
here. The meeting was set for ten o'clock, wasn't it?'
'It's nice now on the Klyazma,' Bos'n George needled those present,
knowing that Perelygino on the Klyazma, the country colony for writers, was
everybody's sore spot. 'There's nightingales singing already. I always work
better in the country, especially in spring.'
'It's the third year I've paid in so as to send my wife with goitre to
this paradise, but there's nothing to be spied amidst the waves,' the
novelist Ieronym Poprikhin said venomously and bitterly.
'Some are lucky and some aren't,' the critic Ababkov droned from the
window-sill.
Bos'n George's little eyes lit up with glee, and she said, softening
her contralto:
We mustn't be envious, comrades. There's twenty-two dachas [4] in all,
and only seven more being built, and there's three thousand of us in
Massolit.'
`Three thousand one hundred and eleven,' someone put in from the
corner.
'So you see,' the Bos'n went on, 'what can be done? Naturally, it's the
most talented of us that got the dachas...'
'The generals!' Glukharev the scenarist cut right into the squabble.
Beskudnikov, with an artificial yawn, walked out of the room.
'Five rooms to himself in Perelygino,' Glukharev said behind him.
`Lavrovich has six to himself,' Deniskin cried out, `and the dining
room's panelled in oak!'
'Eh, that's not the point right now,' Ababkov droned, 'it's that it's
half past eleven.'
A clamour arose, something like rebellion was brewing. They started
telephoning hated Perelygino, got the wrong dacha, Lavrovich's, found out
that Lavrovich had gone to the river, which made them totally upset. They
called at random to the commission on fine literature, extension 950, and of
course found no one there.
'He might have called!' shouted Deniskin, Glukharev and Quant.
Ah, they were shouting in vain: Mikhail Alexandrovich could not call
anywhere. Far, far from Griboedov's, in an enormous room lit by
thousand-watt bulbs, on three zinc tables, lay what had still recently been
Mikhail Alexandrovich.
On the first lay the naked body, covered with dried blood, one arm
broken, the chest caved in; on the second, the head with the front teeth
knocked out, with dull, open eyes unafraid of the brightest light; and on
the third, a pile of stiffened rags.
Near the beheaded body stood a professor of forensic medicine, a
pathological anatomist and his dissector, representatives of the
investigation, and Mikhail Alexandrovich's assistant in Massolit, the writer
Zheldybin, summoned by telephone from his sick wife's side.
A car had come for Zheldybin and first of all taken him together with
the investigators (this was around midnight) to the dead man's apartment,
where the sealing of his papers had been carried out, after which they all
went to the morgue.
And now those standing by the remains of the deceased were debating
what was the better thing to do: to sew the severed head to the neck, or to
lay out the body in the hall at Griboedov's after simply covering the dead
man snugly to the chin with a black cloth?
No, Mikhail Alexandrovich could not call anywhere, and Deniskin,
Glukharev and Quant, along with Beskudnikov, were being indignant and
shouting quite in vain. Exactly at midnight, all twelve writers left the
upper floor and descended to the restaurant. Here again they silently
berated Mikhail Alexandrovich: all the tables on the veranda, naturally,
were occupied, and they had to stay for supper in those beautiful but
airless halls.
And exactly at midnight, in the first of these halls, something
crashed, jangled, spilled, leaped. And all at once a high male voice
desperately cried out 'Hallelujah!' to the music. The famous Griboedov jazz
band struck up. Sweat-covered faces seemed to brighten, it was as if the
horses painted on the ceiling came alive, the lamps seemed to shine with
added light, and suddenly, as if tearing loose, both halls broke into dance,
and following them the veranda broke into dance.
Glukharev danced with the poetess Tamara Polumesyats, Quant danced,
Zhukopov the novelist danced with some movie actress in a yellow dress.
Dragunsky danced, Cherdakchi danced, little Deniskin danced with the
enormous Bos'n George, the beautiful Semeikina-Gall, an architect, danced in
the tight embrace of a stranger in white canvas trousers. Locals and invited
guests danced, Muscovites and out-of-towners, the writer Johann from
Kronstadt, a certain Vitya Kuftik from Rostov, apparently a stage director,
with a purple spot all over his cheek, the most eminent representatives of
the poetry section of Massolit danced - that is, Baboonov, Blasphemsky,
Sweetkin, Smatchstik and Addphina Buzdyak - young men of unknown profession,
in crew cuts, with cotton-padded shoulders, danced, someone very elderly
danced, a shred of green onion stuck in his beard, and with him danced a
sickly, anaemia-consumed girl in a wrinkled orange silk dress.
Streaming with sweat, waiters carried sweating mugs of beer over their
heads, shouting hoarsely and with hatred: 'Excuse me, citizen!' Somewhere
through a megaphone a voice commanded: `One Karsky shashlik! Two Zubrovkas!
Home-style tripe!' The high voice no longer sang, but howled 'Hallelujah!'
The clashing of golden cymbals in the band sometimes even drowned out
the clashing of dishes, which the dishwashers sent down a sloping chute to
the kitchen. In short - hell.
And at midnight there came an apparition in hell. A handsome dark-eyed
man with a dagger-like beard, in a tailcoat, stepped on to the veranda and
cast a regal glance over his domain. They used to say, the mystics used to
say, that there was a time when the handsome man wore not a tailcoat but a
wide leather belt with pistol butts sticking from it, and his raven hair was
tied with scarlet silk, and under his command a brig sailed the Caribbean
under a black death flag with a skull and crossbones.
But no, no! The seductive mystics are lying, there are no Caribbean
Seas in the world, no desperate freebooters sail them, no corvette chases
after them, no cannon smoke drifts across the waves. There is nothing, and
there was nothing! There is that sickly linden over there, there is the
cast-iron fence, and the boulevard beyond it... And the ice is melting in
the bowl, and at the next table you see someone's bloodshot, bovine eyes,
and you're afraid, afraid... Oh, gods, my gods, poison, bring me poison!...
And suddenly a word fluttered up from some table: 'Berlioz!!' The jazz
broke up and fell silent, as if someone had hit it with a fist. 'What, what,
what, what?!!' 'Berlioz!!!' And they began jumping up, exclaiming...
Yes, a wave of grief billowed up at the terrible news about Mikhail
Alexandrovich. Someone fussed about, crying that it was necessary at once,
straight away, without leaving the spot, to compose some collective telegram
and send it off immediately.
But what telegram, may we ask, and where? And why send it? And where,
indeed? And what possible need for any telegram does someone have whose
flattened pate is now clutched in the dissector's rubber hands, whose neck
the professor is now piercing with curved needles? He's dead, and has no
need of any telegrams. It's all over, let's not burden the telegraph wires
any more.
Yes, he's dead, dead... But, as for us, we're alive!
Yes, a wave of grief billowed up, held out for a while, but then began
to subside, and somebody went back to his table and - sneakily at first,
then openly - drank a little vodka and ate a bite. And, really, can one let
chicken cutlets de volatile perish? How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich?
By going hungry? But, after all, we're alive!
Naturally, the grand piano was locked, the jazz band dispersed, several
journalists left for their offices to write obituaries. It became known that
Zheldybin had come from the morgue. He had installed himself in the
deceased's office upstairs, and the rumour spread at once that it was he who
would replace Berlioz. Zheldybin summoned from the restaurant all twelve
members of the board, and at the urgently convened meeting in Berlioz's
office they started a discussion of the pressing questions of decorating the
hall with columns at Griboedov's, of transporting the body from the morgue
to that hall, of opening it to the public, and all else connected with the
sad event.
And the restaurant began to live its usual nocturnal life and would
have gone on living it until closing time, that is, until four o'clock in
the morning, had it not been for an occurrence which was completely out of
the ordinary and which struck the restaurant's clientele much more than the
news of Berlioz's death.
The first to take alarm were the coachmen [5] waiting at the gates of
the Griboedov house. One of them, rising on his box, was heard to cry out:
'Hoo-ee! Just look at that!'
After which, from God knows where, a little light flashed by the
cast-iron fence and began to approach the veranda. Those sitting at the
tables began to get up and peer at it, and saw that along with the little
light a white ghost was marching towards the restaurant. When it came right
up to the trellis, everybody sat as if frozen at their tables, chunks of
sterlet on their forks, eyes popping. The doorman, who at that moment had
stepped out of the restaurant coatroom to have a smoke in the yard, stamped
out his cigarette and made for the ghost with the obvious intention of
barring its way into the restaurant, but for some reason did not do so, and
stopped, smiling stupidly.
And the ghost, passing through an opening in the trellis, stepped
unhindered on to the veranda. Here everyone saw that it was no ghost at all,
but Ivan Nikolaevich Homeless, the much-renowned poet.
He was barefoot, in a torn, whitish Tolstoy blouse, with a paper icon
bearing the image of an unknown saint pinned to the breast of it with a
safety pin, and was wearing striped white drawers. In his hand Ivan
Nikolaevich carried a lighted wedding candle. Ivan Nikolaevich's right cheek
was freshly scratched. It would even be difficult to plumb the depths of the
silence that reigned on the veranda. Beer could be seen running down on to
the floor from a mug tilted in one waiter's hand.
The poet raised the candle over his head and said loudly:
'Hail, friends!' After which he peeked under the nearest table and
exclaimed ruefully: 'No, he's not there!'
Two voices were heard. A basso said pitilessly:
That's it. Delirium tremens.'
And the second, a woman's, frightened, uttered the words:
'How could the police let him walk the streets like that?'
This Ivan Nikolaevich heard, and replied:
They tried to detain me twice, in Skaterny and here on Bronnaya, but I
hopped over the fence and, as you can see, cut my cheek!' Here Ivan
Nikolaevich raised the candle and cried out: 'Brethren in literature!' (His
hoarse voice grew stronger and more fervent.) 'Listen to me everyone! He has
appeared. Catch him immediately, otherwise he'll do untold harm!'
'What? What? What did he say? Who has appeared?' voices came from all
sides.
The consultant,' Ivan replied, `and this consultant just killed Misha
Berlioz at the Patriarch's Ponds.'
Here people came flocking to the veranda from the inner rooms, a crowd
gathered around Ivan's flame.
`Excuse me, excuse me, be more precise,' a soft and polite voice said
over Ivan Nikolaevich's ear, 'tell me, what do you mean "killed"?
Who killed?'
'A foreign consultant, a professor, and a spy,' Ivan said, looking
around.
'And what is his name?' came softly to Ivan's ear. That's just it - his
name!' Ivan cried in anguish. 'If only I knew his name! I didn't make out
his name on his visiting card... I only remember the first letter, "W", his
name begins with "W"! What last name begins with "W"?' Ivan asked himself,
clutching his forehead, and suddenly started muttering: 'Wi, we, wa ... Wu
... Wo ... Washner? Wagner? Weiner? Wegner? Winter?' The hair on Ivan's head
began to crawl with the tension.
'Wolf?' some woman cried pitifully.
Ivan became angry.
'Fool!' he cried, seeking the woman with his eyes. "What has Wolf got
to do with it? Wolf's not to blame for anything! Wo, wa... No, I'll never
remember this way! Here's what, citizens: call the police at once, let them
send out five motor cycles with machine-guns to catch the professor. And
don't forget to tell them that there are two others with him: a long
checkered one, cracked pince-nez, and a cat, black and fat... And meanwhile
I'll search Griboedov's, I sense that he's here!'
Ivan became anxious, pushed away the people around him, started waving
the candle, pouring wax on himself, and looking under the tables. Here
someone said: `Call a doctor!' and someone's benign, fleshy face, clean
shaven and well nourished, in horn-rimmed glasses, appeared before Ivan.
'Comrade Homeless,' the face began in a guest speaker's voice, 'calm
down! You're upset at the death of our beloved Mikhail Alexandrovich... no,
say just Misha Berlioz. We all understand that perfectly well. You need
rest. The comrades will take you home to bed right now, you'll forget...'
'You,' Ivan interrupted, baring his teeth, "but don't you understand
that the professor has to be caught? And you come at me with your
foolishness! Cretin!'
`Pardon me, Comrade Homeless!...' the face replied, blushing,
retreating, and already repentant at having got mixed up in this affair.
'No, anyone else, but you I will not pardon,' Ivan Nikolaevich said
with quiet hatred.
A spasm distorted his face, he quickly shifted the candle from his
right hand to his left, swung roundly and hit the compassionate face on the
ear.
Here it occurred to them to fall upon Ivan - and so they did. The
candle went out, and the glasses that had fallen from the face were
instantly trampled. Ivan let out a terrible war cry, heard, to the
temptation of all, even on the boulevard, and set about defending himself.
Dishes fell clattering from the tables, women screamed.
All the while the waiters were tying up the poet with napkins, a
conversation was going on in the coatroom between the commander of the brig
and the doorman.
'Didn't you see he was in his underpants?' the pirate inquired coldly.
'But, Archibald Archibaldovich,' the doorman replied, cowering, 'how
could I not let him in, if he's a member of Massolit?' 'Didn't you see he
was in his underpants?' the pirate repeated. 'Pardon me, Archibald
Archibaldovich,' the doorman said, turning purple, 'but what could I do? I
understand, there are ladies sitting on the veranda...'
`Ladies have nothing to do with it, it makes no difference to the
ladies,' the pirate replied, literally burning the doorman up with his eyes,
'but it does to the police! A man in his underwear can walk the streets of
Moscow only in this one case, that he's accompanied by the police, and only
to one place - the police station! And you, if you're a doorman, ought to
know that on seeing such a man, you must, without a moment's delay, start
blowing your whistle. Do you hear? Do you hear what's going on on the
veranda?'
Here the half-crazed doorman heard some sort of hooting coming from the
veranda, the smashing of dishes and women's screams.
'Now, what's to be done with you for that?' the freebooter asked.
The skin on the doorman's face acquired a typhoid tinge, his eyes went
dead. It seemed to him that the black hair, now combed and parted, was
covered with flaming silk. The shirt-front and tailcoat disappeared and a
pistol butt emerged, tucked into a leather belt. The doorman pictured
himself hanging from the fore-topsail yard. His eyes saw his own tongue
sticking out and his lifeless head lolling on his shoulder, and even heard
the splash of waves against the hull. The doorman's knees gave way. But here
the freebooter took pity on him and extinguished his sharp gaze.
`Watch out, Nikolai, this is the last time! We have no need of such
doormen in the restaurant. Go find yourself a job as a beadle.' Having said
this, the commander commanded precisely, clearly, rapidly: `Get Pantelei
from the snack bar. Police. Protocol. A car. To the psychiatric clinic.' And
added: 'Blow your whistle!'
In a quarter of an hour an extremely astounded public, not only in the
restaurant but on the boulevard itself and in the windows of houses looking
on to the restaurant garden, saw Pantelei, the doorman, a policeman, a
waiter and the poet Riukhin carry through the gates of Griboedov's a young
man swaddled like a doll, dissolved in tears, who spat, aiming precisely at
Riukhin, and shouted for all the boulevard to hear:
'You bastard! ... You bastard!...'
A truck-driver with a spiteful face was starting his motor. Next to him
a coachman, rousing his horse, slapping it on the croup with violet reins,
shouted:
'Have a run for your money! I've taken `em to the psychics before!'
Around them the crowd buzzed, discussing the unprecedented event. In
short, there was a nasty, vile, tempting, swinish scandal, which ended only
when the truck carried away from the gates of Griboedov's the unfortunate
Ivan Nikolaevich, the policeman, Pantelei and Riukhin.
CHAPTER 6. Schizophrenia, as was Said
It was half past one in the morning when a man with a pointed beard and
wearing a white coat came out to the examining room of the famous
psychiatric clinic, built recently on the outskirts of Moscow by the bank of
the river. Three orderlies had their eyes fastened on Ivan Nikolaevich, who
was sitting on a couch. The extremely agitated poet Riukhin was also there.
The napkins with which Ivan Nikolaevich had been bed up lay in a pile
on the same couch. Ivan Nikolaevich's arms and legs were free.
Seeing the entering man, Riukhin turned pale, coughed, and said
timidly:
'Hello, Doctor.'
The doctor bowed to Riukhin but, as he bowed, looked not at him but at
Ivan Nikolaevich. The latter sat perfectly motionless, with an angry face
and knitted brows, and did not even stir at the doctor's entrance.
'Here, Doctor,' Riukhin began speaking, for some reason, in a
mysterious whisper, glancing timorously at Ivan Nikolaevich, `is the
renowned poet Ivan Homeless ... well, you see ... we're afraid it might be
delirium tremens...'
'Was he drinking hard?' the doctor said through his teeth.
'No, he drank, but not really so...'
'Did he chase after cockroaches, rats, little devils, or slinking
dogs?'
'No,' Riukhin replied with a shudder, `I saw him yesterday and this
morning ... he was perfectly well.'
'And why is he in his drawers? Did you get him out of bed?'
'No, Doctor, he came to the restaurant that way...'
'Aha, aha,' the doctor said with great satisfaction, 'and why the
scratches? Did he have a fight?'
'He fell off a fence, and then in the restaurant he hit somebody... and
then somebody else...'
'So, so, so,' the doctor said and, turning to Ivan, added: 'Hello
there!'
'Greetings, saboteur! [1]' Ivan replied spitefully and loudly.
Riukhin was so embarrassed that he did not dare raise his eyes to the
courteous doctor. But the latter, not offended in the least, took off his
glasses with a habitual, deft movement, raised the skirt of his coat, put
them into the back pocket of his trousers, and then asked Ivan:
'How old are you?'
'You can all go to the devil!' Ivan shouted rudely and turned away.
'But why are you angry? Did I say anything unpleasant to you?'
'I'm twenty-three years old,' Ivan began excitedly, 'and I'll file a
complaint against you all. And particularly against you, louse!' he adverted
separately to Riukhin.
'And what do you want to complain about?'
'About the fact that I, a healthy man, was seized and dragged by force
to a madhouse!' Ivan replied wrathfully.
Here Riukhin looked closely at Ivan and went cold: there was decidedly
no insanity in the man's eyes. No longer dull as they had been at
Griboedov's, they were now clear as ever.
`Good God!' Riukhin thought fearfully. 'So he's really normal! What
nonsense! Why, in fact, did we drag him here? He's normal, normal, only his
mug got scratched...'
'You are,' the doctor began calmly, sitting down on a white stool with
a shiny foot, `not in a madhouse, but in a clinic, where no one will keep
you if it's not necessary.'
Ivan Nikolaevich glanced at him mistrustfully out of the corner of his
eye, but still grumbled:
'Thank the Lord! One normal man has finally turned up among the idiots,
of whom the first is that giftless goof Sashka!'
'Who is this giftless Sashka?' the doctor inquired.
'This one here - Riukhin,' Ivan replied, jabbing his dirty finger in
Riukhin's direction.
The latter flushed with indignation. That's the thanks I get,' he
thought bitterly, 'for showing concern for him! What trash, really!'
'Psychologically, a typical little kulak,'[2] Ivan Nikolaevich began,
evidently from an irresistible urge to denounce Riukhin, 'and, what's more,
a little kulak carefully disguising himself as a proletarian. Look at his
lenten physiognomy, and compare it with those resounding verses he wrote for
the First of May [3] - heh, heh, heh ... "Soaring up!" and "Soaring down!!"
But if you could look inside him and see what he thinks... you'd gasp!' And
Ivan Nikolaevich burst into sinister laughter.
Riukhin was breathing heavily, turned red, and thought of just one
thing, that he had warmed a serpent on his breast, that he had shown concern
for a man who turned out to be a vicious enemy. And, above all, there was
nothing to be done: there's no arguing with the mentally ill!
`And why, actually, were you brought here?' the doctor asked, after
listening attentively to Homeless's denunciations.
'Devil take them, the numskulls! They seized me, tied me up with some
rags, and dragged me away in a truck!'
'May I ask why you came to the restaurant in just your underwear?'
There's nothing surprising about that,' Ivan replied. `I went for a
swim in the Moscow River, so they filched my clothes and left me this trash!
I couldn't very well walk around Moscow naked! I put it on because I
was hurrying to Griboedov.'
The doctor glanced questioningly at Riukhin, who muttered glumly:
'The name of the restaurant.'
`Aha,' said the doctor, `and why were you in such a hurry? Some
business meeting?'
'I'm trying to catch the consultant,' Ivan Nikolaevich said and looked
around anxiously.
'What consultant?'
'Do you know Berlioz?' Ivan asked significantly.
The... composer?'
Ivan got upset.
'What composer? Ah, yes... Ah, no. The composer has the same name as
Misha Berlioz.'
Riukhin had no wish to say anything, but was forced to explain:
The secretary of Massolit, Berlioz, was run over by a tram-car tonight
at the Patriarch's Ponds.'
'Don't blab about what you don't know!' Ivan got angry with Riukhin. 'I
was there, not you! He got him under the tram-car on purpose!'
'Pushed him?'
'"Pushed him", nothing!' Ivan exclaimed, angered by the general
obtuseness. 'His kind don't need to push! He can perform such stunts - hold
on to your hat! He knew beforehand that Berlioz would get under the
tram-car!'
'And did anyone besides you see this consultant?'
That's the trouble, it was just Berlioz and I.'
'So. And what measures did you take to catch this murderer?' Here the
doctor turned and sent a glance towards a woman in a white coat, who was
sitting at a table to one side. She took out a sheet of paper and began
filling in the blank spaces in its columns.
'Here's what measures: I took a little candle from the kitchen...'
That one?' asked the doctor, pointing to the broken candle lying on the
table in front of the woman, next to the icon.
That very one, and...'
'And why the icon?'
'Ah, yes, the icon...' Ivan blushed. `It was the icon that frightened
them most of all.' He again jabbed his finger in the direction of Riukhin.
'But the thing is that he, the consultant, he... let's speak directly... is
mixed up with the unclean powers... and you won't catch him so easily.'
The orderlies for some reason snapped to attention and fastened their
eyes on Ivan.
Yes, sirs,' Ivan went on, 'mixed up with them! An absolute fact. He
spoke personally with Pontius Pilate. And there's no need to stare at me
like that. I'm telling the truth! He saw everything - the balcony and the
palm trees. In short, he was at Pontius Pilate's, I can vouch for it.'
'Come, come...'
'Well, so I pinned the icon on my chest and ran...'
Here the clock suddenly struck twice.
'Oh-oh!' Ivan exclaimed and got up from the couch. `It's two o'clock,
and I'm wasting time with you! Excuse me, where's the telephone?'
'Let him use the telephone,' the doctor told the orderlies.
Ivan grabbed the receiver, and the woman meanwhile quietly asked
Riukhin:
'Is he married?'
'Single,' Riukhin answered fearfully.
'Member of a trade union?'
'Yes.'
'Police?' Ivan shouted into the receiver. 'Police? Comrade
officer-on-duty, give orders at once for five motor cycles with machine-guns
to be sent out to catch the foreign consultant. What? Come and pick me up,
I'll go with you... It's the poet Homeless speaking from the madhouse...
What's your address?' Homeless asked the doctor in a whisper, covering
the receiver with his hand, and then again shouting into it: 'Are you
listening?
Hello!... Outrageous!' Ivan suddenly screamed and hurled the receiver
against the wall. Then he turned to the doctor, offered him his hand, said
'Goodbye' drily, and made as if to leave.
`For pity's sake, where do you intend to go?' the doctor said, peering
into Ivan's eyes. 'In the dead of night, in your underwear... You're not
feeling well, stay with us.'
`Let me pass,' Ivan said to the orderlies, who closed ranks at the
door. 'Will you let me pass or not?' the poet shouted in a terrible voice.
Riukhin trembled, but the woman pushed a button on the table and a
shiny little box with a sealed ampoule popped out on to its glass surface.
'Ah, so?!' Ivan said, turning around with a wild and hunted look.
'Well, then... Goodbye!' And he rushed head first into the
window-blind.
The crash was rather forceful, but the glass behind the blind gave no
crack, and in an instant Ivan Nikolaevich was struggling in the hands of the
orderlies. He gasped, tried to bite, shouted:
'So that's the sort of windows you've got here! Let me go! Let me
go!...'
A syringe flashed in the doctor's hand, with a single movement the
woman slit the threadbare sleeve of the shirt and seized the arm with
unwomanly strength. There was a smell of ether, Ivan went limp in the hands
of the four people, the deft doctor took advantage of this moment and stuck
the needle into Ivan's arm. They held Ivan for another few seconds and then
lowered him on to the couch.
'Bandits!' Ivan shouted and jumped up from the couch, but was installed
on it again. The moment they let go of him, he again jumped up, but sat back
down by himself. He paused, gazing around wildly, then unexpectedly yawned,
then smiled maliciously.
'Locked me up after all,' he said, yawned again, unexpectedly lay down,
put his head on the pillow, his fist under his head like a child, and
muttered now in a sleepy voice, without malice: 'Very well, then... you'll
pay for it yourselves... I've warned you, you can do as you like... I'm now
interested most of all in Pontius Pilate ... Pilate...', and he closed his
eyes.
'A bath, a private room, number 117, and a nurse to watch him,' the
doctor ordered as he put his glasses on. Here Riukhin again gave a start:
the white door opened noiselessly, behind it a corridor could be seen, lit
by blue night-lights. Out of the corridor rolled a stretcher on rubber
wheels, to which the quieted Ivan was transferred, and then he rolled off
down the corridor and the door closed behind him.
'Doctor,' the shaken Riukhin asked in a whisper, 'it means he's really
ill?'
'Oh, yes,' replied the doctor.
'But what's wrong with him, then?' Riukhin asked timidly.
The tired doctor glanced at Riukhin and answered listlessly:
'Locomotor and speech excitation... delirious interpretations... A
complex case, it seems. Schizophrenia, I suppose. Plus this alcoholism...'
Riukhin understood nothing from the doctor's words, except that things
were evidently not so great with Ivan Nikolaevich. He sighed and asked:
'But what's all this talk of his about some consultant?'
`He must have seen somebody who struck his disturbed imagination. Or
maybe a hallucination...'
A few minutes later the truck was carrying Riukhin off to Moscow. Day
was breaking, and the light of the street lights still burning along the
highway was now unnecessary and unpleasant. The driver was vexed at having
wasted the night, drove the truck as fast as he could, and skidded on the
turns.
Now the woods dropped off, stayed somewhere behind, and the river went
somewhere to the side, and an omnium gatherum came spilling to meet the
truck: fences with sentry boxes and stacks of wood, tall posts and some sort
of poles, with spools strung on the poles, heaps of rubble, the earth scored
by canals - in short, you sensed that she was there, Moscow, right there,
around the turn, and about to heave herself upon you and engulf you.
Riukhin was jolted and tossed about; the sort of stump he had placed
himself on kept trying to slide out from under him. The restaurant napkins,
thrown in by the policeman and Pantelei, who had left earlier by bus, moved
all around the flatbed. Riukhin tried to collect them, but then, for some
reason hissing spitefully: 'Devil take them! What am I doing fussing like a
fool?...', he spumed them aside with his foot and stopped looking at them.
The rider's state of mind was terrible. It was becoming clear that his
visit to the house of sorrow had left the deepest mark on him. Riukhin tried
to understand what was tormenting him. The corridor with blue lights, which
had stuck itself to his memory? The thought that there is no greater
misfortune in the world than the loss of reason? Yes, yes, of course, that,
too. But that - that's only a general thought. There's something else. What
is it? An insult, that's what. Yes, yes, insulting words hurled right in his
face by Homeless. And the trouble is not that they were insulting, but that
there was truth in them.
The poet no longer looked around, but, staring into the dirty, shaking
floor, began muttering something, whining, gnawing at himself.
Yes, poetry... He was thirty-two years old! And, indeed, what then? So
then he would go on writing his several poems a year. Into old age? Yes,
into old age. What would these poems bring him? Glory? 'What nonsense! Don't
deceive yourself, at least. Glory will never come to someone who writes bad
poems. What makes them bad? The truth, he was telling the truth!' Riukhin
addressed himself mercilessly. 'I don't believe in anything I write!...'
Poisoned by this burst of neurasthenia, the poet swayed, the floor
under him stopped shaking. Riukhin raised his head and saw that he had long
been in Moscow, and, what's more, that it was dawn over Moscow, that the
cloud was underlit with gold, that his truck had stopped, caught in a column
of other vehicles at the turn on to the boulevard, and that very close to
him on a pedestal stood a metal man [4], his head inclined slightly, gazing
at the boulevard with indifference.
Some strange thoughts flooded the head of the ailing poet. 'There's an
example of real luck...' Here Riukhin rose to his full height on the flatbed
of the truck and raised his arm, for some reason attacking the cast-iron man
who was not bothering anyone. 'Whatever step he made in his life, whatever
happened to him, it all turned to his benefit, it all led to his glory! But
what did he do? I can't conceive... Is there anything special in the words:
"The snowstorm covers..."? I don't understand!...
Luck, sheer luck!' Riukhin concluded with venom, and felt the truck
moving under him. `He shot him, that white guard shot him, smashed his hip,
and assured his immortality...'
The column began to move. In no more than two minutes, the completely
ill and even aged poet was entering the veranda of Griboedov's. It was now
empty. In a corner some company was finishing its drinks, and in the middle
the familiar master of ceremonies was bustling about, wearing a skullcap,
with a glass of Abrau wine in his hand.
Riukhin, laden with napkins, was met affably by Archibald
Archibaldovich and at once relieved of the cursed rags. Had Riukhin not
become so worn out in the clinic and on the truck, he would certainly have
derived pleasure from telling how everything had gone in the hospital and
embellishing the story with invented details. But just then he was far from
such things, and, little observant though Riukhin was, now, after the
torture on the truck, he peered keenly at the pirate for the first time and
realized that, though the man asked about Homeless and even exclaimed
'Ai-yai-yai!', he was essentially quite indifferent to Homeless's fate and
did not feel a bit sorry for him.
'And bravo! Right you are!' Riukhin thought with cynical,
self-annihilating malice and, breaking off the story about the
schizophrenia, begged:
`Archibald Archibaldovich, a drop of vodka...' The pirate made a
compassionate face and whispered:
'I understand... this very minute...' and beckoned to a waiter. A
quarter of an hour later, Riukhin sat in complete solitude, hunched over his
bream, drinking glass after glass, understanding and recognizing that it was
no longer possible to set anything right in his life, that it was only
possible to forget.
The poet had wasted his night while others were feasting and now
understood that it was impossible to get it back. One needed only to raise
one's head from the lamp to the sky to understand that the night was
irretrievably lost. Waiters were hurriedly tearing the tablecloths from the
tables. The cats slinking around the veranda had a morning look. Day
irresistibly heaved itself upon the poet.
CHAPTER 7. A Naughty Apartment
If Styopa Likhodeev had been told the next morning: 'Styopa! You'll be
shot if you don't get up this minute!' - Styopa would have replied in a
languid, barely audible voice:
'Shoot me, do what you like with me, I won't get up.'
Not only not get up, it seemed to him that he could not open his eyes,
because if he were to do so, there would be a flash of lightning, and his
head would at once be blown to pieces. A heavy bell was booming in that
head, brown spots rimmed with fiery green floated between his eyeballs and
his closed eyelids, and to crown it all he was nauseous, this nausea, as it
seemed to him, being connected with the sounds of some importunate
gramophone.
Styopa tried to recall something, but only one thing would get recalled
- that yesterday, apparently, and in some unknown place, he had stood with a
napkin in his hand and tried to kiss some lady, promising her that the next
day, and exactly at noon, he would come to visit her. The lady had declined,
saying: 'No, no, I won't be home!', but Styopa had stubbornly insisted: 'And
I'll just up and come anyway!'
Who the lady was, and what time it was now, what day, of what month,
Styopa decidedly did not know, and, worst of all, he could not figure out
where he was. He attempted to learn this last at least, and to that end
unstuck the stuck-together lids of his left eye. Something gleamed dully in
the semi-darkness. Styopa finally recognized the pier-glass and realized
that he was lying on his back in his own bed - that is, the jeweller's
wife's former bed - in the bedroom. Here he felt such a throbbing in his
head that he closed his eyes and moaned.
Let us explain: Styopa Likhodeev, director of the Variety Theatre, had
come to his senses that morning at home, in the very apartment which he
shared with the late Berlioz, in a big, six-storeyed, U-shaped building on
Sadovaya Street.
It must be said that this apartment - no.50 - had long had, if not a
bad, at least a strange reputation. Two years ago it had still belonged to
the widow of the jeweller de Fougeray. Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray, a
respectable and very practical fifty-year-old woman, let out three of the
five rooms to lodgers: one whose last name was apparently Belomut, and
another with a lost last name.
And then two years ago inexplicable events began to occur in this
apartment: people began to disappear [1] from this apartment without a
trace.
Once, on a day off, a policeman came to the apartment, called the
second lodger (the one whose last name got lost) out to the front hall, and
said he was invited to come to the police station for a minute to put his
signature to something. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna's long-time
and devoted housekeeper, to say, in case he received any telephone calls,
that he would be back in ten minutes, and left together with the proper,
white-gloved policeman. He not only did not come back in ten minutes, but
never came back at all. The most surprising thing was that the policeman
evidently vanished along with him.
The pious, or, to speak more frankly, superstitious Anfisa declared
outright to the very upset Anna Frantsevna that it was sorcery and that she
knew perfectly well who had stolen both the lodger and the policeman, only
she did not wish to talk about it towards night-time.
Well, but with sorcery, as everyone knows, once it starts, there's no
stopping it. The second lodger is remembered to have disappeared on a
Monday, and that Wednesday Belomut seemed to drop from sight, though, true,
under different circumstances. In the morning a car came, as usual, to take
him to work, and it did take him to work, but it did not bring anyone back
or come again itself.
Madame Belomut's grief and horror defied description. But, alas,
neither the one nor the other continued for long. That same night, on
returning with Anfisa from her dacha, which Anna Frantsevna had hurried off
to for some reason, she did not find the wife of citizen Belomut in the
apartment. And not only that: the doors of the two rooms occupied by the
Belomut couple turned out to be sealed.
Two days passed somehow. On the third day, Anna Frantsevna, who had
suffered all the while from insomnia, again left hurriedly for her dacha...
Needless to say, she never came back!
Left alone, Anfisa, having wept her fill, went to sleep past one
o'clock in the morning. What happened to her after that is not known, but
lodgers in other apartments told of hearing some sort of knocking all night
in no.50 and of seeing electric light burning in the windows till morning.
In the morning it turned out that there was also no Anfisa!
For a long time all sorts of legends were repeated in the house about
these disappearances and about the accursed apartment, such as, for
instance, 'that this dry and pious little Anfisa had supposedly carried on
her dried-up breast, in a suede bag, twenty-five big diamonds belonging to
Anna Frantsevna. That in the woodshed of that very dacha to which Anna
Frantsevna had gone so hurriedly, there supposedly turned up, of themselves,
some inestimable treasures in the form of those same diamonds, plus some
gold coins of tsarist minting... And so on, in the same vein. Well, what we
don't know, we can't vouch for.
However it may have been, the apartment stood empty and sealed for only
a week. Then the late Berlioz moved in with his wife, and this same Styopa,
also with his wife. It was perfectly natural that, as soon as they got into
the malignant apartment, devil knows what started happening with them as
well! Namely, within the space of a month both wives vanished. But these two
not without a trace. Of Berlioz's wife it was told that she had supposedly
been seen in Kharkov with some ballet-master, while Styopa's wife allegedly
turned up on Bozhedomka Street, where wagging tongues said the director of
the Variety, using his innumerable acquaintances, had contrived to get her a
room, but on the one condition that she never show her face on Sadovaya...
And so, Styopa moaned. He wanted to call the housekeeper Grunya and ask
her for aspirin, but was still able to realize that it was foolish, and that
Grunya, of course, had no aspirin. He tried to call Berlioz for help,
groaned twice: 'Misha... Misha...', but, as you will understand, received no
reply. The apartment was perfectly silent.
Moving his toes, Styopa realized that he was lying there in his socks,
passed his trembling hand down his hip to determine whether he had his
trousers on or not, but failed. Finally, seeing that he was abandoned and
alone, and there was no one to help him, he decided to get up, however
inhuman the effort it cost him.
Styopa unstuck his glued eyelids and saw himself reflected in the
pier-glass as a man with hair sticking out in all directions, with a bloated
physiognomy covered with black stubble, with puffy eyes, a dirty shirt,
collar and necktie, in drawers and socks.
So he saw himself in the pier-glass, and next to the mirror he saw an
unknown man, dressed in black and wearing a black beret.
Styopa sat up in bed and goggled his bloodshot eyes as well as he could
at the unknown man. The silence was broken by this unknown man, who said in
a low, heavy voice, and with a foreign accent, the following words:
'Good morning, my most sympathetic Stepan Bogdanovich!'
There was a pause, after which, making a most terrible strain on
himself, Styopa uttered:
"What can I do for you?' - and was amazed, not recognizing his own
voice. He spoke the word 'what' in a treble, 'can I' in a bass, and his 'do
for you' did not come off at all.
The stranger smiled amicably, took out a big gold watch with a diamond
triangle on the lid, rang eleven times, and said:
'Eleven. And for exactly an hour I've been waiting for you to wake up,
since you made an appointment for me to come to your place at ten. Here I
am!'[2]
Styopa felt for his trousers on the chair beside his bed, whispered:
'Excuse me...', put them on, and asked hoarsely: 'Tell me your name,
please?'
He had difficulty speaking. At each word, someone stuck a needle into
his brain, causing infernal pain.
'What! You've forgotten my name, too?' Here the unknown man smiled.
`Forgive me...' Styopa croaked, feeling that his hangover had presented
him with a new symptom: it seemed to him that the floor beside his bed went
away, and that at any moment he would go flying down to the devil's dam in
the nether world.
`My dear Stepan Bogdanovich,' the visitor said, with a perspicacious
smile, 'no aspirin will help you. Follow the wise old rule - cure like with
like. The only thing that will bring you back to life is two glasses of
vodka with something pickled and hot to go with it.'
Styopa was a shrewd man and, sick as he was, realized that since he had
been found in this state, he would have to confess everything.
`Frankly speaking,' he began, his tongue barely moving, 'yesterday I
got a bit...'
'Not a word more!' the visitor answered and drew aside with his chair.
Styopa, rolling his eyes, saw that a tray had been set on a small table, on
which tray there were sliced white bread, pressed caviar in a little bowl,
pickled mushrooms on a dish, something in a saucepan, and, finally, vodka in
a roomy decanter belonging to the jeweller's wife. What struck Styopa
especially was that the decanter was frosty with cold. This, however, was
understandable: it was sitting in a bowl packed with ice. In short, the
service was neat, efficient.
The stranger did not allow Styopa's amazement to develop to a morbid
degree, but deftly poured him half a glass of vodka.
'And you?' Styopa squeaked.
'With pleasure!'
His hand twitching, Styopa brought the glass to his lips, while the
stranger swallowed the contents of his glass at one gulp. Chewing a lump of
caviar, Styopa squeezed out of himself the words:
'And you... a bite of something?'
`Much obliged, but I never snack,' the stranger replied and poured
seconds. The saucepan was opened and found to contain frankfurters in tomato
sauce.
And then the accursed green haze before his eyes dissolved, the words
began to come out clearly, and, above all, Styopa remembered a thing or two.
Namely, that it had taken place yesterday in Skhodnya, at the dacha of the
sketch-writer Khustov, to which this same Khustov had taken Styopa in a
taxi. There was even a memory of having hired this taxi by the Metropol, and
there was also some actor, or not an actor... with a gramophone in a little
suitcase. Yes, yes, yes, it was at the dacha! The dogs, he remembered, had
howled from this gramophone. Only the lady Styopa had wanted to kiss
remained unexplained... devil knows who she was... maybe she was in radio,
maybe not...
The previous day was thus coming gradually into focus, but right now
Styopa was much more interested in today's day and, particularly, in the
appearance in his bedroom of a stranger, and with hors d'oeuvres and vodka
to boot. It would be nice to explain that!
'Well, I hope by now you've remembered my name?'
But Styopa only smiled bashfully and spread his arms.
'Really! I get the feeling that you followed the vodka with port wine!
Good heavens, it simply isn't done!'
'I beg you to keep it between us,' Styopa said fawningly.
'Oh, of course, of course! But as for Khustov, needless to say, I can't
vouch for him.'
'So you know Khustov?'
"Yesterday, in your office, I saw this individuum briefly, but it only
takes a fleeting glance at his face to understand that he is a bastard, a
squabbler, a trimmer and a toady.'
`Perfectly true!' thought Styopa, struck by such a true, precise and
succinct definition of Khustov.
Yes, the previous day was piecing itself together, but, even so,
anxiety would not take leave of the director of the Variety. The thing was
that a huge black hole yawned in this previous day. Say what you will,
Styopa simply had not seen this stranger in the beret in his office
yesterday.
'Professor of black magic Woland,'[3] the visitor said weightily,
seeing Styopa's difficulty, and he recounted everything in order.
Yesterday afternoon he arrived in Moscow from abroad, went immediately
to Styopa, and offered his show to the Variety. Styopa telephoned the Moscow
Regional Entertainment Commission and had the question approved (Styopa
turned pale and blinked), then signed a contract with Professor Woland for
seven performances (Styopa opened his mouth), and arranged that Woland
should come the next morning at ten o'clock to work out the details...
And so Woland came. Having come, he was met by the housekeeper Grunya,
who explained that she had just come herself, that she was not a live-in
maid, that Berlioz was not home, and that if the visitor wished to see
Stepan Bogdanovich, he should go to his bedroom himself. Stepan Bogdanovich
was such a sound sleeper that she would not undertake to wake him up. Seeing
what condition Stepan Bogdanovich was in, the artiste sent Grunya to the
nearest grocery store for vodka and hors d'oeuvres, to the druggist's for
ice, and...
`Allow me to reimburse you,' the mortified Styopa squealed and began
hunting for his wallet.
'Oh, what nonsense!' the guest performer exclaimed and would hear no
more of it.
And so, the vodka and hors d'oeuvres got explained, but all the same
Styopa was a pity to see: he remembered decidedly nothing about the contract
and, on his life, had not seen this Woland yesterday. Yes, Khustov had been
there, but not Woland.
'May I have a look at the contract?' Styopa asked quietly.
'Please do, please do...'
Styopa looked at the paper and froze. Everything was in place: first of
all, Styopa's own dashing signature... aslant the margin a note in the hand
of the findirector [4] Rimsky authorizing the payment of ten thousand
roubles to the artiste Woland, as an advance on the thirty-five thousand
roubles due him for seven performances. What's more, Woland's signature was
right there attesting to his receipt of the ten thousand!
`What is all this?!' the wretched Styopa thought, his head spinning.
Was he starting to have ominous gaps of memory? Well, it went without
saying, once the contract had been produced, any further expressions of
surprise would simply be indecent. Styopa asked his visitor's leave to
absent himself for a moment and, just as he was, in his stocking feet, ran
to the front hall for the telephone. On his way he called out in the
direction of the kitchen:
'Grunya!'
But no one responded. He glanced at the door to Berlioz's study, which
was next to the front hall, and here he was, as they say, flabbergasted. On
the door-handle he made out an enormous wax seal [5] on a string.
'Hel-lo!' someone barked in Styopa's head. 'Just what we needed!' And
here Styopa's thoughts began running on twin tracks, but, as always happens
in times of catastrophe, in the same direction and, generally, devil knows
where. It is even difficult to convey the porridge in Styopa's head. Here
was this devilry with the black beret, the chilled vodka, and the incredible
contract... And along with all that, if you please, a seal on the door as
well! That is, tell anyone you like that Berlioz has been up to no good - no
one will believe it, by Jove, no one will believe it! Yet look, there's the
seal! Yes, sir...
And here some most disagreeable little thoughts began stirring in
Styopa's brain, about the article which, as luck would have it, he had
recently inflicted on Mikhail Alexandrovich for publication in his journal.
The article, just between us, was idiotic! And worthless. And the money
was so little...
Immediately after the recollection of the article, there came flying a
recollection of some dubious conversation that had taken place, he recalled,
on the twenty-fourth of April, in the evening, right there in the dining
room, while Styopa was having dinner with Mikhail Alexandrovich. That is, of
course, this conversation could not have been called dubious in the full
sense of the word (Styopa would not have ventured upon such a conversation),
but it was on some unnecessary subject. He had been quite free, dear
citizens, not to begin it. Before the seal, this conversation would
undoubtedly have been considered a perfect trifle, but now, after the
seal...
'Ah, Berlioz, Berlioz!' boiled up in Styopa's head. This is simply too
much for one head!'
But it would not do to grieve too long, and Styopa dialled the number
of the office of the Variety's findirector, Rimsky. Styopa's position was
ticklish: first, the foreigner might get offended that Styopa was checking
on him after the contract had been shown, and then to talk with the
findirector was also exceedingly difficult. Indeed, he could not just ask
him like that:
`Tell me, did I sign a contract for thirty-five thousand roubles
yesterday with a professor of black magic?' It was no good asking like that!
'Yes!' Rimsky's sharp, unpleasant voice came from the receiver.
'Hello, Grigory Danilovich,' Styopa began speaking quietly, 'it's
Likhodeev. There's a certain matter... hm... hm... I have this... er...
artiste Woland sitting here... So you see... I wanted to ask, how about this
evening?...'
'Ah, the black magician?' Rimsky's voice responded in the receiver. The
posters will be ready shortly.'
'Uh-huh...' Styopa said in a weak voice, 'well, 'bye...'
'And you'll be coming in soon?' Rimsky asked.
'In half an hour,' Styopa replied and, hanging up the receiver, pressed
his hot head in his hands. Ah, what a nasty thing to have happen! What was
wrong with his memory, citizens? Eh?
However, to go on lingering in the front hall was awkward, and Styopa
formed a plan straight away: by all means to conceal his incredible
forgetfulness, and now, first off, contrive to get out of the foreigner
what, in fact, he intended to show that evening in the Variety, of which
Styopa was in charge.
Here Styopa turned away from the telephone and saw distinctly in the
mirror that stood in the front hall, and which the lazy Grunya had not wiped
for ages, a certain strange specimen, long as a pole, and in a pince-nez
(ah, if only Ivan Nikolaevich had been there! He would have recognized this
specimen at once!). The figure was reflected and then disappeared. Styopa
looked further down the hall in alarm and was rocked a second time, for in
the mirror a stalwart black cat passed and also disappeared.
Styopa's heart skipped a beat, he staggered.
'What is all this?' he thought. 'Am I losing my mind? Where are these
reflections coming from?!' He peeked into the front hall and cried
timorously:
'Grunya! What's this cat doing hanging around here?! Where did he come
from? And the other one?!'
'Don't worry, Stepan Bogdanovich,' a voice responded, not Grunya's but
the visitor's, from the bedroom. The cat is mine. Don't be nervous. And
Grunya is not here, I sent her off to Voronezh. She complained you diddled
her out of a vacation.'
These words were so unexpected and preposterous that Styopa decided he
had not heard right. Utterly bewildered, he trotted back to the bedroom and
froze on the threshold. His hair stood on end and small beads of sweat broke
out on his brow.
The visitor was no longer alone in the bedroom, but had company: in the
second armchair sat the same type he had imagined in the front hall. Now he
was clearly visible: the feathery moustache, one lens of the pince-nez
gleaming, the other not there. But worse things were to be found in the
bedroom: on the jeweller's wife's ottoman, in a casual pose, sprawled a
third party - namely, a black cat of uncanny size, with a glass of vodka in
one paw and a fork, on which he had managed to spear a pickled mushroom, in
the other.
The light, faint in the bedroom anyway, now began to grow quite dark in
Styopa's eyes. This is apparently how one loses one's mind...' he thought
and caught hold of the doorpost.
`I see you're somewhat surprised, my dearest Stepan Bogdanovich?'
Woland inquired of the teeth-chattering Styopa. `And yet there's
nothing to be surprised at. This is my retinue.'
Here the cat tossed off the vodka, and Styopa's hand began to slide
down the doorpost.
'And this retinue requires room,' Woland continued, 'so there's just
one too many of us in the apartment. And it seems to us that this one too
many is precisely you.'
Theirself, theirself!' the long checkered one sang in a goat's voice,
referring to Styopa in the plural. 'Generally, theirself has been up to some
terrible swinishness lately. Drinking, using their position to have liaisons
with women, don't do devil a thing, and can't do anything, because they
don't know anything of what they're supposed to do. Pulling the wool over
their superiors' eyes.'
`Availing hisself of a government car!' the cat snitched, chewing a
mushroom.
And here occurred the fourth and last appearance in the apartment, as
Styopa, having slid all the way to the floor, clawed at the doorpost with an
enfeebled hand.
Straight from the pier-glass stepped a short but extraordinarily
broad-shouldered man, with a bowler hat on his head and a fang sticking out
of his mouth, which made still uglier a physiognomy unprecedentedly
loathsome without that. And with flaming red hair besides.
'Generally,' this new one entered into the conversation, `I don't
understand how he got to be a director,' the redhead's nasal twang was
growing stronger and stronger, 'he's as much a director as I'm a bishop.'
"You don't look like a bishop, Azazello,'[6] the cat observed, heaping
his plate with frankfurters.
That's what I mean,' twanged the redhead and, turning to Woland, he
added deferentially:
'Allow me, Messire, to chuck him the devil out of Moscow?'
'Scat!' the cat barked suddenly, bristling his fur.
And then the bedroom started spinning around Styopa, he hit his head
against the doorpost, and, losing consciousness, thought: 'I'm dying...'
But he did not die. Opening his eyes slightly, he saw himself sitting
on something made of stone. Around him something was making noise. When he
opened his eyes properly, he realized that the noise was being made by the
sea and, what's more, that the waves were rocking just at his feet, that he
was, in short, sitting at the very end of a jetty, that over him was a
brilliant blue sky and behind him a white city on the mountains.
Not knowing how to behave in such a case, Styopa got up on his
trembling legs and walked along the jetty towards the shore.
Some man was standing on the jetty, smoking and spitting into the sea.
He looked at Styopa with wild eyes and stopped spitting.
Then Styopa pulled the following stunt: he knelt down before the
unknown smoker and said:
'I implore you, tell me what city is this?'
"Really!' said the heartless smoker.
'I'm not drunk,' Styopa replied hoarsely, 'something's happened to
me... I'm ill... Where am I? What city is this?'
"Well, it's Yalta...'
Styopa quietly gasped and sank down on his side, his head striking the
warm stone of the jetty. Consciousness left him.
CHAPTER 8. The Combat between the Professor and the Poet
At the same time that consciousness left Styopa in Yalta, that is,
around half past eleven in the morning, it returned to Ivan Nikolaevich
Homeless, who woke up after a long and deep sleep. He spent some time
pondering how it was that he had wound up in an unfamiliar room with white
walls, with an astonishing night table made of some light metal, and with
white blinds behind which one could sense the sun.
Ivan shook his head, ascertained that it did not ache, and remembered
that he was in a clinic. This thought drew after it the remembrance of
Berlioz's death, but today it did not provoke a strong shock in Ivan. Having
had a good sleep, Ivan Nikolaevich became calmer and began to think more
clearly. After lying motionless for some time in this most clean, soft and
comfortable spring bed, Ivan noticed a bell button beside him. From a habit
of touching things needlessly, Ivan pressed it. He expected the pressing of
the button to be followed by some ringing or appearance, but something
entirely different happened. A frosted glass cylinder with the word 'Drink'
on it lit up at the foot of Ivan's bed. After pausing for a while, the
cylinder began to rotate until the word `Nurse' popped out. It goes without
saying that the clever cylinder amazed Ivan. The word 'Nurse' was replaced
by the words 'Call the Doctor.'
'Hm...' said Ivan, not knowing how to proceed further with this
cylinder. But here he happened to be lucky. Ivan pressed the button a second
time at the word 'Attendant'. The cylinder rang quietly in response,
stopped, the light went out, and a plump, sympathetic woman in a clean white
coat came into the room and said to Ivan:
'Good morning!'
Ivan did not reply, considering such a greeting inappropriate under the
circumstances. Indeed, they lock up a healthy man in a clinic, and pretend
that that is how it ought to be!
The woman meanwhile, without losing her good-natured expression,
brought the blinds up with one push of a button, and sun flooded the room
through a light and wide-meshed grille which reached right to the floor.
Beyond the grille a balcony came into view, beyond that the bank of a
meandering river, and on its other bank a cheerful pine wood.
'Time for our bath,' the woman invited, and under her hands the inner
wall parted, revealing behind it a bathroom and splendidly equipped toilet.
Ivan, though he had resolved not to talk to the woman, could not help
himself and, on seeing the water gush into the tub in a wide stream from the
gleaming faucet, said ironically:
'Looky there! Just like the Metropol!...'
'Oh, no,' the woman answered proudly, `much better. There is no such
equipment even anywhere abroad. Scientists and doctors come especially to
study our clinic. We have foreign tourists every day.'
At the words 'foreign tourists', Ivan at once remembered yesterday's
consultant. Ivan darkened, looked sullen, and said:
`Foreign tourists... How you all adore foreign tourists! But among
them, incidentally, you come across all sorts. I, for instance, met one
yesterday - quite something!'
And he almost started telling about Pontius Pilate, but restrained
himself, realizing that the woman had no use for these stories, that in any
case she could not help him.
The washed Ivan Nikolaevich was straight away issued decidedly
everything a man needs after a bath: an ironed shirt, drawers, socks. And
not only that: opening the door of a cupboard, the woman pointed inside and
asked:
'What would you like to put on - a dressing gown or some nice pyjamas?'
Attached to his new dwelling by force, Ivan almost clasped his hands at
the woman's casualness and silently pointed his finger at the crimson
flannel pyjamas.
After this, Ivan Nikolaevich was led down the empty and noiseless
corridor and brought to an examining room of huge dimensions. Ivan, having
decided to take an ironic attitude towards everything to be found in this
wondrously equipped building, at once mentally christened this room the
'industrial kitchen'.
And with good reason. Here stood cabinets and glass cases with gleaming
nickel-plated instruments. There were chairs of extraordinarily complex
construction, some pot-bellied lamps with shiny shades, a myriad of phials,
Bunsen burners, electric cords and appliances quite unknown to anyone.
In the examining room Ivan was taken over by three persons - two women
and a man - all in white. First, they led Ivan to a corner, to a little
table, with the obvious purpose of getting something or other out of him.
Ivan began to ponder the situation. Three ways stood before him. The
first was extremely tempting: to hurl himself at all these lamps and
sophisticated little things, make the devil's own wreck of them, and thereby
express his protest at being detained for nothing. But today's Ivan already
differed significantly from the Ivan of yesterday, and this first way
appeared dubious to him: for all he knew, the thought might get rooted in
them that he was a violent madman. Therefore Ivan rejected the first way.
There was a second: immediately to begin his account of the consultant and
Pontius Pilate. However, yesterday's experience showed that this story
either was not believed or was taken somehow perversely. Therefore Ivan
renounced this second way as well, deciding to choose the third way -
withdrawal into proud silence.
He did not succeed in realizing it fully, and had willy-nilly to
answer, though charily and glumly, a whole series of questions. Thus they
got out of Ivan decidedly everything about his past life, down to when and
how he had fallen ill with scarlet fever fifteen years ago. A whole page
having been covered with writing about Ivan, it was turned over, and the
woman in white went on to questions about Ivan's relatives. Some sort of
humdrum started: who died when and why, and whether he drank or had venereal
disease, and more of the same. In conclusion he was asked to tell about
yesterday's events at the Patriarch's Ponds, but they did not pester him too
much, and were not surprised at the information about Pontius Pilate.
Here the woman yielded Ivan up to the man, who went to work on him
differently and no longer asked any questions. He took the temperature of
Ivan's body, counted his pulse, looked in Ivan's eyes, directing some sort
of lamp into them. Then the second woman came to the man's assistance, and
they pricked Ivan in the back with something, but not painfully, drew some
signs on the skin of his chest with the handle of a little hammer, tapped
his knees with the hammer, which made Ivan's legs jump, pricked his finger
and took his blood, pricked him inside his bent elbow, put some rubber
bracelets on his arms...
Ivan just smiled bitterly to himself and reflected on how stupidly and
strangely it had all happened. Just think! He had wanted to warn them all of
the danger threatening from the unknown consultant, had intended to catch
him, and all he had achieved was to wind up in some mysterious room, telling
all sorts of hogwash about Uncle Fyodor, who had done some hard drinking in
Vologda. Insufferably stupid!
Finally Ivan was released. He was escorted back to his room, where he
was given a cup of coffee, two soft-boiled eggs and white bread with butter.
Having eaten and drunk all that was offered him, Ivan decided to wait
for whoever was chief of this institution, and from this chief to obtain
both attention for himself and justice.
And he did come, and very soon after Ivan's breakfast. Unexpectedly,
the door of Ivan's room opened, and in came a lot of people in white coats.
At their head walked a man of about forty-five, as carefully shaven as
an actor, with pleasant but quite piercing eyes and courteous manners. The
whole retinue showed him tokens of attention and respect, and his entrance
therefore came out very solemn. 'Like Pontius Pilate!' thought Ivan. Yes,
this was unquestionably the chief. He sat down on a stool, while everyone
else remained standing.
'Doctor Stravinsky,' the seated man introduced himself to Ivan and gave
him a friendly look.
'Here, Alexander Nikolaevich,' someone with a trim beard said in a low
voice, and handed the chief Ivan's chart, all covered with writing.
They've sewn up a whole case!' Ivan thought. And the chief ran through
the chart with a practised eye, muttered 'Mm-hm, mm-hm...', and exchanged a
few phrases with those around him in a little-known language. 'And he speaks
Latin like Pilate,' Ivan thought sadly. Here one word made him jump; it was
the word 'schizophrenia' - alas, already uttered yesterday by the cursed
foreigner at the Patriarch's Ponds, and now repeated today by Professor
Stravinsky. 'And he knew that, too!' Ivan thought anxiously.
The chief apparently made it a rule to agree with and rejoice over
everything said to him by those around him, and to express this with the
words 'Very nice, very nice...'
'Very nice!' said Stravinsky, handing the chart back to someone, and he
addressed Ivan:
'You are a poet?'
`A poet,' Ivan replied glumly, and for the first time suddenly felt
some inexplicable loathing for poetry, and his own verses, coming to mind at
once, seemed to him for some reason distasteful.
Wrinkling his face, he asked Stravinsky in turn:
'You are a professor?'
To this, Stravinsky, with obliging courtesy, inclined his head.
'And you're the chief here?' Ivan continued.
Stravinsky nodded to this as well.
'I must speak with you,' Ivan Nikolaevich said meaningly.
That is what I'm here for,' returned Stravinsky.
'The thing is,' Ivan began, feeling his hour had come, `that I've been
got up as a madman, and nobody wants to listen to me!...'
'Oh, no, we shall hear you out with great attention,' Stravinsky said
seriously and soothingly, 'and by no means allow you to be got up as a
madman.'
'Listen, then: yesterday evening I met a mysterious person at the
Patriarch's Ponds, maybe a foreigner, maybe not, who knew beforehand about
Berlioz's death and has seen Pontius Pilate in person.'
The retinue listened to the poet silently and without stirring.
'Pilate? The Pilate who lived in the time of Jesus Christ?' Stravinsky
asked, narrowing his eyes at Ivan.
"The same.'
'Aha,' said Stravinsky, 'and this Berlioz died under a tram-car?'
'Precisely, he's the one who in my presence was killed by a tram-car
yesterday at the Ponds, and this same mysterious citizen...'
The acquaintance of Pontius Pilate?' asked Stravinsky, apparently
distinguished by great mental alacrity.
'Precisely him,' Ivan confirmed, studying Stravinsky. 'Well, so he said
beforehand that Annushka had spilled the sunflower oil... And he slipped
right on that place! How do you like that?' Ivan inquired significantly,
hoping to produce a great effect with his words.
But the effect did not ensue, and Stravinsky quite simply asked the
following question:
'And who is this Annushka?'
This question upset Ivan a little; his face twitched.
`Annushka is of absolutely no importance here,' he said nervously.
"Devil knows who she is. Just some fool from Sadovaya. What's important
is that he knew beforehand, you see, beforehand, about the sunflower oil! Do
you understand me?'
`Perfectly,' Stravinsky replied seriously and, touching the poet's
knee, added: 'Don't get excited, just continue.'
To continue,' said Ivan, trying to fall in with Stravinsky's tone, and
knowing already from bitter experience that only calm would help him, 'so,
then, this horrible type (and he's lying that he's a consultant) has some
extraordinary power!... For instance, you chase after him and it's
impossible to catch up with him... And there's also a little pair with him -
good ones, too, but in their own way: some long one in broken glasses and,
besides him, a cat of incredible size who rides the tram all by himself. And
besides,' interrupted by no one, Ivan went on talking with ever increasing
ardour and conviction, `he was personally on Pontius Pilate's balcony,
there's no doubt of it. So what is all this, eh? He must be arrested
immediately, otherwise he'll do untold harm.'
`So you're trying to get him arrested? Have I understood you
correctly?' asked Stravinsky.
'He's intelligent,' thought Ivan. "You've got to admit, even among
intellectuals you come across some of rare intelligence, there's no denying
it,' and he replied:
`Quite correctly! And how could I not be trying, just consider for
yourself! And meanwhile I've been forcibly detained here, they poke lamps
into my eyes, give me baths, question me for some reason about my Uncle
Fedya!... And he departed this world long ago! I demand to be released
immediately!'
'Well, there, very nice, very nice!' Stravinsky responded. 'Now
everything's clear. Really, what's the sense of keeping a healthy man in a
clinic? Very well, sir, I'll check you out of here right now, if you tell me
you're normal. Not prove, but merely tell. So, then, are you normal?'
Here complete silence fell, and the fat woman who had taken care of
Ivan in the morning looked at the professor with awe. Ivan thought once
again: 'Positively intelligent!'
The professor's offer pleased him very much, yet before replying he
thought very, very hard, wrinkling his forehead, and at last said firmly:
'I am normal.'
'Well, how very nice,' Stravinsky exclaimed with relief, `and if so,
let's reason logically. Let's take your day yesterday.' Here he turned and
Ivan's chart was immediately handed to him. 'In search of an unknown man who
recommended himself as an acquaintance of Pontius Pilate, you performed the
following actions yesterday.' Here Stravinsky began holding up his long
fingers, glancing now at the chart, now at Ivan. 'You hung a little icon on
your chest. Did you?'
'I did,' Ivan agreed sullenly.
'You fell off a fence and hurt your face. Right? Showed up in a
restaurant carrying a burning candle in your hand, in nothing but your
underwear, and in the restaurant you beat somebody. You were brought here
tied up. Having come here, you called the police and asked them to send out
machine-guns. Then you attempted to throw yourself out the window. Right?
The question is: can one, by acting in such fashion, catch or arrest
anyone?
And if you're a normal man, you yourself will answer: by no means. You
wish to leave here? Very well, sir. But allow me to ask, where are you going
to go?'
'To the police, of course,' Ivan replied, no longer so firmly, and
somewhat at a loss under the professor's gaze.
'Straight from here?'
'Mm-hm...'
'Without stopping at your place?' Stravinsky asked quickly.
'I have no time to stop anywhere! While I'm stopping at places, he'll
slip away!'
'So. And what will you tell the police to start with?'
'About Pontius Pilate,' Ivan Nikolaevich replied, and his eyes clouded
with a gloomy mist.
'Well, how very nice!' the won-over Stravinsky exclaimed and, turning
to the one with the little beard, ordered: 'Fyodor Vassilyevich, please
check citizen Homeless out for town. But don't put anyone in his room or
change the linen. In two hours citizen Homeless will be back here. So,
then,' he turned to the poet, 'I won't wish you success, because I don't
believe one iota in that success. See you soon!' He stood up, and his
retinue stirred.
'On what grounds will I be back here?' Ivan asked anxiously.
Stravinsky was as if waiting for this question, immediately sat down,
and began to speak:
`On the grounds that as soon as you show up at the police station in
your drawers and tell them you've seen a man who knew Pontius Pilate
personally, you'll instantly be brought here, and you'll find yourself again
in this very same room.'
'What have drawers got to do with it?' Ivan asked, gazing around in
bewilderment.
'It's mainly Pontius Pilate. But the drawers, too. Because we'll take
the clinic underwear from you and give you back your clothes. And you were
delivered here in your drawers. And yet you were by no means going to stop
at your place, though I dropped you a hint. Then comes Pilate... and that's
it.'
Here something strange happened with Ivan Nikolaevich. His will seemed
to crack, and he felt himself weak, in need of advice.
'What am I to do, then?' he asked, timidly this time.
"Well, how very nice!' Stravinsky replied. 'A most reasonable question.
Now I am going to tell you what actually happened to you. Yesterday someone
frightened you badly and upset you with a story about Pontius Pilate and
other things. And so you, a very nervous and high-strung man, started going
around the city, telling about Pontius Pilate. It's quite natural that
you're taken for a madman. Your salvation now lies in just one thing -
complete peace. And you absolutely must remain here.'
'But he has to be caught!' Ivan exclaimed, imploringly now.
'Very good, sir, but why should you go running around yourself? Explain
all your suspicions and accusations against this man on paper. Nothing could
be simpler than to send your declaration to the proper quarters, and if, as
you think, we are dealing with a criminal, it will be clarified very
quickly. But only on one condition: don't strain your head, and try to think
less about Pontius Pilate. People say all kinds of things! One mustn't
believe everything.'
'Understood!' Ivan declared resolutely. `I ask to be given pen and
paper.'
'Give him paper and a short pencil,' Stravinsky ordered the fat woman,
and to Ivan he said: 'But I don't advise you to write today.'
'No, no, today, today without fail!' Ivan cried out in alarm.
'Well, all right. Only don't strain your head. If it doesn't come out
today, it will tomorrow.'
'He'll escape.'
'Oh, no,' Stravinsky objected confidently, 'he won't escape anywhere, I
guarantee that. And remember that here with us you'll be helped in all
possible ways, and without us nothing will come of it. Do you hear me?'
Stravinsky suddenly asked meaningly and took Ivan Nikolaevich by both hands.
Holding them in his own, he repeated for a long time, his eyes fixed on
Ivan's:
'You'll be helped here... do you hear me?... You'll be helped here...
you'll get relief... it's quiet here, all peaceful... you'll be helped
here...'
Ivan Nikolaevich unexpectedly yawned, and the expression on his face
softened.
'Yes, yes,' he said quietly.
'Well, how very nice!' Stravinsky concluded the conversation in his
usual way and stood up: 'Goodbye!' He shook Ivan's hand and, on his way out,
turned to the one with the little beard and said: 'Yes, and try oxygen...
and baths.'
A few moments later there was no Stravinsky or his retinue before Ivan.
Beyond the window grille, in the noonday sun, the joyful and springtime
pine wood stood beautiful on the other bank and, closer by, the river
sparkled.
CHAPTER 9. Koroviev's Stunts
Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, chairman of the tenants' association' [1] of
no.302-bis on Sadovaya Street in Moscow, where the late Berlioz used to
reside, had been having the most terrible troubles, starting from that
Wednesday night.
At midnight, as we already know, a commission of which Zheldybin formed
a part came to the house, summoned Nikanor Ivanovich, told him about the
death of Berlioz, and together with him went to apartment no.50.
There the sealing of the deceased's manuscripts and belongings was
carried out. Neither Grunya, the daytime housekeeper, nor the light-minded
Stepan Bogdanovich was there at the time. The commission announced to
Nikanor Ivanovich that it would take the deceased's manuscripts for sorting
out, that his living space, that is, three rooms (the former study, living
room and dining room of the jeweller's wife), reverted to the disposal of
the tenants' association, and that the belongings were to be kept in the
aforementioned living space until the heirs were announced.
The news of Berlioz's death spread through the whole house with a sort
of supernatural speed, and as of seven o'clock Thursday morning, Bosoy began
to receive telephone calls and then personal visits with declarations
containing claims to the deceased's living space. In the period of two
hours, Nikanor Ivanovich received thirty-two such declarations.
They contained pleas, threats, libels, denunciations, promises to do
renovations at their own expense, references to unbearable overcrowding and
the impossibility of living in the same apartment with bandits. Among others
there were a description, staggering in its artistic power, of the theft
from apartment no. 51 of some meat dumplings, tucked directly into the
pocket of a suit jacket, two vows to end life by suicide and one confession
of secret pregnancy.
Nikanor Ivanovich was called out to the front hall of his apartment,
plucked by the sleeve, whispered to, winked at, promised that he would not
be left the loser.
This torture went on until noon, when Nikanor Ivanovich simply fled his
apartment for the management office by the gate, but when he saw them lying
in wait for him there, too, he fled that place as well. Having somehow
shaken off those who followed on his heels across the asphalt-paved
courtyard, Nikanor Ivanovich disappeared into the sixth entrance and went up
to the fifth floor, where this vile apartment no.50 was located.
After catching his breath on the landing, the corpulent Nikanor
Ivanovich rang, but no one opened for him. He rang again, and then again,
and started grumbling and swearing quietly. Even then no one opened. His
patience exhausted, Nikanor Ivanovich took from his pocket a bunch of
duplicate keys belonging to the house management, opened the door with a
sovereign hand, and went in.
'Hey, housekeeper!' Nikanor Ivanovich cried in the semi-dark front
hall. 'Grunya, or whatever your name is! ... Are you here?'
No one responded.
Then Nikanor Ivanovich took a folding ruler from his briefcase, removed
the seal from the door to the study, and stepped in. Stepped in, yes, but
halted in amazement in the doorway and even gave a start.
At the deceased's desk sat an unknown, skinny, long citizen in a little
checkered jacket, a jockey's cap, and a pince-nez... well, in short, that
same one.
'And who might you be, citizen?' Nikanor Ivanovich asked fearfully.
'Hah! Nikanor Ivanovich!' the unexpected citizen yelled in a rattling
tenor and, jumping up, greeted the chairman with a forced and sudden
handshake. This greeting by no means gladdened Nikanor Ivanovich.
'Excuse me,' he said suspiciously, 'but who might you be? Are you an
official person?'
'Eh, Nikanor Ivanovich!' the unknown man exclaimed soulfully. "What are
official and unofficial persons? It all depends on your point of view on the
subject. It's all fluctuating and relative, Nikanor Ivanovich. Today I'm an
unofficial person, and tomorrow, lo and behold, I'm an official one! And it
also happens the other way round - oh, how it does!'
This argument in no way satisfied the chairman of the house management.
Being a generally suspicious person by nature, he concluded that the man
holding forth in front of him was precisely an unofficial person, and
perhaps even an idle one.
"Yes, but who might you be? What's your name?' the chairman inquired
with increasing severity and even began to advance upon the unknown man.
`My name,' the citizen responded, not a bit put out by the severity,
'well, let's say it's Koroviev. But wouldn't you like a little snack,
Nikanor Ivanovich? No formalities, eh?'
`Excuse me,' Nikanor Ivanovich began, indignantly now, `what have
snacks got to do with it!' (We must confess, unpleasant as it is, that
Nikanor Ivanovich was of a somewhat rude nature.) 'Sitting in the deceased's
half is not permitted! What are you doing here?'
`Have a seat, Nikanor Ivanovich,' the citizen went on yelling, not a
bit at a loss, and began fussing about offering the chairman a seat.
Utterly infuriated, Nikanor Ivanovich rejected the seat and screamed:
'But who are you?'
'I, if you please, serve as interpreter for a foreign individual who
has taken up residence in this apartment,' the man calling himself Koroviev
introduced himself and clicked the heels of his scuffed, unpolished shoes.
Nikanor Ivanovich opened his mouth. The presence of some foreigner in
this apartment, with an interpreter to boot, came as a complete surprise to
him, and he demanded explanations.
The interpreter explained willingly. A foreign artiste, Mr Woland, had
been kindly invited by the director of the Variety, Stepan Bogdanovich
Likhodeev, to spend the time of his performances, a week or so, in his
apartment, about which he had written to Nikanor Ivanovich yesterday,
requesting that he register the foreigner as a temporary resident, while
Likhodeev himself took a trip to Yalta.
'He never wrote me anything,' the chairman said in amazement.
`Just look through your briefcase, Nikanor Ivanovich,' Koroviev
suggested sweetly.
Nikanor Ivanovich, shrugging his shoulders, opened the briefcase and
found Likhodeev's letter in it.
`How could I have forgotten about it?' Nikanor Ivanovich muttered,
looking dully at the opened envelope.
`All sorts of things happen, Nikanor Ivanovich, all sorts!' Koroviev
rattled. 'Absent-mindedness, absent-mindedness, fatigue and high blood
pressure, my dear friend Nikanor Ivanovich! I'm terribly absent-minded
myself! Someday, over a glass, I'll tell you a few facts from my biography -
you'll die laughing!'
'And when is Likhodeev going to Yalta?'
`He's already gone, gone!' the interpreter cried. `He's already
wheeling along, you know! He's already devil knows where!' And here the
interpreter waved his arms like the wings of a windmill.
Nikanor Ivanovich declared that he must see the foreigner in person,
but got a refusal on that from the interpreter: quite impossible. He's busy.
Training the cat.
'The cat I can show you, if you like,' Koroviev offered.
This Nikanor Ivanovich refused in his turn, and the interpreter
straight away made the chairman an unexpected but quite interesting
proposal: seeing that Mr Woland had no desire whatsoever to live in a hotel,
and was accustomed to having a lot of space, why shouldn't the tenants'
association rent to him, Woland, for one little week, the time of his
performances in Moscow, the whole of the apartment, that is, the deceased's
rooms as well?
'It's all the same to him - the deceased - you must agree, Nikanor
Ivanovich,' Koroviev whispered hoarsely. 'He doesn't need the apartment now,
does he?'
Nikanor Ivanovich, somewhat perplexed, objected that foreigners ought
to live at the Metropol, and not in private apartments at all...
`I'm telling you, he's capricious as devil knows what!' Koroviev
whispered. 'He just doesn't want to! He doesn't like hotels! I've had them
up to here, these foreign tourists!' Koroviev complained confidentially,
jabbing his finger at his sinewy neck. 'Believe me, they wring the soul
right out of you! They come and either spy on you like the lowest son of a
bitch, or else torment you with their caprices - this isn't right and that
isn't right!... And for your association, Nikanor Ivanovich, it's a sheer
gain and an obvious profit. He won't stint on money.' Koroviev looked around
and then whispered into the chairman's ear: 'A millionaire!'
The interpreter's offer made clear practical sense, it was a very solid
offer, yet there was something remarkably unsolid in his manner of speaking,
and in his clothes, and in that loathsome, good-for-nothing pince-nez. As a
result, something vague weighed on the chairman's soul, but he nevertheless
decided to accept the offer. The thing was that the tenants' association,
alas, had quite a sizeable deficit. Fuel had to be bought for the heating
system by fall, but who was going to shell out for it - no one knew. But
with the foreign tourist's money, it might be possible to wriggle out of it.
However, the practical and prudent Nikanor Ivanovich said he would
first have to settle the question with the foreign tourist bureau.
`I understand!' Koroviev cried out. `You've got to settle it!
Absolutely! Here's the telephone, Nikanor Ivanovich, settle it at once!
And don't be shy about the money,' he added in a whisper, drawing the
chairman to the telephone in the front hall, 'if he won't pay, who will! You
should see the villa he's got in Nice! Next summer, when you go abroad, come
especially to see it - you'll gasp!'
The business with the foreign tourist bureau was arranged over the
phone with an extraordinary speed, quite amazing to the chairman. It turned
out that they already knew about Mr Woland's intention of staying in
Likhodeev's private apartment and had no objections to it.
`That's wonderful!' Koroviev yelled. Somewhat stunned by his chatter,
the chairman announced that the tenants' association agreed to rent
apartment no.50 for a week to the artiste Woland, for... Nikanor Ivanovich
faltered a little, then said:
'For five hundred roubles a day.'
Here Koroviev utterly amazed the chairman. Winking thievishly in the
direction of the bedroom, from which the soft leaps of a heavy cat could be
heard, he rasped out:
'So it comes to three thousand five hundred for the week?'
To which Nikanor Ivanovich thought he was going to add: 'Some appetite
you've got, Nikanor Ivanovich!' but Koroviev said something quite different:
'What kind of money is that? Ask five, he'll pay it.'
Grinning perplexedly, Nikanor Ivanovich, without noticing how, found
himself at the deceased's writing desk, where Koroviev with great speed and
dexterity drew up a contract in two copies. Then he flew to the bedroom with
them and came back, both copies now bearing the foreigner's sweeping
signature. The chairman also signed the contract. Here Koroviev asked for a
receipt for five...
Write it out, write it out, Nikanor Ivanovich!... thousand roubles...'
And with words somehow unsuited to serious business - 'Bin, zwei, drei!' -
he laid out for the chairman five stacks of new banknotes.
The counting-up took place, interspersed with Koroviev's quips and
quiddities, such as 'Cash loves counting', 'Your own eye won't lie', and
others of the same sort.
After counting the money, the chairman received from Koroviev the
foreigner's passport for temporary registration, put it, together with the
contract and the money, into his briefcase, and, somehow unable to help
himself, sheepishly asked for a free pass...
'Don't mention it!' bellowed Koroviev. 'How many tickets do you want,
Nikanor Ivanovich - twelve, fifteen?'
The flabbergasted chairman explained that all he needed was a couple of
passes, for himself and Pelageya Antonovna, his wife.
Koroviev snatched out a notebook at once and dashed off a pass for
Nikanor Ivanovich, for two persons in the front row. And with his left hand
the interpreter deftly slipped this pass to Nikanor Ivanovich, while with
his right he put into the chairman's other hand a thick, crackling wad.
Casting an eye on it, Nikanor Ivanovich blushed deeply and began to
push it away.
'It isn't done...' he murmured.
'I won't hear of it,' Koroviev whispered right in his ear. 'With us
it's not done, but with foreigners it is. You'll offend him, Nikanor
Ivanovich, and that's embarrassing. You've worked hard...'
`It's severely punishable,' the chairman whispered very, very softly
and glanced over his shoulder.
'But where are the witnesses?' Koroviev whispered into his other ear.
'I ask you, where are they? You don't think... ?'
Here, as the chairman insisted afterwards, a miracle occurred: the wad
crept into his briefcase by itself. And then the chairman, somehow limp and
even broken, found himself on the stairs. A whirlwind of thoughts raged in
his head. There was the villa in Nice, and the trained cat, and the thought
that there were in fact no witnesses, and that Pelageya Antonovna would be
delighted with the pass. They were incoherent thoughts, but generally
pleasant. But, all the same, somewhere, some little needle kept pricking the
chairman in the very bottom of his soul. This was the needle of anxiety.
Besides, right then on the stairs the chairman was seized, as with a
stroke, by the thought: 'But how did the interpreter get into the study if
the door was sealed?! And how was it that he, Nikanor Ivanovich, had not
asked about it?' For some time the chairman stood staring like a sheep at
the steps of the stairway, but then he decided to spit on it and not torment
himself with intricate questions...
As soon as the chairman left the apartment, a low voice came from the
bedroom:
'I didn't like this Nikanor Ivanovich. He is a chiseller and a crook.
Can it be arranged so that he doesn't come any more?'
'Messire, you have only to say the word...' Koroviev responded from
somewhere, not in a rattling but in a very clear and resounding voice.
And at once the accursed interpreter turned up in the front hall,
dialled a number there, and for some reason began speaking very tearfully
into the receiver:
'Hello! I consider it my duty to inform you that the chairman of our
tenants' association at no.502-bis on Sadovaya, Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, is
speculating in foreign currency. [2] At the present moment, in his apartment
no. 55, he has four hundred dollars wrapped up in newspaper in the
ventilation of the privy. This is Timofei Kvastsov speaking, a tenant of the
said house, apartment no. 11. But I adjure you to keep my name a secret. I
fear the vengeance of the above-stated chairman.'
And he hung up, the scoundrel!
What happened next in apartment no.50 is not known, but it is known
what happened at Nikanor Ivanovich's. Having locked himself in the privy
with the hook, he took from his briefcase the wad foisted on him by the
interpreter and satisfied himself that it contained four hundred roubles.
Nikanor Ivanovich wrapped this wad in a scrap of newspaper and put it
into the ventilation duct.
Five minutes later the chairman was sitting at the table in his small
dining room. His wife brought pickled herring from the kitchen, neatly
sliced and thickly sprinkled with green onion. Nikanor Ivanovich poured
himself a dram of vodka, drank it, poured another, drank it, picked up three
pieces of herring on his fork... and at that moment the doorbell rang.
Pelageya Antonovna was just bringing in a steaming pot which, one could
tell at once from a single glance, contained, amidst a fiery borscht, that
than which there is nothing more delicious in the world - a marrow bone.
Swallowing his spittle, Nikanor Ivanovich growled like a dog:
'Damn them all! Won't allow a man to eat... Don't let anyone in, I'm
not here, not here... If it's about the apartment, tell them to stop
blathering, there'll be a meeting next week.'
His wife ran to the front hall, while Nikanor Ivanovich, using a ladle,
drew from the fire-breathing lake - it, the bone, cracked lengthwise. And at
that moment two citizens entered the dining room, with Pelageya Antonovna
following them, for some reason looking very pale. Seeing the citizens,
Nikanor Ivanovich also turned white and stood up.
'Where's the Jakes?' the first one, in a white side-buttoned shirt,
asked with a preoccupied air.
Something thudded against the dining table (this was Nikanor Ivanovich
dropping the ladle on to the oilcloth).
'This way, this way,' Pelageya Antonovna replied in a patter.
And the visitors immediately hastened to the corridor.
^What's the matter?' Nikanor Ivanovich asked quietly, going after the
visitors. `There can't be anything like that in our apartment... And - your
papers... begging your pardon...'
The first, without stopping, showed Nikanor Ivanovich a paper, and the
second was at the same moment standing on a stool in the privy, his arm in
the ventilation duct. Everything went dark in Nikanor Ivanovich's eyes. The
newspaper was removed, but in the wad there were not roubles but some
unknown money, bluish-greenish, and with the portrait of some old man.
However, Nikanor Ivanovich saw it all dimly, there were some sort of
spots floating in front of his eyes.
'Dollars in the ventilation...' the first said pensively and asked
Nikanor Ivanovich gently and courteously: 'Your little wad?'
'No!' Nikanor Ivanovich replied in a dreadful voice. 'Enemies stuck me
with it!'
'That happens,' the first agreed and added, again gently: 'Well, you're
going to have to turn in the rest.'
'I haven't got any! I swear to God, I never laid a finger on it!' the
chairman cried out desperately.
He dashed to the chest, pulled a drawer out with a clatter, and from it
the briefcase, crying out incoherently:
'Here's the contract... that vermin of an interpreter stuck me with
it... Koroviev... in a pince-nez!...'
He opened the briefcase, glanced into it, put a hand inside, went blue
in the face, and dropped the briefcase into the borscht. There was nothing
in the briefcase: no letter from Styopa, no contract, no foreigner's
passport, no money, no theatre pass. In short, nothing except a folding
ruler.
'Comrades!' the chairman cried frenziedly. `Catch them! There are
unclean powers in our house!'
It is not known what Pelageya Antonovna imagined here, only she clasped
her hands and cried:
'Repent, Ivanych! You'll get off lighter.'
His eyes bloodshot, Nikanor Ivanovich raised his fists over his wife's
head, croaking:
'Ohh, you damned fool!'
Here he went slack and sank down on a chair, evidently resolved to
submit to the inevitable.
During this time, Timofei Kondratievich Kvastsov stood on the landing,
placing now his ear, now his eye to the keyhole of the door to the
chairman's apartment, melting with curiosity.
Five minutes later the tenants of the house who were in the courtyard
saw the chairman, accompanied by two other persons, proceed directly to the
gates of the house. It was said that Nikanor Ivanovich looked awful,
staggered like a drunk man as he passed, and was muttering something.
And an hour after that an unknown citizen appeared in apartment no. 11,
just as Timofei Kondratievich, spluttering with delight, was telling some
other tenants how the chairman got pinched, motioned to Timofei
Kondratievich with his finger to come from the kitchen to the front hall,
said something to him, and together they vanished.
CHAPTER 10. News From Yalta
At the same time that disaster struck Nikanor Ivanovich, not far away
from no.502-bis, on the same Sadovaya Street, in the office of the financial
director of the Variety Theatre, Rimsky, there sat two men: Rimsky himself,
and the administrator of the Variety, Varenukha [1].'
The big office on the second floor of the theatre had two windows on
Sadovaya and one, just behind the back of the findirector, who was sitting
at his desk, facing the summer garden of the Variety, where there were
refreshment stands, a shooting gallery and an open-air stage. The
furnishings of the office, apart from the desk, consisted of a bunch of old
posters hanging on the wall, a small table with a carafe of water on it,
four armchairs and, in the corner, a stand on which stood a dust-covered
scale model of some past review. Well, it goes without saying that, in
addition, there was in the office a small, shabby, peeling fireproof safe,
to Rimsky's left, next to the desk.
Rimsky, now sitting at his desk, had been in bad spirits since morning,
while Varenukha, on the contrary, was very animated and somehow especially
restlessly active. Yet there was no outlet for his energy.
Varenukha was presently hiding in the findirector's office to escape
the seekers of free passes, who poisoned his life, especially on days when
the programme changed. And today was precisely such a day. As soon as the
telephone started to ring, Varenukha would pick up the receiver and lie into
it:
"Who? Varenukha? He's not here. He stepped out.'
'Please call Likhodeev again,' Rimsky asked vexedly.
'He's not home. I even sent Karpov, there's no one in the apartment.'
`Devil knows what's going on!' Rimisky hissed, clacking on the adding
machine.
The door opened and an usher dragged in a thick stack of freshly
printed extra posters; in big red letters on a green background was printed:
Today and Every Day at the Variety Theatre
an Additional Programme
PROFESSOR WOLAND
S