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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







     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]




     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.




     '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.



     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.




     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.





     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.




     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.





     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.





     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