I know that I haven't been here for a while, but I just want to try and get things back on track. I have yet to see what our new book of the month is going to be, but if you guys could start participating a bit again, it would be much appreciated. Thanks!

CHAPTER 15. Nikanor Ivanovich's Dream

     It  is  not  difficult  to guess that  the  fat  man  with  the  purple
physiognomy  who was put in room 119  of the  clinic  was  Nikanor Ivanovich
Bosoy.
     He got to Professor Stravinsky  not at once,  however,  but after first
visiting  another  place [1]. Of this other place little remained in Nikanor
Ivanovich's memory. He recalled only a desk, a bookcase and a sofa.
     There a conversation was held with Nikanor Ivanovich, who had some sort
of haze before his eyes from the rush of blood and mental agitation, but the
conversation  came out somehow strange, muddled, or, better  to say, did not
come out at all.
     The very first question put to Nikanor Ivanovich was the following:
     'Are you  Nikanor  Ivanovich Bosoy, chairman of the house  committee at
no.502-bis on Sadovaya Street?'
     To  this  Nikanor  Ivanovich, bursting into terrible laughter,  replied
literally thus:
     'I'm  Nikanor, of course  I'm  Nikanor!  But  what  the deuce  kind  of
chairman am I?'
     'Meaning what?' the question was asked with a narrowing of eyes.
     `Meaning,'  he  replied,  `that  if  I  was  chairman,  I  should  have
determined at once that he was  an unclean power! Otherwise  - what is it? A
cracked pince-nez, all in rags... what kind of foreigner's interpreter could
he be?'
     'Who are you talking about?' Nikanor Ivanovich was asked.
     'Koroviev!' Nikanor Ivanovich cried  out.  `Got himself lodged  in  our
apartment number fifty. Write it down - Koroviev! He must be caught at once.
Write it down - the sixth entrance. He's there.'
     `Where  did you get  the currency?'  Nikanor Ivanovich was  asked  soul
fully.
     'As God is  true, as God is almighty,' Nikanor Ivanovich began, he sees
everything, and it serves me right. I never  laid a finger on it, never even
suspected what it was, this currency! God is punishing me for my iniquity,'
     Nikanor Ivanovich went on with feeling, now buttoning, now  unbuttoning
his shirt,  now  crossing himself. 'I took! I took, but I  took ours. Soviet
money! I'd  register  people for  money,  I  don't argue,  it happened.  Our
secretary Bedsornev is a good one,  too, another good one! Frankly speaking,
there's nothing but thieves in  the  house  management...  But I never  took
currency!'
     To the  request that he stop playing the fool and tell how  the dollars
got  into  the ventilation, Nikanor  Ivanovich went on his knees and swayed,
opening his mouth as if he meant to swallow a section of the parquet.
     'If you want,'  he mumbled, 'I'll eat  dirt  that  I didn't do  it! And
Koroviev - he's the devil!'
     All patience has its  limits, and the voice at the desk was now raised,
hinting  to Nikanor Ivanovich that it was time he  began  speaking  in human
language.
     Here the room with  that same  sofa resounded  with Nikanor Ivanovich's
wild roaring, as he jumped up from his knees:
     'There  he  is!  There,  behind the bookcase! He's  grinning!  And  his
pince-nez... Hold him! Spray the room with holy water!'
     The blood left Nikanor Ivanovich's face. Trembling, he  made crosses in
the air, rushing  to the door  and back,  intoned  some  prayer, and finally
began spouting sheer gibberish.
     It  became perfectly  clear that  Nikanor  Ivanovich was unfit for  any
conversation. He was taken  out and put in  a separate room, where he calmed
down somewhat and only prayed and sobbed.
     They did, of course, go to Sadovaya and visit apartment no.50. But they
did not find any Koroviev there, and no one  in the house either knew or had
seen any Koroviev. The apartment occupied by the late Berlioz, as well as by
the Yalta-visiting  Likhodeev,  was empty,  and in the study wax seals  hung
peacefully  on  the  bookcases, unbroken  by anyone.  With  that  they  left
Sadovaya, and  there  also  departed with them  the perplexed and dispirited
secretary of the house management, Bedsornev.
     In the evening Nikanor Ivanovich was delivered to Stravinsky's clinic.
     There he  became  so  agitated  that  an injection,  made according  to
Stravinsky's recipe, had  to  be  given him, and  only  after  midnight  did
Nikanor Ivanovich fall asleep in room  119, every now  and  then emitting  a
heavy, painful moan.
     But the longer  he  slept,  the  easier his  sleep became.  He  stopped
tossing and groaning, his breathing became easy and regular, and he was left
alone. Then  Nikanor Ivanovich was visited by a dream, at the basis of which
undoubtedly lay the experience of that day. It began with  Nikanor Ivanovich
seeing as  it were some people with golden  trumpets in their  hands leading
him, and very solemnly, to a big lacquered door. At this door his companions
played as it  were a nourish for Nikanor Ivanovich,  and then from the sky a
resounding bass said merrily:
     'Welcome, Nikanor Ivanovich, turn over your currency!'
     Exceedingly astonished, Nikanor Ivanovich saw a black loudspeaker above
him.
     Then he found himself for some reason in a theatre house, where crystal
chandeliers blazed  under a gilded ceiling  and  Quinquet lamps  [2] on  the
walls. Everything was  as it ought  to be in a  small-sized but very  costly
theatre. There was a stage closed  off by a velvet curtain, its  dark cerise
background spangled, as if with stars, with oversized gold pieces, there was
a prompter's box, and there was even an audience.
     What surprised Nikanor Ivanovich was that this audience was all  of the
same sex  - male -  and  all for some reason bearded. Besides that,  it  was
striking that there were no seats  in the theatre,  and the audience was all
sitting on the floor, splendidly polished and slippery.
     Abashed in  this new and big  company, Nikanor Ivanovich, after a brief
hesitation,  followed  the  general example and  sat  down  on  the  parquet
Turkish-fashion,  huddled between some stalwart, bearded redhead and another
citizen, pale and quite overgrown. None of the sitters paid any attention to
the newly arrived spectator.
     Here the soft ringing of a bell was heard, the lights in the house went
out, and the  curtain opened to reveal a lighted stage with  an  armchair, a
little  table  on  which  stood a golden  bell,  and  a solid  black  velvet
backdrop.
     An artiste came out  from  the  wings in an  evening  jacket,  smoothly
shaven,  his hair neatly parted, young and with  very pleasant features. The
audience in the house livened up, and everyone turned towards the stage. The
artiste advanced to the prompter's box and rubbed his hands.
     'All sitting?'[3] he asked in a soft baritone and smiled to the house.
     'Sitting,  sitting,' a chorus of tenors and  basses answered  from  the
house.
     'Hm ...' the artiste began pensively, 'and how you're not sick of it. I
just don't understand! Everybody  else is out  walking around  now, enjoying
the spring sun and the warmth,  and you're stuck in here on  the  floor of a
stuffy theatre!  Is  the  programme so interesting? Tastes differ, however,'
the artiste concluded philosophically.
     Then he  changed both the timbre  of his voice and its intonation,  and
announced gaily and resoundingly:
     `And  now  for the  next  number on our programme  -  Nikanor Ivanovich
Bosoy,  chairman  of  a  house committee and director of a dietetic kitchen.
Nikanor Ivanovich, on-stage!'
     General  applause greeted the artiste. The surprised Nikanor  Ivanovich
goggled his eyes, while the master of ceremonies, blocking the glare  of the
footlights  with  his  hand,  located  him  among the  sitters and  tenderly
beckoned  him  on-stage  with  his finger.  And  Nikanor Ivanovich,  without
knowing how, found himself on-stage. Beams of coloured light struck his eyes
from in front and below, which at once caused the house and the audience  to
sink into darkness.
     'Well,  Nikanor Ivanovich,  set  us  a good  example,  sir,' the  young
artiste said soulfully, 'turn over your currency.'
     Silence ensued.  Nikanor Ivanovich took a deep breath and quietly began
to speak:
     'I swear to God that I...'
     But before he had time to get the words out, the whole house burst into
shouts of indignation. Nikanor Ivanovich got confused and fell silent.
     'As far as I understand you,' said the programme announcer, 'you wanted
to  swear  to  God  that  you  haven't got  any  currency?',  and  he  gazed
sympathetically at Nikanor Ivanovich.
     'Exactly right, I haven't,' replied Nikanor Ivanovich.
     'Right,' responded the artiste, 'and... excuse the  indiscretion, where
did the four  hundred dollars that were found in the privy  of the apartment
of which you and your wife are the sole inhabitants come from?'
     'Magic!' someone in the dark house said with obvious irony.
     'Exactly  right - magic,' Nikanor  Ivanovich timidly  replied,  vaguely
addressing either the artiste or the dark house, and he explained:
     'Unclean powers, the checkered interpreter stuck me with them.'
     And  again the house raised an indignant  roar. When silence came,  the
artiste said:
     'See what La Fontaine fables  I have to listen to! Stuck  him with four
hundred dollars! Now, all of you here are currency dealers, so I address you
as experts: is that conceivable?'
     We're not currency  dealers,'  various offended  voices came  from  the
theatre, 'but, no, it's not conceivable!'
     'I'm entirely  of the  same mind,' the artiste said firmly, `and let me
ask you: what is it that one can be stuck with?'
     'A baby!' someone cried from the house.
     `Absolutely correct,' the  programme announcer confirmed,  'a baby,  an
anonymous letter, a tract,  an  infernal  machine, anything else, but no one
will  stick  you with  four  hundred dollars, for such idiots don't exist in
nature.' And turning to  Nikanor Ivanovich,  the artiste added reproachfully
and sorrowfully:
     `You've upset me, Nikanor Ivanovich, and I was counting on you. So, our
number didn't come off.'
     Whistles came from the house, addressed to Nikanor Ivanovich.
     'He's a currency dealer,' they shouted from the house, 'and we innocent
ones have to suffer for the likes of him!'
     `Don't scold  him,'  the  master  of  ceremonies  said  softly,  'he'll
repent.' And turning to  Nikanor Ivanovich, his blue eyes filled with tears,
he added: 'Well, Nikanor Ivanovich, you may go to your place.'
     After that the artiste rang the bell and announced loudly:
     'Intermission, you blackguards!'
     The shaken Nikanor Ivanovich, who unexpectedly for himself had become a
participant in some sort  of theatre programme, again found  himself in  his
place on  the floor. Here he  dreamed that  the  house  was plunged in total
darkness, and fiery red words leaped out on the walls:
     Turn over your currency!'  Then the curtain opened again and the master
of ceremonies invited:
     'I call Sergei Gerardovich Dunchil to the stage.'
     Dunchil turned out to be a fine-looking but rather unkempt man of about
fifty.
     `Sergei  Gerardovich,' the master  of ceremonies addressed him, 'you've
been sitting here for a  month  and  a half now, stubbornly refusing to turn
over  the currency you still have, while the country is  in need of it,  and
you  have  no  use  for  it whatsoever.  And  still you  persist.  You're an
intelligent  man, you understand it  all  perfectly well,  and yet you don't
want to comply with me.'
     To  my regret, there  is  nothing  I  can  do,  since  I have  no  more
currency,' Dunchil calmly replied.
     `Don't  you  at  least  have  some  diamonds?' asked  the artiste.  'No
diamonds either.'
     The  artiste hung  his head and  pondered,  then  clapped  his hands. A
middle-aged lady  came out from the wings, fashionably dressed - that is, in
a  collarless  coat  and a tiny hat.  The  lady looked worried, but  Dunchil
glanced at her without moving an eyebrow.
     'Who is this  lady?' the programme announcer asked Dunchil. 'That is my
wife,'  Dunchil replied with dignity and looked at the lady's long neck with
a certain repugnance.
     We  have  troubled  you,  Madame  Dunchil,' the  master  of  ceremonies
adverted to the lady, 'with regard  to  the following: we wanted to ask you,
does your husband have any more currency?'
     `He turned  it  all  over  the  other  time,'  Madame  Dunchil  replied
nervously.
     'Right,' said  the artiste, 'well, then, if it's  so, it's  so.  If  he
turned  it  all  over,  then  we  ought  to  part  with  Sergei  Gerardovich
immediately,  there's nothing else to do!  If you wish, Sergei  Gerardovich,
you may leave the theatre.' And the artiste made a regal gesture.
     Dunchil turned calmly and with dignity, and headed for the wings. 'Just
a moment!'  the master of ceremonies stopped  him. 'Allow  me  on parting to
show you  one  more number from our  programme.' And  again  he  clapped his
hands.
     The black backdrop parted, and on to the stage came a young beauty in a
ball  gown, holding in her hands a golden  tray on which lay a fat wad  tied
with candy-box ribbon and a diamond necklace from which blue, yellow and red
fire leaped in all directions.
     Dunchil took a step back and his face went pale. The house froze.
     'Eighteen thousand dollars  and a  necklace  worth  forty  thousand  in
gold,'  the artiste solemnly announced,  `kept  by Sergei Gerardovich in the
city of Kharkov, in the apartment  of  his mistress,  Ida Herkulanovna Vors,
whom we have the pleasure of  seeing here before us and who so kindly helped
in discovering these  treasures  - priceless, vet useless  in the hands of a
private person. Many thanks, Ida Herkulanovna!'
     The  beauty  smiled,   flashing  her  teeth,  and  her  lush  eyelashes
fluttered. 'And under  your so very dignified mask,' the artiste adverted to
Dunchil, `is  concealed a  greedy  spider and an astonishing bamboozler  and
liar.  You  wore everyone  out during this month and a half  with your  dull
obstinacy.  Go home now, and  let the hell your wife sets up for you be your
punishment.'
     Dunchil swayed and, it  seems, wanted to fall down, but was held  up by
someone's sympathetic hands. Here  the front curtain  dropped and  concealed
all those on-stage.
     Furious  applause shook the  house, so much so  that Nikanor  Ivanovich
fancied the lights were leaping in the  chandeliers. When the  front curtain
went up, there was no one on-stage except the lone  artiste. Greeted  with a
second burst of applause, he bowed and began to speak:
     'In the person of this Dunchil, our programme has shown  you a  typical
ass. I  did  have  the pleasure of saying  yesterday that  the concealing of
currency is senseless. No one can make use of it  under any circumstances, I
assure you. Let's  take this  same Dunchil.  He  gets a splendid  salary and
doesn't  want for  anything.  He  has  a  splendid  apartment, a  wife and a
beautiful mistress. But no, instead of living quietly and peacefully without
any  troubles,  having turned  over  the currency and stones, this mercenary
blockhead  gets himself exposed in  front  of everybody,  and to top it  off
contracts  major  family  trouble.  So,  who's   going  to  turn  over?  Any
volunteers?  In that case, for  the next number on  our programme, a  famous
dramatic  talent,  the actor  Kurolesov, Sawa Potapovich, especially invited
here,  will  perform excerpts  from  The  Covetous  Knight [4]  by the  poet
Pushkin.'
     The promised  Kurolesov was not slow in coming on stage  and turned out
to be a strapping and beefy man, clean-shaven, in a tailcoat and white tie.
     Without any  preliminaries,  he  concocted a gloomy  face,  knitted his
brows, and began speaking  in an unnatural  voice, glancing sidelong at  the
golden bell:
     `As a young scapegrace awaits a tryst with some sly strumpet...'[5]
     And Kurolesov  told  many  bad things about himself. Nikanor  Ivanovich
heard Kurolesov confess that some  wretched widow  had gone  on her knees to
him, howling, in the rain, but had failed to move the actor's callous heart.
     Before his dream, Nikanor Ivanovich had been completely ignorant of the
poet Pushkin's works, but the man himself he knew perfectly well and several
times  a day  used to say  phrases like: 'And who's going  to pay the rent -
Pushkin?'[6] or  `Then who did unscrew the bulb on the  stairway - Pushkin?'
or 'So who's going to buy the fuel - Pushkin?'
     Now, having become acquainted  with one of his works, Nikanor Ivanovich
felt sad, imagined the woman  on her  knees,  with her orphaned children, in
the rain, and involuntarily thought: "What a type, though, this Kurolesov!'
     And the latter, ever raising his voice, went on with his confession and
got Nikanor  Ivanovich  definitively  muddled, because he  suddenly  started
addressing someone who was  not on-stage, and responded for this absent  one
himself, calling himself now dear sir,  now baron, now  father, now son, now
formally, and now familiarly.
     Nikanor  Ivanovich  understood  only one thing, that the actor died  an
evil death,  crying  out: 'Keys! My keys!', after  which he collapsed on the
floor, gasping and carefully tearing off his tie.
     Having died,  Kurolesov got up,  brushed the  dust from  his  trousers,
bowed with  a false  smile,  and  withdrew  to  the  accompaniment  of  thin
applause. And the master of ceremonies began speaking thus:
     'We have just heard The  Covetous Knight wonderfully performed by  Sawa
Potapovich. This knight  hoped that frolicking  nymphs would come running to
him, and that many other pleasant things in the same vein would occur.  But,
as you see,  none of  it happened,  no nymphs came  running to  him, and the
muses paid him no tribute, and  he raised no mansions, but, on the contrary,
ended quite  badly,  died of  a  stroke,  devil  take  him, on  his chest of
currency and jewels. I warn you that the same sort of thing,  if not  worse,
is going to happen to you if you don't turn over your currency!'
     Whether Pushkin's poetry produced such an effect, or it was the prosaic
speech of the master  of ceremonies,  in any  case a shy voice suddenly came
from the house:
     'I'll turn over my currency.'
     `Kindly  come to  the  stage,' the  master  of  ceremonies  courteously
invited, peering into the dark house.
     On-stage appeared a short, fair-haired  citizen, who,  judging  by  his
face, had not shaved in about three weeks.
     'Beg pardon, what is your name?' the master of ceremonies inquired.
     'Kanavkin, Nikolai,' the man responded shyly.
     'Ah! Very pleased. Citizen Kanavkin. And so? ...'
     'I'll turn it over,' Kanavkin said quietly.
     'How much?'
     'A thousand dollars and twenty ten-rouble gold pieces.'
     'Bravo! That's all, then?'
     The  programme announcer  stared  straight into Kanavkin's eyes, and it
even seemed  to  Nikanor  Ivanovich  that  those  eyes  sent out  rays  that
penetrated Kanavkin like X-rays. The house stopped breathing.
     `I believe  you!'  the artiste exclaimed finally and  extinguished  his
gaze. I do! These eyes are not lying! How many times have  I  told you  that
your basic error consists in  underestimating  the significance of the human
eye. Understand that the tongue can conceal the truth, but the eyes - never!
A sudden question  is put to you, you don't even  flinch, in  one second you
get hold of yourself and  know what you  must say to conceal  the truth, and
you speak quite convincingly, and not a wrinkle on  your face  moves,  but -
alas - the truth which the question  stirs up  from the bottom of your  soul
leaps momentarily into your eyes, and it's all over! They see it, and you're
caught!'
     Having delivered, and with great ardour, this highly convincing speech,
the artiste tenderly inquired of Kanavkin:
     'And where is it hidden?'
     With my aunt, Porokhovnikova, on Prechistenka.'
     'Ah! That's... wait... that's Klavdia Ilyinishna, isn't it?'
     'Yes.'
     'Ah, yes, yes, yes, yes! A separate little house? A little front garden
opposite? Of course, I know, I know! And where did you put it there?'
     'In the cellar, in a candy tin...'
     The artiste clasped his hands.
     'Have you ever seen the like?' he cried out, chagrined. "Why, it'll get
damp and mouldy there! Is it conceivable to entrust currency to such people?
Eh? Sheer childishness! By God! ...'
     Kanavkin himself realized  he had fouled up and was in for it,  and  he
hung his tufty head.
     'Money,' the  artiste went  on, 'must  be kept  in the  state  bank, in
special dry  and well-guarded rooms, and by no means in  some aunt's cellar,
where it may, in particular, suffer damage from rats!  Really, Kanavkin, for
shame! You're a grown-up!'
     Kanavkin no longer knew what  to do with himself, and  merely picked at
the lapel of his jacket with his finger.
     'Well,  all right,' the artiste  relented, 'let bygones  be...'  And he
suddenly added  unexpectedly: 'Ah, by the way ... so that in one ... to save
a trip ... this same aunt also has some, eh?'
     Kanavkin,  never expecting  such  a turn of  affairs,  wavered, and the
theatre fell silent.
     'Ehh, Kanavkin...' the master  of  ceremonies said in tender  reproach,
'and here  I was  praising him! Look, he  just  went and messed it up for no
reason  at  all! It's absurd, Kanavkin! Wasn't  I  just talking about  eyes?
Can't  we see that the  aunt has got some?  Well, then why do you torment us
for nothing?'
     'She has!' Kanavkin cried dashingly.
     'Bravo!' cried the master of ceremonies.
     'Bravo!' the house roared frightfully.
     When  things  quieted  down, the  master  of  ceremonies  congratulated
Kanavkin, shook his  hand, offered him a ride home to the city in a car, and
told someone in  the wings  to go in that same car to fetch the aunt and ask
her kindly to come for the programme at the women's theatre.
     'Ah, yes, I  wanted to  ask  you, has the aunt ever mentioned where she
hides  hers?'  the  master  of  ceremonies  inquired,  courteously  offering
Kanavkin  a  cigarette and  a lighted match.  As he lit  up, the man grinned
somehow wistfully.
     'I believe you, I believe you,' the artiste responded with a sigh. 'Not
just her nephew,  the  old pinchfist  wouldn't tell the devil himself! Well,
so, we'll try  to  awaken  some  human  feelings in her. Maybe not  all  the
strings have rotted in her usurious little soul. Bye-bye, Kanavkin!'
     And  the happy Kanavkin  drove off. The  artiste inquired whether there
were any others  who wished to  turn  over their currency, but  was answered
with silence.
     'Odd birds, by God!'  the  artiste said, shrugging, and the curtain hid
him.
     The  lights  went out, there  was darkness for a  while,  and  in it  a
nervous tenor was heard singing from far away:
     There great heaps of gold  do shine, and all  those heaps  of  gold are
mine..."
     Then twice the sound of subdued applause came from somewhere.
     'Some little lady in the women's theatre is turning hers over,' Nikanor
Ivanovich's red-bearded neighbour  spoke up unexpectedly,  and added with  a
sigh:  'Ah,  if it  wasn't  for  my  geese! ... I've  got  fighting geese in
Lianozovo, my dear fellow ... they'll die without me, I'm afraid. A fighting
bird's delicate, it needs care ... Ah, if it wasn't for my geese!
     '...  They won't surprise  me with  Pushkin...'  And again  he began to
sigh.
     Here  the house  lit  up brightly,  and  Nikanor Ivanovich dreamed that
cooks in white chef's hats and with ladles in their hands came  pouring from
all the  doors. Scullions dragged in  a cauldron of  soup  and a  stand with
cut-up rye bread. The spectators livened up. The jolly  cooks shuttled among
the theatre buffs, ladled out bowls of soup, and distributed bread.
     'Dig in, lads,' the cooks shouted, 'and turn over your currency! What's
the point of sitting here? Who wants to slop up this  swill! Go home, have a
good drink, a little bite, that's the way!'
     'Now, you, for instance, what're you doing sitting here, old man?"
     Nikanor  Ivanovich  was  directly  addressed  by  a  fat  cook  with  a
raspberry-coloured neck,  as  he offered him a bowl in  which a lone cabbage
leaf floated in some liquid.
     'I don't have any! I don't! I don't!' Nikanor Ivanovich cried out  in a
terrible voice. 'You understand, I don't!'
     `You  don't?' the cook  bellowed  in a menacing bass.  'You  don't?' he
asked  in  a  tender  woman's  voice.  `You  don't, you  don't,' he murmured
soothingly, turning into the nurse Praskovya Fyodorovna.
     She  was gently shaking Nikanor Ivanovich by  the shoulder as he moaned
in his sleep.  Then  the cooks melted away, and the theatre with its curtain
broke  up.  Through his tears,  Nikanor Ivanovich  made  out his room in the
hospital  and  two people in white coats, who were by no means casual  cooks
getting at people with their  advice, but the doctor and that same Praskovya
Fyodorovna, who was holding not a bowl but a little dish covered with gauze,
with a syringe lying on it.
     `What  is  all  this?'  Nikanor  Ivanovich said bitterly, as  they were
giving him the injection. 'I  don't have any and  that's  that! Let  Pushkin
turn over his currency for them. I don't have any!'
     'No,  you  don't,  you  don't,'  the kind-hearted  Praskovya Fyodorovna
soothed him, 'and if you don't, there's no more to be said.'
     After the injection, Nikanor  Ivanovich  felt  better  and  fell asleep
without any dreams.
     But, thanks to his cries, alarm was communicated to room 120, where the
patient  woke up and began looking  for his head, and to room 118, where the
unknown master  became restless and wrung his  hands in  anguish, looking at
the moon, remembering the last bitter  autumn night of his life, a  strip of
light under the basement door, and uncurled hair.
     From room 118, the  alarm flew by way  of  the balcony to Ivan, and  he
woke up and began to weep.
     But  the doctor quickly calmed all these  anxious, sorrowing heads, and
they began to  fall asleep. Ivan was the last  to become oblivious, as  dawn
was already breaking over the river. After the  medicine, which suffused his
whole  body, calm  came like a wave and covered him.  His body grew lighter,
his head  basked in  the warm wind of reverie. He fell asleep, and the  last
waking  thing he heard was the  pre-dawn chirping of birds in the woods. But
they soon fell silent, and he began  dreaming that the sun was already going
down  over  Bald Mountain, and  the mountain was  cordoned off  by a  double
cordon ...

CHAPTER 14. Glory to the Cock!

     His nerves gave out, as  they say, and Rimsky fled to his office before
they finished  drawing up the  report. He  sat at  his desk  and stared with
inflamed eyes  at the magic banknotes lying  before  him. The  findirector's
wits were  addled.  A steady hum came  from outside. The audience poured  in
streams from  the  Variety  building  into  the street.  Rimsky's  extremely
sharpened hearing suddenly  caught the distant trill of a policeman. That in
itself  never  bodes  anything pleasant. But when  it  was repeated  and, to
assist it, another joined  in, more authoritative and prolonged, and to them
was added a clearly audible guffawing and even some hooting, the findirector
understood at once  that something else scandalous and  vile had happened in
the street. And that, however much he wanted to wave it away, it was closely
connected  with the repulsive sance presented by the black magician and his
assistants.
     The keen-eared findirector was not mistaken in the least. As soon as he
cast a glance out the window on  to Sadovaya,  his face twisted, and he  did
not whisper but hissed:
     'So I thought!'
     In the bright glare  of the  strongest street lights he saw, just below
him on the sidewalk, a  lady in  nothing  but a shift  and violet  bloomers.
True, there  was a little  hat on the lady's  head  and  an  umbrella in her
hands. The lady, who was in a  state  of utter  consternation, now crouching
down, now  making as if to run off  somewhere, was surrounded by an agitated
crowd, which produced  the very  guffawing that had  sent a  shiver down the
fin-director's spine. Next to  the  lady  some  citizen  was flitting about,
trying to  tear off his summer coat, and  in his  agitation simply unable to
manage the sleeve in which his arm was stuck.
     Shouts and  roaring guffaws came from  yet  another place - namely, the
left entrance  - and turning his head in that  direction, Grigory Danilovich
saw a  second lady, in pink underwear. She  leaped  from the street  to  the
sidewalk,  striving to hide  in the  hallway,  but the audience pouring  out
blocked  the way,  and the poor victim other own flightiness and passion for
dressing up, deceived  by  vile  Fagott's firm, dreamed of only one  thing -
falling  through  the earth. A  policeman  made  for the unfortunate  woman,
drilling the  air with his whistle,  and  after  the policeman hastened some
merry young men in caps. It was they who produced the guffawing and hooting.
     A skinny, moustachioed cabby  flew up to  the first undressed woman and
dashingly  reined  in his bony, broken-down  nag.  The  moustached  face was
grinning gleefully.
     Rimsky beat himself on  the head  with his fist, spat,  and leaped back
from the window. For some  time he sat at his desk listening  to the street.
The  whistling at  various points reached  its  highest pitch, then began to
subside.  The  scandal, to  Rimsky's  surprise, was somehow liquidated  with
unexpected swiftness.
     It came time to act. He had to drink the  bitter cup of responsibility.
The telephones had been  repaired  during the third  part. He  had  to  make
calls, to tell what had happened, to  ask for help,  lie  his way out of it,
heap  everything  on Likhodeev, cover up  for himself, and  so on. Pah,  the
devil!
     Twice  the upset director put his hand  on the  receiver,  and twice he
drew it back. And suddenly, in the dead silence of the office, the telephone
burst out ringing  by itself right in the findirector's  face, and he gave a
start and went cold. 'My  nerves  are really upset, though!' he thought, and
picked up the receiver. He recoiled from it instantly and turned whiter than
paper.  A soft  but at the  same  time  insinuating  and  lewd  female voice
whispered into the receiver:
     'Don't call anywhere, Rimsky, it'll be bad ...'
     The  receiver  straight away went empty. With  goose-flesh prickling on
his back, the findirector  hung up  the telephone and for some reason turned
to look at  the  window  behind  him.  Through the  scant  and still  barely
greening branches of a maple, he saw the moon racing in a transparent cloud.
     His eyes fixed on the branches for  some reason, Rimsky went  on gazing
at them, and the longer he gazed, the more strongly he was gripped by fear.
     With great effort, the findirector finally turned away from the moonlit
window and stood up.  There could no longer be any question of phone  calls,
and now the findirector was thinking of only one thing  - getting out of the
theatre as quickly as possible.
     He listened: the theatre building was  silent. Rimsky realized that  he
had long  been  the only  one  on the whole  second floor,  and  a childish,
irrepressible fear came over him at this thought. He could not think without
shuddering of having to walk alone  now along the  empty corridors and  down
the stairs. Feverishly he seized the  hypnotist's banknotes from  the table,
put them in his briefcase, and  coughed so as to cheer himself up at least a
little. The cough came out slightly hoarse, weak.
     And  here it seemed to  him that  a whiff of some  putrid dankness  was
coming in under  the office  door. Shivers ran down the findirector's spine.
And then the clock also  rang out unexpectedly and began to strike midnight.
And even its striking  provoked  shivers in the  findirector. But his  heart
definitively sank when he heard the English key turning quietly in the lock.
Clutching his briefcase with damp, cold hands,  the findirector felt that if
this scraping in the keyhole were to go  on  any longer, he would break down
and give a piercing scream.
     Finally the door yielded to someone's  efforts,  opened, and  Varenukha
noiselessly entered  the office. Rimsky simply sank  down  into the armchair
where he  stood, because his legs gave way. Drawing a deep breath, he smiled
an ingratiating smile, as it were, and said quietly:
     'God, you frightened me...'
     Yes, this sudden appearance might have frightened anyone you  like, and
yet at the same time it was a great joy: at least one  little end peeped out
in this tangled affair.
     Well, tell me quickly!  Well? Well?'  Rimsky wheezed, grasping  at this
little end. 'What does it all mean?!'
     `Excuse  me,  please,' the  entering  man replied  in  a hollow  voice,
closing the door, 'I thought you had already left.'
     And Varenukha, without taking  his cap off, walked to  the armchair and
sat on the other side of the desk.
     It must be said that Varenukha's response was marked by a slight oddity
which at once needled the findirector, who could compete in sensitivity with
the seismograph of any  of  the world's best stations. How could it  be? Why
did Varenukha  come to  the  findirector's  office if  he thought he was not
there? He had his own  office, first of all. And  second, whichever entrance
to the building Varenukha had used, he  would inevitably have met one of the
night-watchmen, to all of whom it had been announced that Grigory Danilovich
was  staying  late  in his  office. But the findirector  did not spend  long
pondering this oddity - he had other problems.
     'Why didn't you call? What are all these shenanigans about Yalta?'
     "Well, it's as  I was saying,' the administrator replied, sucking as if
he were troubled by a bad tooth. 'He was found in the tavern in Pushkino.'
     `In Pushkino?! You mean just outside Moscow?! What  about the telegrams
from Yalta?!'
     'The devil they're from Yalta!  He got a telegrapher drunk in Pushkino,
and  the two of them  started acting up, sending  telegrams  marked "Yalta",
among other things.'
     'Aha ... aha ... Well, all right, all right...'  Rimsky did not say but
sang out. His eyes lit up with a yellow  light. In his head there formed the
festive picture of Styopa's  shameful dismissal  from  his job. Deliverance!
The findirector's long-awaited deliverance  from this disaster in the person
of  Likhodeev!  And maybe  Stepan  Bogdanovich would achieve something worse
than dismissal... The details!' said Rimsky, banging  the paperweight on the
desk.
     And Varenukha began giving the details. As soon as he arrived where the
findirector had sent him, he was received at once and given a most attentive
hearing.  No one, of course, even entertained the thought  that Styopa could
be in  Yalta.  Everyone  agreed  at once  with  Varenukha's  suggestion that
Likhodeev was, of course, at the Yalta in Pushkino.
     `Then where  is he  now?'  the  agitated  findirector  interrupted  the
administrator.
     'Well,  where else could  he be?'  the administrator replied,  grinning
crookedly. 'In a sobering-up cell, naturally!'
     'Well, well. How nice!'
     Varenukha  went on  with  his  story, and the  more he told,  the  more
vividly there unfolded  before the findirector the long chain of Likhodeev's
boorish and outrageous acts, and every link in this chain was worse than the
one before.  The drunken dancing  in the arms of the telegrapher on the lawn
in front  of the Pushkino  telegraph office to  the sounds of some itinerant
barrel-organ  was  worth something!  The chase  after  some female  citizens
shrieking with  terror! The attempt at a  fight with the barman in the Yalta
itself! Scattering green onions all over the floor of the same Yalta.
     Smashing eight bottles of  dry white Ai-Danil. Breaking the meter  when
the taxi-driver refused to take Styopa in his cab. Threatening to arrest the
citizens  who  attempted to stop Styopa's obnoxiousness...  In  short, black
horror!
     Styopa was well known in Moscow theatre circles, and everyone knew that
the man  was  no gift.  But all the same, what the administrator was telling
about him was too much even for Styopa. Yes, too much. Even much too much...
     Rimsky's  needle-sharp glance  pierced  the  administrator's face  from
across  the desk, and the  longer  the man  spoke,  the  grimmer  those eyes
became. The  more lifelike  and  colourful the  vile details with  which the
administrator  furnished  his story, the less  the  findirector believed the
storyteller. And when Varenukha told how Styopa had let himself go so far as
to try to resist those who came to bring him back to Moscow, the findirector
already knew  firmly  that everything the  administrator who had returned at
midnight  was telling him,  everything, was a lie! A  lie from first word to
last!
     Varenukha never went to Pushkino, and there was no Styopa in Pushkino.
     There was  no drunken  telegrapher, there  was no broken glass  in  the
tavern, Styopa did not get tied up with ropes ... none of it happened.
     As  soon   as  the   findirector  became   firmly  convinced  that  the
administrator was lying to him, fear crept over  his body, starting from the
legs,  and  twice again  the  findirector  fancied that  a  putrid  malarial
dankness was wafting across the  floor.  Never for  a moment taking his eyes
off  the administrator  -  who  squirmed somehow strangely in  his armchair,
trying not to get out  of  the blue  shade  of  the desk lamp, and screening
himself  with a newspaper in some remarkable  fashion  from  the  bothersome
light  -  the  findirector was thinking of only one thing:  what did it  all
mean? Why was  he  being lied  to  so brazenly,  in the  silent and deserted
building, by the administrator  who  was so  late in coming back to him? And
the  awareness of danger, an  unknown but menacing danger,  began to gnaw at
Rimsky's soul. Pretending to ignore Varenukha's dodges  and tricks with  the
newspaper, the findirector studied his face, now almost without listening to
the yarn Varenukha was spinning. There was something that seemed  still more
inexplicable  than the  calumny invented. God knows why, about adventures in
Pushkino,  and  that  something   was  the  change  in  the  administrator's
appearance and manners.
     No  matter how the man pulled the duck-like visor of his cap  over  his
eyes, so as to  throw a shadow on his  face, no  matter how he fidgeted with
the newspaper, the findirector managed to make out an enormous bruise on the
right  side  of his face  just  by  the  nose.  Besides  that,  the normally
full-blooded administrator was now pale with a chalk-like, unhealthy pallor,
and  on this stifling night his neck  was for  some reason wrapped in an old
striped  scarf.  Add to that the  repulsive  manner  the  administrator  had
acquired during the time of his absence of  sucking  and smacking, the sharp
change in his voice, which had become hollow and coarse, and the furtiveness
and cowardliness in his eyes, and one could boldly say that Ivan Savelyevich
Varenukha had become unrecognizable.
     Something else burningly troubled the findirector, but he was unable to
grasp precisely what  it  was,  however much  he strained his feverish mind,
however hard he peered at Varenukha. One thing he could affirm,  that  there
was   something  unprecedented,   unnatural  in  this  combination  of   the
administrator and the familiar armchair.
     "Well, we  finally overpowered him, loaded him into the car,' Varenukha
boomed, peeking from behind the paper and covering the bruise with his hand.
     Rimsky  suddenly  reached  out  and,  as  if  mechanically, tapping his
fingers on the table at the  same time, pushed the electric-bell button with
his palm and went numb.  The sharp  signal ought  to have been heard without
fail  in  the  empty  building.  But no  signal came, and  the  button  sank
lifelessly into the wood of the desk. The button was dead, the bell broken.
     The findirector's stratagem did not escape the notice of Varenukha, who
asked, twitching, with a clearly malicious fire flickering in his eyes:
     "What are you ringing for?'
     'Mechanically,'  the  findirector replied  hollowly,  jerking  his hand
back, and asked in turn, in an unsteady voice: "What's that on your face?'
     'The car skidded, I  bumped  against  the door-handle,' Varenukha said,
looking away.
     'He's lying!'  the findirector  exclaimed  mentally. And here his  eyes
suddenly grew round  and utterly  insane, and he stared  at the back of  the
armchair.
     Behind  the chair  on the floor two  shadows  lay criss-cross, one more
dense and  black,  the other faint and grey. The shadow  of the  back of the
chair  and of its tapering legs could be seen distinctly on  the  floor, but
there was no shadow of Varenukha's head  above  the back of the chair, or of
the administrator's legs under its legs.
     `He  casts  no  shadow!'  Rimsky cried  out desperately in his mind. He
broke into shivers.
     Varenukha, following  Rimsky's insane gaze, looked furtively behind him
at the back of the chair, and realized that he had been found out.
     He got  up  from  the chair (the findirector did likewise) and made one
step back from the desk, clutching his briefcase in his hands.
     'He's  guessed, damn him!  Always was clever,' Varenukha said, grinning
spitefully right in the findirector's face, and  he sprang unexpectedly from
the chair to the  door and quickly  pushed  down the catch on the lock.  The
findirector looked  desperately  behind him, as  he retreated  to the window
giving on to the garden, and in this window, flooded with moonlight, saw the
face of a naked girl  pressed  against the glass and her naked arm  reaching
through the vent-pane and trying  to open the lower latch. The upper one was
already open.
     It seemed to Rimsky that the light of the desk lamp was  going  out and
the desk was tilting. An icy wave engulfed Rimsky, but - fortunately for him
- he got control of himself and did not fall. He had enough strength left to
whisper, but not cry out:
     'Help...'
     Varenukha, guarding the door, hopped up  and down by it, staying in air
for a  long time  and  swaying there. Waving  his hooked fingers in Rimsky's
direction, he hissed and smacked, winking to the girl in the window.
     She began to hurry, stuck her red-haired head through the vent, reached
her arm down as far as she could, her nails clawing at  the  lower latch and
shaking  the  frame.  Her  arm began  to lengthen,  rubber-like, and  became
covered with a putrid green. Finally the dead woman's green fingers got hold
of the latch knob, turned it, and the  frame began to open. Rimsky cried out
weakly, leaned against the wall, and held his briefcase in front of him like
a shield. He realized that his end had come.
     The frame swung wide open, but instead of the night's freshness and the
fragrance  of the lindens, the smell of  a cellar burst into the  room.  The
dead  woman stepped on to the window-sill. Rimsky clearly saw spots of decay
on her breast.
     And just then the joyful,  unexpected crowing  of a cock came from  the
garden, from that  low building  beyond  the  shooting gallery  where  birds
participating  in the programme were kept. A  loud,  trained cock trumpeted,
announcing that dawn was rolling towards Moscow from the east.
     Savage  fury distorted the girl's  face, she emitted a hoarse oath, and
at the door Varenukha shrieked and dropped from the air to the floor.
     The cock-crow was repeated, the girl  clacked her  teeth,  and her  red
hair stood on end. With the third  crowing of the cock, she turned and  flew
out and  after her,  jumping  up and stretching himself horizontally  in the
air, looking like a flying cupid, Varenukha slowly floated over the desk and
out the window.
     White  as snow, with not a single black  hair on his  head, the old man
who  still  recently had  been Rimsky rushed to  the door, undid the  catch,
opened the door, and ran hurtling down the dark corridor. At the turn to the
stairs, moaning with fear, he felt  for the switch, and the stairway lighted
up. On the  stairs the  shaking, trembling old  man fell because he imagined
that Varenukha had softly tumbled on top of him.
     Having run downstairs, Rimsky saw a watchman asleep  on a  chair by the
box office in the lobby. Rimsky stole past him on tiptoe and slipped out the
main  entrance. Outside he felt  slightly  better.  He  recovered his senses
enough to realize, clutching his head, that his hat had stayed behind in the
office.
     Needless to say, he did not go back for it, but, breathless, ran across
the  wide street to the  opposite corner by the movie theatre, near  which a
dull  reddish light hovered. In a moment he  was there.  No one had  time to
intercept the cab.
     `Make  the  Leningrad  express, I'll  tip you well,' the old  man said,
breathing heavily and clutching his heart.
     'I'm  going to  the garage,' the  driver answered  hatefully and turned
away.
     Then Rimsky unlatched his briefcase, took out fifty roubles, and handed
them to the driver through the open front window.
     A few  moments  later,  the rattling car  was flying like the wind down
Sadovoye  Ring.  The  passenger was  tossed about  on  his seat,  and in the
fragment  of mirror  hanging in  front of  the driver,  Rimsky saw  now  the
driver's happy eyes,  now  his own insane ones.  Jumping  out of the car  in
front of the  train station, Rimsky cried to the first man he saw in a white
apron with a badge:
     'First class, single, I'll pay  thirty,'  he was pulling  the banknotes
from  his briefcase, crumpling them,  'no first class, get  me second ... if
not -- a hard bench!'
     The man with the badge kept glancing up at the lighted clock face as he
tore the banknotes from Rimsky's hand.
     Five minutes  later the express train  disappeared from under the glass
vault of the train station and vanished clean away in the darkness. And with
it vanished Rimsky.

CHAPTER 13. The Hero Enters

     And so, the unknown man shook his finger at Ivan and whispered:
     'Shhh! ...'
     Ivan lowered his legs from the bed and peered. Cautiously looking  into
the  room  from  the  balcony  was   a  clean-shaven,  dark-haired  man   of
approximately thirty-eight, with a sharp nose, anxious  eyes,  and a wisp of
hair hanging down on his forehead.
     Having listened and  made  sure that Ivan  was  alone,  the  mysterious
visitor took heart and stepped into the room. Here Ivan saw that the man was
dressed as a patient. He was  wearing long  underwear, slippers on  his bare
feet, and a brown dressing-gown thrown over his shoulders.
     The visitor winked at Ivan, hid a bunch of keys in his pocket, inquired
in a whisper: 'May I sit down?' - and receiving an affirmative  nod,  placed
himself in an armchair.
     'How did you get here?' Ivan asked in a whisper, obeying the dry finger
shaken at him. 'Aren't the balcony grilles locked?'
     The grilles are  locked,' the guest agreed, `but  Praskovya Fyodorovna,
while the dearest  person, is also, alas, quite absent-minded. A month ago I
stole a bunch of keys from her, and so gained the opportunity of getting out
on to the common  balcony,  which  runs  around the entire  floor, and so of
occasionally calling on a neighbour.'
     'If  you can get out on to the  balcony, you  can escape. Or is it high
up?' Ivan was interested.
     'No,' the guest replied firmly, 'I cannot escape from here, not because
it's high up, but because I have nowhere to escape to.' And he  added, after
a pause: 'So, here we sit.'
     `Here  we  sit,'  Ivan replied,  peering into the man's brown and  very
restless eyes.
     'Yes ...'  here  the  guest  suddenly became  alarmed,  'but you're not
violent, I hope? Because, you know, I cannot stand noise, turmoil, force, or
other things like that. Especially hateful to me are people's cries, whether
cries of rage, suffering, or anything else. Set  me at ease, tell me, you're
not violent?'
     `Yesterday  in  a  restaurant  I  socked  one  type  in  the mug,'  the
transformed poet courageously confessed.
     'Your grounds?' the guest asked sternly.
     "No grounds, I must confess,' Ivan answered, embarrassed.
     'Outrageous,' the guest denounced Ivan and added: 'And besides, what  a
way to express yourself: "socked  in the mug"... It  is  not known precisely
whether  a man  has a mug or a face. And, after all, it may well  be a face.
So, you know, using fists ... No, you should give that up, and for good.'
     Having thus reprimanded Ivan, the guest inquired:
     'Your profession?'
     'Poet,' Ivan confessed, reluctantly for some reason.
     The visitor became upset.
     'Ah, just my luck!' he exclaimed, but at once reconsidered, apologized,
and asked: 'And what is your name?'
     'Homeless.'
     'Oh-oh ...' the guest said, wincing.
     'What, you mean you dislike my poetry?' Ivan asked with curiosity.
     'I dislike it terribly.'
     'And what have you read.'
     'I've never read any of your poetry!' the visitor exclaimed nervously.
     Then how can you say that?'
     'Well, what of it?' the guest replied. 'As if I haven't read others? Or
else ... maybe there's  some  miracle? Very well,  I'm  ready to  take it on
faith. Is your poetry good? You tell me yourself.'
     'Monstrous!' Ivan suddenly spoke boldly and frankly.
     'Don't write any more!' the visitor asked beseechingly.
     'I promise and I swear!' Ivan said solemnly.
     The  oath  was  sealed with a handshake,  and  here soft footsteps  and
voices were heard in the corridor.
     'Shh!' the  guest whispered and, jumping out to the balcony, closed the
grille behind him.
     Praskovya  Fyodorovna peeked  in, asked  Ivan  how  he was feeling  and
whether he wished to sleep in the  dark or with a light.  Ivan asked  her to
leave the light on, and Praskovya Fyodorovna withdrew, wishing the patient a
good night. And when everything was quiet, the guest came back again.
     He informed Ivan in a whisper that there was a new arrival  in room 119
- some fat man with a purple physiognomy, who kept muttering something about
currency in  the ventilation and swearing that unclean powers were living in
their place on Sadovaya.
     'He curses Pushkin up and down and  keeps shouting: "Kurolesov, encore,
encore!"' the guest said, twitching nervously. Having calmed himself, he sat
down, said: 'Anyway,  God  help him,'  and continued  his  conversation with
Ivan: 'So, how did you wind up here?'
     'On account of  Pontius Pilate,' Ivan replied,  casting  a glum look at
the floor.
     'What?!' the guest cried, forgetting  all caution, and clapped his hand
over his own mouth. 'A staggering coincidence! Tell me  about it, I beg you,
I beg you!'
     Feeling  trust  in  the  unknown  man  for  some  reason,  Ivan  began,
falteringly and  timorously at  first,  then more boldly,  to tell about the
previous  day's  story at the  Patriarch's  Ponds. Yes,  it  was  a grateful
listener  that  Ivan  Nikolaevich acquired  in the person of the  mysterious
stealer of keys! The guest did  not take Ivan for a madman,  he showed great
interest  in  what he  was being told, and, as the  story developed, finally
became ecstatic. Time and again he interrupted Ivan with exclamations:
     'Well, well, go on, go  on, I beg you!  Only, in the name of all that's
holy, don't leave anything out!'
     Ivan  left nothing out  in  any case, it was easier  for him to tell it
that way,  and he gradually  reached the  moment when  Pontius Pilate,  in a
white mantle with blood-red lining, came out to the balcony.
     Then the visitor put his hands together prayerfully and whispered:
     'Oh, how I guessed! How I guessed it all!'
     The  listener accompanied the description of  Berlioz's terrible  death
with an enigmatic remark, while his eyes flashed with spite:
     'I only  regret  that  it  wasn't the  critic Latunsky  or  the  writer
Mstislav Lavrovich  instead of this Berlioz!',  and  he cried out frenziedly
but soundlessly: 'Go on!'
     The  cat  handing  money  to  the  woman  conductor  amused  the  guest
exceedingly, and  he choked with quiet laughter watching as Ivan, excited by
the success  of his narration, quietly hopped on bent legs,  portraying  the
cat holding the coin up next to his whiskers.
     `And  so,'  Ivan concluded, growing  sad and melancholy  after  telling
about the events at Griboedov's, 'I wound up here.'
     The guest sympathetically placed a hand on the poor poet's shoulder and
spoke thus:
     'Unlucky  poet! But you yourself, dear heart, are to blame  for it all.
You oughtn't to have behaved so casually and even impertinently with him. So
you've  paid for  it. And  you must still say thank  you  that  you  got off
comparatively cheaply.'
     'But who is he, finally?' Ivan asked, shaking his fists in agitation.
     The guest peered at Ivan and answered with a question:
     `You're  not going to get  upset?  We're all unreliable  here...  There
won't be any calling for the doctor, injections, or other fuss?'
     'No, no!' Ivan exclaimed. 'Tell me, who is he?'
     'Very well,' the visitor replied, and he said weightily and distinctly:
     "Yesterday at the Patriarch's Ponds you met Satan.'
     Ivan did not get upset, as he  had promised, but even so he was greatly
astounded.
     'That can't be! He doesn't exist!'
     `Good heavens!  Anyone  else  might  say that,  but  not you.  You were
apparently  one  of  his  first  victims. You're  sitting, as  you  yourself
understand, in a psychiatric  clinic, yet you keep  saying he doesn't exist.
Really, it's strange!'
     Thrown off, Ivan fell silent.
     'As soon as you started describing him,' the guest went on, 'I began to
realize who it was that you had the pleasure of talking with yesterday. And,
really,  I'm  surprised  at  Berlioz! Now  you,  of course, are  a  virginal
person,'  here the guest apologized  again, `but  that one, from  what  I've
heard about him,  had after all  read at  least  something! The  very  first
things this professor  said  dispelled  all  my  doubts.  One can't fail  to
recognize him, my friend! Though you ... again I must apologize, but I'm not
mistaken, you are an ignorant man?'
     'Indisputably,' the unrecognizable Ivan agreed.
     'Well, so ... even the face, as  you  described it, the different eyes,
the  eyebrows!  ... Forgive me, however, perhaps you've never even heard the
opera Faust?
     Ivan  became terribly embarrassed for some reason and, his face aflame,
began mumbling something about some trip to a sanatorium ... to Yalta ...
     'Well, so, so... hardly surprising! But Berlioz, I repeat, astounds  me
... He's not only a well-read man but also a  very shrewd one. Though I must
say in his defence  that Woland  is, of course, capable  of pulling the wool
over the eyes of an even shrewder man.'
     'What?!' Ivan cried out in his turn.
     'Hush!'
     Ivan slapped himself roundly on the forehead with his palm and rasped:
     'I see, I see. He had  the letter "W" on his visiting card. Ai-yai-yai,
what a thing!' He lapsed into a bewildered silence for some time, peering at
the moon floating outside the grille, and then spoke:
     'So that means he  might actually have been at Pontius Pilate's? He was
already  born then?  And  they call me  a madman!'  Ivan added  indignantly,
pointing to the door.
     A bitter wrinkle appeared on the guest's lips.
     `Let's look  the  truth  in the eye.'  And  the guest  turned his  face
towards the nocturnal luminary racing through a cloud. 'You  and I  are both
madmen,  there's  no  denying  that! You see, he shocked you - and  you came
unhinged, since  you evidently had the  ground prepared for it. But what you
describe undoubtedly took place in  reality. But it's so extraordinary  that
even Stravinsky, a psychiatrist of  genius, did not, of course, believe you.
Did he examine you?'  (Ivan nodded.) 'Your interlocutor was at Pilate's, and
had breakfast with Kant, and now he's visiting Moscow.'
     'But he'll be up to  devil knows what here! Oughtn't  we  to catch  him
somehow?' the former,  not  yet  definitively  quashed Ivan still raised his
head, though without much confidence, in the new Ivan.
     'You've already tried, and that will do  for  you,' the  guest  replied
ironically. 'I don't advise others to try  either.  And  as for being up  to
something, rest assured, he  will be! Ah, ah! But  how  annoying that it was
you who met him and  not I. Though  it's  all burned up,  and the coals have
gone  to  ashes,  still,  I  swear,  for  that  meeting  I'd  give Praskovya
Fyodorovna's bunch of keys, for I have nothing else to give. I'm destitute.'
     'But what do you need him for?'
     The  guest  paused ruefully for a  long time and twitched,  but finally
spoke:
     `You see, it's  such  a  strange story,  I'm sitting here  for the same
reason you  are -  namely, on account  of Pontius  Pilate.' Here  the  guest
looked around fearfully  and said: The thing is that a  year  ago I  wrote a
novel about Pilate.'
     'You're a writer?' the poet asked with interest.
     The guest's face darkened  and  he threatened Ivan with  his fist, then
said:
     `I  am  a master.'  He grew  stern and  took  from  the pocket  of  his
dressing-gown a completely greasy black cap  with the letter 'M' embroidered
on it in yellow silk.  He put this cap on and showed himself to Ivan both in
profile and  full face,  to prove that he was a master. `She sewed it for me
with her own hands,' he added mysteriously.
     'And what is your name?'
     'I  no longer  have  a name,' the strange  guest answered  with  gloomy
disdain.  `I renounced  it,  as I generally did  everything  in life.  Let's
forget it.'
     Then at least tell me about the novel,' Ivan asked delicately.
     'If you please, sir. My life, it  must be  said, has taken  a not  very
ordinary course,' the guest began.
     ... A  historian by education, he had worked until two years ago at one
of the Moscow museums, and, besides that, had also done translations.
     'From what languages?' Ivan interrupted curiously.
     'I know  five  languages besides my own,'  replied the guest, 'English,
French, German, Latin and Greek. Well, I can also read Italian a little.'
     'Oh, my!' Ivan whispered enviously.
     ... The  historian had  lived  solitarily, had no  family  anywhere and
almost no acquaintances in Moscow. And, just think, one day he won a hundred
thousand roubles.
     'Imagine my astonishment,'  the guest in the black cap whispered, 'when
I put my hand in  the basket of dirty laundry and, lo and behold, it had the
same number  as in the  newspaper. A  state bond  [1],'' he explained, 'they
gave it to me at the museum.'
     ... Having  won  a  hundred thousand roubles,  Ivan's  mysterious guest
acted thus: bought books, gave up his room on Myasnitskaya ...
     'Ohh, that accursed hole! ...' he growled.
     ...and rented  from a  builder, in a lane near the Arbat, two  rooms in
the basement of a little house in the garden. He left his work at the museum
and began writing a novel about Pontius Pilate.
     'Ah, that was a golden age!' the narrator whispered, his eyes shining.
     `A  completely private little  apartment, plus a front hall with a sink
in it,' he underscored for some  reason with special  pride, 'little windows
just  level  with the paved walk leading from the gate. Opposite, only  four
steps away, near the fence,  lilacs, a linden  and  a maple. Ah, ah,  ah! In
winter it  was very seldom that I saw someone's black feet through my window
and heard  the  snow crunching  under  them.  And  in my  stove  a  fire was
eternally blazing!
     But suddenly spring came and through the  dim glass I saw lilac bushes,
naked at first, then dressing themselves up in  green. And it was then, last
spring,  that something happened far  more delightful than getting a hundred
thousand roubles. And that, you must agree, is a huge sum of money!'
     That's true,' acknowledged the attentively listening Ivan. 'I opened my
little windows and sat in the second, quite minuscule room.' The guest began
measuring with his arms:  'Here's the sofa, and another sofa opposite, and a
little table between  them, with a beautiful night  lamp on  it,  and  books
nearer the window, and here a small writing table, and in the first room - a
huge room, one hundred and fifty  square feet! - books, books and the stove.
Ah, what furnishings I had!  The extraordinary smell of  the  lilacs! And my
head was getting light with fatigue, and Pilate was flying to the end...'
     'White mantle, red lining! I  understand!' Ivan  exclaimed.  'Precisely
so! Pilate  was flying to the end, to  the  end, and I already knew that the
last words of the  novel would be:  "... the  fifth procurator of Judea, the
equestrian Pontius Pilate". Well, naturally, I used to go  out for a walk. A
hundred thousand  is a huge  sum, and I had an excellent suit. Or I'd go and
have  dinner  in some cheap restaurant. There was a  wonderful restaurant on
the Arbat, I don't know whether it exists now.' Here the guest's eyes opened
wide,  and he went on whispering,  gazing  at  the moon: 'She  was  carrying
repulsive, alarming  yellow flowers in  her hand.  Devil knows  what they're
called, but for some reason they're the first to appear in Moscow. And these
flowers stood  out clearly against  her  black spring coat. She was carrying
yellow flowers! Not a nice colour. She turned down a lane from Tverskaya and
then looked back. Well, you know Tverskaya! Thousands of people were walking
along Tverskaya, but I can assure you that she  saw me alone, and looked not
really  alarmed, but even as if in pain. And I was struck not so much by her
beauty  as by  an extraordinary loneliness  in  her eyes, such as no one had
ever seen before! Obeying this yellow  sign, I also turned down the lane and
followed  her.  We walked along the crooked, boring lane silently, I  on one
side, she  on  the other. And, imagine, there was  not a soul in the lane. I
was  suffering, because it seemed  to me that it was  necessary to speak  to
her, and I worried that I wouldn't utter a single word, and she would leave,
and I'd never see her again. And, imagine, suddenly she began to speak:
     ' "Do you like my flowers?"
     'I remember clearly the sound of her voice, rather low, slightly husky,
and, stupid as it is, it  seemed  that  the echo resounded  in the  lane and
bounced off the dirty yellow wall. I quickly crossed to her side and, coming
up to her, answered:
     '"No!"
     'She  looked at me in surprise, and I suddenly, and quite unexpectedly,
understood that all my life I had loved precisely this woman! Quite a thing,
eh? Of course, you'll say I'm mad?'
     'I won't say anything,' Ivan exclaimed, and added: 'I beg you, go on!'
     And the guest continued.
     'Yes,  she looked at  me in surprise, and  then,  having looked,  asked
thus:
     '"You generally don't like flowers?"
     'It seemed to me there was hostility in her voice. I was walking beside
her, trying to  keep  in step,  and, to my surprise,  did not feel the least
constraint.
     ' "No, I like flowers, but not this kind," I said.
     '"Which, then?"
     '"I like roses."
     'Then I regretted having said it, because she smiled guiltily and threw
the flowers into the gutter. Slightly at a loss, I nevertheless picked  them
up and gave them to her, but she, with a smile, pushed the flowers away, and
I carried them in my hand.
     'So we  walked silently for some time, until she took  the flowers from
my hand and threw  them to  the  pavement,  then put her own hand in a black
glove with a bell-shaped cuff under my arm, and we walked on side by side.'
     'Go on,' said Ivan, 'and please don't leave anything out!'
     'Go on?'  repeated the visitor. 'Why, you can guess for yourself how it
went on.'  He suddenly  wiped an unexpected tear with his right  sleeve  and
continued:  `Love  leaped out in front of us like  a  murderer  in an  alley
leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as
a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn't
so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long  time, without
knowing  each  other, never  having seen each other, and that she was living
with a different man ... as I was, too, then ... with that, what's her ...'
     'With whom?' asked Homeless.
     With that... well... with ...' replied the guest, snapping his fingers.
     'You were married?'
     'Why, yes, that's why I'm snapping... With that... Varenka ... Manechka
... no, Varenka ... striped dress, the museum ... Anyhow, I don't remember.
     'Well,  so  she said she went  out  that day with yellow flowers in her
hand so that I would find her at  last, and that if  it hadn't happened, she
would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty.
     'Yes, love struck us instantly. I knew it that same day, an hour later,
when, without  having noticed  the city,  we  found ourselves by the Kremlin
wall on the embankment.
     We talked as if we had parted only  the day before, as if  we had known
each  other  for  many years. We arranged to  meet the next day at  the same
place  on  the Moscow River, and we did.  The May sun shone down on  us. And
soon, very soon, this woman became my secret wife.
     'She used to come to me every afternoon,  but I would begin waiting for
her in the  morning. This waiting expressed  itself in the moving around  of
objects on the table.  Ten  minutes  before,  I would sit down by the little
window  and  begin to listen  for the  banging of the decrepit gate. And how
curious: before  my meeting  with her,  few  people came to our yard  - more
simply, no one  came  - but now  it seemed  to me that the  whole  city came
flocking there.
     'Bang goes the gate, bang goes my heart, and, imagine,  it's inevitably
somebody's  dirty   boots  level  with  my   face  behind   the  window.   A
knife-grinder. Now, who needs a knife-grinder in our house? To sharpen what?
What knives?
     'She would come through the gate once, but my heart would pound no less
than ten times before that, I'm not lying. And then, when her hour came  and
the hands showed noon, it even wouldn't stop pounding  until, almost without
tapping, almost noiselessly, her shoes would come even with my window, their
black suede bows held tightly by steel buckles.
     'Sometimes she would get mischievous, pausing at the  second window and
tapping the glass  with her toe. That same instant I would be at the window,
but  the shoe would be gone, the black silk blocking the light would be gone
- I'd go and open the door for her.
     `No one  knew  of our liaison,  I  assure you of  that, though it never
happens. Her husband  didn't know, her acquaintances didn't know. In the old
house where I had that basement, people knew, of  course, they saw that some
woman visited me, but they didn't know her name.'
     `But who is she?' asked  Ivan, intrigued in the highest  degree by this
love story.
     The guest made  a gesture signifying that he  would never tell that  to
anyone, and went on with his story.
     Ivan learned that the master and the  unknown woman loved each other so
deeply that they  became  completely inseparable. Ivan could clearly picture
to himself the two rooms  in  the basement of the house, where it was always
twilight because of the lilacs  and  the fence. The  worn red furniture, the
bureau, the clock on it which struck every half hour, and books, books, from
the painted floor to the sooty ceiling, and the stove.
     Ivan learned  that his guest  and his secret wife,  from the very first
days  of  their liaison, had come  to the  conclusion that  fate itself  had
thrown them together at the corner of Tverskaya and that lane, and that they
had been created for each other for all time.
     Ivan learned from the guest's story how the lovers would spend the day.
     She  would  come, and put on an  apron first  thing, and  in the narrow
front hall where stood that same sink of which the poor patient was for some
reason so proud, would light the kerosene stove on the wooden table, prepare
lunch, and  set it out  on the oval table in  the  first room. When the  May
storms   came  and  water  rushed  noisily  through  the  gateway  past  the
near-sighted windows, threatening to  flood  their  last  refuge, the lovers
would light the stove and bake potatoes in it. Steam rose from the potatoes,
the  black  potato  skins  dirtied  their fingers. Laughter  came  from  the
basement,  the trees  in  the  garden  after rain shed  broken  twigs, white
clusters.
     When  the storms ended  and  sultry summer came,  there appeared in the
vase  the long-awaited roses they both loved. The  man who called  himself a
master  worked feverishly on  his  novel, and  this novel  also absorbed the
unknown woman.
     'Really, there were times when I'd begin to be jealous of it on account
of her,' the night visitor come from the moonlit balcony whispered to Ivan.
     Her slender fingers with sharply  filed  nails buried  in her hair, she
endlessly  reread what  he  had written,  and after rereading it  would  sit
sewing that very same  cap. Sometimes she crouched down by the lower shelves
or stood by the upper  ones and  wiped  the hundreds of dusty spines  with a
cloth. She foretold fame, she urged him  on, and it  was then that she began
to call him a master. She  waited impatiently for the already promised  last
words about the fifth procurator of  Judea,  repeated aloud in  a  sing-song
voice certain phrases she liked, and said that her life was in this novel.
     It was finished in  the month of  August,  was  given  to  some unknown
typist, and she  typed it in five copies. And  finally the hour came when he
had to leave his secret refuge and go out into life.
     `And  I went out into life holding  it in my hands,  and then  my  life
ended,' the master  whispered and  drooped  his  head,  and for a  long time
nodded the woeful black cap with the yellow letter 'M'  on it. He  continued
his story, but it became somewhat incoherent, one could only understand that
some catastrophe had then befallen Ivan's guest.
     'For the first time I found myself in the world of literature, but now,
when  it's  all  over and  my ruin is clear, I recall  it  with horror!' the
master whispered  solemnly  and  raised  his  hand.  'Yes,  he astounded  me
greatly, ah, how he astounded me!'
     'Who?' Ivan whispered barely audibly, fearing to interrupt the agitated
narrator.
     'Why, the editor, I tell you, the editor! Yes, he read it all right. He
looked at me as  if I had a swollen  cheek, looked sidelong into the corner,
and  even tittered  in embarrassment. He  crumpled the manuscript needlessly
and grunted. The questions he asked seemed crazy to me. Saving nothing about
the essence of the  novel, he asked me who I was, where I came from, and how
long I  had been writing, and why  no one  had heard of me before,  and even
asked what in my opinion  was a totally  idiotic question: who  had given me
the  idea of writing a novel on such a strange theme? Finally  I got sick of
him and asked directly  whether he would publish the  novel or  not. Here he
started squirming, mumbled  something, and declared that he could not decide
the question on his own, that other members  of the  editorial board  had to
acquaint themselves with  my work - namely, the critics Latunsky and Ariman,
and the writer Mstislav Lavrovich.  [2] He asked me to  come in two weeks. I
came  in two weeks and  was received by  some  girl whose eyes  were crossed
towards her nose from constant lying.'
     That's Lapshennikova, the editorial secretary,' Ivan said with a smirk.
     He knew very well the world described so wrathfully by his guest.
     `Maybe,' the  other  snapped, 'and  so  from  her I got  my novel back,
already quite greasy and dishevelled. Trying to avoid looking me in the eye,
Lapshennikova told me  that the publisher was provided with material for two
years ahead, and therefore the question of printing my novel, as she put it,
"did not arise".
     `What  do I remember after  that?' the  master  muttered,  rubbing  his
temple. 'Yes, red petals strewn across the  tide  page, and also the eyes of
my friend. Yes, those eyes I remember.'
     The story of Ivan's  guest was becoming more confused, more filled with
all sorts of reticences. He said something about slanting  rain  and despair
in  the  basement refuge, about  having  gone  elsewhere. He exclaimed in  a
whisper that  he did not blame her in the least for  pushing  him to fight -
oh, no, he did not blame her!
     Further on, as Ivan  heard, something sudden and strange  happened. One
day our  hero opened  a newspaper and saw  in it  an  article  by the critic
Ariman, [3] in which Ariman  warned all and  sundry  that he, that  is,  our
hero, had attempted to foist into print an apology for Jesus Christ.
     'Ah, I remember, I remember!'  Ivan cried out. 'But I've forgotten your
name!'
     'Let's leave my name out of it, I repeat, it no longer exists,' replied
the guest. 'That's not the point. Two days later in  another newspaper, over
the signature of  Mstislav Lavrovich, appeared another article, in which its
author  recommended striking, and  striking hard,  at  Pilatism  and at  the
icon-dauber  who had ventured to foist it  (again  that accursed word!) into
print.
     'Dumbfounded  by this  unheard-of word  "Pilatism", I  opened  a  third
newspaper. There were two articles in it,  one by Latunsky, the other signed
with the initials "N.E." I assure you,  the works  of Ariman  and  Lavrovich
could be counted as jokes  compared with what  Latunsky wrote. Suffice it to
say that Latunsky's  article was  entitled "A Militant  Old Believer". [4] I
got so carried away reading the article about myself that I didn't notice (I
had forgotten to lock the  door) how she  came in and stood before me with a
wet umbrella in her hand and wet  newspapers as well. Her eyes flashed fire,
her  trembling  hands were cold. First she  rushed to  kiss  me, then,  in a
hoarse  voice,  and  pounding the table with  her  fist, she said  she would
poison Latunsky.'
     Ivan grunted somewhat embarrassedly, but said nothing.
     'Joyless autumn days set in,' the guest went on. 'The monstrous failure
with  this novel seemed  to have  taken out a part  of my  soul. Essentially
speaking, I had nothing more to do, and I lived from one meeting with her to
the next. And it was at that time that something happened to me. Devil knows
what, Stravinsky probably figured it out long ago. Namely, anguish came over
me and certain forebodings appeared.
     "The  articles, please note, did not cease. I laughed at  the first  of
them. But the more of  them that appeared, the more my attitude towards them
changed.  The  second stage was one of astonishment. Some  rare falsity  and
insecurity  could be  sensed  literally in  every line  of  these  articles,
despite  their threatening  and  confident tone. I  had  the feeling, and  I
couldn't get rid  of  it, that the authors of these articles were not saying
what they wanted to say, and that their rage sprang precisely from that. And
then, imagine, a third stage came - of fear. No, not fear of these articles,
you understand, but fear of other things totally unrelated to them or to the
novel. Thus, for  instance, I began to be afraid of the dark.  In short, the
stage of  mental illness came. It seemed to me, especially as I was  falling
asleep, that  some very  cold  and  pliant  octopus  was stealing  with  its
tentacles immediately and directly towards my heart. And I had to sleep with
the light on.
     'My beloved changed very much (of  course, I never  told  her about the
octopus,  but  she could see that something  was  going  wrong with me), she
became thinner and paler, stopped laughing, and  kept  asking me to  forgive
her for  having  advised  me  to publish an  excerpt. She said I should drop
everything and go  to the  south,  to the Black Sea,  and spend all that was
left of the hundred thousand on the trip.
     'She was very insistent, and to avoid an argument (something  told me I
was not to go to the Black Sea), I promised her that I'd do it one  of those
days. But she said she would buy me the ticket herself. Then  I took out all
my money - that is, about ten thousand roubles - and gave it to her.
     ' "Why so much?" she was surprised.
     'I said something  or other about being afraid of thieves and asked her
to  keep the  money  until my departure.  She took it,  put it in her purse,
began kissing me and  saying that it would be easier for her to die  than to
leave me alone in such a state, but that she was expected, that she must bow
to  necessity, that  she  would come the next day. She begged me not  to  be
afraid of anything.
     'This was at dusk, in mid-October. And she left. I lay down on the sofa
and fell asleep without turning on the  light. I was awakened by the feeling
that the octopus was there. Groping in the dark, I barely managed to turn on
the light. My pocket watch showed two o'clock in the morning. I  was falling
ill when I went to bed, and  I woke up sick.  It suddenly seemed  to me that
the autumn darkness would push through the glass and pour into the room, and
I  would  drown in it as  in  ink. I got up  a man  no longer in  control of
himself. I cried out, the thought came to me of running to  someone, even if
it was my landlord upstairs.  I struggled with myself like  a madman.  I had
strength enough to get  to the stove and  start a fire in it. When the  wood
began to  crackle and  the stove door rattled,  I  seemed  to feel  slightly
better.  I dashed to  the  front room,  turned on the  light there,  found a
bottle of white wine, uncorked it and began drinking from the  bottle.  This
blunted the  fear somewhat  - at least enough to keep me from running  to me
landlord  - and I went back  to me stove. I  opened the little door, so that
the heat began to burn my face and hands, and whispered:
     ' "Guess that trouble has befallen me ... Come, come, come! ..."
     'But no one  came.  The fire  roared in the  stove,  rain lashed at the
windows. Then  the final thing happened. I took the heavy manuscript  of the
novel and the draft notebooks from the desk drawer and started burning them.
This was terribly hard to do, because written-on paper burns reluctantly.
     Breaking my fingernails, I tore up the notebooks, stuck them vertically
between the logs, and  ruffled the pages  with the poker. At times the ashes
got the best  of me, choking  the flames, but I struggled with them, and the
novel,  though  stubbornly resisting, was nevertheless  perishing.  Familiar
words flashed before me,  the yellow climbed steadily up the  pages, but the
words still showed through it. They would  vanish only when the paper turned
black, and I finished them off with the poker.
     `Just  then someone  began scratching quietly  at the  window. My heart
leaped, and having stuffed the last notebook into the fire, I rushed to open
the  door.  Brick steps  led up from the  basement to the door on the  yard.
Stumbling, I ran up to it and asked quietly:
     ' "Who's there?"
     'And that voice, her voice, answered:
     'It's me...'
     'I don't remember how I managed with the chain and hook. As soon as she
stepped inside, she clung to me, trembling, all wet, her cheeks wet  and her
hair uncurled. I could only utter the word:
     ' "You ... you? ...", and my voice broke, and we ran downstairs.
     `She freed herself of  her  overcoat in the front hall, and we  quickly
went into the first room. With a soft cry, she pulled  out of the stove with
her bare hands and threw on to the floor the last of what was there, a sheaf
that had  caught fire from  below. Smoke filled the room at once. I  stamped
out  the fire  with  my  feet,  and  she  collapsed  on  the sofa  and  wept
irrepressibly and convulsively.
     'When she calmed down, I said:
     ' "I came to hate this novel, and I'm afraid. I'm ill. Frightened."
     'She stood up and said:
     '  "God, how sick you are. Why is it, why? But I'll save you. I'11 save
you. What is all this?"
     `I  saw her eyes swollen  with smoke  and weeping, felt her cold  hands
stroke my forehead.
     '"I'll cure  you, I'll  cure  you,"  she was  murmuring,  clutching  my
shoulders. "You'll restore it. Why, why didn't I keep a copy?"
     'She bared her teeth with rage, she said something else inarticulately.
Then,  compressing  her  lips,  she began  to  collect  and smooth  out  the
burnt-edged pages. It was some chapter from the middle of the novel, I don't
remember which.  She neatly stacked  the  pages, wrapped them in paper, tied
them  with  a  ribbon.  All  her  actions  showed  that  she   was  full  of
determination,  and that  she had regained control of herself. She asked for
wine and, having drunk it, spoke more calmly:
     ' "This  is how one pays for lying," she said, "and I don't want to lie
any more. I'd stay with  you right now, but I'd rather not do it that way. I
don't want it to remain for ever in his memory that I  ran  away from him in
the middle of  the  night. He's never done me any wrong ...  He was summoned
unexpectedly, there was a fire at the  factory. But he'll be back soon. I'll
talk  with him  tomorrow morning, I'll tell him that I love  another man and
come back to you for ever. Or maybe you don't want that? Answer me."
     ' "Poor dear, my poor dear," I said to her. "I  won't  allow you to  do
it. Things won't go well for me, and I don't want you to perish with me."
     '  "Is that the  only reason?" she asked, and brought  her eyes dose to
mine.
     '"The only one."
     'She  became terribly animated, she  dung to me, put her arms around my
neck and said:
     ' "I'm perishing with you. In the morning I'll be here."
     'And  so, the  last thing I remember from my  life is a strip  of light
from my  front hall, and in that  strip of light an uncurled strand of hair,
her beret and her eyes filled  with determination. I also remember the black
silhouette in the outside doorway and the white package.
     ' "I'd  see you home, but it's beyond my strength to  come  back alone.
I'm afraid."
     ' "Don't be afraid. Bear with it for a few hours. Tomorrow morning I'll
be here."
     `Those  were her  last  words  in  my  life ...  Shh!  ... `the patient
suddenly interrupted himself  and raised a  finger. 'It's a restless moonlit
night tonight.'
     He disappeared  on to the balcony.  Ivan  heard little wheels roll down
the corridor, someone sobbed or cried out weakly.
     When everything grew still, the guest came back and announced that room
120 had  received  an occupant. Someone had been brought, and he kept asking
to be given back his head. The two interlocutors fell anxiously silent, but,
having calmed down,  they returned  to the interrupted story. The  guest was
just opening  his mouth, but the night was indeed a restless one. There were
still voices in the corridor, and the guest began to speak into  Ivan's ear,
so softly that what  he told him was known  only to the poet, apart from the
first phrase:
     'A quarter of  an hour after she left  me,  there  came  a knock at  my
window ...'
     What the patient whispered  into Ivan's ear evidently agitated him very
much. Spasms repeatedly passed over his face. Fear and rage swam and flitted
in his eyes. The narrator pointed his hand somewhere in the direction of the
moon,  which had  long  since  left the balcony. Only when all  sounds  from
outside ceased to reach them did the  guest move away from Ivan and begin to
speak more loudly:
     'Yes, and  so in mid-January, at  night, in the  same coat but with the
buttons torn off, [5] I was huddled with cold  in  my little yard. Behind me
were  snowdrifts  that hid the lilac bushes,  and before me and below  -  my
little windows, dimly lit, covered with shades. I  bent down to the first of
them and listened - a gramophone was  playing in my  rooms. That  was all  I
heard, but I  could not see anything. I stood there a  while, then  went out
the gate to the  lane. A blizzard was frolicking in it. A dog, dashing under
my feet, frightened  me, and I ran away from it to the other side. The cold,
and the fear  that  had  become my  constant  companion,  were driving me to
frenzy. I had nowhere to go, and the simplest thing,  of course, would  have
been to throw myself under a tram-car on the street where my lane  came out.
From  far  off  I could see those light-filled, ice-covered  boxes  and hear
their  loathsome screeching in the frost. But,  my dear neighbour, the whole
thing was that  fear possessed  every cell of  my body. And,  just as  I was
afraid of the dog, so I was afraid of the tram-car. Yes, there is no illness
in this place worse than mine, I assure you!'
     `But  you  could  have let her know,'  said Ivan, sympathizing with the
poor patient. 'Besides, she has your money. She did keep it, of course?'
     'You needn't doubt that, of course she kept it. But you evidently don't
understand me. Or, rather, I've lost  the  ability I once had for describing
things. However,  I'm not very sorry  about that, since I no longer have any
use for  it. Before her,' the guest reverently looked out at the darkness of
the night,  `there would  lie  a  letter from a madhouse.  How  can one send
letters  from such an address ... a mental  patient?  ... You're joking,  my
friend! Make her unhappy? No, I'm not capable of that.'
     Ivan was unable to object to this, but the silent Ivan sympathized with
the guest, he commiserated  with  him. And the  other, from the  pain of his
memories, nodded his head in the black cap and spoke thus:
     'Poor woman ... However, I have hopes that she has forgotten me ...'
     'But you may recover ...' Ivan said timidly.
     'I am  incurable,' the  guest replied calmly.  'When Stravinsky says he
will  bring  me back to life, I don't  believe him. He is  humane and simply
wants to  comfort me. I don't deny, however,  that I'm much better now. Yes,
so  where did I  leave off? Frost, those flying  trams... I knew  that  this
clinic had been opened, and set out for it on foot across the entire city.
     Madness!  Outside the city I  probably  would have frozen to death, but
chance saved me. A truck had broken down,  I came  up to the  driver, it was
some three miles beyond the city limits, and to my surprise he took  pity on
me. The truck was coming here.  And he took me along. I got away with having
my left  toes frostbitten. But  they  cured that. And now this is the fourth
month that I've been here. And, you know, I find it not at all bad here. One
mustn't  make  grandiose  plans,  dear neighbour,  really!  I, for instance,
wanted to go all around the globe. Well, so it  turns out that I'm not going
to do it. I see  only an insignificant piece  of that  globe. I suppose it's
not the very best there is on it, but, I repeat, it's not so bad.  Summer is
coming, the ivy will  twine up  on to the  balcony.  So Praskovya Fyodorovna
promises. The  keys have broadened my possibilities. There'll be the moon at
night. Ah, it's gone! Freshness. It's falling past midnight. Time to go.'
     Tell me, what happened afterwards with Yeshua and Pilate?' Ivan asked.
     'I beg you, I want to know.'
     'Ah, no, no,' the guest replied with a painful twitch. 'I cannot recall
my novel without trembling. And your acquaintance from the Patriarch's Ponds
would do it better than I. Thank you for the conversation. Goodbye.'
     And  before Ivan  could collect  his senses,  the grille closed  with a
quiet clang, and the guest vanished.

CHAPTER 12. Black Magic and Its Exposure

     A  small  man  in  a  yellow  bowler-hat  full  of  holes  and  with  a
pear-shaped,    raspberry-coloured   nose,   in   checkered   trousers   and
patent-leather  shoes,  rolled out  on to  the  stage  of  the Variety on an
ordinary two-wheeled bicycle. To the sounds of a foxtrot  he  made a circle,
and then gave a triumphant shout, which caused his bicycle to rear up. After
riding around  on  the  back wheel,  the  little  man  turned  upside  down,
contrived while in motion to unscrew the front wheel and send it  backstage,
and then  proceeded on his  way with one wheel, turning the pedals with  his
hands.
     On a tall metal pole with a seat at the top and a single wheel, a plump
blonde rolled out in tights and a little skirt strewn with silver stars, and
began riding in a circle. As he  met her,  the  little man  uttered cries of
greeting, doffing his bowler-hat with his foot.
     Finally, a little eight-year-old with  an elderly face came rolling out
and began scooting about  among the adults on  a tiny  two-wheeler furnished
with an enormous automobile horn.
     After  making  several  loops,  the  whole  company,  to  the  alarming
drum-beats of the orchestra, rolled to the  very edge  of the stage, and the
spectators in the front rows gasped and drew back, because it seemed to  the
public that the whole trio with  its  vehicles was about to crash  down into
the orchestra pit.
     But the bicycles  stopped  just at the  moment  when  the front  wheels
threatened to slide into the abyss on  the  heads of  the musicians. With  a
loud  shout of 'Hup!' the cyclists jumped off their vehicles and  bowed, the
blonde  woman  blowing kisses  to the public,  and the  little one tooting a
funny signal on his horn.
     Applause  shook  the  building, the light-blue curtain  came  from both
sides  and covered the  cyclists,  the green `Exit' lights by the doors went
out, and in the web  of trapezes under  the cupola white spheres lit up like
the sun. It was the intermission before the last part.
     The only man who was not the least bit interested in the wonders of the
Giulli family's cycling technique was Grigory Danilovich Rimsky.
     In  complete  solitude  he sat in  his office,  biting his thin lips, a
spasm  passing  over  his  face from  time  to time.  To  the  extraordinary
disappearance  of  Likhodeev  had  now  been  added  the  wholly  unforeseen
disappearance of Varenukha.
     Rimsky knew where  he  had gone, but he had gone and ... not come back!
Rimsky shrugged his shoulders and whispered to himself:
     'But what for?'
     And it was  strange: for such  a  practical man as the findirector, the
simplest thing would, of course, have been to call the place where Varenukha
had gone and find out  what had befallen him, yet until ten o'clock at night
he had been unable to force himself to do it.
     At  ten,  doing outright  violence  to  himself, Rimsky picked  up  the
receiver and  here discovered that  his  telephone was dead.  The  messenger
reported that the other telephones in the building were also out of order.
     This certainly unpleasant,  though hardly supernatural,  occurrence for
some reason thoroughly shocked the findirector, but at the same time  he was
glad: the need to call fell away.
     Just as the red light over the  findirector's  head lit up and blinked,
announcing  the beginning  of  the  intermission, a  messenger  came in  and
informed him of the foreign  artiste's arrival.  The findirector cringed for
some  reason, and, blacker than a storm cloud, went backstage to receive the
visitor, since there was no one else to receive him.
     Under various  pretexts,  curious  people kept  peeking  into  the  big
dressing room from the corridor, where the signal bell was already ringing.
     Among them were conjurers  in bright robes  and turbans, a skater  in a
white knitted jacket, a storyteller pale with powder and the make-up man.
     The  newly  arrived celebrity  struck everyone by his  marvellously cut
tailcoat, of a length never seen before,  and by his  having come in a black
half-mask.  But  most  remarkable  of  all  were  the black  magician's  two
companions: a long checkered one with a  cracked pince-nez,  and a fat black
cat who came into the dressing room on  his hind legs and quite nonchalantly
sat on the sofa squinting at the bare make-up lights.
     Rimsky attempted  to produce  a smile on  his face, which made  it look
sour and spiteful, and bowed to the silent black magician, who was seated on
the sofa  beside  the  cat. There  was  no handshake. Instead, the easygoing
checkered  one  made his  own  introductions  to  the fin-director,  calling
himself 'the gent's assistant'. This circumstance surprised the findirector,
and unpleasantly so: there was  decidedly no mention of any assistant in the
contract.
     Quite  stiffly  and  drily,  Grigory   Danilovich   inquired  of   this
fallen-from-the-sky checkered one where the artiste's paraphernalia was.
     'Our heavenly  diamond,  most precious mister director,' the magician's
assistant replied in a rattling voice, 'the paraphernalia is always with us.
Here it is! Ein, zwei, drei!' And, waving his knotty fingers before Rimsky's
eyes, he suddenly took from behind the cat's ear Rimsky's own gold watch and
chain,  hitherto worn by  the findirector in his waistcoat pocket, under his
buttoned coat, with the chain through a buttonhole.
     Rimsky inadvertently  clutched his stomach,  those present gasped,  and
the make-up man, peeking in the doorway, grunted approvingly.
     Your little watchie?  Kindly take it,' the checkered one  said, smiling
casually  and  offering  the bewildered Rimsky his own property  on a  dirty
palm.
     'No getting on a tram with that one,' the storyteller whispered quietly
and merrily to the make-up man.
     But the  cat pulled a  neater trick than  the  number  with the  stolen
watch. Getting up from the  sofa unexpectedly, he walked on his hind legs to
the dressing table, pulled the stopper out of the carafe with his front paw,
poured water into a glass, drank it, installed the stopper in its place, and
wiped his whiskers with a make-up cloth.
     Here no one even gasped, their mouths simply fell open, and the make-up
man whispered admiringly:
     'That's class!'
     Just then  the bells rang  alarmingly for the third time, and everyone,
agitated  and  anticipating  an  interesting  number,  thronged  out  of the
dressing room.
     A moment  later the  spheres went out  in the  theatre,  the footlights
blazed up, lending a reddish  glow  to the base  of the curtain, and in  the
lighted  gap of the curtain there appeared before the  public  a plump  man,
merry as  a  baby,  with  a  clean-shaven face, in  a  rumpled  tailcoat and
none-too-fresh shirt. This was the master  of ceremonies, well  known to all
Moscow - Georges Bengalsky.
     'And now, citizens,' Bengalsky began, smiling his baby smile, 'there is
about to come  before you ...' Here  Bengalsky interrupted himself and spoke
in a different tone: 'I see the audience has grown for the third part. We've
got half the city here! I met a  friend the other day and said to  him: "Why
don't you come to our show? Yesterday we had  half the city." And he says to
me: "I live in the other half!"'  Bengalsky  paused,  waiting for a burst of
laughter,  but as  no  one laughed, he  went on: '... And so, now comes  the
famous foreign artiste. Monsieur Woland, with a sance of black magic. Well,
both you and I know,' here Bengalsky smiled a wise smile,  'that there's  no
such thing  in  the  world, and that it's all just superstition, and Maestro
Woland is simply a perfect master of the technique of conjuring, as we shall
see from the most interesting part, that is, the exposure of this technique,
and since we're all of us to a man both for  technique and for its exposure,
let's bring on Mr Woland! ...'
     After uttering all this claptrap, Bengalsky pressed his  palms together
and waved them in greeting through  the slit of the curtain, which caused it
to part with a soft rustic.
     The entrance of the magician with his long  assistant and the cat,  who
came on stage on his hind legs, pleased the audience greatly.
     'An  armchair  for  me,' Woland  ordered in a low voice, and that  same
second  an  armchair  appeared on stage, no  one knew  how or from where, in
which the magician sat down. 'Tell me, my gentle Fagott,' Woland inquired of
the checkered clown,  who evidently had  another  appellation than Koroviev,
`what  do  you think, the  Moscow populace has changed significantly, hasn't
it?'
     The  magician  looked  out  at  the  hushed  audience,  struck  by  the
appearance of the armchair out of nowhere.
     "That it has, Messire,' Fagott-Koroviev replied in a low voice.
     "You're right. The  city folk have changed greatly ... externally, that
is  ...  as  has  the city  itself,  incidentally...  Not  to mention  their
clothing,  these ... what do you  call them ... trams, automobiles ...  have
appeared ...'
     'Buses ...'-Fagott prompted deferentially.
     The audience  listened  attentively to  this  conversation, thinking it
constituted  a  prelude to the magic tricks.  The  wings  were  packed  with
performers  and stage-hands, and among their faces could be  seen the tense,
pale face of Rimsky.
     The physiognomy of Bengalsky,  who  had retreated to  the  side  of the
stage, began to  show some perplexity.  He raised one  eyebrow slightly and,
taking advantage of a pause, spoke:
     "The foreign artiste is expressing his  admiration  for  Moscow and its
technological  development,  as well as for the Muscovites.' Here  Bengalsky
smiled twice, first to the stalls, then to the gallery.
     Woland,  Fagott and the cat turned their heads in the direction of  the
master of ceremonies.
     'Did I express admiration?' the magician asked the checkered Fagott.
     'By no  means, Messire, you never  expressed any admiration,' came  the
reply.
     Then what is the man saying?'
     'He  quite simply lied!' the  checkered assistant  declared sonorously,
for the whole theatre to hear, and turning to Bengalsky, he added:
     'Congrats, citizen, you done lied!'
     Tittering spattered  from  the  gallery, but Bengalsky gave a start and
goggled his eyes.
     'Of  course,  I'm not so much interested in buses, telephones and other
...'
     'Apparatuses,' the checkered one prompted.
     'Quite right,  thank you,' the  magician spoke slowly in  a heavy bass,
`as  in a question of much greater importance:  have the city  folk  changed
inwardly?'
     "Yes, that is the most important question, sir.'
     There  was  shrugging  and an  exchanging  of  glances  in  the  wings,
Bengalsky stood all  red, and Rimsky  was pale. But  here, as if sensing the
nascent alarm, the magician said:
     'However, we're  talking  away,  my  dear  Fagott,  and the audience is
beginning to get bored. My gentle Fagott,  show us some  simple little thing
to start with.'
     The audience stirred. Fagott and the cat walked along the footlights to
opposite  sides  of  the  stage.  Fagott  snapped his  fingers, and  with  a
rollicking Three, four!' snatched a deck of cards from the air, shuffled it,
and sent it in a long ribbon  to the cat. The cat intercepted it and sent it
back. The satiny snake whiffled, Fagott opened his mouth like a nestling and
swallowed it all card by card. After which the cat bowed, scraping his right
hind paw, winning himself unbelievable applause.
     'Class! Real class!' rapturous shouts came from the wings.
     And Fagott jabbed his finger at the stalls and announced:
     'You'll find that same deck,  esteemed citizens, on  citizen Parchevsky
in the seventh row, just  between a three-rouble bill and a summons to court
in connection with the payment of alimony to citizen Zeikova.'
     There was a stirring in the stalls, people began to get up, and finally
some citizen whose name was indeed  Parchevsky, all  crimson with amazement,
extracted the deck from his wallet and began sticking it up in the  air, not
knowing what to do with it.
     'You may keep it as a souvenir!' cried Fagott. 'Not for nothing did you
say  at dinner  yesterday that if it weren't for  poker your life in  Moscow
would be utterly unbearable.'
     `An old trick!' came  from  the gallery.  The one in the stalls is from
the same company.'
     'You think so?' shouted Fagott, squinting at the gallery. 'In that case
you're also one of us, because the deck is now in your pocket!'
     There was movement in the balcony, and a joyful voice said:
     'Right! He's got it! Here, here! ... Wait! It's ten-rouble bills!'
     Those sitting  in the  stalls  turned  their  heads. In the  gallery  a
bewildered  citizen  found in his  pocket  a  bank-wrapped packet with  'One
thousand roubles' written on it. His neighbours hovered over him, and he, in
amazement, picked at  the wrapper with his fingernail, trying to find out if
the bills were real or some sort of magic ones.
     'By God, they're  real! Ten-rouble bills!'  joyful cries  came from the
gallery.
     'I want to play with the same kind of deck,' a fat man in the middle of
the stalls requested merrily.
     `Avec playzeer!'  Fagott responded.  `But why just  you? Everyone  will
warmly participate!' And he commanded: 'Look up, please! ... One!' There was
a  pistol in his hand. He  shouted:  'Two!' The  pistol  was pointed  up. He
shouted: 'Three!' There was a flash, a bang, and all at once, from under the
cupola, bobbing between  the  trapezes, white  strips of paper began falling
into the theatre.
     They twirled,  got blown aside, were drawn towards the gallery, bounced
into the orchestra and on to the stage. In a few seconds, the rain of money,
ever thickening,  reached the seats,  and the  spectators began snatching at
it.
     Hundreds of arms were raised,  the spectators  held the bills up to the
lighted stage and  saw the most true and honest-to-God watermarks. The smell
also  left no doubts: it was  the incomparably delightful  smell of  freshly
printed  money.  The whole theatre was seized first with merriment and  then
with amazement. The word 'money, money!' hummed everywhere, there were gasps
of  'ah, ah!'  and merry laughter. One or  two were  already crawling in the
aisles, feeling under  the chairs. Many stood on the  seats, trying to catch
the flighty, capricious notes.
     Bewilderment  was  gradually coming to the faces  of the policemen, and
performers unceremoniously began sticking their heads out from the wings.
     In the dress  circle  a voice was heard: `What're you grabbing at? It's
mine,  it flew  to me!' and another voice: 'Don't  shove me,  or  you'll get
shoved  back!' And  suddenly there  came the  sound of  a  whack. At  once a
policeman's helmet appeared in the dress circle, and someone from  the dress
circle was led away.
     The general  agitation was  increasing, and no one  knows where it  all
would have ended if Fagott  had  not  stopped the  rain of money by suddenly
blowing into the air.
     Two  young men, exchanging significant and merry glances, took off from
their seats  and  made  straight  for the buffet.  There  was  a hum  in the
theatre, all  the spectators'  eyes glittered  excitedly. Yes,  yes, no  one
knows  where  it  all would  have ended if  Bengalsky had not  summoned  his
strength and acted. Trying to gain better control of himself, he rubbed  his
hands, as was his custom, and in his most resounding voice spoke thus:
     'Here, citizens, you and I  have  just beheld  a case of so-called mass
hypnosis. A  purely scientific experiment, proving  in the best way possible
that there  are no  miracles in magic.  Let us ask Maestro Woland to  expose
this experiment  for  us. Presently,  citizens, you will see  these supposed
banknotes disappear as suddenly as they appeared.'
     Here he applauded, but quite  alone, while a confident smile  played on
his face,  yet in his eyes  there  was  no  such  confidence, but  rather an
expression of entreaty.
     The audience did not like Bengalsky's speech. Total silence fell, which
was broken by the checkered Fagott.
     `And  this is  a  case  of so-called  lying,' he announced  in a  loud,
goatish tenor. The notes, citizens, are genuine.'
     'Bravo!' a bass barked from somewhere on high.
     This one, incidentally,' here Fagott pointed to Bengalsky, 'annoys me.
     Keeps  poking his nose where nobody's asked him, spoils the sance with
false observations! What're we going to do with him?'
     Tear his head off!' someone up in the gallery said severely.
     'What's that you said? Eh?' Fagott responded at once to this outrageous
suggestion. Tear his head off? There's an idea! Behemoth!' he shouted to the
cat. 'Go to it! Ein, zwei, drei!!'
     And an unheard-of thing occurred. The  fur bristled on the cat's  back,
and he gave a rending miaow. Then he compressed himself into a ball and shot
like a panther straight at Bengalsky's chest, and from there on to his head.
     Growling, the cat sank his plump paws into the skimpy chevelure  of the
master  of ceremonies and  in two  twists tore the head from  the thick neck
with a savage howl.
     The two and a half thousand people in the theatre cried out as one.
     Blood  spurted in fountains from the torn neck arteries and poured over
the shirt-front  and tailcoat.  The headless  body paddled its feet  somehow
absurdly and sat  down on the floor. Hysterical women's cries came from  the
audience. The cat  handed  the head  to Fagott, who lifted it up by the hair
and showed it to the audience,  and the  head cried  desperately for all the
theatre to hear:
     'A doctor!'
     'Will you pour out such drivel in the future?' Fagott asked the weeping
head menacingly.
     'Never again!' croaked the head.
     'For  God's sake, don't  torture him!' a woman's voice from a  box seat
suddenly rose above the clamour, and the magician turned in the direction of
that voice.
     'So,  what  then,  citizens,  shall  we  forgive  him?'  Fagott  asked,
addressing the audience.
     'Forgive  him, forgive him!'  separate  voices,  mostly women's,  spoke
first, then merged into one chorus with the men's.
     'What are your orders, Messire?' Fagott asked the masked man.
     'Well, now,'  the  latter  replied pensively, 'they're  people like any
other  people...  They  love money, but  that has always  been so... Mankind
loves money,  whatever it's  made of-  leather, paper,  bronze,  gold. Well,
they're  light-minded  ...  well,  what of  it ... mercy sometimes knocks at
their  hearts  ...  ordinary people... In general, reminiscent of the former
ones  ...  only the housing problem has  corrupted them...'  And  he ordered
loudly: 'Put the head on.'
     The cat, aiming accurately, planted the  head on the  neck, and it  sat
exactly in its place, as if it had never gone anywhere. Above all, there was
not even any scar left on the neck. The cat brushed Bengalsky's tailcoat and
shirt-front with his paws, and all traces of blood disappeared from them.
     Fagott got  the  sitting Bengalsky to his feet, stuck a packet of money
into his coat pocket, and sent him from the stage with the words:
     'Buzz off, it's more fun without you!'
     Staggering and looking around senselessly, the master of ceremonies had
plodded  no  farther  than  the fire post when he  felt  sick. He  cried out
pitifully:
     'My head, my head! ...'
     Among  those who  rushed  to him  was  Rimsky. The master of ceremonies
wept, snatched at something in the air with his hands, and muttered:
     'Give me my head, give me back my head ... Take my  apartment,  take my
paintings, only give me back my head! ...'
     A  messenger ran for  a doctor. They tried to  lie Bengalsky down on  a
sofa  in the dressing room, but he began to struggle, became  violent.  They
had  to call an ambulance. When  the unfortunate  master  of  ceremonies was
taken away,  Rimsky  ran  back  to  the stage and saw that new wonders  were
taking place on it. Ah, yes, incidentally, either then or a little  earlier,
the magician disappeared from  the stage together with  his  faded armchair,
and it must be said that the public took absolutely no notice of it, carried
away as it was by the extraordinary things Fagott was unfolding on stage.
     And  Fagott,  having packed off  the  punished  master  of  ceremonies,
addressed the public thus:
     `All righty,  now  that we've  kicked that nuisance out, let's  open  a
ladies' shop!'
     And  all  at  once  the  floor  of the  stage was covered with  Persian
carpets, huge  mirrors appeared,  lit by  greenish tubes at  the sides,  and
between the mirrors -  display windows,  and in them  the merrily astonished
spectators saw Parisian ladies' dresses of various colours and cuts. In some
of the windows, that is, while in others there appeared hundreds  of ladies'
hats, with feathers and without feathers,  and  - with  buckles or without -
hundreds of shoes, black, white, yellow, leather, satin, suede, with straps,
with stones. Among the shoes there appeared cases of perfume,  mountains  of
handbags of antelope  hide, suede, silk,  and among  these,  whole  heaps of
little elongated cases of gold metal such as usually contain lipstick.
     A red-headed girl  appeared  from devil knows where in  a black evening
dress - a girl nice in all respects, had she not been marred by a queer scar
on her neck - smiling a proprietary smile by the display windows.
     Fagott,  grinning  sweetly,  announced  that   the  firm  was  offering
perfectly  gratis an  exchange  of  the ladies'  old dresses and  shoes  for
Parisian  models  and Parisian shoes. The  same  held,  he  added,  for  the
handbags and other things.
     The cat began scraping with his hind paw, while his front paw performed
the gestures appropriate to a doorman opening a door.
     The  girl  sang out sweetly, though with some  hoarseness, rolling  her
r's, something not quite comprehensible but, judging by the women's faces in
the stalls, very tempting:
     'Gueriain,  Chanel,  Mitsouko,  Narcisse  Noir, Chanel No.  5,  evening
gowns, cocktail dresses ...'
     Fagott wriggled, the cat bowed, the girl opened the glass windows.
     'Welcome!' yelled Fagott. With no embarrassment or ceremony!'
     The audience was excited, but as yet  no one ventured on stage. Finally
some brunette stood up in the tenth row of the stalls and, smiling as if  to
say it was all the same to her and she did not give a hoot, went and climbed
on stage by the side stairs.
     'Bravo!' Fagott shouted. 'Greetings  to the first customer! Behemoth, a
chair! Let's start with the shoes, madame.'
     The brunette sat in the chair, and Fagott  at once poured a  whole heap
of shoes on the rug in  front of her.  The brunette  removed her right shoe,
tried a lilac one, stamped on the rug, examined the heel.
     They won't pinch?' she asked pensively.
     To this Fagott exclaimed with a hurt air:
     'Come, come!' and the cat miaowed resentfully.
     'I'll take this pair, m'sieur,' the brunette said with dignity, putting
on the second shoe as well.
     The  brunette's  old  shoes  were  tossed behind  a  curtain,  and  she
proceeded there herself, accompanied by the  red-headed girl and Fagott, who
was carrying several fashionable dresses on hangers. The cat bustled  about,
helped, and for greater importance hung a measuring tape around his neck.
     A minute  later  the brunette  came from  behind the  curtain in such a
dress that  the stalls all let out a  gasp. The brave woman,  who had become
astonishingly prettier, stopped at  the mirror,  moved  her  bare shoulders,
touched the hair on her nape and, twisting, tried to peek at her back.
     The firm asks  you to accept this as a  souvenir,' said Fagott, and  he
offered the brunette an open case with a flacon in it.
     `Merci,'  the brunette said  haughtily and went  down  the steps to the
stalls. As she walked, the spectators jumped up and touched the case.
     And here there came a clean  breakthrough, and  from  all  sides  women
marched  on  to the stage. Amid the general agitation of  talk, chuckles and
gasps, a man's voice was heard: 'I won't allow it!' and a woman's:
     `Despot and  philistine! Don't break my  arm!' Women disappeared behind
the curtain, leaving their dresses there and coming out in new ones. A whole
row  of  ladies  sat  on  stools  with  gilded  legs,  stamping  the  carpet
energetically with  newly shod feet. Fagott was  on his  knees, working away
with a metal shoehorn; the  cat, fainting under piles of purses  and  shoes,
plodded back  and forth between the display windows and the stools; the girl
with the disfigured  neck appeared  and  disappeared, and reached  the point
where she started rattling away entirely in French,  and,  surprisingly, the
women all understood her from  half a word, even those  who  did not  know a
single word of French.
     General amazement was aroused  by a  man  edging his way  on-stage.  He
announced that his wife had the  flu, and he therefore  asked that something
be sent to her through him. As proof that he was indeed married, the citizen
was prepared to show his passport. The solicitous husband's announcement was
met with guffaws. Fagott  shouted  that  he  believed him like his own self,
even  without  the  passport,  and handed  the  citizen two  pairs  of  silk
stockings, and the cat for his part added a little tube of lipstick.
     Late-coming women tore on  to the stage, and off  the  stage the  lucky
ones  came  pouring down in ball gowns,  pyjamas with dragons,  sober formal
outfits, little hats tipped over one eyebrow.
     Then Fagott announced that owing to the lateness of the hour, the  shop
would  close  in  exactly  one  minute  until  the  next   evening,  and  an
unbelievable  scramble arose  on-stage. Women hastily  grabbed shoes without
trying  them on. One burst behind the curtain like  a storm, got  out of her
dress  there, took possession  of the first thing that came to hand - a silk
dressing-gown covered with huge bouquets - and managed to pick up  two cases
of perfume besides.
     Exactly a minute later a pistol shot rang out, the mirrors disappeared,
the display windows and stools dropped away, the carpet melted  into air, as
did the curtain. Last to disappear was  the high mountain of old dresses and
shoes, and the stage was again severe, empty and bare.
     And it was here that a new character mixed into the affair. A pleasant,
sonorous, and very insistent baritone came from box no. 2:
     'All the same it  is  desirable, citizen artiste, that you  expose  the
technique of your  tricks to the spectators  without  delay,  especially the
trick  with  the  paper money.  It  is  also  desirable  that  the master of
ceremonies  return to the  stage. The  spectators are  concerned  about  his
fate.'
     The  baritone belonged  to  none  other  than that  evening's guest  of
honour,   Arkady  Apollonovich  Sempleyarov,  chairman   of  the   Acoustics
Commission of the Moscow theatres.
     Arkady  Apollonovich was  in  his  box with two  ladies:  the older one
dressed expensively  and  fashionably,  the  other  one,  young  and pretty,
dressed  in a simpler way.  The  first,  as was  soon discovered  during the
drawing up of the report, was Arkady Apollonovich's wife, and the second was
his distant relation, a promising debutante,  who had  come from Saratov and
was living in the apartment of Arkady Apollonovich and his wife.
     Pardone!' Fagott replied. 'I'm  sorry, there's nothing here to  expose,
it's all clear.'
     'No, excuse me! The exposure  is  absolutely necessary. Without it your
brilliant numbers will  leave  a painful impression. The mass  of spectators
demands an explanation.'
     'The mass  of  spectators,' the impudent clown interrupted Sempleyarov,
`doesn't seem to be saying  anything.  But, in  consideration of  your  most
esteemed desire, Arkady Apollonovich, so be it - I will perform an exposure.
But, to that end, will you allow me one more tiny number?'
     'Why not?' Arkady Apollonovich replied patronizingly.  'But  there must
be an exposure.'
     'Very well, very  well,  sir. And  so, allow me to ask,  where were you
last evening, Arkady Apollonovich?'
     At  this  inappropriate  and  perhaps  even  boorish  question,  Arkady
Apollonovich's countenance changed, and changed quite drastically.
     `Last evening  Arkady Apollonovich was  at a meeting  of  the Acoustics
Commission,' Arkady Apollonovich's  wife  declared  very haughtily,  "but  I
don't understand what that has got to do with magic.'
     'Ouee, madame!' Fagott agreed. 'Naturally you don't understand. As  for
the meeting, you are totally deluded. After driving off to the said meeting,
which   incidentally   was  not  even  scheduled  for   last  night,  Arkady
Apollonovich dismissed his chauffeur at the Acoustics Commission building on
Clean Ponds'  (the  whole  theatre became  hushed),  `and  went  by  bus  to
Yelokhovskaya  Street  to  visit  an actress  from  the  regional  itinerant
theatre, Militsa Andreevna Pokobatko, with whom he spent some four hours.'
     'Aie!'  someone  cried out  painfully  in  the  total  silence.  Arkady
Apollonovich's young relation suddenly broke into a low and terrible laugh.
     'It's all clear!' she exclaimed. 'And I've long suspected it. Now I see
why that giftless thing got the role of Louisa [1]!''
     And, swinging suddenly, she struck Arkady Apollonovich on the head with
her short and fat violet umbrella.
     Meanwhile, the scoundrelly Fagott, alias Koroviev, was shouting:
     'Here,  honourable  citizens,  is  one  case  of  the  exposure  Arkady
Apollonovich so importunately insisted on!'
     'How dare you touch  Arkady Apollonovich,  you  vile creature?'  Arkady
Apollonovich's wife  asked  threateningly,  rising  in  the box to  all  her
gigantic height.
     A second brief wave of satanic laughter seized the young relation. 'Who
else should dare touch  him,' she answered, guffawing, 'if  not me!' And for
the second time there came the dry, crackling sound of the umbrella bouncing
off the head of Arkady Apollonovich.
     'Police! Seize her!!'  Sempleyarov's  wife shouted in such  a  terrible
voice that many hearts went cold.
     And here the cat also leaped out to the footlights and  suddenly barked
in a human voice for all the theatre to hear:
     The seance  is  over!  Maestro!  Hack  out a  march!'  The  half-crazed
conductor, unaware of what he was doing, waved his baton,  and the orchestra
did not play, or even strike up, or even bang away at, but precisely, in the
cat's  loathsome  expression,  hacked  out  some  incredible  march  of   an
unheard-of brashness.
     For a moment  there was  an illusion of having heard  once upon a time,
under   southern  stars,  in  a  cafe-chantant,  some  barely  intelligible,
half-blind, but rollicking words to this march:
     His Excellency reached the stage
     Of liking barnyard fowl.
     He took under his patronage
     Three young girls and an owl!!!
     Or maybe these were not the words at all, but there were  others to the
same music, extremely indecent ones.  That  is not the important thing,  the
important thing is that, after all this, something like Babel broke loose in
the Variety.  The  police  went  running  to Sempleyarov's box, people  were
climbing  over the barriers,  there were  bursts  of infernal guffawing  and
furious shouts, drowned in the golden clash of the orchestra's cymbals.
     And  one could see that  the stage  was  suddenly  empty,  and that the
hoodwinker  Fagott, as well as the  brazen tom-cat Behemoth, had melted into
air, vanished as the magician had vanished  earlier in his armchair with the
faded upholstery.

CHAPTER 11. Ivan Splits in Two

     The woods  on the  opposite bank of the river,  still lit up by the May
sun an hour earlier, turned dull, smeary, and dissolved.
     Water  fell down  in  a solid sheet  outside  the  window. In the  sky,
threads flashed every moment, the sky kept  bursting open, and the patient's
room was flooded with a tremulous, frightening light.
     Ivan quietly  wept, sitting on his  bed  and looking  out at  the muddy
river boiling with bubbles. At every clap of thunder, he cried out pitifully
and buried his face  in  his hands. Pages covered  with  Ivan's writing  lay
about  on the floor. They had been blown down by the wind that flew into the
room before the storm began.
     The poet's  attempts  to  write a  statement  concerning  the  terrible
consultant  had gone nowhere. As  soon as he got the  pencil  stub and paper
from  the fat attendant, whose name was Praskovya Fyodorovna,  he rubbed his
hands in  a business-like  way and  hastily  settled himself at  the  little
table. The beginning came out quite glibly.
     To the police.  From  Massolit  member  Ivan  Nikolaevich  Homeless.  A
statement.  Yesterday evening  I  came  to  the Patriarch's Ponds  with  the
deceased M. A. Berlioz...'
     And  right  there the  poet  got  confused, mainly  owing  to the  word
'deceased'. Some nonsensicality emerged at once: what's this - came with the
deceased? The deceased  don't  go  anywhere!  Really, for all  he knew, they
might take him for a madman!
     Having  reflected thus, Ivan Nikolaevich began to correct what  he  had
written. What came out this time was: '...  with M. A. Berlioz, subsequently
deceased  ...' This  did  not  satisfy the  author either.  He  had to  have
recourse to a third redaction, which proved still worse than  the first two:
'Berlioz, who  fell under the  tram-car...'  - and  that namesake  composer,
unknown to  anyone, was also  dangling  here, so  he had to put in: 'not the
composer...'
     After suffering over these two Berliozes, Ivan crossed  it all  out and
decided to begin right off with something  very strong,  in order to attract
the  reader's attention  at  once,  so  he wrote that  a  cat  had got on  a
tram-car, and  then went back to the episode with the severed head. The head
and the consultant's prediction led  him  to the thought of  Pontius Pilate,
and for  greater conviction  Ivan  decided to tell  the  whole story  of the
procurator in full, from the  moment he walked out  in  his white cloak with
blood-red lining to the colonnade of Herod's palace.
     Ivan worked assiduously,  crossing out what  he had written, putting in
new words, and even attempted to draw Pontius Pilate and then a cat standing
on  its hind legs. But the  drawings did not help, and the further it  went,
the more confusing and incomprehensible the poet's statement became.
     By the time the frightening  cloud with smoking edges appeared from far
off and covered the woods, and the wind began to blow, Ivan felt that he was
strengthless, that he would  never be able to manage with the statement, and
he would not pick up the scattered pages, and he wept quietly and bitterly.
     The good-natured nurse Praskovya Fyodorovna visited the poet during the
storm, became alarmed  on seeing him weeping, closed the  blinds so that the
lightning would  not frighten  the patient, picked up  the  pages  from  the
floor, and ran with them for the doctor.
     He came, gave  Ivan  an injection in the  arm, and  assured him that he
would  not weep any  more, that  everything would pass now, everything would
change, everything would be forgotten.
     The  doctor proved  right.  Soon  the woods across the river  became as
before. It was outlined to the last tree under the sky, which cleared to its
former perfect blue,  and the  river grew  calm.  Anguish had begun to leave
Ivan  right after the  injection, and now the  poet lay calmly and looked at
the rainbow that stretched across the sky.
     So it went  till  evening, and  he did not even  notice how the rainbow
melted away, how the sky saddened and faded, how the woods turned black.
     Having drunk some hot milk, Ivan  lay  down again and marvelled himself
at how  changed his thinking was. The accursed, demonic cat somehow softened
in  his  memory,  the  severed  head did not  frighten him  any  more,  and,
abandoning all thought of  it, Ivan  began to reflect that,  essentially, it
was not so bad in the clinic, that Stravinsky was  a clever man and a famous
one,  and it was  quite pleasant to deal with him. Besides,  the evening air
was sweet and fresh after the storm.
     The house of sorrow was falling  asleep. In quiet corridors the frosted
white lights went out, and in their  place, according  to regulations, faint
blue night-lights  were lit, and  the careful steps of attendants were heard
more and more rarely on the rubber matting of the corridor outside the door.
     Now Ivan lay in  sweet languor, glancing  at the  lamp under its shade,
shedding a softened light  from the ceiling, then  at the moon rising behind
the black woods, and conversed with himself.
     'Why, actually, did I  get so  excited  about  Berlioz falling  under a
tram-car?' the poet reasoned. `In the  final analysis, let him sink! What am
I, in fact, his chum or in-law? If  we air the  question properly,  it turns
out that, in essence, I really did not even know the deceased. What, indeed,
did I know about him? Nothing except that he was bald and terribly eloquent.
And furthermore, citizens,' Ivan continued his speech, addressing someone or
other,  `let's  sort this out:  why,  tell  me,  did  I  get furious at this
mysterious consultant, magician and professor with the black and empty eye?
     Why all this absurd chase after him in underpants  and with a candle in
my hand, and then those wild shenanigans in the restaurant?'
     'Uh-uh-uh!'  the  former Ivan suddenly said sternly  somewhere,  either
inside  or  over his  ear,  to the new  Ivan. `He  did  know beforehand that
Berlioz's head would be cut off, didn't he? How could I not get excited?'
     'What are we talking about, comrades?' the  new  Ivan  objected  to the
old,  former  Ivan. That things  are not quite proper here, even a child can
understand. He's a one-hundred-per-cent outstanding and mysterious person!
     But  that's   the  most  interesting  thing!  The  man  was  personally
acquainted with Pontius  Pilate,  what could be more interesting  than that?
And,  instead of raising a stupid rumpus at the Ponds, wouldn't it have been
more  intelligent to  question him politely  about what happened  further on
with Pilate  and his  prisoner Ha-Nozri?  And I started devil knows  what! A
major occurrence, really - a magazine editor gets run over! And so, what, is
the magazine going to shut down for that? Well,  what  can be done about it?
Man is mortal and, as has  rightly been said, unexpectedly mortal. Well, may
he rest in peace! Well, so  there'll be another editor, and maybe even  more
eloquent than the previous one!'
     After  dozing  for   a  while,  the   new   Ivan  asked  the  old  Ivan
sarcastically:
     'And what does it make me, in that case?'
     'A fool!' a bass voice said distinctly somewhere, a voice not belonging
to either of the Ivans and extremely like the bass of the consultant.
     Ivan,  for  some  reason  not offended  by  the  word 'fool', but  even
pleasantly  surprised at  it,  smiled and  drowsily  grew quiet.  Sleep  was
stealing  over  Ivan,  and  he  was  already picturing  a palm tree  on  its
elephant's leg, and a cat passing by - not scary, but merry - and, in short,
sleep was  just about  to  come  over  Ivan,  when the grille suddenly moved
noiselessly aside,  and a mysterious figure appeared on  the balcony, hiding
from the moonlight, and shook its finger at Ivan.
     Not frightened in the least,  Ivan sat up in bed and saw that there was
a  man on the  balcony.  And  this  man,  pressing a  finger  to  his  lips,
whispered:
     'Shhh! ...'

CHAPTER 10. News From Yalta

     At the  same time that disaster struck Nikanor  Ivanovich, not far away
from no.502-bis, on the same Sadovaya Street, in the office of the financial
director of the Variety Theatre,  Rimsky, there sat two men: Rimsky himself,
and the administrator of the Variety, Varenukha [1].'
     The  big office on the second floor of the  theatre  had two windows on
Sadovaya and one, just behind the  back of the findirector,  who was sitting
at his desk,  facing the  summer  garden  of the Variety,  where  there were
refreshment   stands,  a  shooting  gallery   and  an  open-air  stage.  The
furnishings of the office,  apart from the desk, consisted of a bunch of old
posters hanging on the  wall, a small table  with  a carafe of water  on it,
four armchairs and, in  the corner,  a stand  on which  stood a dust-covered
scale model of  some  past review.  Well,  it goes  without saying that,  in
addition,  there was in the office a  small, shabby, peeling fireproof safe,
to Rimsky's left, next to the desk.
     Rimsky, now sitting at his desk, had been in bad spirits since morning,
while Varenukha, on the contrary, was very animated and  somehow  especially
restlessly active. Yet there was no outlet for his energy.
     Varenukha was presently  hiding in the findirector's  office to  escape
the seekers  of free passes, who poisoned his life,  especially on days when
the programme  changed. And today  was precisely such a day. As  soon as the
telephone started to ring, Varenukha would pick up the receiver and lie into
it:
     "Who? Varenukha? He's not here. He stepped out.'
     'Please call Likhodeev again,' Rimsky asked vexedly.
     'He's  not home. I even sent Karpov, there's no  one in the apartment.'
`Devil  knows what's  going on!'  Rimisky  hissed,  clacking  on  the adding
machine.
     The  door  opened  and  an usher  dragged in a  thick stack of  freshly
printed extra posters; in big red letters on a green background was printed:
     Today and Every Day at the Variety Theatre
     an Additional Programme
     PROFESSOR WOLAND
     Sances of Black Magic and its Full Exposure
     Varenukha stepped back from the poster,  which  he had thrown on to the
scale model, admired it, and  told  the usher  to send  all the posters  out
immediately to be pasted up.
     'Good... Loud!' Varenukha observed on the usher's departure.
     `And  I  dislike this undertaking extremely,' Rimsky grumbled, glancing
spitefully at the poster through his horn-rimmed glasses, 'and generally I'm
surprised he's been allowed to present it.'
     'No, Grigory Danilovich, don't say so! This is a very subdue  step. The
salt is all in the exposure.'
     `I don't know, I don't know, there's no salt, in my opinion... and he's
always  coming up with things  like this! ... He might at  least show us his
magician! Have you seen him? Where he dug him up, devil knows!'
     It turned  out that Varenukha  had not seen  the magician any more than
Rimsky  had. Yesterday  Styopa had  come running ('like  crazy', in Rimsky's
expression) to the findirector with the already written draft of a contract,
ordered  it copied straight away and  the money  handed over  to Woland. And
this  magician  had  cleared out, and  no  one  had  seen him  except Styopa
himself.
     Rimsky took out his watch, saw that it read five minutes past two,  and
flew into a  complete rage. Really! Likhodeev  had called at around  eleven,
said he'd  come  in  half  an  hour, and  not  only had  not  come, but  had
disappeared from his apartment.
     'He's holding up  my business!' Rimsky  was  roaring  now, jabbing  his
finger at a pile of unsigned papers.
     'Might he have fallen under a tram-car like Berlioz?' Varenukha said as
he held his ear to the  receiver, from which came low, prolonged and utterly
hopeless signals.
     "Wouldn't be a bad  thing...' Rimsky  said barely  audibly  through his
teeth.
     At that same  moment a  woman in a uniform  jacket,  visored cap, black
skirt and sneakers came into the office. From a small pouch  at her belt the
woman took a small white square and a notebook and asked:
     "Who here is Variety? A super-lightning telegram. [2] Sign here.'
     Varenukha  scribbled some flourish in the woman's notebook, and as soon
as the door slammed  behind  her,  he  opened the square. After reading  the
telegram, he blinked and handed the square to Rimsky.
     The telegram contained  the following: `Yalta to Moscow  Variety. Today
eleven  thirty  brown-haired  man  came  criminal  investigation  nightshirt
trousers  shoeless mental case  gave name Likhodeev  Director  Variety  Wire
Yalta criminal investigation where Director Likhodeev.'
     `Hello  and how do  you  do!'  Rimsky  exclaimed,  and added:  'Another
surprise!'
     'A  false Dmitri!'[3] said Varenukha,  and he  spoke into the receiver.
Telegraph office? Variety account. Take a  super-lightning telegram. Are you
listening?  "Yalta   criminal  investigation.  Director   Likhodeev   Moscow
Findirector Rimsky."'
     Irrespective  of the  news  about the  Yalta impostor,  Varenukha again
began searching all over for Styopa by telephone, and naturally did not find
him anywhere.
     Just as Varenukha, receiver in hand, was pondering  where else he might
call, the same woman who had brought the first  telegram came in  and handed
Varenukha  a new envelope. Opening it hurriedly, Varenukha read the  message
and whistled.
     'What now?' Rimsky asked, twitching nervously.
     Varenukha silently  handed  him the  telegram,  and the findirector saw
there the  words: `Beg believe  thrown  Yalta Woland hypnosis  wire criminal
investigation confirm identity Likhodeev.'
     Rimsky  and Varenukha,  their heads  touching, reread the telegram, and
after rereading it, silently stared at each other.
     'Citizens!' the  woman got angry. 'Sign, and then be silent  as much as
you like! I deliver lightnings!'
     Varenukha,  without  taking his eyes off the  telegram, made a  crooked
scrawl in the notebook, and the woman vanished.
     'Didn't you  talk with  him on the phone at a  little past eleven?' the
administrator began in total bewilderment.
     'No, it's  ridiculous!' Rimsky cried  shrilly. Talk or not, he can't be
in Yalta now! It's ridiculous!'
     'He's drunk...' said Varenukha.
     "Who's drunk?' asked Rimsky, and again the two stared at each other.
     That some  impostor or madman had sent telegrams  from Yalta, there was
no  doubt. But the strange thing was this: how did the Yalta mystifier  know
Woland,  who had  come  to Moscow just the day before? How did he know about
the connection between Likhodeev and Woland?
     'Hypnosis...' Varenukha kept repeating the word from the telegram.
     'How does he know about Woland?' He blinked his eyes and suddenly cried
resolutely: 'Ah, no! Nonsense! ... Nonsense, nonsense!'
     'Where's he staying, this Woland, devil take him?' asked Rimsky.
     Varenukha  immediately got  connected with the  foreign  tourist bureau
and, to Rimsky's utter astonishment, announced  that Woland was  staying  in
Likhodeev's apartment. Dialling the number of the Likhodeev  apartment after
that, Varenukha listened for a long time to the low buzzing in the receiver.
     Amidst the buzzing, from somewhere far away, came a heavy, gloomy voice
singing:  '...  rocks, my refuge ...'[4]  and  Varenukha  decided  that  the
telephone lines had crossed with a voice from a radio show.
     The  apartment  doesn't  answer,'  Varenukha  said,  putting  down  the
receiver, 'or maybe I should call...'
     He did  not finish. The same woman appeared in the door, and  both men,
Rimsky and Varenukha, rose  to meet her, while she took from her pouch not a
white sheet this time, but some sort of dark one.
     This is  beginning  to  get  interesting,' Varenukha  said through  his
teeth, his  eyes  following the  hurriedly  departing woman. Rimsky  was the
first to take hold of the sheet.
     On  a  dark background  of  photographic paper, some black  handwritten
lines were barely discernible:
     'Proof my handwriting  my  signature wire  urgently  confirmation place
secret watch Woland Likhodeev.'
     In his  twenty  years of work in  the theatre,  Varenukha had seen  all
kinds of sights, but here he felt his mind becoming obscured as with a veil,
and he could find nothing to say but the  at once mundane and utterly absurd
phrase:
     This cannot be!'
     Rimsky acted otherwise. He stood up, opened the door, barked out to the
messenger girl sitting on a stool:
     'Let no one in except postmen!' - and locked the door with a key.
     Then  he took a pile of papers out of the desk  and began carefully  to
compare the bold, back-slanting letters of the photogram with the letters in
Styopa's resolutions and signatures, furnished with a corkscrew flourish.
     Varenukha,  leaning his weight on the table, breathed hotly on Rimsky's
cheek.
     `It's  his  handwriting,'  the  findirector finally  said  firmly,  and
Varenukha repeated like an echo:
     'His.'
     Peering into Rimsky's face, the administrator  marvelled  at the change
that had come over this face. Thin to begin with, the findirector seemed  to
have  grown still thinner and  even older,  his eyes in  their horn rims had
lost their customary prickliness, and there appeared in them not only alarm,
but even sorrow.
     Varenukha  did everything that a man in a moment  of great astonishment
ought to do. He raced up and down the office, he raised his  arms twice like
one crucified, he drank a whole glass of yellowish water from the carafe and
exclaimed:
     'I don't understand! I don't understand! I don't un-der-stand!'
     Rimsky  meanwhile  was looking out  the  window,  thinking  hard  about
something. The findirector's position was  very difficult.  It was necessary
at   once,  right  on  the  spot,  to   invent   ordinary  explanations  for
extraordinary phenomena.
     Narrowing  his eyes,  the  findirector pictured to himself Styopa, in a
nightshirt and shoeless,  getting into  some unprecedented  super-high-speed
airplane at around  half past eleven that morning, and then the same Styopa,
also at half past eleven,  standing in his stocking feet at the  airport  in
Yalta ... devil knew what to make of it!
     Maybe it was not Styopa who talked with him this morning over the phone
from his  own apartment?  No, it  was Styopa speaking! Who if not  he should
know Styopa's voice? And even if it was not Styopa speaking today, it was no
earlier  than  yesterday,  towards  evening, that Styopa  had  come from his
office to this very  office  with  this  idiotic  contract  and  annoyed the
findirector with his light-mindedness. How could  he have gone or flown away
without leaving word  at  the  theatre?  But if  he had flown away yesterday
evening - he would not have arrived by noon today. Or would he?
     'How many miles is it to Yalta?' asked Rimsky.
     Varenukha stopped his running and yelled:
     'I thought  of that! I already thought  of it!  By train it's over nine
hundred miles to Sebastopol, plus another fifty to Yalta! Well, but by  air,
of course, it's less.'
     Hm ... Yes ... There could be no question of any trains. But what then?
Some fighter  plane? Who would let Styopa on any fighter  plane  without his
shoes? What for? Maybe he took his shoes off when he got to  Yalta? It's the
same thing: what for? And even with his shoes on they  wouldn't have let him
on a fighter! And what has the fighter got to do with it? It's  written that
he  came to the  investigators at half past  eleven in  the  morning, and he
talked on the  telephone in Moscow ... excuse  me ... (the  face of Rimsky's
watch emerged before his eyes).
     Rimsky tried to remember where the  hands had been ... Terrible! It had
been twenty minutes past eleven!
     So  what  does  it  boil  down  to?  If one  supposes  that  after  the
conversation Styopa instantly rushed to the airport, and reached it in, say,
five minutes (which, incidentally, was also unthinkable), it  means that the
plane, taking off at once, covered nearly a thousand miles in five minutes.
     Consequently, it was  flying  at twelve thousand  miles an hour!!! That
cannot be, and that means he's not in Yalta!
     What remains, then? Hypnosis? There's no hypnosis in the world that can
fling  a man a thousand miles away! So he's imagining that he's in Yalta? He
may be  imagining it, but are the Yalta investigators also imagining it? No,
no, sorry, that can't be! ... Yet they did telegraph from there?
     The findirector's face was literally dreadful. The door  handle was all
the while being turned and pulled from outside, and the messenger girl could
be heard through the door crying desperately:
     'Impossible! I won't let you! Cut me to pieces! It's a meeting!'
     Rimsky  regained  control of  himself  as well  as  he could, took  the
receiver of the phone, and said into it:
     'A super-urgent call to Yalta, please.'
     'Clever!' Varenukha observed mentally.
     But the conversation with  Yalta did not take place. Rimsky hung up the
receiver and said:
     'As luck would have it, the line's broken.'
     It could  be  seen  that the  broken line especially upset him for some
reason,  and even made him lapse into  thought. Having  thought a little, he
again took  the receiver  in one hand, and with the other began writing down
what he said into it:
     Take  a super-lightning.  Variety.  Yes.  Yalta criminal investigation.
Yes. 'Today around eleven thirty Likhodeev talked me phone Moscow stop After
that did not come work unable locate by phone stop Confirm  handwriting stop
Taking measures watch said artiste Findirector Rimsky.'"
     'Very clever!' thought Varenukha, but before he had time to think well,
the words rushed through his head: 'Stupid! He can't be in Yalta!'
     Rimsky meanwhile did the following:  he neatly stacked all the received
telegrams, plus the copy of his own, put the stack into an  envelope, sealed
it, wrote a few words on it, and handed it to Varenukha, saying:
     'Go right now, Ivan Savelyevich, take it there personally. [5] Let them
sort it out.'
     'Now that is really clever!' thought Varenukha, and he put the envelope
into his briefcase. Then, just in case, he dialled Styopa's apartment number
on the  telephone, listened, and  began winking and  grimacing  joyfully and
mysteriously. Rimsky stretched his neck.
     'May I speak with the artiste Woland?' Varenukha asked sweetly.
     `Mister's  busy,' the receiver answered  in  a  rattling  voice, 'who's
calling?'
     The administrator of the Variety, Varenukha.'
     `Ivan Savelyevich?' the receiver  cried out joyfully. Terribly  glad to
hear your voice! How're you doing?'
     'Merci,' Varenukha replied in amazement, 'and with whom am I speaking?'
     'His assistant, his  assistant and interpreter, Koroviev!' crackled the
receiver. 'I'm entirely at  your service, my dearest Ivan Savelyevich! Order
me around as you like. And so?'
     `Excuse me,  but ... what,  is Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeev not at home
now?'
     'Alas, no! No!' the receiver shouted. 'He left!'
     'For where?'
     'Out of town, for a drive in the car.'
     'Wh ... what? A dr ... drive? And when will he be back?'
     'He said, I'll get a breath of fresh air and come back.'
     `So...'  said  the puzzled Varenukha, 'merci  ...  kindly tell Monsieur
Woland that his performance is tonight in the third part of the programme.'
     'Right.  Of  course.  Absolutely.  Urgently.  Without fail.  I'll  tell
him,'the receiver rapped out abruptly.
     'Goodbye,' Varenukha said in astonishment.
     'Please  accept,'  said the receiver, 'my best,  warmest  greetings and
wishes! For success! Luck! Complete happiness! Everything!'
     'But of course! Didn't I say so!' the administrator cried agitatedly.
     'It's not any Yalta, he just went to the country!'
     'Well, if that's so,' the findirector  began,  turning pale with anger,
'it's real swinishness, there's even no name for it!'
     Here the  administrator  jumped up and  shouted  so  that Rimsky gave a
start:
     `I  remember! I  remember!  They've opened  a  new Georgian  tavern  in
Pushkino called  "Yalta"! It's all clear! He went  there, got drunk, and now
he's sending telegrams from there!'
     'Well, now that's too much!'  Rimsky answered, his cheek twitching, and
deep,  genuine anger burned  in  his  eyes. 'Well,  then, he's  going to pay
dearly  for  this  little excursion!  ...'  He  suddenly faltered and  added
irresolutely: 'But what about the criminal investigation ...'
     'It's  nonsense! His  own  little jokes,'  the  expansive administrator
interrupted, and asked: 'Shall I take the envelope?'
     'Absolutely,' replied Rimsky.
     And again the  door  opened  and  in came that same  ... 'Her!' thought
Rimsky,  for  some reason with  anguish.  And  both  men  rose to  meet  the
postwoman.
     This time the telegram contained the words:
     Thank   you   confirmation   send   five  hundred   urgently   criminal
investigation my name tomorrow fly Moscow Likhodeev.'
     'He's lost his mind...' Varenukha said weakly.
     Rimsky jingled his key, took money from the fireproof safe, counted out
five hundred roubles,  rang  the bell,  handed the messenger the money,  and
sent him to the telegraph office.
     'Good heavens, Grigory  Danilovich,' Varenukha said,  not believing his
eyes, 'in my opinion you oughtn't to send the money.'
     'It'll come  back,' Rimsky replied quietly, 'but he'll have a hard time
explaining  this  little picnic.' And he  added, indicating the briefcase to
Varenukha: 'Go, Ivan Savelyevich, don't delay.'
     And Varenukha ran out of the office with the briefcase.
     He  went down to  the ground floor,  saw  the longest  line at  the box
office,  found  out from the  box-office girl that  she expected to sell out
within  the  hour,  because  the  public  was  simply  pouring in  since the
additional poster had been put up, told the girl to  earmark and hold thirty
of  the best  seats in  the gallery and  the stalls, popped out  of the  box
office,  shook  off  importunate pass-seekers as  he ran, and dived into his
little office to get his cap. At that moment the telephone rattled.
     'Yes!' Varenukha shouted.
     'Ivan  Savelyevich?'  the receiver  inquired in a most  repulsive nasal
voice.
     'He's not in the  theatre!' Varenukha was  shouting,  but  the receiver
interrupted him at once:
     'Don't play the fool, Ivan  Savelyevich, just listen. Do not take those
telegrams anywhere or show them to anyone.'
     'Who  is  this?' Varenukha bellowed. 'Stop these jokes, citizen! You'll
be found out at once! What's your number?'
     'Varenukha,' the same nasty voice returned, 'do you understand Russian?
Don't take the telegrams anywhere.'
     'Ah, so you won't stop?'  the administrator cried furiously. 'Look out,
then!  You're going to  pay for it!' He shouted some other threat, but  fell
silent, because he sensed that no one was listening to him any longer in the
receiver.
     Here it somehow began to grow dark very quickly in his little office.
     Varenukha ran out, slammed the door behind him, and rushed  through the
side entrance into the summer garden.
     The  administrator was agitated and full of energy. After the  insolent
phone call  he had no doubts that it was a band  of hooligans  playing nasty
tricks,  and that  these tricks were  connected  with  the  disappearance of
Likhodeev.  The administrator  was  choking  with  the desire to  expose the
malefactors, and, strange as it was, the anticipation of something enjoyable
was born in him. It happens that way when a man strives to become the centre
of attention, to bring sensational news somewhere.
     In the garden the wind blew in the administrator's  face and flung sand
in his eyes, as if blocking his way,  as  if cautioning him. A window on the
second floor slammed so that the  glass nearly broke, the tops of the maples
and   lindens   rustled  alarmingly.   It  became  darker  and  colder.  The
administrator rubbed his eyes and saw that  a yellow-bellied storm cloud was
creeping low over Moscow. There came a dense, distant rumbling.
     However  great Varenukha's hurry, an irrepressible desire pulled at him
to run over to the summer toilet for a second on his way,  to check  whether
the repairman had put a wire screen over the light-bulb.
     Running past the shooting  gallery, Varenukha came to a thick growth of
lilacs where the light-blue toilet  building stood. The repairman turned out
to be an efficient fellow, the bulb under  the roof  of the gentlemen's side
was covered with a wire screen, but the administrator was upset that even in
the  pre-storm  darkness one  could make  out  that the walls  were  already
written all over in charcoal and pencil.
     'Well, what sort  of...' the  administrator began  and suddenly heard a
voice purring behind him:
     'Is that you, Ivan Savelyevich?'
     Varenukha started,  turned around, and saw before him a short, fat  man
with what seemed to him a cat-like physiognomy.
     'So, it's me', Varenukha answered hostilely.
     'Very, very  glad,' the  cat-like fat man responded  in a squeaky voice
and, suddenly swinging his arm, gave Varenukha  such a blow on the ear  that
the cap flew off the administrator's head  and vanished without a trace down
the hole in the seat.
     At the fat  man's  blow, the  whole  toilet  lit up momentarily with  a
tremulous light, and a roll of  thunder echoed in the sky. Then came another
flash  and a second man  emerged  before the administrator - short, but with
athletic  shoulders,  hair red as  fire, albugo  in  one eye, a fang in  his
mouth... This second one, evidently a lefty, socked the administrator on the
other ear.  In response there was another roll  of  thunder in  the sky, and
rain poured down on the wooden roof of the toilet.
     `What is it, comr...' the half-crazed administrator whispered, realized
at once that the word 'comrades' hardly fitted bandits attacking a man  in a
public toilet, rasped out: 'citiz...' - figured that they did not merit this
appellation either, and received a third terrible blow  from he did not know
which of them, so that blood gushed from his nose on to his Tolstoy blouse.
     'What  you  got  in the briefcase, parasite?' the one  resembling a cat
cried shrilly. 'Telegrams?  Weren't you warned  over the phone  not to  take
them anywhere? Weren't you warned, I'm asking you?'
     `I   was   wor...   wer...   warned...'   the  administrator  answered,
suffocating.
     `And you  skipped off anyway? Gimme the briefcase, vermin!' the  second
one cried in the same nasal  voice that had come over  the telephone, and he
yanked the briefcase from Varenukha's trembling hands.
     And the two picked the administrator up under the arms, dragged him out
of the  garden, and  raced  down Sadovaya with him. The  storm raged at full
force,  water streamed  with  a  noise and howling  down  the  drains, waves
bubbled and billowed  everywhere,  water  gushed  from  the  roofs past  the
drainpipes, foamy streams  ran  from gateways. Everything living got  washed
off Sadovaya, and there was no one to save Ivan Savelyevich. Leaping through
muddy rivers, under flashes of lightning, the bandits dragged the half-alive
administrator  in a  split second to no.502-bis,  flew with  him through the
gateway, where two  barefoot  women, holding their shoes  and  stockings  in
their hands, pressed themselves to the wall. Then they dashed into the sixth
entrance, and Varenukha, nearly insane, was taken  up to the fifth floor and
thrown  down  in the  semi-dark front hall, so well known to  him, of Styopa
Likhodeev's apartment.
     Here the two robbers vanished, and in their place there appeared in the
front  hall a  completely naked girl -  red-haired, her eyes burning  with a
phosphorescent gleam.
     Varenukha understood that this was the most terrible of all things that
had  ever happened to him and, moaning, recoiled against  the wall. But  the
girl came right up to the administrator and placed the palms of her hands on
his shoulders. Varenukha's hair stood on end, because even through the cold,
water-soaked cloth of his Tolstoy blouse he could feel that those palms were
still colder, that their cold was the cold of ice.
     `Let  me  give you  a  kiss,' the  girl said tenderly, and  there  were
shining eyes  right in front of his  eyes. Then Varenukha  fainted and never
felt the kiss.

CHAPTER 9. Koroviev's Stunts

     Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, chairman of the  tenants' association'  [1] of
no.302-bis on  Sadovaya Street in Moscow,  where  the late  Berlioz  used to
reside, had  been  having  the most terrible  troubles,  starting  from that
Wednesday night.
     At midnight, as we already know, a commission of which Zheldybin formed
a  part  came to the house, summoned  Nikanor Ivanovich, told him  about the
death of Berlioz, and together with him went to apartment no.50.
     There the sealing  of  the deceased's manuscripts  and  belongings  was
carried out. Neither  Grunya, the daytime housekeeper, nor  the light-minded
Stepan  Bogdanovich  was  there  at  the  time. The commission announced  to
Nikanor Ivanovich that it would take the deceased's manuscripts  for sorting
out, that his living space, that is, three rooms (the former  study,  living
room and dining  room of the jeweller's wife), reverted  to  the disposal of
the tenants' association, and that  the  belongings  were to  be kept in the
aforementioned living space until the heirs were announced.
     The news of Berlioz's death spread  through the whole house with a sort
of supernatural speed, and as of seven o'clock Thursday morning, Bosoy began
to  receive  telephone calls  and  then  personal  visits  with declarations
containing claims  to  the  deceased's  living  space. In  the period of two
hours, Nikanor Ivanovich received thirty-two such declarations.
     They  contained pleas, threats,  libels, denunciations,  promises to do
renovations at their own expense, references to unbearable overcrowding  and
the impossibility of living in the same apartment with bandits. Among others
there were  a description,  staggering  in its artistic  power, of the theft
from  apartment no. 51  of some  meat dumplings,  tucked directly  into  the
pocket of a suit jacket, two  vows to end life by suicide and one confession
of secret pregnancy.
     Nikanor Ivanovich was  called  out  to the front hall of his apartment,
plucked by the sleeve,  whispered to, winked at, promised that  he would not
be left the loser.
     This torture went on until noon, when Nikanor Ivanovich simply fled his
apartment for the management office by the  gate, but when he saw them lying
in  wait for  him there,  too,  he  fled that place as  well. Having somehow
shaken  off those  who  followed  on  his  heels  across  the  asphalt-paved
courtyard, Nikanor Ivanovich disappeared into the sixth entrance and went up
to the fifth floor, where this vile apartment no.50 was located.
     After  catching  his  breath  on  the  landing,  the  corpulent Nikanor
Ivanovich rang, but no one opened for him. He rang  again, and  then  again,
and started grumbling  and swearing  quietly. Even  then no  one opened. His
patience  exhausted,  Nikanor  Ivanovich  took from  his  pocket  a bunch of
duplicate keys belonging  to the house management,  opened  the  door with a
sovereign hand, and went in.
     'Hey,  housekeeper!'  Nikanor Ivanovich  cried in the  semi-dark  front
hall. 'Grunya, or whatever your name is! ... Are you here?'
     No one responded.
     Then Nikanor Ivanovich took a folding ruler from his briefcase, removed
the seal from  the door to the study,  and stepped in. Stepped in, yes,  but
halted in amazement in the doorway and even gave a start.
     At the deceased's desk sat an unknown, skinny, long citizen in a little
checkered jacket, a jockey's cap,  and a  pince-nez... well, in  short, that
same one.
     'And who might you be, citizen?' Nikanor Ivanovich asked fearfully.
     'Hah! Nikanor Ivanovich!' the unexpected  citizen yelled in a  rattling
tenor  and, jumping up,  greeted  the  chairman  with a  forced  and  sudden
handshake. This greeting by no means gladdened Nikanor Ivanovich.
     'Excuse me,' he said suspiciously,  'but who might  you  be? Are you an
official person?'
     'Eh, Nikanor Ivanovich!' the unknown man exclaimed soulfully. "What are
official and unofficial persons? It all depends on your point of view on the
subject. It's all fluctuating and relative, Nikanor Ivanovich. Today I'm  an
unofficial person, and  tomorrow, lo and behold, I'm an official one! And it
also happens the other way round - oh, how it does!'
     This argument in no way satisfied the chairman of the house management.
Being a generally suspicious person  by  nature, he concluded  that  the man
holding  forth  in  front of  him was  precisely  an  unofficial person, and
perhaps even an idle one.
     "Yes, but who might  you be? What's your  name?' the  chairman inquired
with increasing severity and even began to advance upon the unknown man.
     `My name,'  the citizen responded, not  a bit put out by  the severity,
'well,  let's  say it's  Koroviev. But wouldn't  you  like a  little  snack,
Nikanor Ivanovich? No formalities, eh?'
     `Excuse  me,'  Nikanor Ivanovich  began,  indignantly  now, `what  have
snacks got  to do  with it!' (We  must  confess, unpleasant  as it  is, that
Nikanor Ivanovich was of a somewhat rude nature.) 'Sitting in the deceased's
half is not permitted! What are you doing here?'
     `Have a  seat, Nikanor  Ivanovich,' the citizen went on yelling, not  a
bit at a loss, and began fussing about offering the chairman a seat.
     Utterly infuriated, Nikanor Ivanovich rejected the seat and screamed:
     'But who are you?'
     'I, if  you please, serve as interpreter for a  foreign  individual who
has taken  up residence in this apartment,' the man calling himself Koroviev
introduced himself and clicked the heels of his scuffed, unpolished shoes.
     Nikanor Ivanovich opened his mouth. The presence  of some  foreigner in
this apartment, with an interpreter to boot,  came as a complete surprise to
him, and he demanded explanations.
     The interpreter explained  willingly. A foreign artiste, Mr Woland, had
been  kindly invited  by the  director  of the  Variety, Stepan  Bogdanovich
Likhodeev, to spend  the time  of  his performances, a  week  or so,  in his
apartment,  about  which  he  had  written  to Nikanor  Ivanovich yesterday,
requesting that  he  register  the foreigner  as a temporary resident, while
Likhodeev himself took a trip to Yalta.
     'He never wrote me anything,' the chairman said in amazement.
     `Just  look  through   your  briefcase,  Nikanor  Ivanovich,'  Koroviev
suggested sweetly.
     Nikanor  Ivanovich,  shrugging his shoulders, opened the briefcase  and
found Likhodeev's letter in it.
     `How could  I  have forgotten  about it?'  Nikanor Ivanovich  muttered,
looking dully at the opened envelope.
     `All sorts of things happen,  Nikanor Ivanovich,  all  sorts!' Koroviev
rattled.  'Absent-mindedness,  absent-mindedness,  fatigue  and  high  blood
pressure,  my  dear  friend Nikanor  Ivanovich! I'm  terribly  absent-minded
myself! Someday, over a glass, I'll tell you a few facts from my biography -
you'll die laughing!'
     'And when is Likhodeev going to Yalta?'
     `He's  already  gone,  gone!'  the  interpreter  cried.  `He's  already
wheeling along,  you know!  He's already devil  knows  where!' And  here the
interpreter waved his arms like the wings of a windmill.
     Nikanor Ivanovich  declared that he  must see  the foreigner in person,
but got a refusal on that from the interpreter: quite impossible. He's busy.
Training the cat.
     'The cat I can show you, if you like,' Koroviev offered.
     This  Nikanor  Ivanovich  refused  in his  turn,  and  the  interpreter
straight  away  made  the  chairman  an  unexpected  but  quite  interesting
proposal: seeing that Mr Woland had no desire whatsoever to live in a hotel,
and was  accustomed to having a  lot of  space, why  shouldn't  the tenants'
association  rent  to  him, Woland, for one  little  week, the  time  of his
performances in Moscow,  the whole of the apartment, that is, the deceased's
rooms as well?
     'It's  all the same to him -  the deceased -  you  must  agree, Nikanor
Ivanovich,' Koroviev whispered hoarsely. 'He doesn't need the apartment now,
does he?'
     Nikanor Ivanovich, somewhat perplexed, objected that  foreigners  ought
to live at the Metropol, and not in private apartments at all...
     `I'm  telling  you,  he's capricious as  devil  knows  what!'  Koroviev
whispered. 'He just  doesn't want to! He doesn't like hotels! I've  had them
up to  here, these foreign  tourists!'  Koroviev  complained confidentially,
jabbing his  finger at  his  sinewy neck. 'Believe  me, they  wring the soul
right  out of you! They come and either spy on you like the lowest  son of a
bitch, or else torment you with their  caprices - this  isn't right and that
isn't right!...  And for  your association, Nikanor Ivanovich, it's  a sheer
gain and an obvious profit. He won't stint on money.' Koroviev looked around
and then whispered into the chairman's ear: 'A millionaire!'
     The interpreter's offer made clear practical sense, it was a very solid
offer, yet there was something remarkably unsolid in his manner of speaking,
and in  his clothes, and in that loathsome, good-for-nothing pince-nez. As a
result, something vague weighed on the chairman's soul,  but he nevertheless
decided to accept the offer. The  thing was  that  the tenants' association,
alas, had quite a  sizeable deficit. Fuel had to be bought for  the  heating
system by  fall, but who was going to  shell out for it - no  one  knew. But
with the foreign tourist's money, it might be possible to wriggle out of it.
     However,  the  practical and prudent Nikanor  Ivanovich said  he  would
first have to settle the question with the foreign tourist bureau.
     `I understand!' Koroviev cried out. `You've got to settle it!
     Absolutely! Here's the telephone, Nikanor Ivanovich, settle it at once!
And  don't be  shy  about the money,' he added  in  a whisper,  drawing  the
chairman to the telephone in the front hall, 'if he won't pay, who will! You
should see the villa he's got in Nice! Next summer, when you go abroad, come
especially to see it - you'll gasp!'
     The business  with the  foreign tourist bureau  was  arranged over  the
phone with an extraordinary speed, quite amazing  to the chairman. It turned
out that  they  already  knew  about  Mr  Woland's  intention  of staying in
Likhodeev's private apartment and had no objections to it.
     `That's wonderful!' Koroviev  yelled. Somewhat stunned by his  chatter,
the  chairman  announced  that  the  tenants'  association  agreed  to  rent
apartment no.50 for a week  to the artiste  Woland, for... Nikanor Ivanovich
faltered a little, then said:
     'For five hundred roubles a day.'
     Here Koroviev utterly  amazed  the chairman. Winking  thievishly in the
direction  of the bedroom, from which the soft leaps of a heavy cat could be
heard, he rasped out:
     'So it comes to three thousand five hundred for the week?'
     To which Nikanor Ivanovich thought he was  going to add: 'Some appetite
you've got, Nikanor Ivanovich!' but Koroviev said something quite different:
     'What kind of money is that? Ask five, he'll pay it.'
     Grinning perplexedly, Nikanor Ivanovich,  without  noticing  how, found
himself at the deceased's writing desk, where Koroviev  with great speed and
dexterity drew up a contract in two copies. Then he flew to the bedroom with
them  and  came  back,  both  copies  now bearing  the  foreigner's sweeping
signature.  The chairman also signed the contract. Here Koroviev asked for a
receipt for five...
     Write it out, write it out, Nikanor Ivanovich!... thousand  roubles...'
And with  words somehow unsuited to serious business  - 'Bin, zwei, drei!' -
he laid out for the chairman five stacks of new banknotes.
     The  counting-up took place,  interspersed with  Koroviev's  quips  and
quiddities, such  as 'Cash loves  counting', 'Your own  eye  won't lie', and
others of the same sort.
     After  counting the  money, the chairman  received  from  Koroviev  the
foreigner's passport for temporary  registration, put it,  together with the
contract and  the  money, into  his  briefcase, and, somehow  unable to help
himself, sheepishly asked for a free pass...
     'Don't mention it!' bellowed  Koroviev. 'How many tickets do you  want,
Nikanor Ivanovich - twelve, fifteen?'
     The flabbergasted chairman explained that all he needed was a couple of
passes, for himself and Pelageya Antonovna, his wife.
     Koroviev snatched  out a notebook at once  and  dashed off  a pass  for
Nikanor Ivanovich, for two persons  in the front row. And with his left hand
the interpreter deftly  slipped  this pass  to Nikanor Ivanovich, while with
his right he put into the chairman's other hand a thick, crackling wad.
     Casting  an eye on  it, Nikanor Ivanovich blushed deeply and  began  to
push it away.
     'It isn't done...' he murmured.
     'I won't  hear  of it,' Koroviev whispered right in  his ear.  'With us
it's  not  done,  but with foreigners it  is.  You'll  offend  him,  Nikanor
Ivanovich, and that's embarrassing. You've worked hard...'
     `It's  severely punishable,' the chairman  whispered very, very  softly
and glanced over his shoulder.
     'But where are the witnesses?' Koroviev whispered into his other ear.
     'I ask you, where are they? You don't think... ?'
     Here, as the chairman insisted afterwards, a  miracle occurred: the wad
crept into his briefcase by itself. And then the  chairman, somehow limp and
even broken, found  himself  on the stairs. A whirlwind of thoughts raged in
his head. There was the villa in  Nice, and the trained cat, and the thought
that there were  in fact no witnesses, and that Pelageya Antonovna would  be
delighted  with  the pass. They  were  incoherent  thoughts,  but  generally
pleasant. But, all the same, somewhere, some little needle kept pricking the
chairman in the very bottom of his soul. This was the needle of anxiety.
     Besides, right  then on the stairs  the chairman was  seized, as with a
stroke,  by the thought:  'But how did the interpreter get into the study if
the  door was  sealed?! And how  was it that  he, Nikanor Ivanovich, had not
asked about  it?' For some time  the chairman stood staring like a  sheep at
the steps of the stairway, but then he decided to spit on it and not torment
himself with intricate questions...
     As soon as  the chairman left the apartment, a low  voice came from the
bedroom:
     'I  didn't like this Nikanor Ivanovich. He is a  chiseller and a crook.
Can it be arranged so that he doesn't come any more?'
     'Messire,  you  have only to say  the word...'  Koroviev responded from
somewhere, not in a rattling but in a very clear and resounding voice.
     And  at once the accursed  interpreter  turned  up  in the  front hall,
dialled a number  there, and for some  reason  began speaking very tearfully
into the receiver:
     'Hello! I consider it  my duty  to  inform you that the chairman of our
tenants' association  at no.502-bis on Sadovaya, Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, is
speculating in foreign currency. [2] At the present moment, in his apartment
no.  55,  he  has four hundred  dollars  wrapped  up  in  newspaper  in  the
ventilation of the privy. This is Timofei Kvastsov speaking, a tenant of the
said  house, apartment no. 11. But I adjure you to keep  my name a secret. I
fear the vengeance of the above-stated chairman.'
     And he hung up, the scoundrel!
     What happened  next  in apartment  no.50  is not known, but it is known
what happened  at  Nikanor Ivanovich's. Having locked  himself in the  privy
with  the hook, he took from his briefcase the  wad  foisted  on him by  the
interpreter and satisfied himself that it contained four hundred roubles.
     Nikanor Ivanovich  wrapped this wad  in a scrap of newspaper and put it
into the ventilation duct.
     Five  minutes later the chairman  was sitting at the table in his small
dining room. His  wife brought  pickled  herring from  the  kitchen,  neatly
sliced  and  thickly  sprinkled  with green onion. Nikanor Ivanovich  poured
himself a dram of vodka, drank it, poured another, drank it, picked up three
pieces of herring on his fork... and at that moment the doorbell rang.
     Pelageya Antonovna was just bringing in a steaming pot which, one could
tell at once  from a single  glance, contained, amidst a fiery borscht, that
than which there is nothing more delicious in the world - a marrow bone.
     Swallowing his spittle, Nikanor Ivanovich growled like a dog:
     'Damn them  all! Won't  allow a man to eat... Don't let anyone  in, I'm
not here,  not here...  If  it's about  the  apartment,  tell them  to  stop
blathering, there'll be a meeting next week.'
     His wife ran to the front hall, while Nikanor Ivanovich, using a ladle,
drew from the fire-breathing lake - it, the bone, cracked lengthwise. And at
that moment  two  citizens entered  the dining room, with Pelageya Antonovna
following them,  for some  reason looking  very  pale.  Seeing the citizens,
Nikanor Ivanovich also turned white and stood up.
     'Where's  the Jakes?'  the  first one, in  a white side-buttoned shirt,
asked with a preoccupied air.
     Something  thudded against the dining table (this was Nikanor Ivanovich
dropping the ladle on to the oilcloth).
     'This way, this way,' Pelageya Antonovna replied in a patter.
     And the visitors immediately hastened to the corridor.
     ^What's the matter?' Nikanor  Ivanovich asked quietly,  going after the
visitors. `There can't be anything like that in  our apartment... And - your
papers... begging your pardon...'
     The first, without stopping, showed Nikanor Ivanovich a paper,  and the
second  was at the same moment standing  on a stool in the privy, his arm in
the ventilation duct.  Everything went dark in Nikanor Ivanovich's eyes. The
newspaper  was removed,  but  in the wad  there were  not  roubles but  some
unknown money, bluish-greenish, and with the portrait of some old man.
     However, Nikanor Ivanovich saw it all  dimly, there  were some  sort of
spots floating in front of his eyes.
     'Dollars  in  the  ventilation...' the  first said  pensively and asked
Nikanor Ivanovich gently and courteously: 'Your little wad?'
     'No!' Nikanor Ivanovich replied  in a dreadful voice. 'Enemies stuck me
with it!'
     'That happens,' the first agreed and added, again gently: 'Well, you're
going to have to turn in the rest.'
     'I haven't got  any! I swear to God, I never laid a  finger on it!' the
chairman cried out desperately.
     He dashed to the chest, pulled a drawer out with a clatter, and from it
the briefcase, crying out incoherently:
     'Here's  the  contract... that vermin of an  interpreter stuck  me with
it... Koroviev... in a pince-nez!...'
     He opened the briefcase, glanced  into it, put a hand inside, went blue
in  the face, and dropped  the briefcase into the borscht. There was nothing
in  the  briefcase:  no  letter  from  Styopa,  no contract, no  foreigner's
passport,  no  money, no theatre  pass. In  short, nothing except a  folding
ruler.
     'Comrades!'  the  chairman  cried  frenziedly. `Catch them!  There  are
unclean powers in our house!'
     It is not known what Pelageya Antonovna imagined here, only she clasped
her hands and cried:
     'Repent, Ivanych! You'll get off lighter.'
     His eyes bloodshot, Nikanor Ivanovich raised his fists  over his wife's
head, croaking:
     'Ohh, you damned fool!'
     Here he went slack and  sank  down  on a  chair, evidently  resolved to
submit to the inevitable.
     During this  time, Timofei Kondratievich Kvastsov stood on the landing,
placing now his  ear,  now  his  eye to the  keyhole  of  the  door  to  the
chairman's apartment, melting with curiosity.
     Five  minutes later the tenants of the house  who were in the courtyard
saw the  chairman, accompanied by two other persons, proceed directly to the
gates  of the  house. It  was  said  that Nikanor  Ivanovich  looked  awful,
staggered like a drunk man as he passed, and was muttering something.
     And an hour after that an unknown citizen appeared in apartment no. 11,
just as Timofei Kondratievich, spluttering with delight,  was  telling  some
other   tenants   how  the  chairman   got  pinched,  motioned   to  Timofei
Kondratievich with his finger  to come  from  the kitchen to the front hall,
said something to him, and together they vanished.

CHAPTER 8. The Combat between the Professor and the Poet

     At the same  time  that  consciousness left Styopa in Yalta,  that  is,
around  half  past eleven  in the morning, it returned  to  Ivan Nikolaevich
Homeless,  who woke up after a  long and  deep  sleep.  He spent  some  time
pondering how it was that he had wound  up in an  unfamiliar room with white
walls, with an astonishing  night table made of some light  metal, and  with
white blinds behind which one could sense the sun.
     Ivan shook  his head, ascertained that it did  not ache, and remembered
that  he was  in  a  clinic. This  thought drew after  it the remembrance of
Berlioz's death, but today it did not provoke a strong shock in Ivan. Having
had a good  sleep, Ivan Nikolaevich  became calmer  and began to think  more
clearly. After lying motionless for  some time in this most clean, soft  and
comfortable spring bed, Ivan noticed a bell  button beside him. From a habit
of touching things needlessly, Ivan pressed  it. He expected the pressing of
the  button to  be followed by  some  ringing  or appearance, but  something
entirely different happened. A frosted glass  cylinder with the word 'Drink'
on  it  lit up at the  foot  of Ivan's bed.  After pausing for a  while, the
cylinder began to  rotate until the word `Nurse' popped out. It goes without
saying that  the clever cylinder amazed Ivan. The word 'Nurse' was  replaced
by the words 'Call the Doctor.'
     'Hm...'  said  Ivan, not  knowing  how  to proceed  further  with  this
cylinder. But here he happened to be lucky. Ivan pressed the button a second
time  at  the  word  'Attendant'.  The cylinder  rang  quietly in  response,
stopped, the light went out, and a plump, sympathetic woman in a clean white
coat came into the room and said to Ivan:
     'Good morning!'
     Ivan did not reply, considering such a greeting inappropriate under the
circumstances. Indeed, they lock up a healthy man in  a  clinic, and pretend
that that is how it ought to be!
     The  woman  meanwhile,  without  losing  her  good-natured  expression,
brought  the  blinds up with one push of a button, and sun flooded  the room
through a light and wide-meshed grille which reached right to the floor.
     Beyond the grille a balcony came into  view, beyond that  the bank of a
meandering river, and on its other bank a cheerful pine wood.
     'Time for our bath,' the woman invited, and  under  her hands the inner
wall parted, revealing behind it a bathroom and splendidly equipped toilet.
     Ivan, though he had resolved not  to talk to the woman,  could not help
himself and, on seeing the water gush into the tub in a wide stream from the
gleaming faucet, said ironically:
     'Looky there! Just like the Metropol!...'
     'Oh, no,' the woman answered  proudly, `much  better. There is  no such
equipment  even anywhere abroad. Scientists and  doctors come especially  to
study our clinic. We have foreign tourists every day.'
     At  the words  'foreign  tourists', Ivan at once remembered yesterday's
consultant. Ivan darkened, looked sullen, and said:
     `Foreign  tourists... How you all  adore foreign  tourists!  But  among
them,  incidentally, you come  across  all  sorts. I, for instance, met  one
yesterday - quite something!'
     And he  almost started telling  about  Pontius Pilate,  but  restrained
himself, realizing that the woman had no use for these stories, that in  any
case she could not help him.
     The  washed  Ivan  Nikolaevich   was  straight  away  issued  decidedly
everything a man needs after  a bath: an ironed shirt,  drawers,  socks. And
not only that: opening the  door of a cupboard, the woman pointed inside and
asked:
     'What would you like to put on - a dressing gown or some nice pyjamas?'
     Attached to his new dwelling by force, Ivan almost clasped his hands at
the  woman's casualness  and  silently  pointed  his  finger at the  crimson
flannel pyjamas.
     After  this, Ivan  Nikolaevich was  led  down the empty  and  noiseless
corridor  and brought to an examining room of huge dimensions.  Ivan, having
decided  to take an ironic attitude  towards everything  to be found in this
wondrously  equipped building,  at  once  mentally christened this room  the
'industrial kitchen'.
     And with good reason. Here stood cabinets and glass cases with gleaming
nickel-plated  instruments.  There were  chairs of  extraordinarily  complex
construction, some pot-bellied lamps with shiny shades, a myriad  of phials,
Bunsen burners, electric cords and appliances quite unknown to anyone.
     In the examining room Ivan was  taken over by three persons - two women
and  a man - all in white. First,  they led Ivan to  a  corner,  to a little
table, with the obvious purpose of getting something or other out of him.
     Ivan began to ponder  the situation. Three  ways stood before  him. The
first  was  extremely  tempting:  to hurl  himself  at  all these lamps  and
sophisticated little things, make the devil's own wreck of them, and thereby
express his protest at being detained for nothing. But today's Ivan  already
differed  significantly from  the  Ivan  of yesterday,  and  this  first way
appeared dubious to him: for all  he knew, the thought  might get  rooted in
them that he  was a violent madman.  Therefore Ivan  rejected the first way.
There  was a second: immediately to begin his account of the  consultant and
Pontius  Pilate.  However,  yesterday's experience  showed  that  this story
either  was  not  believed  or was taken somehow perversely. Therefore  Ivan
renounced this  second way  as  well,  deciding  to choose  the third  way -
withdrawal into proud silence.
     He  did not succeed  in  realizing  it  fully,  and had  willy-nilly to
answer, though charily and  glumly, a  whole series of questions.  Thus they
got out of Ivan decidedly everything about his  past life, down to when  and
how  he had fallen ill with scarlet  fever fifteen  years ago. A whole  page
having been covered  with writing  about  Ivan, it was  turned over, and the
woman in white went on  to  questions about  Ivan's relatives. Some  sort of
humdrum started: who died when and why, and whether he drank or had venereal
disease, and more of  the  same. In  conclusion he  was  asked to tell about
yesterday's events at the Patriarch's Ponds, but they did not pester him too
much, and were not surprised at the information about Pontius Pilate.
     Here  the woman yielded  Ivan up  to the man, who  went to  work on him
differently and no longer asked any questions.  He took  the temperature  of
Ivan's body, counted his pulse, looked  in Ivan's  eyes, directing some sort
of lamp into them. Then the  second woman came to the  man's assistance, and
they pricked Ivan in the back with something,  but not painfully,  drew some
signs on the skin of  his chest with the handle of a little  hammer,  tapped
his  knees with the hammer, which made Ivan's legs jump,  pricked his finger
and took his  blood, pricked  him  inside  his bent  elbow,  put some rubber
bracelets on his arms...
     Ivan just smiled bitterly  to himself and reflected on how stupidly and
strangely it had all happened. Just think! He had wanted to warn them all of
the  danger threatening from  the unknown consultant, had intended to  catch
him, and all he had achieved was to wind up in some mysterious room, telling
all sorts of  hogwash about Uncle Fyodor, who had done some hard drinking in
Vologda. Insufferably stupid!
     Finally Ivan was released. He was  escorted  back to his room, where he
was given a cup of coffee, two soft-boiled eggs and white bread with butter.
     Having eaten and drunk all  that was offered him, Ivan  decided to wait
for whoever  was chief of this institution, and  from this chief  to  obtain
both attention for himself and justice.
     And he did come, and very soon  after  Ivan's breakfast.  Unexpectedly,
the door of Ivan's room opened, and in came a lot of people in white coats.
     At their head walked a man of about forty-five, as  carefully shaven as
an actor, with  pleasant but quite  piercing eyes and courteous manners. The
whole retinue showed him tokens of attention  and respect,  and his entrance
therefore came out  very solemn. 'Like Pontius  Pilate!' thought  Ivan. Yes,
this  was unquestionably the chief. He sat  down on  a stool, while everyone
else remained standing.
     'Doctor Stravinsky,' the seated man introduced himself to Ivan and gave
him a friendly look.
     'Here, Alexander  Nikolaevich,' someone with a trim beard said in a low
voice, and handed the chief Ivan's chart, all covered with writing.
     They've sewn up a whole case!' Ivan thought. And the chief ran  through
the chart with a practised eye, muttered 'Mm-hm, mm-hm...', and exchanged  a
few phrases with those around him in a little-known language. 'And he speaks
Latin like Pilate,' Ivan thought sadly. Here one word made  him jump; it was
the  word 'schizophrenia' - alas, already  uttered  yesterday by  the cursed
foreigner  at  the  Patriarch's Ponds, and  now repeated today by  Professor
Stravinsky. 'And he knew that, too!' Ivan thought anxiously.
     The chief  apparently made it a rule to  agree  with  and rejoice  over
everything said to him  by  those  around him, and  to express this with the
words 'Very nice, very nice...'
     'Very nice!' said Stravinsky, handing the chart back to someone, and he
addressed Ivan:
     'You are a poet?'
     `A  poet,' Ivan replied glumly, and for  the first  time  suddenly felt
some inexplicable loathing for poetry, and his own verses, coming to mind at
once, seemed to him for some reason distasteful.
     Wrinkling his face, he asked Stravinsky in turn:
     'You are a professor?'
     To this, Stravinsky, with obliging courtesy, inclined his head.
     'And you're the chief here?' Ivan continued.
     Stravinsky nodded to this as well.
     'I must speak with you,' Ivan Nikolaevich said meaningly.
     That is what I'm here for,' returned Stravinsky.
     'The thing  is,' Ivan began, feeling his hour had come, `that I've been
got up as a madman, and nobody wants to listen to me!...'
     'Oh,  no, we shall hear you out  with great attention,' Stravinsky said
seriously and  soothingly,  'and by  no means allow you to  be  got up  as a
madman.'
     'Listen, then: yesterday  evening  I  met  a  mysterious person at  the
Patriarch's Ponds, maybe a foreigner, maybe not, who  knew  beforehand about
Berlioz's death and has seen Pontius Pilate in person.'
     The retinue listened to the poet silently and without stirring.
     'Pilate? The Pilate who lived  in the time of Jesus Christ?' Stravinsky
asked, narrowing his eyes at Ivan.
     "The same.'
     'Aha,' said Stravinsky, 'and this Berlioz died under a tram-car?'
     'Precisely,  he's the one who in my  presence was killed by a  tram-car
yesterday at the Ponds, and this same mysterious citizen...'
     The  acquaintance  of  Pontius  Pilate?' asked  Stravinsky,  apparently
distinguished by great mental alacrity.
     'Precisely him,' Ivan confirmed, studying Stravinsky. 'Well, so he said
beforehand  that Annushka had spilled  the  sunflower oil... And he  slipped
right  on that place! How do you like  that?'  Ivan  inquired significantly,
hoping to produce a great effect with his words.
     But  the effect did not  ensue, and Stravinsky  quite  simply asked the
following question:
     'And who is this Annushka?'
     This question upset Ivan a little; his face twitched.
     `Annushka is of absolutely no importance here,' he said nervously.
     "Devil knows who she is. Just some fool from Sadovaya. What's important
is that he knew beforehand, you see, beforehand, about the sunflower oil! Do
you understand me?'
     `Perfectly,' Stravinsky  replied  seriously  and, touching  the  poet's
knee, added: 'Don't get excited, just continue.'
     To continue,' said Ivan,  trying to fall in with Stravinsky's tone, and
knowing already from bitter experience  that only calm  would help him, 'so,
then, this horrible type (and he's  lying that he's a consultant)  has  some
extraordinary  power!...  For  instance,  you  chase  after  him  and   it's
impossible to catch up with him... And there's also a little pair with him -
good ones, too,  but in their  own way: some long one in broken glasses and,
besides him, a cat of incredible size who rides the tram all by himself. And
besides,' interrupted by  no one, Ivan went on talking  with ever increasing
ardour and  conviction,  `he  was personally  on Pontius  Pilate's  balcony,
there's  no  doubt of  it. So what  is all  this, eh?  He  must be  arrested
immediately, otherwise he'll do untold harm.'
     `So  you're  trying  to   get  him  arrested?  Have  I  understood  you
correctly?' asked Stravinsky.
     'He's  intelligent,'  thought Ivan.  "You've got to  admit, even  among
intellectuals you come across some of rare intelligence, there's  no denying
it,' and he replied:
     `Quite correctly!  And  how could I not  be trying,  just  consider for
yourself! And meanwhile I've been  forcibly detained  here, they  poke lamps
into my  eyes, give me baths,  question  me  for some  reason about my Uncle
Fedya!... And he  departed  this  world long ago!  I  demand to be  released
immediately!'
     'Well,  there,  very  nice,  very  nice!'  Stravinsky  responded.  'Now
everything's clear. Really, what's the sense  of keeping a healthy man in  a
clinic? Very well, sir, I'll check you out of here right now, if you tell me
you're normal. Not prove, but merely tell. So, then, are you normal?'
     Here  complete  silence fell, and the  fat  woman who had taken care of
Ivan  in the  morning  looked at the professor  with awe. Ivan  thought once
again: 'Positively intelligent!'
     The  professor's  offer pleased him very much, yet  before replying  he
thought very, very hard, wrinkling his forehead, and at last said firmly:
     'I am normal.'
     'Well,  how  very nice,'  Stravinsky exclaimed with relief, `and if so,
let's reason logically.  Let's take your day yesterday.'  Here he turned and
Ivan's chart was immediately handed to him. 'In search of an unknown man who
recommended himself as an acquaintance of  Pontius Pilate, you performed the
following  actions yesterday.'  Here  Stravinsky began holding  up  his long
fingers, glancing now at the chart, now at Ivan.  'You hung a little icon on
your chest. Did you?'
     'I did,' Ivan agreed sullenly.
     'You fell  off a  fence and  hurt  your  face. Right?  Showed  up  in a
restaurant  carrying  a burning  candle in  your hand,  in nothing  but your
underwear, and  in the restaurant you  beat somebody. You were  brought here
tied up. Having come  here, you called the police and asked them to send out
machine-guns. Then you attempted to throw yourself out the window. Right?
     The question is:  can  one, by acting  in such fashion, catch or arrest
anyone?
     And if you're a normal man, you yourself will  answer: by no means. You
wish to leave here? Very well, sir. But allow me to ask, where are you going
to go?'
     'To  the  police, of course,' Ivan  replied,  no  longer so firmly, and
somewhat at a loss under the professor's gaze.
     'Straight from here?'
     'Mm-hm...'
     'Without stopping at your place?' Stravinsky asked quickly.
     'I  have no time to stop anywhere! While I'm  stopping at places, he'll
slip away!'
     'So. And what will you tell the police to start with?'
     'About Pontius Pilate,' Ivan Nikolaevich replied, and his eyes  clouded
with a gloomy mist.
     'Well, how  very nice!' the won-over Stravinsky exclaimed and,  turning
to  the one with the  little  beard, ordered: 'Fyodor  Vassilyevich,  please
check  citizen Homeless out  for town. But  don't put  anyone in his room or
change the linen.  In  two  hours citizen  Homeless will  be back  here. So,
then,' he turned to  the  poet, 'I won't wish  you success, because I  don't
believe one  iota  in that  success.  See you  soon!' He  stood  up, and his
retinue stirred.
     'On what grounds will I be back here?' Ivan asked anxiously.
     Stravinsky was as  if waiting for this  question, immediately sat down,
and began to speak:
     `On  the grounds  that as  soon as you show up at the police station in
your  drawers  and tell  them  you've seen  a  man  who  knew Pontius Pilate
personally, you'll instantly be brought here, and you'll find yourself again
in this very same room.'
     'What  have drawers got to  do with it?' Ivan asked,  gazing around  in
bewilderment.
     'It's mainly Pontius Pilate.  But  the drawers, too. Because we'll take
the  clinic underwear from you and give you back your  clothes. And you were
delivered here in your drawers.  And  yet you were by no means going to stop
at your place, though I dropped you a  hint. Then comes Pilate... and that's
it.'
     Here something strange happened with  Ivan Nikolaevich. His will seemed
to crack, and he felt himself weak, in need of advice.
     'What am I to do, then?' he asked, timidly this time.
     "Well, how very nice!' Stravinsky replied. 'A most reasonable question.
Now I am going to tell  you what actually happened to you. Yesterday someone
frightened you  badly and upset you with  a story  about Pontius Pilate  and
other things. And  so you, a very nervous and high-strung man, started going
around the city,  telling  about  Pontius  Pilate.  It's quite natural  that
you're  taken  for a  madman. Your salvation  now  lies  in just one thing -
complete peace. And you absolutely must remain here.'
     'But he has to be caught!' Ivan exclaimed, imploringly now.
     'Very good, sir, but why should you go running around yourself? Explain
all your suspicions and accusations against this man on paper. Nothing could
be simpler than to send your declaration to  the proper quarters, and if, as
you  think, we are  dealing with  a  criminal,  it  will  be  clarified very
quickly. But only on one condition: don't strain your head, and try to think
less about  Pontius  Pilate. People  say  all kinds of  things! One  mustn't
believe everything.'
     'Understood!'  Ivan declared  resolutely.  `I ask to  be given  pen and
paper.'
     'Give him paper and a short  pencil,' Stravinsky ordered the fat woman,
and to Ivan he said: 'But I don't advise you to write today.'
     'No, no, today, today without fail!' Ivan cried out in alarm.
     'Well,  all right. Only  don't strain your head. If it doesn't come out
today, it will tomorrow.'
     'He'll escape.'
     'Oh, no,' Stravinsky objected confidently, 'he won't escape anywhere, I
guarantee  that. And remember  that  here with  us  you'll be helped in  all
possible  ways, and without  us nothing  will come  of  it. Do you hear me?'
Stravinsky suddenly asked meaningly and took Ivan Nikolaevich by both hands.
     Holding them in his own, he repeated for a long time, his eyes fixed on
Ivan's:
     'You'll be helped here... do you  hear me?... You'll be helped  here...
you'll  get  relief... it's quiet  here, all  peaceful...  you'll be  helped
here...'
     Ivan  Nikolaevich unexpectedly  yawned, and  the expression on his face
softened.
     'Yes, yes,' he said quietly.
     'Well,  how  very nice!' Stravinsky concluded the  conversation  in his
usual way and stood up: 'Goodbye!' He shook Ivan's hand and, on his way out,
turned to  the one  with the little beard and  said: 'Yes, and try oxygen...
and baths.'
     A few moments later there was no Stravinsky or his retinue before Ivan.
     Beyond the window grille, in the noonday sun, the joyful and springtime
pine  wood stood  beautiful  on  the other bank  and,  closer by,  the river
sparkled.

CHAPTER 7. A Naughty Apartment

     If Styopa Likhodeev had been  told the next morning: 'Styopa! You'll be
shot  if  you don't  get up  this  minute!' - Styopa would have replied in a
languid, barely audible voice:
     'Shoot me, do what you like with me, I won't get up.'
     Not only not get up,  it seemed to him that he could not open his eyes,
because  if he were to  do so,  there would be a flash of lightning, and his
head would at  once be blown  to pieces.  A heavy bell  was booming in  that
head, brown  spots rimmed with fiery green floated  between his eyeballs and
his closed eyelids, and to crown  it all he was nauseous, this nausea, as it
seemed  to  him,  being  connected  with  the  sounds  of  some  importunate
gramophone.
     Styopa tried to recall something, but only one thing would get recalled
- that yesterday, apparently, and in some unknown place, he had stood with a
napkin in his hand and tried to kiss  some lady, promising her that the next
day, and exactly at noon, he would come to visit her. The lady had declined,
saying: 'No, no, I won't be home!', but Styopa had stubbornly insisted: 'And
I'll just up and come anyway!'
     Who the lady  was, and what time it was now, what  day,  of what month,
Styopa decidedly did not know,  and,  worst of  all, he could not figure out
where  he was. He attempted to  learn  this last at  least, and to  that end
unstuck the stuck-together  lids of his left eye. Something gleamed dully in
the  semi-darkness. Styopa  finally recognized  the pier-glass  and realized
that he was lying  on his  back  in his own  bed  - that is, the  jeweller's
wife's former  bed  -  in the bedroom. Here he felt such a  throbbing in his
head that he closed his eyes and moaned.
     Let us  explain: Styopa Likhodeev, director of the Variety Theatre, had
come to  his senses that morning at  home,  in  the very  apartment which he
shared with the  late Berlioz, in a  big, six-storeyed, U-shaped building on
Sadovaya Street.
     It must  be said that  this apartment - no.50 - had long  had, if not a
bad, at least a  strange reputation. Two  years ago it had still belonged to
the widow  of  the  jeweller de  Fougeray. Anna  Frantsevna de  Fougeray,  a
respectable and  very practical fifty-year-old woman, let out  three  of the
five rooms to  lodgers: one  whose  last  name  was apparently  Belomut, and
another with a lost last name.
     And then  two  years ago  inexplicable  events began  to  occur in this
apartment: people  began  to disappear [1]  from this  apartment  without  a
trace.
     Once,  on  a  day off, a policeman came to the  apartment,  called  the
second lodger (the one whose last name  got lost) out to the front hall, and
said  he was invited  to come to the police station for a  minute to put his
signature to  something. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna's long-time
and devoted housekeeper,  to say, in case he received any  telephone  calls,
that  he would be back in ten  minutes, and left together  with the  proper,
white-gloved policeman. He  not  only  did not come back in ten minutes, but
never  came back at  all. The most surprising  thing was that  the policeman
evidently vanished along with him.
     The  pious,  or, to speak  more  frankly, superstitious Anfisa declared
outright to the very upset Anna Frantsevna that it was sorcery  and that she
knew perfectly  well who had stolen both the lodger and the policeman,  only
she did not wish to talk about it towards night-time.
     Well, but with  sorcery, as everyone knows, once it starts,  there's no
stopping  it. The  second  lodger is remembered to  have  disappeared  on  a
Monday, and  that Wednesday Belomut seemed to drop from sight, though, true,
under different circumstances. In the  morning a car came, as usual, to take
him to work, and it did take him to  work, but it  did not bring anyone back
or come again itself.
     Madame  Belomut's  grief  and  horror  defied description.  But,  alas,
neither  the  one  nor the other continued for  long. That  same  night,  on
returning with Anfisa from her dacha, which Anna Frantsevna  had hurried off
to  for some reason,  she did not  find the  wife of citizen  Belomut in the
apartment.  And not only that:  the doors of the two rooms  occupied  by the
Belomut couple turned out to be sealed.
     Two days passed somehow. On the third  day,  Anna Frantsevna,  who  had
suffered all the while  from insomnia, again left hurriedly for her dacha...
Needless to say, she never came back!
     Left  alone,  Anfisa,  having wept her  fill,  went to  sleep past  one
o'clock in the morning. What  happened to her after  that  is not known, but
lodgers in other apartments told of hearing some sort of  knocking all night
in no.50 and of seeing electric light burning in the windows till morning.
     In the morning it turned out that there was also no Anfisa!
     For a long time all sorts of legends  were repeated in the  house about
these  disappearances  and  about  the  accursed  apartment,  such  as,  for
instance, 'that  this dry and pious little Anfisa had supposedly carried  on
her dried-up breast, in a suede  bag,  twenty-five big diamonds belonging to
Anna Frantsevna.  That  in  the woodshed  of  that  very dacha to which Anna
Frantsevna had gone so hurriedly, there supposedly turned up, of themselves,
some  inestimable treasures in the form of  those same  diamonds,  plus some
gold  coins of tsarist minting... And so on, in the same vein. Well, what we
don't know, we can't vouch for.
     However it may have been, the apartment stood empty and sealed for only
a week. Then the late Berlioz moved in  with his wife, and this same Styopa,
also with his wife. It was perfectly natural that, as soon as they got  into
the malignant  apartment,  devil  knows what started happening with them  as
well! Namely, within the space of a month both wives vanished. But these two
not without a trace. Of  Berlioz's wife it was told that  she had supposedly
been seen in Kharkov with some ballet-master, while Styopa's  wife allegedly
turned up on Bozhedomka Street, where  wagging  tongues said the director of
the Variety, using his innumerable acquaintances, had contrived to get her a
room, but on the one condition that she never show her face on Sadovaya...
     And so, Styopa moaned. He wanted to call the housekeeper Grunya and ask
her for aspirin, but was still able to realize that it was foolish, and that
Grunya,  of  course,  had  no aspirin.  He tried to  call Berlioz for  help,
groaned twice: 'Misha... Misha...', but, as you will understand, received no
reply. The apartment was perfectly silent.
     Moving his toes, Styopa realized that he was  lying there in his socks,
passed his  trembling  hand  down  his hip  to determine whether he  had his
trousers on or not, but  failed. Finally, seeing  that  he was abandoned and
alone, and  there was  no one to  help  him, he  decided to get up,  however
inhuman the effort it cost him.
     Styopa unstuck  his  glued  eyelids  and  saw  himself reflected in the
pier-glass as a man with hair sticking out in all directions, with a bloated
physiognomy  covered with black  stubble, with puffy  eyes,  a dirty  shirt,
collar and necktie, in drawers and socks.
     So he saw himself  in the pier-glass, and next to the mirror he  saw an
unknown man, dressed in black and wearing a black beret.
     Styopa sat up in bed and goggled his bloodshot eyes as well as he could
at the unknown man. The silence was broken by this unknown  man, who said in
a low, heavy voice, and with a foreign accent, the following words:
     'Good morning, my most sympathetic Stepan Bogdanovich!'
     There  was  a  pause,  after  which,  making a  most terrible strain on
himself, Styopa uttered:
     "What  can  I do  for  you?' - and was amazed, not recognizing his  own
voice. He spoke the word 'what'  in a treble, 'can I' in a bass, and his 'do
for you' did not come off at all.
     The stranger smiled amicably,  took out a big gold watch with a diamond
triangle on the lid, rang eleven times, and said:
     'Eleven. And for  exactly an hour I've been waiting for you to wake up,
since you made  an appointment for me  to come to your place  at ten. Here I
am!'[2]
     Styopa felt for his trousers on the chair beside his bed, whispered:
     'Excuse me...', put them on,  and asked hoarsely:  'Tell me your  name,
please?'
     He had difficulty speaking. At each  word, someone stuck  a needle into
his brain, causing infernal pain.
     'What! You've forgotten my name, too?' Here the unknown man smiled.
     `Forgive me...' Styopa croaked, feeling that his hangover had presented
him with a new symptom: it seemed to  him that the floor beside his bed went
away, and that at  any moment he would go flying down to  the devil's dam in
the nether world.
     `My  dear Stepan  Bogdanovich,' the  visitor said, with a perspicacious
smile, 'no aspirin will help  you. Follow the wise old rule - cure like with
like. The only thing  that  will bring you back to life  is  two glasses  of
vodka with something pickled and hot to go with it.'
     Styopa was a shrewd man and, sick as he was, realized that since he had
been found in this state, he would have to confess everything.
     `Frankly  speaking,'  he began, his  tongue barely moving, 'yesterday I
got a bit...'
     'Not a word more!' the visitor answered and drew aside with his  chair.
Styopa, rolling his eyes, saw  that a tray had been set on a small table, on
which tray there  were sliced white bread,  pressed caviar in a little bowl,
pickled mushrooms on a dish, something in a saucepan, and, finally, vodka in
a roomy  decanter  belonging to  the jeweller's  wife.  What  struck  Styopa
especially was that the decanter  was  frosty with cold.  This, however, was
understandable: it  was sitting in a  bowl packed with  ice.  In  short, the
service was neat, efficient.
     The stranger  did  not allow  Styopa's amazement to develop to a morbid
degree, but deftly poured him half a glass of vodka.
     'And you?' Styopa squeaked.
     'With pleasure!'
     His hand twitching,  Styopa brought the  glass to  his  lips, while the
stranger swallowed the contents of his glass at one  gulp. Chewing a lump of
caviar, Styopa squeezed out of himself the words:
     'And you... a bite of something?'
     `Much obliged,  but  I never snack,' the  stranger replied  and  poured
seconds. The saucepan was opened and found to contain frankfurters in tomato
sauce.
     And then the accursed  green haze before his eyes dissolved, the  words
began to come out clearly, and, above all, Styopa remembered a thing or two.
Namely, that it had  taken place yesterday in Skhodnya, at the dacha of  the
sketch-writer  Khustov, to which  this same Khustov had  taken  Styopa in  a
taxi. There was even a memory of having hired this taxi by the Metropol, and
there was also some  actor, or not an actor... with a gramophone in a little
suitcase. Yes, yes, yes, it was at the dacha! The  dogs,  he remembered, had
howled  from  this  gramophone.  Only  the lady  Styopa  had wanted  to kiss
remained unexplained... devil knows who she was...  maybe  she was in radio,
maybe not...
     The previous day was thus coming gradually  into  focus,  but right now
Styopa  was  much more  interested  in today's day and, particularly, in the
appearance  in his bedroom  of a stranger, and with hors d'oeuvres and vodka
to boot. It would be nice to explain that!
     'Well, I hope by now you've remembered my name?'
     But Styopa only smiled bashfully and spread his arms.
     'Really!  I get the feeling that you followed the vodka with port wine!
Good heavens, it simply isn't done!'
     'I beg you to keep it between us,' Styopa said fawningly.
     'Oh, of course, of course! But as for Khustov, needless to say, I can't
vouch for him.'
     'So you know Khustov?'
     "Yesterday, in your office, I saw  this individuum briefly, but it only
takes  a fleeting glance at his  face  to understand that he is a bastard, a
squabbler, a trimmer and a toady.'
     `Perfectly  true!' thought Styopa, struck  by  such a true, precise and
succinct definition of Khustov.
     Yes,  the  previous day was  piecing  itself  together, but,  even  so,
anxiety would  not  take leave of the director of the Variety. The thing was
that  a  huge  black hole yawned in this  previous  day.  Say what you will,
Styopa  simply  had not  seen this  stranger  in the  beret  in  his  office
yesterday.
     'Professor  of black magic  Woland,'[3]  the  visitor  said  weightily,
seeing Styopa's difficulty, and he recounted everything in order.
     Yesterday afternoon he arrived in Moscow from abroad,  went immediately
to Styopa, and offered his show to the Variety. Styopa telephoned the Moscow
Regional  Entertainment  Commission and  had the  question  approved (Styopa
turned  pale and blinked), then signed a contract  with Professor Woland for
seven performances  (Styopa  opened his mouth),  and  arranged  that  Woland
should come the next morning at ten o'clock to work out the details...
     And so Woland came. Having come, he  was met by the housekeeper Grunya,
who explained  that she had just  come  herself, that  she was not a live-in
maid, that Berlioz  was not home, and  that if  the  visitor  wished  to see
Stepan Bogdanovich,  he should go to his bedroom himself. Stepan Bogdanovich
was such a sound sleeper that she would not undertake to wake him up. Seeing
what  condition  Stepan Bogdanovich was in, the  artiste sent  Grunya to the
nearest  grocery  store for vodka and hors d'oeuvres, to the  druggist's for
ice, and...
     `Allow me  to reimburse  you,' the mortified Styopa  squealed and began
hunting for his wallet.
     'Oh,  what nonsense!' the guest  performer  exclaimed and would hear no
more of it.
     And  so, the vodka and hors d'oeuvres got explained,  but all the  same
Styopa was a pity to see: he remembered decidedly nothing about the contract
and, on his life, had  not seen this Woland yesterday. Yes, Khustov had been
there, but not Woland.
     'May I have a look at the contract?' Styopa asked quietly.
     'Please do, please do...'
     Styopa looked at the paper and froze. Everything was in place: first of
all, Styopa's own dashing  signature... aslant the margin a note in the hand
of  the  findirector  [4] Rimsky  authorizing  the payment of  ten  thousand
roubles to the artiste Woland, as  an advance  on the  thirty-five  thousand
roubles due him for seven performances. What's more, Woland's  signature was
right there attesting to his receipt of the ten thousand!
     `What is all this?!'  the wretched  Styopa  thought, his head spinning.
Was  he  starting to  have ominous gaps  of  memory? Well, it  went  without
saying,  once  the contract had  been produced, any further  expressions  of
surprise  would  simply  be  indecent. Styopa asked  his  visitor's leave to
absent himself for a  moment and, just as he was,  in his stocking feet, ran
to  the  front  hall for the telephone.  On  his way he  called  out in  the
direction of the kitchen:
     'Grunya!'
     But no one responded. He glanced at the door  to Berlioz's study, which
was next to the front hall, and here  he was, as they say, flabbergasted. On
the door-handle he made out an enormous wax seal [5] on a string.
     'Hel-lo!' someone barked in Styopa's head. 'Just  what we  needed!' And
here  Styopa's thoughts began running on twin tracks, but, as always happens
in times of catastrophe, in the  same  direction and, generally, devil knows
where. It is  even  difficult to convey  the porridge in Styopa's head. Here
was this devilry with the black beret, the chilled vodka, and the incredible
contract...  And along with all that, if you  please, a seal on the  door as
well! That is, tell anyone you like that Berlioz has been up to no good - no
one will believe  it, by Jove, no one will believe it! Yet look, there's the
seal! Yes, sir...
     And here  some  most  disagreeable  little  thoughts  began stirring in
Styopa's  brain, about  the article which,  as luck  would have it,  he  had
recently inflicted on Mikhail Alexandrovich for publication in his journal.
     The article, just between us, was idiotic! And worthless. And the money
was so little...
     Immediately after the recollection  of the article, there came flying a
recollection of some dubious conversation that had taken place, he recalled,
on the twenty-fourth of April,  in the  evening, right  there in the  dining
room, while Styopa was having dinner with Mikhail Alexandrovich. That is, of
course, this conversation could not have  been  called  dubious in the  full
sense of the word (Styopa would not have ventured upon such a conversation),
but  it was on  some  unnecessary  subject.  He had been  quite  free,  dear
citizens, not  to  begin  it.  Before  the  seal,  this  conversation  would
undoubtedly  have been  considered  a  perfect  trifle,  but now, after  the
seal...
     'Ah, Berlioz, Berlioz!' boiled up  in Styopa's head. This is simply too
much for one head!'
     But it would not do to  grieve too  long, and Styopa dialled the number
of the office of  the  Variety's findirector, Rimsky. Styopa's  position was
ticklish: first, the foreigner might get offended that Styopa  was  checking
on  him after the contract  had  been  shown,  and  then  to talk  with  the
findirector was also exceedingly difficult.  Indeed,  he could not just  ask
him like that:
     `Tell  me,  did  I sign a  contract for  thirty-five  thousand  roubles
yesterday with a professor of black magic?' It was no good asking like that!
     'Yes!' Rimsky's sharp, unpleasant voice came from the receiver.
     'Hello,  Grigory  Danilovich,'  Styopa began  speaking  quietly,  'it's
Likhodeev. There's  a certain  matter... hm...  hm... I  have  this... er...
artiste Woland sitting here... So you see... I wanted to ask, how about this
evening?...'
     'Ah, the black magician?' Rimsky's voice responded in the receiver. The
posters will be ready shortly.'
     'Uh-huh...' Styopa said in a weak voice, 'well, 'bye...'
     'And you'll be coming in soon?' Rimsky asked.
     'In half an hour,' Styopa replied and, hanging up the receiver, pressed
his  hot  head in his hands. Ah, what a nasty thing to have happen! What was
wrong with his memory, citizens? Eh?
     However, to  go on  lingering in the front hall was awkward, and Styopa
formed  a  plan  straight  away:  by  all  means  to conceal his  incredible
forgetfulness, and now,  first  off, contrive  to  get out of the  foreigner
what, in fact,  he  intended to show that evening in  the  Variety, of which
Styopa was in charge.
     Here  Styopa turned away from the  telephone and saw distinctly  in the
mirror that stood in the front hall, and which the lazy Grunya had not wiped
for ages, a certain strange specimen,  long  as  a  pole, and in a pince-nez
(ah, if only Ivan Nikolaevich had been there!  He would have recognized this
specimen at  once!). The figure was  reflected and then disappeared.  Styopa
looked further down  the hall in alarm and was rocked a second time,  for in
the mirror a stalwart black cat passed and also disappeared.
     Styopa's heart skipped a beat, he staggered.
     'What is  all this?' he thought. 'Am  I losing my mind? Where are these
reflections  coming  from?!'  He  peeked  into  the  front  hall  and  cried
timorously:
     'Grunya! What's this cat  doing hanging around here?! Where did he come
from? And the other one?!'
     'Don't worry, Stepan Bogdanovich,' a voice  responded, not Grunya's but
the visitor's,  from the  bedroom. The  cat  is mine. Don't  be nervous. And
Grunya is not here, I  sent her off to Voronezh.  She complained you diddled
her out of a vacation.'
     These words were so unexpected and preposterous that  Styopa decided he
had not heard  right. Utterly bewildered, he trotted back to the bedroom and
froze on the threshold. His hair stood on end and small beads of sweat broke
out on his brow.
     The visitor was no longer alone in the bedroom, but had company: in the
second armchair sat the same type he had imagined in  the front hall. Now he
was  clearly  visible: the  feathery  moustache,  one  lens of the pince-nez
gleaming, the  other  not there. But worse  things  were to be  found in the
bedroom: on the jeweller's wife's ottoman,  in  a casual  pose,  sprawled  a
third party - namely, a black cat of uncanny size, with a  glass of vodka in
one paw and a fork, on which  he had managed to spear a pickled mushroom, in
the other.
     The light, faint in the bedroom anyway, now began to grow quite dark in
Styopa's  eyes. This is  apparently how one loses one's mind...' he  thought
and caught hold of the doorpost.
     `I see you're somewhat surprised, my dearest Stepan Bogdanovich?'
     Woland  inquired  of  the  teeth-chattering  Styopa.  `And yet  there's
nothing to be surprised at. This is my retinue.'
     Here  the  cat tossed off  the vodka, and Styopa's hand began to  slide
down the doorpost.
     'And  this  retinue requires room,' Woland continued,  'so there's just
one too many of us in  the apartment. And it seems to  us that this  one too
many is precisely you.'
     Theirself, theirself!' the long  checkered one sang in  a goat's voice,
referring to Styopa in the plural. 'Generally, theirself has been up to some
terrible swinishness lately. Drinking, using their position to have liaisons
with  women,  don't  do  devil a thing, and can't do  anything, because they
don't know anything of  what they're supposed to  do.  Pulling the wool over
their superiors' eyes.'
     `Availing hisself  of a government car!' the  cat  snitched, chewing  a
mushroom.
     And here  occurred the  fourth and last appearance in the apartment, as
Styopa, having slid all the way to the floor, clawed at the doorpost with an
enfeebled hand.
     Straight  from  the  pier-glass stepped  a  short  but  extraordinarily
broad-shouldered man, with a bowler hat  on his head and a fang sticking out
of  his  mouth,  which  made  still  uglier  a  physiognomy  unprecedentedly
loathsome without that. And with flaming red hair besides.
     'Generally,'  this  new  one  entered into  the  conversation, `I don't
understand  how he got to  be  a  director,' the redhead's  nasal twang  was
growing stronger and stronger, 'he's as much a director as I'm a bishop.'
     "You don't look like a bishop, Azazello,'[6] the cat observed,  heaping
his plate with frankfurters.
     That's what I  mean,'  twanged the redhead  and,  turning to Woland, he
added deferentially:
     'Allow me, Messire, to chuck him the devil out of Moscow?'
     'Scat!' the cat barked suddenly, bristling his fur.
     And  then the  bedroom  started spinning around Styopa, he hit his head
against the doorpost, and, losing consciousness, thought: 'I'm dying...'
     But he did  not  die. Opening his eyes slightly, he saw himself sitting
on  something made of stone. Around him something  was making noise. When he
opened his eyes properly, he realized that the noise  was being made by  the
sea and, what's more, that the  waves were rocking just at his feet, that he
was, in  short, sitting  at  the very end of  a  jetty, that over him was  a
brilliant blue sky and behind him a white city on the mountains.
     Not  knowing how to  behave  in such  a case,  Styopa  got  up  on  his
trembling legs and walked along the jetty towards the shore.
     Some man was standing on the jetty, smoking and spitting into the sea.
     He looked at Styopa with wild eyes and stopped spitting.
     Then  Styopa pulled  the following  stunt: he  knelt  down  before  the
unknown smoker and said:
     'I implore you, tell me what city is this?'
     "Really!' said the heartless smoker.
     'I'm  not drunk,' Styopa  replied  hoarsely,  'something's happened  to
me... I'm ill... Where am I? What city is this?'
     "Well, it's Yalta...'
     Styopa quietly gasped and sank down on his side, his  head striking the
warm stone of the jetty. Consciousness left him.

CHAPTER 6. Schizophrenia, as was Said

     It was half past one in the morning when a man with a pointed beard and
wearing  a  white  coat  came  out  to  the  examining room  of  the  famous
psychiatric clinic, built recently on the outskirts of Moscow by the bank of
the river. Three orderlies had their eyes fastened on Ivan Nikolaevich,  who
was sitting on a couch. The extremely agitated poet Riukhin was also there.
     The  napkins with which Ivan Nikolaevich had been bed up lay in  a pile
on the same couch. Ivan Nikolaevich's arms and legs were free.
     Seeing  the  entering  man,  Riukhin  turned  pale, coughed,  and  said
timidly:
     'Hello, Doctor.'
     The  doctor bowed to Riukhin but, as he bowed, looked not at him but at
Ivan Nikolaevich. The latter sat perfectly motionless, with  an  angry  face
and knitted brows, and did not even stir at the doctor's entrance.
     'Here,  Doctor,'  Riukhin  began  speaking,   for  some  reason,  in  a
mysterious  whisper,  glancing  timorously  at  Ivan  Nikolaevich,  `is  the
renowned  poet Ivan Homeless  ... well, you see ... we're afraid it might be
delirium tremens...'
     'Was he drinking hard?' the doctor said through his teeth.
     'No, he drank, but not really so...'
     'Did  he  chase after cockroaches,  rats,  little devils,  or  slinking
dogs?'
     'No,' Riukhin replied with a  shudder,  `I saw him  yesterday  and this
morning ... he was perfectly well.'
     'And why is he in his drawers? Did you get him out of bed?'
     'No, Doctor, he came to the restaurant that way...'
     'Aha, aha,'  the doctor said with  great  satisfaction,  'and  why  the
scratches? Did he have a fight?'
     'He fell off a fence, and then in the restaurant he hit somebody... and
then somebody else...'
     'So, so, so,'  the  doctor said  and, turning  to Ivan,  added:  'Hello
there!'
     'Greetings, saboteur! [1]' Ivan replied spitefully and loudly.
     Riukhin was so embarrassed that  he did not dare raise his eyes to  the
courteous doctor. But the latter, not offended  in  the least,  took off his
glasses with  a habitual, deft movement,  raised the skirt of his coat,  put
them into the back pocket of his trousers, and then asked Ivan:
     'How old are you?'
     'You can all go to the devil!' Ivan shouted rudely and turned away.
     'But why are you angry? Did I say anything unpleasant to you?'
     'I'm twenty-three years old,' Ivan began excitedly,  'and  I'll file  a
complaint against you all. And particularly against you, louse!' he adverted
separately to Riukhin.
     'And what do you want to complain about?'
     'About the fact that I, a healthy man, was seized  and dragged by force
to a madhouse!' Ivan replied wrathfully.
     Here Riukhin looked closely at  Ivan and went cold: there was decidedly
no  insanity  in  the  man's eyes.  No  longer  dull  as  they  had been  at
Griboedov's, they were now clear as ever.
     `Good  God!'  Riukhin  thought fearfully. 'So he's  really normal! What
nonsense! Why, in fact, did we drag him here? He's normal,  normal, only his
mug got scratched...'
     'You are,' the doctor began calmly, sitting down  on a white stool with
a shiny foot, `not in a  madhouse,  but in a  clinic, where no one will keep
you if it's not necessary.'
     Ivan Nikolaevich glanced at him mistrustfully out of the  corner of his
eye, but still grumbled:
     'Thank the Lord! One normal man has finally turned up among the idiots,
of whom the first is that giftless goof Sashka!'
     'Who is this giftless Sashka?' the doctor inquired.
     'This one here -  Riukhin,' Ivan replied, jabbing  his  dirty finger in
Riukhin's direction.
     The  latter  flushed with indignation. That's the  thanks  I  get,'  he
thought bitterly, 'for showing concern for him! What trash, really!'
     'Psychologically, a  typical little  kulak,'[2] Ivan Nikolaevich began,
evidently from an irresistible urge to  denounce Riukhin, 'and, what's more,
a little kulak carefully  disguising himself as a  proletarian.  Look at his
lenten physiognomy, and compare it with those resounding verses he wrote for
the First of May [3] - heh, heh, heh ... "Soaring up!" and "Soaring  down!!"
But  if you could look inside him and see what he thinks... you'd gasp!' And
Ivan Nikolaevich burst into sinister laughter.
     Riukhin  was  breathing  heavily, turned red,  and thought of  just one
thing, that he had warmed a serpent on his breast, that he had shown concern
for  a man  who turned out to be a vicious enemy. And, above all,  there was
nothing to be done: there's no arguing with the mentally ill!
     `And  why, actually, were  you  brought here?' the  doctor asked, after
listening attentively to Homeless's denunciations.
     'Devil take them, the numskulls! They  seized  me, tied me up with some
rags, and dragged me away in a truck!'
     'May I ask why you came to the restaurant in just your underwear?'
     There's nothing surprising about  that,' Ivan  replied.  `I went  for a
swim in the Moscow River, so they filched my clothes and left me this trash!
     I couldn't very well walk around Moscow naked!  I put it  on  because I
was hurrying to Griboedov.'
     The doctor glanced questioningly at Riukhin, who muttered glumly:
     'The name of the restaurant.'
     `Aha,' said  the  doctor,  `and  why  were  you in  such a  hurry? Some
business meeting?'
     'I'm  trying to catch the consultant,' Ivan Nikolaevich said and looked
around anxiously.
     'What consultant?'
     'Do you know Berlioz?' Ivan asked significantly.
     The... composer?'
     Ivan got upset.
     'What composer?  Ah, yes... Ah, no. The composer  has  the same name as
Misha Berlioz.'
     Riukhin had no wish to say anything, but was forced to explain:
     The secretary  of Massolit, Berlioz, was run over by a tram-car tonight
at the Patriarch's Ponds.'
     'Don't blab about what you don't know!' Ivan got angry with Riukhin. 'I
was there, not you! He got him under the tram-car on purpose!'
     'Pushed him?'
     '"Pushed  him",  nothing!'  Ivan  exclaimed,  angered  by  the  general
obtuseness. 'His kind don't need to push! He  can perform such stunts - hold
on  to your  hat! He  knew  beforehand  that  Berlioz  would get  under  the
tram-car!'
     'And did anyone besides you see this consultant?'
     That's the trouble, it was just Berlioz and I.'
     'So. And  what measures did you take to catch this  murderer?' Here the
doctor turned and sent  a glance towards  a woman  in a white  coat, who was
sitting  at a  table to one side.  She  took out a sheet of  paper and began
filling in the blank spaces in its columns.
     'Here's what measures: I took a little candle from the kitchen...'
     That one?' asked the doctor, pointing to the broken candle lying on the
table in front of the woman, next to the icon.
     That very one, and...'
     'And why the icon?'
     'Ah, yes, the icon...' Ivan  blushed. `It was the icon that  frightened
them most of all.' He again jabbed his finger in  the direction of  Riukhin.
'But the thing is that he,  the consultant, he... let's speak directly... is
mixed up with the unclean powers... and you won't catch him so easily.'
     The  orderlies  for some reason snapped to attention and fastened their
eyes on Ivan.
     Yes, sirs,' Ivan went on,  'mixed  up with them! An  absolute  fact. He
spoke personally with Pontius  Pilate.  And there's  no need to  stare at me
like  that.  I'm  telling the truth! He saw everything - the balcony and the
palm trees. In short, he was at Pontius Pilate's, I can vouch for it.'
     'Come, come...'
     'Well, so I pinned the icon on my chest and ran...'
     Here the clock suddenly struck twice.
     'Oh-oh!'  Ivan exclaimed  and got up from the couch. `It's two o'clock,
and I'm wasting time with you! Excuse me, where's the telephone?'
     'Let him use the telephone,' the doctor told the orderlies.
     Ivan  grabbed  the  receiver,  and  the  woman meanwhile  quietly asked
Riukhin:
     'Is he married?'
     'Single,' Riukhin answered fearfully.
     'Member of a trade union?'
     'Yes.'
     'Police?'  Ivan   shouted   into   the   receiver.   'Police?   Comrade
officer-on-duty, give orders at once for five motor cycles with machine-guns
to be sent out to catch the  foreign consultant. What? Come and pick me  up,
I'll go with you... It's the poet Homeless speaking from the madhouse...
     What's your address?' Homeless asked the doctor in  a whisper, covering
the  receiver  with  his hand,  and  then  again  shouting into it: 'Are you
listening?
     Hello!... Outrageous!' Ivan suddenly screamed  and hurled  the receiver
against the  wall. Then he  turned to the doctor, offered him his hand, said
'Goodbye' drily, and made as if to leave.
     `For pity's sake, where do you intend  to go?' the doctor said, peering
into  Ivan's eyes.  'In  the dead of night, in  your underwear... You're not
feeling well, stay with us.'
     `Let  me  pass,'  Ivan said to the orderlies,  who closed ranks at  the
door. 'Will you let me pass or not?' the poet shouted in a terrible voice.
     Riukhin  trembled,  but  the woman  pushed  a button on the table and a
shiny little box with a sealed ampoule popped out on to its glass surface.
     'Ah, so?!' Ivan said, turning around with a wild and hunted look.
     'Well,   then...  Goodbye!'  And   he  rushed   head  first   into  the
window-blind.
     The crash was rather forceful, but the glass  behind the blind  gave no
crack, and in an instant Ivan Nikolaevich was struggling in the hands of the
orderlies. He gasped, tried to bite, shouted:
     'So that's the  sort  of  windows you've  got here! Let me go!  Let  me
go!...'
     A syringe flashed  in the doctor's  hand,  with  a single  movement the
woman  slit the threadbare  sleeve  of  the shirt  and  seized the  arm with
unwomanly strength. There was a  smell of ether, Ivan went limp in the hands
of the four  people, the deft doctor took advantage of this moment and stuck
the needle into Ivan's arm. They  held Ivan for another few seconds and then
lowered him on to the couch.
     'Bandits!' Ivan shouted and jumped up from the couch, but was installed
on it again. The moment they let go of him, he again jumped up, but sat back
down  by himself. He paused, gazing around wildly, then unexpectedly yawned,
then smiled maliciously.
     'Locked me up after all,' he said, yawned again, unexpectedly lay down,
put  his head  on the pillow, his fist  under  his  head  like a  child, and
muttered now in  a sleepy voice,  without malice: 'Very well, then... you'll
pay for it yourselves... I've warned you, you  can do as you like... I'm now
interested most of all in Pontius Pilate ...  Pilate...', and he closed  his
eyes.
     'A bath,  a private  room, number  117, and  a nurse to watch him,' the
doctor  ordered  as he put his glasses  on. Here Riukhin again gave a start:
the white door opened  noiselessly, behind  it a corridor could be seen, lit
by  blue night-lights. Out of  the  corridor rolled  a  stretcher  on rubber
wheels, to which  the quieted Ivan  was  transferred, and then he rolled off
down the corridor and the door closed behind him.
     'Doctor,' the  shaken Riukhin asked in a whisper, 'it means he's really
ill?'
     'Oh, yes,' replied the doctor.
     'But what's wrong with him, then?' Riukhin asked timidly.
     The tired doctor glanced at Riukhin and answered listlessly:
     'Locomotor  and  speech  excitation...  delirious  interpretations... A
complex case, it seems. Schizophrenia, I suppose. Plus this alcoholism...'
     Riukhin  understood nothing from the doctor's words, except that things
were evidently not so great with Ivan Nikolaevich. He sighed and asked:
     'But what's all this talk of his about some consultant?'
     `He must have seen  somebody who  struck his  disturbed imagination. Or
maybe a hallucination...'
     A few minutes later the truck was carrying Riukhin  off to  Moscow. Day
was  breaking, and the  light of  the street  lights still burning along the
highway was now unnecessary and unpleasant.  The  driver was vexed at having
wasted the  night, drove the truck as  fast as he  could, and skidded on the
turns.
     Now the woods dropped off, stayed somewhere behind, and  the river went
somewhere to the  side, and  an  omnium gatherum came spilling  to  meet the
truck: fences with sentry boxes and stacks of wood, tall posts and some sort
of poles, with spools strung on the poles, heaps of rubble, the earth scored
by  canals - in short, you sensed that  she was there, Moscow, right  there,
around the turn, and about to heave herself upon you and engulf you.
     Riukhin was jolted  and tossed about;  the sort of stump  he had placed
himself  on kept trying to slide out from under him. The restaurant napkins,
thrown in by the policeman and Pantelei, who had left earlier  by bus, moved
all  around the flatbed. Riukhin tried to collect them, but then,  for  some
reason hissing spitefully: 'Devil take them! What am  I doing fussing like a
fool?...', he spumed them aside with his foot and stopped looking at them.
     The rider's state of mind was  terrible. It was becoming clear that his
visit to the house of sorrow had left the deepest mark on him. Riukhin tried
to understand what was tormenting  him. The corridor with blue lights, which
had  stuck  itself  to  his memory?  The  thought that  there  is no greater
misfortune in  the world than the loss of reason? Yes, yes, of course, that,
too. But that - that's only a general thought. There's  something else. What
is it? An insult, that's what. Yes, yes, insulting words hurled right in his
face by Homeless. And the trouble is not that they were insulting,  but that
there was truth in them.
     The poet no longer looked  around, but, staring into the dirty, shaking
floor, began muttering something, whining, gnawing at himself.
     Yes, poetry... He was thirty-two years old! And, indeed, what  then? So
then he  would  go  on writing his several poems a year. Into old  age? Yes,
into old age. What would these poems bring him? Glory? 'What nonsense! Don't
deceive  yourself, at least. Glory will never come to someone who writes bad
poems.  What makes  them bad? The truth, he was telling the truth!'  Riukhin
addressed himself mercilessly. 'I don't believe in anything I write!...'
     Poisoned  by this  burst of  neurasthenia, the poet swayed,  the  floor
under him stopped shaking. Riukhin raised his head  and saw that he had long
been in Moscow,  and, what's more,  that  it was dawn over  Moscow, that the
cloud was underlit with gold, that his truck had stopped, caught in a column
of other  vehicles at the turn  on  to the boulevard, and that very close to
him on a pedestal stood a metal man [4], his head inclined  slightly, gazing
at the boulevard with indifference.
     Some strange thoughts flooded  the head of the ailing poet. 'There's an
example of real luck...' Here Riukhin rose to his full height on the flatbed
of the truck and raised his arm, for some reason attacking the cast-iron man
who was not bothering anyone.  'Whatever step  he made in his life, whatever
happened to him, it all turned to his benefit, it all led to his  glory! But
what did he do? I can't  conceive... Is there anything special in the words:
"The snowstorm covers..."? I don't understand!...
     Luck, sheer  luck!'  Riukhin concluded  with venom, and  felt the truck
moving under him. `He shot him,  that white guard shot him, smashed his hip,
and assured his immortality...'
     The column began  to move. In no more than two minutes, the  completely
ill and  even aged poet was entering the veranda of Griboedov's.  It was now
empty. In a corner some company was finishing its drinks, and  in the middle
the familiar master  of  ceremonies was bustling  about, wearing a skullcap,
with a glass of Abrau wine in his hand.
     Riukhin,  laden   with  napkins,   was   met   affably   by   Archibald
Archibaldovich  and at once  relieved of  the  cursed  rags. Had Riukhin not
become so worn  out in the clinic and on the  truck, he would certainly have
derived pleasure  from telling  how everything had  gone in the hospital and
embellishing the story with invented details. But just  then he was far from
such  things, and,  little observant though  Riukhin  was,  now,  after  the
torture on the truck, he peered keenly at the pirate for the first time  and
realized  that,  though the  man asked  about  Homeless  and even  exclaimed
'Ai-yai-yai!', he was essentially quite  indifferent to Homeless's fate  and
did not feel a bit sorry for him.
     'And   bravo!  Right   you  are!'   Riukhin   thought   with   cynical,
self-annihilating  malice   and,  breaking   off   the   story   about   the
schizophrenia, begged:
     `Archibald  Archibaldovich,  a  drop of  vodka...'  The pirate  made  a
compassionate face and whispered:
     'I  understand...  this very  minute...' and  beckoned  to a waiter.  A
quarter of an hour later, Riukhin sat in complete solitude, hunched over his
bream, drinking glass after glass, understanding and recognizing that it was
no longer  possible  to  set anything right in his  life,  that it was  only
possible to forget.
     The  poet  had wasted  his night  while  others were feasting  and  now
understood that it was impossible to  get it  back. One needed only to raise
one's  head from the lamp  to  the  sky  to  understand that  the night  was
irretrievably lost. Waiters were hurriedly tearing the tablecloths from  the
tables. The  cats  slinking  around  the  veranda  had  a morning  look. Day
irresistibly heaved itself upon the poet.

CHAPTER 5. There were Doings at Griboedov's

     The  old,  two-storeyed,  cream-coloured  house   stood  on  the   ring
boulevard, in the depths of a seedy garden, separated from the sidewalk by a
fancy cast-iron  fence. The  small terrace in front  of the  house was paved
with  asphalt, and in wintertime was dominated by a snow pile with a  shovel
stuck in it, but in summertime  turned into the most  magnificent section of
the summer restaurant under a canvas tent.
     The house was called  `The House of Griboedov'  on  the grounds that it
was  alleged  to  have  once  belonged to  an  aunt of the  writer Alexander
Sergeevich Griboedov. [1] Now, whether it did or did not  belong  to her, we
do not exactly know. On recollection, it even seems that Griboedov never had
any  such house-owning  aunt... Nevertheless, that  was  what the  house was
called. Moreover, one Moscow liar had it that there, on the second floor, in
a round hall with columns,  the famous writer had  supposedly read  passages
from Woe From Wit to this very aunt while she reclined on a sofa.
     However, devil knows, maybe he did, it's of no importance.
     What  is important  is that at the present time this house was owned by
that  same  Massolit  which  had  been  headed by  the  unfortunate  Mikhail
Alexandrovich Berlioz before his appearance at the Patriarch's Ponds.
     In  the casual  manner of Massolit members, no one called the house The
House of  Griboedov', everyone simply said 'Griboedov's': 'I spent two hours
yesterday  knocking about Griboedov's.'  'Well, and so?' `Got myself a month
in Yalta.' 'Bravo!'  Or: 'Go to Berlioz, he receives today from four to five
at Griboedov's...' and so on.
     Massolit had settled itself at Griboedov's in  the best and cosiest way
imaginable.  Anyone entering Griboedov's first  of  all became involuntarily
acquainted with the announcements of various sports clubs, and with group as
well as  individual photographs  of  the members of Massolit,  hanging  (the
photographs) on the walls of the staircase leading to the second floor.
     On the door to the very first room of this upper  floor one could see a
big  sign: 'Fishing and Vacation  Section', along with the picture of a carp
caught on a line.
     On  the  door  of room  no. 2  something  not  quite comprehensible was
written: 'One-day Creative Trips. Apply to M. V. Spurioznaya.'
     The  next  door   bore  a   brief  but   now  totally  incomprehensible
inscription: 'Perelygino'. [2] After which the chance visitor to Griboedov's
would not know  where  to  look  from the  motley inscriptions on the aunt's
walnut  doors: `Sign up  for  Paper  with  Poklevkina', `Cashier', 'Personal
Accounts of Sketch-Writers'...
     If one cut through the longest  line, which already went downstairs and
out  to the doorman's lodge, one  could see the sign 'Housing Question' on a
door which people were crashing every second.
     Beyond the housing  question  there opened out  a luxurious  poster  on
which a  cliff  was depicted and,  riding on its crest, a horseman in a felt
cloak with a  rifle on his shoulder. A  little  lower  -  palm trees  and  a
balcony;  on the  balcony -  a  seated young  man  with  a  forelock, gazing
somewhere aloft with very lively eyes, holding a fountain pen in his hand.
     The  inscription:   'Full-scale  Creative  Vacations   from  Two  Weeks
(Story/Novella)  to  One  Year  (Novel/Trilogy).  Yalta,  Suuk-Su,  Borovoe,
Tsikhidziri,  Makhindzhauri, Leningrad (Winter Palace).'[3] There was also a
line at this door, but not an excessive one - some hundred and fifty people.
     Next, obedient to the whimsical  curves, ascents  and descents  of  the
Griboedov house,  came the `Massolit Executive Board', 'Cashiers nos.  2, 3,
4, 5', 'Editorial Board',  'Chairman  of Massolit', 'Billiard Room', various
auxiliary institutions and, finally, that same hall with the colonnade where
the aunt had delighted in the comedy other genius nephew.
     Any visitor  finding himself in Griboedov's, unless of course  he was a
total  dim-wit, would realize at once what a  good life those lucky fellows,
the Massolit  members,  were having, and black envy would  immediately start
gnawing at him. And he would immediately address bitter reproaches to heaven
for  not having  endowed him  at  birth with literary talent, lacking  which
there was naturally no dreaming of owning a Massolit membership card, brown,
smelling  of  costly leather, with a  wide gold border - a card known to all
Moscow.
     Who will speak in  defence  of envy? This feeling  belongs to the nasty
category, but all the same one must put oneself in the visitor's position.
     For what he had  seen on the upper floor was not all, and was far  from
all.
     The entire  ground  floor  of  the  aunt's  house  was  occupied  by  a
restaurant,  and what a  restaurant! It was  justly  considered  the best in
Moscow. And not only because it took up two vast halls with arched ceilings,
painted with violet,  Assyrian-maned horses, not only because on each  table
there  stood  a  lamp shaded  with  a  shawl,  not only because  it was  not
accessible to  just anybody  coming  in off the  street, but  because in the
quality of its fare Griboedov's beat  any restaurant  in Moscow up and down,
and this  fare was available  at the most reasonable, by  no means  onerous,
price.
     Hence  there was  nothing  surprising, for instance,  in the  following
conversation, which the author of these most truthful lines  once heard near
the cast-iron fence of Griboedov's:
     'Where are you dining today, Amvrosy?'
     `What  a  question!  Why,  here,  of  course, my  dear Foka!  Archibald
Archibaldovich whispered to me today  that there  will be  perch  au naturel
done to order. A virtuoso little treat!'
     `You  sure know  how  to live, Amvrosy!' skinny, run-down  Foka, with a
carbuncle on  his  neck,  replied  with a  sigh  to the ruddy-lipped  giant,
golden-haired, plump-cheeked Amvrosy-the-poet.
     `I have no special  knowledge,'  Amvrosy protested, 'just  the ordinary
wish to live like a human being. You mean to say, Foka that perch can be met
with at the Coliseum as  well. But at the  Coliseum a portion of perch costs
thirteen roubles  fifteen kopecks, and  here - five-fifty!  Besides, at  the
Coliseum they serve three-day-old perch, and, besides,  there's no guarantee
you won't get slapped in the mug  with a bunch  of grapes at the Coliseum by
the first young man  who bursts in from Theatre Alley. No, I'm categorically
opposed  to  the  Coliseum,'  the gastronome  Amvrosy  boomed for  the whole
boulevard to hear. 'Don't try to convince me, Foka!'
     'I'm not trying to convince you, Amvrosy,' Foka squeaked. 'One can also
dine at home.'
     `I humbly thank you,' trumpeted Amvrosy, 'but I can imagine  your wife,
in the communal kitchen at home, trying to do perch au naturel to order in a
saucepan! Hee, hee, hee! ... Aurevwar, Foka!' And, humming, Amvrosy directed
his steps to the veranda under the tent.
     Ahh,  yes! ... Yes, there was a time! ... Old Muscovites will  remember
the renowned Griboedov's! What is poached perch done to order!
     Cheap stuff, my dear Amvrosy! But sterlet, sterlet in a silvery chafing
dish, sterlet slices interlaid  with crayfish  tails and  fresh  caviar? And
eggs en  cocotte with  mushroom puree in little dishes? And how did you like
the  fillets of  thrush? With truffles? Quail a la genoise?  Nine-fifty! And
the  jazz, and the courteous service! And in July, when the whole  family is
in the country, and you are kept  in the city by urgent literary  business -
on the veranda, in the shade of the creeping vines,  in a golden spot on the
cleanest of  tablecloths, a bowl of soup printanier? Remember,  Amvrosy? But
why ask! I  can  see by your lips that you do. What is your  whitefish, your
perch! But the snipe, the great snipe, the jack snipe, the woodcock in their
season,  the quail, the curlew? Cool seltzer  fizzing in  your  throat?! But
enough, you are getting distracted, reader! Follow me!...
     At half  past ten  on  the evening when Berlioz died at the Patriarch's
Ponds,  only one room was  lit upstairs at Griboedov's, and in it languished
twelve writers who had gathered for a meeting  and were waiting  for Mikhail
Alexandrovich.
     Sitting on chairs, and  on  tables, and even on the two window-sills in
the office of the Massolit executive board, they suffered seriously from the
heat. Not a single breath of fresh air came through the open windows. Moscow
was releasing the heat accumulated in the asphalt all day, and it  was clear
that night would bring no relief. The smell of onions came from the basement
of the aunt's house, where the restaurant kitchen was at work, they were all
thirsty, they were all nervous and angry.
     The  belletrist  Beskudnikov  -  a quiet,  decently  dressed  man  with
attentive and at the  same time elusive eyes - took out his  watch. The hand
was crawling towards eleven.  Beskudnikov tapped his  finger on the face and
showed it to the poet  Dvubratsky, who was sitting next to  him on the table
and in boredom dangling his feet shod in yellow shoes with rubber treads.
     'Anyhow,' grumbled Dvubratsky.
     "The  laddie  must've got stuck  on the Klyazma,' came the thick-voiced
response  of Nastasya Lukinishna Nepremenova,  orphan of a Moscow  merchant,
who  had become  a writer and  wrote  stories  about sea  battles  under the
pen-name of Bos'n George.
     'Excuse me!' boldly exclaimed Zagrivov, an author  of popular sketches,
'but I  personally would prefer a  spot of tea on the  balcony to stewing in
here. The meeting was set for ten o'clock, wasn't it?'
     'It's  nice now  on the Klyazma,' Bos'n  George needled  those present,
knowing that Perelygino on the Klyazma, the country colony for  writers, was
everybody's sore spot. 'There's nightingales  singing already. I always work
better in the country, especially in spring.'
     'It's the third year I've  paid in so as to send my wife with goitre to
this paradise,  but  there's  nothing to be  spied  amidst the  waves,'  the
novelist Ieronym Poprikhin said venomously and bitterly.
     'Some are  lucky and some  aren't,' the critic  Ababkov droned from the
window-sill.
     Bos'n George's little eyes lit up with glee,  and  she said,  softening
her contralto:
     We mustn't be envious, comrades. There's  twenty-two dachas [4] in all,
and  only  seven more  being  built,  and  there's  three thousand of  us in
Massolit.'
     `Three thousand  one  hundred  and  eleven,'  someone  put in from  the
corner.
     'So you see,' the Bos'n went on, 'what can be done? Naturally, it's the
most talented of us that got the dachas...'
     'The generals!' Glukharev the scenarist cut right into the squabble.
     Beskudnikov, with an artificial yawn, walked out of the room.
     'Five rooms to himself in Perelygino,' Glukharev said behind him.
     `Lavrovich  has six  to himself,'  Deniskin cried  out, `and the dining
room's panelled in oak!'
     'Eh,  that's not the point right now,' Ababkov droned, 'it's that  it's
half past eleven.'
     A clamour  arose,  something like  rebellion was brewing. They  started
telephoning hated Perelygino,  got the wrong  dacha, Lavrovich's, found  out
that Lavrovich  had gone to the river, which made them  totally  upset. They
called at random to the commission on fine literature, extension 950, and of
course found no one there.
     'He might have called!' shouted Deniskin, Glukharev and Quant.
     Ah,  they were shouting in  vain: Mikhail Alexandrovich could not  call
anywhere.   Far,   far   from  Griboedov's,  in  an  enormous  room  lit  by
thousand-watt bulbs, on three zinc tables, lay what had  still recently been
Mikhail Alexandrovich.
     On the  first  lay the  naked body,  covered with dried blood,  one arm
broken,  the  chest  caved in; on the  second, the head with the front teeth
knocked out, with dull, open  eyes unafraid of  the brightest light;  and on
the third, a pile of stiffened rags.
     Near the  beheaded body  stood  a  professor  of  forensic medicine,  a
pathological  anatomist   and   his  dissector,   representatives   of   the
investigation, and Mikhail Alexandrovich's assistant in Massolit, the writer
Zheldybin, summoned by telephone from his sick wife's side.
     A car had come  for Zheldybin and first of  all taken him together with
the  investigators  (this was around midnight) to the  dead man's apartment,
where the sealing of his papers had  been  carried out, after which they all
went to the morgue.
     And now those standing by the remains of  the  deceased  were  debating
what was the  better thing to do: to sew the severed head to the neck, or to
lay out  the body in  the hall at Griboedov's after simply covering the dead
man snugly to the chin with a black cloth?
     No, Mikhail  Alexandrovich  could  not  call  anywhere,  and  Deniskin,
Glukharev  and  Quant,  along  with Beskudnikov, were  being  indignant  and
shouting quite  in vain.  Exactly at  midnight, all  twelve writers left the
upper  floor  and  descended  to the  restaurant. Here again  they  silently
berated Mikhail  Alexandrovich: all the  tables on  the  veranda, naturally,
were  occupied, and  they  had to stay for  supper  in those  beautiful  but
airless halls.
     And  exactly  at  midnight,  in  the first of  these  halls,  something
crashed, jangled,  spilled,  leaped.  And  all  at once a  high  male  voice
desperately cried out 'Hallelujah!' to the music. The  famous Griboedov jazz
band  struck up. Sweat-covered  faces  seemed to brighten,  it was as if the
horses painted on the  ceiling  came alive, the lamps  seemed to  shine with
added light, and suddenly, as if tearing loose, both halls broke into dance,
and following them the veranda broke into dance.
     Glukharev danced  with  the poetess  Tamara Polumesyats, Quant  danced,
Zhukopov the novelist danced with some movie actress in a yellow dress.
     Dragunsky  danced, Cherdakchi danced,  little  Deniskin danced with the
enormous Bos'n George, the beautiful Semeikina-Gall, an architect, danced in
the tight embrace of a stranger in white canvas trousers. Locals and invited
guests  danced,  Muscovites  and  out-of-towners,  the  writer  Johann  from
Kronstadt, a certain Vitya  Kuftik from Rostov, apparently a stage director,
with  a purple spot all over his cheek, the most eminent  representatives of
the  poetry  section  of  Massolit danced - that  is, Baboonov, Blasphemsky,
Sweetkin, Smatchstik and Addphina Buzdyak - young men of unknown profession,
in  crew  cuts,  with cotton-padded shoulders, danced, someone very  elderly
danced,  a shred  of green onion stuck in his beard, and with him  danced  a
sickly, anaemia-consumed girl in a wrinkled orange silk dress.
     Streaming with sweat, waiters carried sweating mugs of beer  over their
heads, shouting hoarsely and  with hatred:  'Excuse  me, citizen!' Somewhere
through a  megaphone a voice commanded: `One Karsky shashlik! Two Zubrovkas!
Home-style tripe!' The high voice no longer sang, but howled 'Hallelujah!'
     The clashing of  golden cymbals in  the band sometimes even drowned out
the  clashing of dishes, which the dishwashers sent down a sloping  chute to
the kitchen. In short - hell.
     And at midnight there came an apparition in hell. A handsome  dark-eyed
man with a  dagger-like beard, in a tailcoat,  stepped on to the veranda and
cast a regal glance over his domain. They used to  say, the mystics  used to
say, that there was  a  time when the handsome man wore not a tailcoat but a
wide leather belt with pistol butts sticking from it, and his raven hair was
tied with  scarlet  silk, and under his command a  brig sailed the Caribbean
under a black death flag with a skull and crossbones.
     But no, no!  The  seductive  mystics  are lying, there are no Caribbean
Seas  in the  world, no  desperate freebooters sail them, no corvette chases
after them, no cannon smoke drifts across the  waves. There  is nothing, and
there was nothing!  There  is that sickly linden over  there,  there is  the
cast-iron  fence, and  the boulevard beyond it... And the  ice is melting in
the bowl, and at  the  next table you see someone's  bloodshot, bovine eyes,
and you're afraid, afraid... Oh, gods, my gods, poison, bring me poison!...
     And suddenly a word fluttered up from some table:  'Berlioz!!' The jazz
broke up and fell silent, as if someone had hit it with a fist. 'What, what,
what, what?!!' 'Berlioz!!!' And they began jumping up, exclaiming...
     Yes,  a  wave of grief billowed up  at the  terrible news about Mikhail
Alexandrovich. Someone fussed about,  crying  that it was necessary at once,
straight away, without leaving the spot, to compose some collective telegram
and send it off immediately.
     But what telegram, may we ask,  and where? And why  send it? And where,
indeed?  And  what possible  need for  any telegram  does someone have whose
flattened pate  is now clutched  in the dissector's rubber hands, whose neck
the  professor is now  piercing with curved  needles? He's dead, and has  no
need of any telegrams. It's  all  over, let's not burden the telegraph wires
any more.
     Yes, he's dead, dead... But, as for us, we're alive!
     Yes, a wave of grief billowed up, held out for  a while, but then began
to subside, and somebody  went back to his  table and  -  sneakily at first,
then openly - drank a little vodka and ate a bite. And, really,  can one let
chicken cutlets de volatile perish? How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich?
     By going hungry? But, after all, we're alive!
     Naturally, the grand piano was locked, the jazz band dispersed, several
journalists left for their offices to write obituaries. It became known that
Zheldybin  had  come  from  the  morgue.  He  had  installed himself in  the
deceased's office upstairs, and the rumour spread at once that it was he who
would  replace Berlioz. Zheldybin summoned from the  restaurant  all  twelve
members of  the  board, and at  the  urgently convened meeting in  Berlioz's
office they started a discussion of the pressing questions of decorating the
hall  with columns at  Griboedov's, of transporting the body from the morgue
to that hall, of opening it to the public, and all else  connected with  the
sad event.
     And  the  restaurant began to live  its usual nocturnal  life and would
have gone on living it  until closing  time, that is, until four o'clock  in
the morning, had it not  been for an  occurrence which was completely out of
the  ordinary and which struck the restaurant's clientele much more than the
news of Berlioz's death.
     The first to  take alarm were the coachmen  [5] waiting at the gates of
the Griboedov house. One of them, rising on his box, was heard to cry out:
     'Hoo-ee! Just look at that!'
     After  which, from God knows  where,  a  little  light flashed  by  the
cast-iron fence and began  to  approach the  veranda.  Those sitting at  the
tables began  to get up and peer at  it, and saw  that along with the little
light a white  ghost was marching towards the restaurant. When it came right
up  to  the trellis, everybody sat as if frozen at  their tables, chunks  of
sterlet on  their forks, eyes popping. The doorman, who  at that  moment had
stepped out of the  restaurant coatroom to have a smoke in the yard, stamped
out  his  cigarette and  made  for the  ghost with  the obvious intention of
barring its way into the restaurant, but for some reason did not do so,  and
stopped, smiling stupidly.
     And  the  ghost, passing  through  an  opening in  the trellis, stepped
unhindered on to the veranda. Here everyone saw that it was no ghost at all,
but Ivan Nikolaevich Homeless, the much-renowned poet.
     He was barefoot,  in a torn, whitish Tolstoy blouse,  with a paper icon
bearing  the image of an  unknown saint pinned to  the  breast of it  with a
safety  pin, and  was  wearing striped  white  drawers.  In  his  hand  Ivan
Nikolaevich carried a lighted wedding candle. Ivan Nikolaevich's right cheek
was freshly scratched. It would even be difficult to plumb the depths of the
silence that reigned on the  veranda. Beer could be seen  running down on to
the floor from a mug tilted in one waiter's hand.
     The poet raised the candle over his head and said loudly:
     'Hail,  friends!'  After which he peeked  under  the nearest  table and
exclaimed ruefully: 'No, he's not there!'
     Two voices were heard. A basso said pitilessly:
     That's it. Delirium tremens.'
     And the second, a woman's, frightened, uttered the words:
     'How could the police let him walk the streets like that?'
     This Ivan Nikolaevich heard, and replied:
     They tried to detain me twice, in Skaterny and here on Bronnaya, but  I
hopped  over  the  fence  and,  as you  can see,  cut  my cheek!'  Here Ivan
Nikolaevich  raised the candle and cried out: 'Brethren in literature!' (His
hoarse voice grew stronger and more fervent.) 'Listen to me everyone! He has
appeared. Catch him immediately, otherwise he'll do untold harm!'
     'What? What?  What did he say? Who  has appeared?' voices came from all
sides.
     The  consultant,' Ivan replied, `and this consultant just  killed Misha
Berlioz at the Patriarch's Ponds.'
     Here people came flocking to  the veranda from the inner rooms, a crowd
gathered around Ivan's flame.
     `Excuse me, excuse me, be  more precise,' a soft and polite voice  said
over Ivan Nikolaevich's ear, 'tell me, what do you mean "killed"?
     Who killed?'
     'A  foreign  consultant, a professor, and a  spy,'  Ivan  said, looking
around.
     'And what is his name?' came softly to Ivan's ear. That's just it - his
name!' Ivan  cried in anguish. 'If only I knew  his  name! I didn't make out
his name on his visiting card... I only remember  the first letter, "W", his
name begins with "W"! What last  name begins  with "W"?' Ivan asked himself,
clutching his forehead, and suddenly  started muttering: 'Wi, we,  wa ... Wu
... Wo ... Washner? Wagner? Weiner? Wegner? Winter?' The hair on Ivan's head
began to crawl with the tension.
     'Wolf?' some woman cried pitifully.
     Ivan became angry.
     'Fool!' he cried, seeking the  woman with his  eyes. "What has Wolf got
to do  with it? Wolf's  not to blame for anything! Wo, wa... No,  I'll never
remember this way! Here's what, citizens: call the police at once,  let them
send  out  five motor  cycles with machine-guns to catch the  professor. And
don't  forget  to tell them  that  there are  two  others with  him:  a long
checkered one, cracked pince-nez, and a cat, black  and fat... And meanwhile
I'll search Griboedov's, I sense that he's here!'
     Ivan  became anxious, pushed away the people around him, started waving
the  candle,  pouring  wax on  himself, and looking under  the tables.  Here
someone said:  `Call a  doctor!'  and  someone's benign, fleshy face,  clean
shaven and well nourished, in horn-rimmed glasses, appeared before Ivan.
     'Comrade  Homeless,' the face began in  a guest speaker's voice,  'calm
down! You're upset at the death of  our beloved Mikhail Alexandrovich... no,
say  just  Misha  Berlioz. We all  understand that perfectly well. You  need
rest. The comrades will take you home to bed right now, you'll forget...'
     'You,' Ivan  interrupted, baring his teeth, "but  don't  you understand
that  the  professor  has to  be  caught?  And  you come  at  me  with  your
foolishness! Cretin!'
     `Pardon  me,   Comrade  Homeless!...'   the  face  replied,   blushing,
retreating, and already repentant at having got mixed up in this affair.
     'No, anyone else, but  you  I will not  pardon,' Ivan Nikolaevich  said
with quiet hatred.
     A spasm distorted  his  face,  he quickly  shifted  the candle from his
right  hand to his left, swung roundly and hit the compassionate face on the
ear.
     Here  it occurred  to them  to  fall upon  Ivan - and so they did.  The
candle  went out,  and  the  glasses  that had  fallen  from  the  face were
instantly  trampled.  Ivan  let  out  a  terrible  war  cry,  heard,  to the
temptation of all,  even  on the boulevard, and set about defending himself.
Dishes fell clattering from the tables, women screamed.
     All  the while the waiters  were tying  up the  poet  with  napkins,  a
conversation was going on in the coatroom between the commander  of the brig
and the doorman.
     'Didn't you see he was in his underpants?' the pirate inquired coldly.
     'But, Archibald  Archibaldovich,'  the doorman replied, cowering,  'how
could I not let him in, if he's a  member of Massolit?' 'Didn't  you see  he
was  in  his  underpants?'  the  pirate  repeated.   'Pardon  me,  Archibald
Archibaldovich,' the doorman said, turning purple,  'but what  could I do? I
understand, there are ladies sitting on the veranda...'
     `Ladies  have nothing  to do with it,  it makes  no  difference to  the
ladies,' the pirate replied, literally burning the doorman up with his eyes,
'but it does  to the police! A man in his underwear can walk the  streets of
Moscow only in this one case,  that he's accompanied by the police, and only
to one place - the police station!  And  you, if  you're a doorman, ought to
know that on seeing  such a man, you must,  without a  moment's delay, start
blowing  your whistle.  Do you  hear? Do  you hear  what's going on  on  the
veranda?'
     Here the half-crazed doorman heard some sort of hooting coming from the
veranda, the smashing of dishes and women's screams.
     'Now, what's to be done with you for that?' the freebooter asked.
     The skin on the doorman's face acquired a typhoid tinge, his eyes  went
dead.  It  seemed to him  that  the black hair,  now combed and parted,  was
covered  with  flaming silk. The shirt-front and  tailcoat disappeared and a
pistol  butt  emerged,  tucked  into  a leather belt. The  doorman  pictured
himself hanging from  the  fore-topsail yard.  His eyes saw his  own  tongue
sticking  out and his lifeless head  lolling on his shoulder, and even heard
the splash of waves against the hull. The doorman's knees gave way. But here
the freebooter took pity on him and extinguished his sharp gaze.
     `Watch out,  Nikolai, this  is the last  time! We have no need  of such
doormen in the restaurant. Go find yourself  a job as a beadle.' Having said
this,  the commander  commanded precisely,  clearly,  rapidly: `Get Pantelei
from the snack bar. Police. Protocol. A car. To the psychiatric clinic.' And
added: 'Blow your whistle!'
     In a quarter of an hour an extremely  astounded public, not only in the
restaurant but on the  boulevard itself and in the windows of houses looking
on  to the restaurant  garden, saw Pantelei,  the doorman,  a  policeman,  a
waiter and the poet  Riukhin carry through the gates of Griboedov's a  young
man swaddled like  a doll, dissolved in tears, who spat, aiming precisely at
Riukhin, and shouted for all the boulevard to hear:
     'You bastard! ... You bastard!...'
     A truck-driver with a spiteful face was starting his motor. Next to him
a coachman, rousing his  horse, slapping it on  the croup with violet reins,
shouted:
     'Have a run for your money! I've taken `em to the psychics before!'
     Around them the crowd buzzed,  discussing the unprecedented  event.  In
short, there  was a nasty, vile, tempting, swinish scandal, which ended only
when  the truck carried away from  the gates of  Griboedov's the unfortunate
Ivan Nikolaevich, the policeman, Pantelei and Riukhin.

CHAPTER 4. The Chase

     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.

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.