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.