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as a proletarian. Look at his mean face and compare it with all that pompous
verse he writes for May Day ... all that stuff about "onwards and upwards"
and "banners waving "! If you could look inside him and see what he's
thinking you'd be sickened! ' And Ivan Nikolayich gave a hoot of malicious
laughter.
Ryukhin, breathing heavily, turned red. There was only one thought in
his mind--that he had nourished a serpent in his bosom, that he had tried to
help someone who when it came to the pinch had treacherously rounded on him.
The worst of it was that he could not answer back--one mustn't swear at a
lunatic!
'Exactly why have they brought you here? ' asked the doctor, who had
listened to Bezdomny's outburst with great attention.
'God knows, the blockheads! They grabbed me, tied me up with some
filthy rags and dumped me in a lorry!'
'May I ask why you came into the restaurant in nothing but your
underwear?'
'There's nothing odd about it,' answered Ivan. ' I went for a swim in
the Moscow River and someone pinched my clothes and left me this junk
instead! I couldn't walk round Moscow naked, could I? I had to put on what
there was, because I was in a hurry to get to the Griboyedov restaurant.'
The doctor glanced questioningly at Ryukhin, who mumbled sulkily:
'Yes, that's the name of the restaurant.'
'Aha,' said the doctor, ' but why were you in such a hurry? Did you
have an appointment there? '
'I had to catch the professor,' replied Ivan Nikolayich, glancing
nervously round.
'What professor? ' ' Do you know Berlioz? ' asked Ivan with a meaning
look.
'You mean . . . the composer? '
Ivan looked puzzled. ' What composer? Oh, yes . . . no, no. The
composer just happens to have the same name as Misha Berlioz.'
Ryukhin was still feeling too offended to speak, but he had to explain:
'Berlioz, the chairman of MASSOLIT, was run over by a tram this
evening at Patriarch's.'
'Don't lie, you--you don't know anything about it,' Ivan burst out at
Ryukhin. ' I was there, not you! He made him fall under that tram on
purpose! '
'Did he push him? '
'What are you talking about?' exclaimed Ivan, irritated by his
listener's failure to grasp the situation. ' He didn't have to push him! He
can do things you'd never believe! He knew in advance that Berlioz was going
to fall under a tram! '
'Did anybody see this professor apart from you? '
'No, that's the trouble. Only Berlioz and myself.'
'I see. What steps did you take to arrest this murderer?' At this
point the doctor turned and threw a glance at a woman in a white overall
sitting behind a desk.
'This is what I did : I took this candle from the kitchen . . .'
'This one? ' asked the doctor, pointing to a broken candle lying on
the desk beside the ikon.
'Yes, that's the one, and . . .'
'Why the ikon? '
'Well, er, the ikon. . . .' Ivan blushed. ' You see an ikon frightens
them more than anything else.' He again pointed at Ryukhin. ' But the fact
is that the professor is ... well, let's be frank . . . he's in league with
the powers of evil . . . and it's not so easy to catch someone like him.'
The orderlies stretched their hands down their trouser-seams and stared
even harder at Ivan.
'Yes,' went on Ivan. ' He's in league with them. There's no arguing
about it. He once talked to Pontius Pilate. It's no good looking at me like
that, I'm telling you the truth! He saw it all --the balcony, the palm
trees. He was actually with Pontius Pilate, I'll swear it.'
'Well, now . . .'
'So, as I was saying, I pinned the ikon to my chest and ran .,.'
Here the clock struck twice.
'Oh, my God! ' exclaimed Ivan and rose from the divan. ' It's two
o'clock and here am I wasting time talking to you! Would you mind--where's
the telephone? '
'Show him the telephone,' the doctor said to the orderlies.
As Ivan grasped the receiver the woman quietly asked Ryukhin:
'Is he married? '
'No, he's a bachelor,' replied Ryukhin, startled.
'Is he a union member? '
'Yes.'
'Police? ' shouted Ivan into the mouthpiece. ' Police? Is that the
duty officer? Sergeant, please arrange to send five motor cycles with
sidecars, armed with machine-guns to arrest the foreign professor. What?
Take me with you, I'll show you where to go. . . . This is Bezdomny, I'm a
poet, and I'm speaking from the lunatic asylum. . . . What's your address? '
Bezdomny whispered to the doctor, covering the mouthpiece with his palm, and
then yelled back into the receiver: ' Are you listening? Hullo! . . . Fools!
. . .' Ivan suddenly roared, hurling the receiver at the wall. Then he
turned round to the doctor, offered him his hand, said a curt goodbye and
started to go.
'Excuse me, but where are you proposing to go?' said the doctor,
looking Ivan in the eye. ' At this hour of night, in your underwear . . .
You're not well, stay with us.'
'Come on, let me through,' said Ivan to the orderlies who had lined up
to block the doorway. ' Are you going to let me go or not? ' shouted the
poet in a terrible voice.
Ryukhin shuddered. The woman pressed a button on the desk ; a
glittering metal box and a sealed ampoule popped out on to its glass
surface.
'Ah, so that's your game, is it? ' said Ivan with a wild, hunted
glance around. ' All right then . . . Goodbye!! ' And he threw himself head
first at the shuttered window.
There was a loud crash, but the glass did not even crack, and a moment
later Ivan Nikolayich was struggling in the arms of the orderlies. He
screamed, tried to bite, then shouted :
'Fine sort of glass you put in your windows! Let me go! Let me go! '
A hypodermic syringe glittered in the doctor's hand, with one sweep the
woman pushed back the tattered sleeve of Ivan's blouse and clamped his arm
in a most un-feminine grip. There was a smell of ether, Ivan weakened
slightly in the grasp of the four men and the doctor skilfully seized the
moment to jab the needle into Ivan's arm. Ivan kept up the struggle for a
few more seconds, then collapsed on to the divan.
'Bandits! ' cried Ivan and leaped up, only to be pushed back. As soon
as they let him go he jumped up again, but sat down of his own accord. He
said nothing, staring wildly about him, then gave a sudden unexpected yawn
and smiled malevolently :
'So you're going to lock me up after all,' he said, yawned again, lay
down with his head on the cushion, his fist under his cheek like a child and
muttered in a sleepy voice but without malice : ' All right, then . . . but
you'll pay for it ... I warned you, but if you want to ... What interests me
most now is Pontius Pilate . . . Pilate . . .' And with that he closed his
eyes.
'Vanna, put him in No. 117 by himself and with someone to watch him.'
The doctor gave his instructions and replaced his spectacles. Then Ryukhin
shuddered again : a pair of white doors opened without a sound and beyond
them stretched a corridor lit by a row of blue night-bulbs. Out of the
corridor rolled a couch on rubber wheels. The sleeping Ivan was lifted on to
it, he was pushed off down the corridor and the doors closed after him.
'Doctor,' asked the shaken Ryukhin in a whisper, ' is he really ill?'
'Oh yes,' replied the doctor.
'Then what's the matter with him?' enquired Rvukhin timidly.
The exhausted doctor looked at Ryukhin and answered wearily:
'Overstimulation of the motor nerves and speech centres . . .
delirious illusions. . . . Obviously a complicated case. Schizophrenia, I
should think . . . touch of alcoholism, too. . . .'
Ryukhin understood nothing of this, except that Ivan Nikolayich was
obviously in poor shape. He sighed and asked :
'What was that he said about some professor? '
'I expect he saw someone who gave a shock to his disturbed
imagination. Or maybe it was a hallucination. . . .'
A few minutes later a lorry was taking Ryukhin back into Moscow. Dawn
was breaking and the still-lit street lamps seemed superfluous and
unpleasant. The driver, annoyed at missing a night's sleep, pushed his lorry
as hard as it would go, making it skid round the corners.
The woods fell away in the distance and the river wandered off in
another direction. As the lorry drove on the scenery slowly changed: fences,
a watchman's hut, piles of logs, dried and split telegraph poles with
bobbins strung on the wires between them, heaps of stones, ditches--in
short, a feeling that Moscow was about to appear round the next corner and
would rise up and engulf them at any moment.
The log of wood on which Ryukhin was sitting kept wobbling and
slithering about and now and again it tried to slide away from under him
altogether. The restaurant dish-cloths, which the policeman and the barman
had thrown on to the back of the lorry before leaving earlier by
trolley-bus, were being flung about all over the back of the lorry. Ryukhin
started to try and pick them up, but with a sudden burst of ill-temper he
hissed :
'To hell with them! Why should I crawl around after them? ' He pushed
them away with his foot and turned away from them.
Ryukhin was in a state of depression. It was obvious that his visit to
the asylum had affected him deeply. He tried to think what it was that was
disturbing him. Was it the corridor with its blue lamps, which had lodged so
firmly in his memory? Was it the thought that the worst misfortune in the
world was to lose one's reason? Yes, it was that, of course--but that after
all was a generalisation, it applied to everybody. There was something else,
though. What was it? The insult--that was it. Yes, those insulting words
that Bezdomny had flung into his face. And the agony of it was not that they
were insulting but that they were true.
The poet stopped looking about him and instead stared gloomily at the
dirty, shaking floor of the lorry in an agony of self-reproach.
Yes, his poetry . . . He was thirty-two! And what were his prospects?
To go on writing a few poems every year. How long--until he was an old man?
Yes, until he was an old man. What would these poems do for him? Make him
famous? ' What rubbish! Don't fool yourself. Nobody ever gets famous from
writing bad poetry. Why is it bad, though? He was right --he was telling the
truth! ' said Ryukhin pitilessly to himself. I don't believe in a single
word of what I've written . . .! '
Embittered by an upsurge of neurasthenia, the poet swayed. The floor
beneath had stopped shaking. Ryukhin lifted his head and saw that he was in
the middle of Moscow, that day had dawned, that his lorry had stopped in a
traffic-jam at a boulevard intersection and that right near him stood a
metal man on a plinth, his head inclined slightly forward, staring blankly
down the street.
Strange thoughts assailed the poet, who was beginning to feel ill. '
Now there's an example of pure luck .'--Ryukhin stood up on the lorry's
platform and raised his fist in an inexplicable urge to attack the harmless
cast-iron man--'. . . everything he did in life, whatever happened to him,
it all went his way, everything conspired to make him famous! But what did
he achieve? I've never been able to discover . . . What about that famous
phrase of his that begins " A storm of mist. . ."? What a load of rot! He
was lucky, that's all, just lucky! '--Ryukhin concluded venomously, feeling
the lorry start to move under him--' and just because that White officer
shot at him and smashed his hip, he's famous for ever . . .'
The jam was moving. Less than two minutes later the poet, now not only
ill but ageing, walked on to the Griboyedov verandah. It was nearly empty.
Ryukhin, laden with dish-cloths, was greeted warmly by Archibald
Archibaldovich and immediately relieved of the horrible rags. If Ryukhin had
not been so exhausted by the lorry-ride and by his experiences at the
clinic, he would probably have enjoyed describing everything that had
happened in the hospital and would have embellished the story with some
invented details. But for the moment he was incapable. Although Ryukhin was
not an observant man, now, after his agony on the lorry, for the first time
be looked really hard at the pirate and realised that although the man was
asking questions about Bezdomny and even exclaiming ' Oh, poor fellow! ' he
was in reality totally indifferent to Bezdomny's fate and did not feel sorry
for him at all. ' Good for him! He's right! ' thought Ryukhin with cynical,
masochistic relish and breaking off his description of the symptoms of
schizophrenia, he asked :
'Archibald Archibaldovich, could I possibly have a glass of vodka. .
.? '
The pirate put on a sympathetic expression and whispered :
'Of course, I quite understand . . . right away . . .' and signalled
to a waiter.
A quarter of an hour later Ryukhin was sitting in absolute solitude
hunched over a dish of sardines, drinking glass after glass of vodka,
understanding more and more about himself and admitting that there was
nothing in his life that he could put right--he could only try to forget.
The poet had wasted his night while others had spent it enjoying
themselves and now he realised that it was lost forever. He only had to lift
his head up from the lamp and look at the sky to see that the night had gone
beyond return. Waiters were hurriedly jerking the cloths off the tables. The
cats pacing the verandah had a morning look about them. Day broke inexorably
over the poet.
If next day someone had said to Stepa Likhodeyev 'Stepa! If vou don't
get up this minute you're going to be shot,' he would have replied in a
faint, languid voice : ' All right, shoot me. Do what you like to me, but
I'm not getting up! '
The worst of it was that he could not open his eyes, because when he
did so there would be a flash of lightning and his head would shiver to
fragments. A great bell was tolling in his head, brown spots with livid
green edges were swimming around somewhere between his eyeballs and his
closed lids. To cap it all he felt sick and the nausea was somehow connected
with the sound of a gramophone.
Stepa tried to remember what had happened, but could only recall one
thing--yesterday, somewhere. God knows where, he had been holding a table
napkin and trying to kiss a woman, promising her that he would come and
visit her tomorrow at the stroke of noon. She had refused, saying ' No, no,
I won't be at home,' but Stepa had insisted ' I don't care--I'll come
anyway!'
Stepa had now completely forgotten who that woman had been, what the
time was, what day of what month it was, and worst of all he had no idea
where he was. In an effort to find out, he unstuck his gummed-up left
eyelid. Something glimmered in the semi-darkness. At last Stepa recognised
it as a mirror. He was lying cross-wise on the bed in his own bedroom. Then
something hit him on the head and he closed his eyes and groaned.
Stepa Likhodeyev, manager of the Variety Theatre, had woken up thait
morning in the flat that he shared with Berlioz in a big six-stoirey block
of flats on Sadovaya Street. This flat--No. 50-- had a strange reputation.
Two years before, it had been owned by the widow of a jeweller called de
Fougere, Anna Frantzevna, a respectable and very business-like lady of
fifty, who let three of her five rooms to lodgers. One of them was, it
seems, called Belomut; the other's name has been lost.
Two years ago odd things began happening in that apartment-- people
started to vanish from it without trace. One Monday afternoon a policeman
called, invited the second lodger (the one whose name is no longer known)
into the hall and asked him to come along to the police station for a minute
or two to sign a document. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantzevna's devoted
servant of many years, to say that if anybody rang him up he would be back
in ten minutes. He then went out accompanied by the courteous policeman in
white gloves. But he not only failed to come back in ten minutes; he never
came back at all. Odder still, the policeman appeared to have vanished with
him.
Anfisa, a devout and frankly rather a superstitious woman, informed the
distraught Anna Frantsevna that it was witchcraft, that she knew perfectly
well who had enticed away the lodger and the policeman, only she dared not
pronounce the name at night-time.
Witchcraft once started, as we all know, is virtually unstoppable. The
anonymous lodger disappeared, you will remember, on a Monday ; the following
Wednesday Belomut, too, vanished from the face of the earth, although
admittedly in different circumstances. He was fetched as usual in the
morning by the car which took him to work, but it never brought him back and
never called again.
Words cannot describe the pain and distress which this caused to madame
Belomut, but alas for her, she was not fated to endure even this unhappy
state for long. On returning from her dacha that evening, whither she had
hastily gone with Anfisa, Anna Frantzevna found no trace of madame Belomut
in the flat and what was more, the doors of both rooms occupied by the
Belomuts had been sealed. Two days of uncertainty and insomnia passed for
Anna Frantzevna ; on the third day she made another hasty visit to her dacha
from whence, it need hardly be said, she never returned. Anfisa, left alone,
cried her eye s out and finally went to bed at two-o'clock in the morning.
Nobody knows what happened to her after that, but tenants of the
neighbouring flat described having heard knocking coming from No. 50 and
having seen lights burning in the windows all night. By morning Anfisa too
was gone. Legends of all kinds about the mysterious flat and its vanishing
lodgers circulated in the building for some time. According to one of them
the devout and spinsteriy Anfisa used to carry twenty-five large diamonds,
belonging to Anna Frantzevna, in a chamois-leather bag between her withered
breasts. It was said, too, that among other things a priceless treasure
consisting of those same diamonds and a hoard of tsarist gold coins were
somehow found in the coal-she'd behind Anna Frantzevna's dacha. Lacking
proof, of course, we shall never know how true these rumours were. However,
the flat only remained empty for a week before Berlioz and his wife and
Stepa and his wife moved into it. Naturally as soon as they took possession
of the haunted flat the oddest things started happening to them too. Within
a single month both wives had disappeared, although not without trace.
Rumour had it that Berlioz's wife had been seen in Kharkov with a
ballet-master, whilst Stepa's wife had apparently found her way to an
orphanage where, the story went, the manager of the Variety had used his
connections to get her a room on condition that she never showed her face in
Sadovaya Street again. . . .
So Stepa groaned. He wanted to call his maid, Grunya, and ask her for
an aspirin but he was conscious enough to realise that it would be useless
because Grunya most probably had no aspirin. He tried to call for Berlioz's
help and twice moaned ' Misha . . . Misha . . .', but as you will have
guessed, there was no reply. There was complete silence in the flat.
Wriggling his toes, Stepa deduced that he was lying in his socks. He
ran a trembling hand down his hip to test whether he had his trousers on or
not and found that he had not. At last, realising that he was alone and
abandoned, that there was nobody to help him, he decided to get up, whatever
superhuman effort it might cost him.
Stepa prised open his eyelids and saw himself reflected in the long
mirror in the shape of a man whose hair stuck out in all directions, with a
puffy, stubble-grown face, with watery eyes and wearing a dirty shirt, a
collar, tie, underpants and socks.
As he looked at himself in the mirror, he also noticed standing beside
it a strange man dressed in a black suit and a black beret.
Stepa sat up on the bed and did his best to focus his bloodshot eyes on
the stranger. The silence was broken by the unknown visitor, who said
gravely, in a low voice with a foreign accent:
'Good morning, my dear Stepan Bogdanovich! '
There was a pause. Pulling himself together with fearful effort Stepa
said:
'What do you want?' He did not recognise his own voice. He had spoken
the word ' what' in a treble, ' do you ' in a bass and ' want' had simply
not emerged at all.
The stranger gave an amiable smile, pulled out a large gold watch with
a diamond triangle on the cover, listened to it strike eleven times and said
:
'Eleven. I have been waiting exactly an hour for you to wake up. You
gave me an appointment to see you at your flat at ten so here I am!'
Stepa fumbled for his trousers on the chair beside his bed and
whispered:
'Excuse me. . . .' He put on his trousers and asked hoarsely :
'Please tell me--who are you? '
He found talking difficult, as with every word someone stuck a needle
into his brain, causing him infernal agony.
'What! Have you forgotten my name too? ' The stranger smiled.
'Sorry . . .' said Stepa huskily. He could feel his hangover
developing a new symptom : the floor beside his bed seemed to be on the move
and any moment now he was liable to take a dive head first down into hell.
'My dear Stepan Bogdanovich,' said the visitor with a shrewd smile. '
Aspirin will do you no good. Follow a wise old rule-- the hair of the dog.
The only thing that will bring you back to life is two measures of vodka
with something sharp and peppery to eat.'
Ill though Stepa was he had enough sense to realise that since he had
been found in this state he had better tell all.
'Frankly . . .' he began, scarcely able to move his tongue, ' I did
have a bit too . . .'
'Say no more! ' interrupted the visitor and pushed the armchair to one
side.
Stepa's eyes bulged. There on a little table was a tray, laid with
slices of white bread and butter, pressed caviare in a glass bowl, pickled
mushrooms on a saucer, something in a little saucepan and finally vodka in
one of the jeweller's ornate decanters. The decanter was so chilled that it
was wet with condensation from standing in a finger-bowl full of cracked
ice.
The stranger cut Stepa's astonishment short by deftly pouring him out
half a glass of vodka.
'What about you? ' croaked Stepa.
'With pleasure! '
With a shaking hand Stepa raised the glass to his lips and the
mysterious guest swallowed his at one gulp. As he munched his caviare Stepa
was able to squeeze out the words :
'Won't you have a bite to eat too? '
'Thank you, but I never eat when I'm drinking,' replied the stranger,
pouring out a second round. He lifted the lid of the saucepan. It contained
little frankfurters in tomato sauce.
Slowly the awful green blobs in front of his eyes dissolved, words
started to form and most important of all Stepa's memory began to come back.
That was it--he had been at Khustov's dacha at Skhodna and Khustov had
driven Stepa out there by taxi. He even remembered hailing the taxi outside
the Metropole. There had been another man with them--an actor ... or was he
an actor? . . . anyhow he had a portable gramophone. Yes, yes, they had all
gone to the dacha! And the dogs, he remembered, had started howling when
they played the gramophone. Only the woman Stepa had tried to kiss remained
a complete blank . . . who the hell was she? . . . Didn't she work for the
radio? Or perhaps she didn't. . . .
Gradually the previous day came back into focus, but Stepa was much
more interested in today and in particular in this odd stranger who had
materialised in his bedroom complete with snacks and vodka. If only someone
would explain it all!
'Well, now, I hope, you've remembered my name? '
Stepa could only grin sheepishly and spread his hands.
'Well, really! I suspect you drank port on top of vodka last night.
What a way to behave!'
'Please keep this to yourself,' said Stepa imploringly.
'Oh, of course, of course! But naturally I can't vouch for Khustov.'
'Do you know Khustov? '
'I saw that individual for a moment or two in your office yesterday,
but one cursory glance at his face was enough to convince me that he was a
scheming, quarrelsome, sycophantic swine.'
'He's absolutely right! ' thought Stepa, amazed at such a truthful,
precise and succinct description of Khustov.
The ruins of yesterday were piecing themselves together now, but the
manager of the Variety still felt vaguely anxious. There was still a gaping
black void in his memory. He had absolutely no recollection of having seen
this stranger in his office the day before.
'Woland, professor of black magic,' said the visitor gravely, and
seeing Stepa was still in difficulties he described their meeting in detail.
He had arrived in Moscow from abroad yesterday, had immediately called
on Stepa and offered himself as a guest artiste at the Variety. Stepa had
telephoned the Moscow District Theatrical Commission, had agreed to the
proposal (Stepa turned pale and blinked) and had signed a contract with
Professor Woland for seven performances (Stepa's mouth dropped open),
inviting Woland to call on him at ten o'clock the next morning to conclude
the details. ... So Woland had come. When he arrived he had been met by
Grunya the maid, who explained that she herself had only just arrived
because she lived out, that Berlioz wasn't at home and that if the gentleman
wanted to see Stepan Bogdanovich he should go into the bedroom.. Stepan
Bogdanovich had been sleeping so soundly that she had been unable to wake
him. Seeing the condition that Stepa was in, the artiste had sent Grunya out
to the nearest delicatessen for some vodka and snacks, to the chemist for
some ice and . . .
'You must let me settle up with you,' moaned Stepa, thoroughly
crushed, and began hunting for his wallet.
'Oh, what nonsense! ' exclaimed the artiste and would hear no more of
it.
So that explained the vodka and the food; but Stepa was miserably
confused: he could remember absolutely nothing about a contract and he would
die before admitting to having seen Woland the previous day. Khustov had
been there all right, but not Woland.
'Would you mind showing me the contract?' asked Stepa gently.
'Oh, but of course. . . .'
Stepa looked at the sheet of paper and went numb. It was all there :
his own bold signature, the backward-sloping signature of Rimsky, the
treasurer, sanctioning the payment to Woland of a cash advance of ten
thousand roubles against his total fee of thirty-five thousand roubles for
seven performances. And what was more--Woland's receipt for ten thousand
roubles!
'What the hell? ' thought the miserable Stepa. His head began to spin.
Was this one of his lapses of memory? Well, of course, now that the actual
contract had been produced any further signs of disbelief would merely be
rude. Stepa excused himself for a moment and ran to the telephone in the
hall,. On the way he shouted towards the kitchen :
'Grunya! '
There was no reply. He glanced at the door of Berlioz's study, which
opened off the hall, and stopped, as they say, dumbfounded. There, tied to
the door-handle, hung an enormous wax seal.
'My God! ' said a voice in Stepa's head. ' If that isn't the last
straw! ' It would be difficult to describe Stepa's mental confusion. First
this diabolical character with his black beret, the iced vodka and that
incredible contract. . . . And then, if you please, a seal on the door! Who
could ever imagine Berlioz getting into any sort of trouble? No one. Yet
there it was--a seal. H'm.
Stepa was at once assailed by a number of uncomfortable little thoughts
about an article which he had recently talked Mikhail Alexandrovich into
printing in his magazine. Frankly the article had been awful--stupid,
politically dubious and badly paid. Hard on the heels of his recollection of
the article came a memory of a slightly equivocal conversation which had
taken place, as far as he could remember, on 24th April here in the
dining-room when Stepa and Berlioz had been having supper together. Of
course their talk had not really been dubious (Stepa would not have joined
in any such conversation) but it had been on a rather unnecessary subject.
They could easily have avoided having it altogether. Before the appearance
of this seal the conversation would undoubtedly have been dismissed as
utterly trivial, but since the seal . . .
'Oh, Berlioz, Berlioz,' buzzed the voice in Stepa's head. ' Surely
he'll never mention it!'
But there was no time for regrets. Stepa dialled the office of Rimsky,
the Variety Theatre's treasurer. Stepa was in a delicate position: for one
thing, the foreigner might be offended at Stepa ringing up to check on him
after he had been shown the contract and for another, the treasurer was an
extremely difficult man to deal with. After all he couldn't just say to him
: ' Look here, did J sign a contract yesterday for thirty-five thousand
roubles with a professor of black magic? ' It simply wouldn't do!
'Yes? ' came Rimsky's harsh, unpleasant voice in the earphone.
'Hello, Grigory Danilovich,' said Stepa gently. ' Likhodeyev speaking.
It's about this ... er ... this fellow . . . this artiste, in my flat,
called, er, Woland . . . I just wanted to ask you about this evening--is
everything O.K.? '
'Oh, the black magician? ' replied Rimsky. ' The posters will be here
any minute now.'
'Uhuh . . .' said Stepa weakly. ' O.K., so long . . .'
'Will you be coming over soon? ' asked Rimsky.
'In half an hour,' answered Stepa and replacing the receiver he
clasped his feverish head. God, how embarrassing! What an appalling thing to
forget!
As it would be rude to stay in the hall for much longer, Stepa
concocted a plan. He had to use every possible means of concealing his
incredible forgetfulness and begin by cunningly persuading the foreigner to
tell him exactly what he proposed to do in his act at the Variety.
With this Stepan turned away from the telephone and in the hall mirror,
which the lazy Grunya had not dusted for years, he clearly saw a
weird-looking man, as thin as a bean-pole and wearing a pince-nez. Then the
apparition vanished. Stepa peered anxiously down the hallway and immediately
had another shock as a huge black cat appeared in the mirror and also
vanished.
Stepa's heart gave a jump and he staggered back.
'What in God's name . . .? ' he thought. ' Am I going out of my mind?
Where are these reflections coming from? ' He gave another look round the
hall and shouted in alarm :
'Grunya! What's this cat doing, sneaking in here? Where does it come
from? And who's this other character? '
'Don't worry, Stepan Bogdanovich,' came a voice, though not
Grunya's--it was the visitor speaking from the bedroom. ' The cat is mine.
Don't be nervous. And Grunya's not here--I sent her away to her family in
Voronezh. She complained that you had cheated her out of her leave.'
These words were so unexpected and so absurd that Stepa decided he had
not heard them. In utter bewilderment he bounded back into the bedroom and
froze on the threshold. His hair rose and a mild sweat broke out on his
forehead.
The visitor was no longer alone in the bedroom. The second armchair was
now occupied by the creature who had materialised in the hall. He was now to
be seen quite plainly--feathery moustache, one lens of his pince-nez
glittering, the other missing. But worst of all wa:s the third invader : a
black cat of revolting proportions sprawled in a nonchalant attitude on the
pouffe, a glass of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had just speared
a pickled mushroom, in the other.
Stepa felt the light in the bedroom, already weak enough, begin to
fade. ' This must be what it's like to go mad . . .' he thought, clutching
the doorpost.
'You seem slightly astonished, my dear Stepan Bogdanovich,' said
Woland. Stepai's teeth were chattering. ' But I assure you there is nothing
to be surprised at. These are my assistants.'
Here the cat drank its vodka and Stepa's hand dropped from the
doorpost.
'And my assistants need a place to stay,' went on Woland, ' so it
seems that there is one too many of us in this flat. That one, I rather
think, is you.'
'Yes, that's them! ' said the tall man in a goatish voice, speaking of
Stepa in the plural. ' They've been behaving disgustingly lately. Getting
drunk, carrying on with women, trading on their position and not doing a
stroke of work--not that they could do anything even if they tried because
they're completely incompetent. Pulling the wool over the boss's eyes,
that's what they've been doing! '
'Drives around in a free car! ' said the cat slanderously, chewing a
mushroom.
Then occurred the fourth and last phenomenon at which Stepa collapsed
entirely, his weakened hand scraping down the doorpost as he slid to the
floor.
Straight from the full-length mirror stepped a short but unusually
broad-she uldered man with a bowler hat on his head. A fang protruding from
his mouth disfigured an already hideous physiognomy that was topped with
fiery red hair.
'I cannot,' put in the new arrival, ' understand how he ever came to
be manager'--his voice grew more and more nasal-- ' he's as much a manager
as I am a bishop.'
'You don't look much like a bishop, Azazello,' remarked the cat,
piling sausages on his plate.
'That's what I mean,' snarled the man with red hair and turning to
Woland he added in a voice of respect: ' Will you permit us, messire, to
kick him out of Moscow? '
'Shoo!! ' suddenly hissed the cat, its hair standing on end.
The bedroom began to spin round Stepa, he hit his head on the doorpost
and as he lost consciousness he thought, ' I'm dying . . .'
But he did not die. Opening his eyes slightly he found himself sitting
on something made of stone. There was a roaring sound nearby. When he opened
his eyes fully he realised that the roaring was the sea; that the waves were
breaking at his feet, that he was in fact sitting on the very end of a stone
pier, a shining blue sky above him and behind him a white town climbing up
the mountainside.
Not knowing quite what to do in a case like this, Stepa raised himself
on to his shaking legs and walked down the pier to the shore.
On the pier stood a man, smoking and spitting into the sea. He glared
at Stepa and stopped spitting.
Stepa then did an odd thing--he kneeled down in front of the unknown
smoker and said :
'Tell me, please, where am I? '
'Well, I'm damned! ' said the unsympathetic smoker.
'I'm not drunk,' said Stepa hoarsely. ' Something's happened to me,
I'm ill. . . . Where am I? What town is this? '
'Yalta, of course. . . .'
Stepa gave a gentle sigh, collapsed and fainted as he struck his head
on the warm stonework of the pier.
At about half past eleven that morning, just as Stepa lost
consciousness in Yalta, Ivan Nikolayich Bezdomny regained it, waking from a
deep and prolonged sleep. For a while he tried to think why he was in this
strange room with its white walls, its odd little bedside table made of
shiny metal and its white shutters, through which the sun appeared to be
shining.
Ivan shook his head to convince himself that it was not aching and
remembered that he was in a hospital. This in turn reminded him of Berlioz's
death, but today Ivan no longer found this very disturbing. After his long
sleep Ivan Nikolayich felt calmer and able to think more clearly. After
lying for a while motionless in his spotlessly clean and comfortably sprung
bed, Ivan noticed a bell-push beside him. Out of a habit of fingering
anything in sight, Ivan pressed it. He expected a bell to ring or a person
to appear, but something quite different happened.
At the foot of Ivan's bed a frosted-glass cylinder lit up with the word
'DRINK'. After a short spell in that position, the cylinder began turning
until it stopped at another word:
'NANNY '. Ivan found this clever machine slightly confusing. ' NANNY '
was replaced by ' CALL THE DOCTOR '.
'H'm . . .' said Ivan, at a loss to know what the machine expected him
to do. Luck came to his rescue. Ivan pressed the button at the word ' NURSE
'. In reply the machine gave a faint tinkle, stopped and went out. Into the
room came a kind-looking woman in a clean white overall and said to Ivan :
'Good morning!'
Ivan did not reply, as he felt the greeting out of place in the
circumstances. They had, after all, dumped a perfectly healthy man in
hospital and were making it worse by pretending it was necessary! With the
same kind look the woman pressed a button and raised the blind. Sunlight
poured into the room through a light, wide-mesh grille that extended to the
floor. Beyond the grille was a balcony, beyond that the bank of a meandering
river and on the far side a cheerful pine forest.
'Bath time! ' said the woman invitingly and pushed aside a folding
partition to reveal a magnificently equipped bathroom.
Although Ivan had made up his mind not to talk to the woman, when he
saw a broad stream of water thundering into the bath from a glittering tap
he could not help saying sarcastically :
'Look at that! Just like in the Metropole! '
'Oh, no,' replied the woman proudly. ' Much better. There's no
equipment like this anywhere, even abroad. Professors and doctors come here
specially to inspect our clinic. We have foreign tourists here every day.'
At the words ' foreign tourist' Ivan at once remembered the mysterious
professor of the day before. He scowled and said :
'Foreign tourists . . . why do you all think they're so wonderful?
There are some pretty odd specimens among them, I can tell you. I met one
yesterday--he was a charmer! '
He was just going to start telling her about Pontius Pilate, but
changed his mind. The woman would never understand and it was useless to
expect any help from her.
Washed and clean, Ivan Nikolayich was immediately provided with
everything a man needs after a bath--a freshly ironed shirt, underpants and
socks. That was only a beginning : opening the door of a wardrobe, the woman
pointed inside and asked him:
'What would you like to wear--a dressing gown or pyjamas? '
Although he was a prisoner in his new home, Ivan found it hard to
resist the woman's easy, friendly manner and he pointed to a pair of crimson
flannelette pyjamas.
After that Ivan Nikolayich was led along an empty, soundless corridor
into a room of vast dimensions. He had decided to treat everything in this
wonderfully equipped building with
sarcasm and he at once mentally christened this room ' the factory
kitchen'.
And with good reason. There were cupboards and glass-fronted cabinets
full of gleaming nickel-plated instruments. There were armchairs of
strangely complex design, lamps with shiny, bulbous shades, a mass of
phials, bunsen burners, electric cables and various totally mysterious
pieces of apparatus.
Three people came into the room to see Ivan, two women and one man, all
in white. They began by taking Ivan to a desk in the corner to interrogate
him.
Ivan considered the situation. He had a choice of three courses. The
first was extremely tempting--to hurl himself at these lamps and other
ingenious gadgets and smash them all to pieces as a way of expressing his
protest at being locked up for nothing. But today's Ivan was significantly
different from the Ivan of yesterday and he found the first course dubious ;
it would only make them more convinced that he was a dangerous lunatic, so
he abandoned it. There was a second--to begin at once telling them the story
about the professor and Pontius Pilate. However yesterday's experience had
shown him that people either refused to believe the story or completely
misunderstood it, so Ivan rejected that course too, deciding to adopt the
third: he would wrap himself in proud silence.
It proved impossible to keep it up, and willy-nilly he found himself
answering, albeit curtly and sulkily, a whole series of questions. They
carefully extracted from Ivan everything about his past life, down to an
attack of scarlet fever fifteen years before. Having filled a whole page on
Ivan they turned it over and one of the women in white started questioning
him about his relatives. It was a lengthy performance--who had died, when
and why, did they drink, had they suffered from venereal disease and so
forth. Finally they asked him to describe what had happened on the previous
day at Patriarch's Ponds, but they did not pay much attention to it and the
story about Pontius Pilate left them cold.
The woman then handed Ivan over to the man, who took a different line
with him, this time in silence. He took Ivan's temperature, felt his pulse
and looked into his eyes while he shone a lamp into them. The other woman
came to the man's assistance and they hit Ivan on the back with some
instrument, though not painfully, traced some signs on the skin of his chest
with the handle of a little hammer, hit him on the knees with more little
hammers, making Ivan's legs jerk, pricked his finger and drew blood from it,
pricked his elbow joint, wrapped rubber bracelets round his arm . . .
Ivan could only smile bitterly to himself and ponder on the absurdity
of it all. He had wanted to warn them all of the danger threatening them
from the mysterious professor, and had tried to catch him, yet all he had
achieved was to land up in this weird laboratory just to talk a lot of
rubbish about his uncle Fyodor who had died of drink in Vologda.
At last they let Ivan go. He was led back to his room where he was
given a cup of coffee, two soft-boiled eggs and a slice of white bread and
butter. When he had eaten his breakfast, Ivan made up his mind to wait for
someone in charge of the clinic to arrive, to make him listen and to plead
for justice.
The man came soon after Ivan's breakfast. The door into Ivan's room
suddenly opened and in swept a crowd of people in white overalls. In front
strode a man of about forty-five, with a clean-shaven, actorish face, kind
but extremely piercing eyes and a courteous manner. The whole retinue showed
him signs of attention and respect, which gave his entrance a certain
solemnity. ' Like Pontius Pilate! ' thought Ivan.
Yes, he was undoubtedly the man in charge. He sat down on a stool.
Everybody else remained standing.
'How do you do. My name is doctor Stravinsky,' he said as he sat down,
looking amiably at Ivan.
'Here you are, Alexander Nikolayich,' said a neatly bearded man and
handed the chief Ivan's filled-in questionnaire.
'They've got it all sewn up,' thought Ivan. The man in charge ran a
practised eye over the sheet of paper, muttered' Mm'hh' and exchanged a few
words with his colleagues in a strange language. ' And he speaks Latin
too--like Pilate ', mused Ivan sadly. Suddenly a word made him shudder. It
was the word ' schizophrenia ', which the sinister stranger had spoken at
Patriarch's Ponds. Now professor Stravinsky was saying it. ' So he knew
about this, too! ' thought Ivan uneasily.
The chief had adopted the rule of agreeing with everybody and being
pleased with whatever other people might say, expressing it by the word '
Splendid . . .'
'Splendid! ' said Stravinsky, handing back the sheet of paper. He
turned to Ivan.
'Are you a poet? '
'Yes, I am,' replied Ivan glumly and for the first time he suddenly
felt an inexplicable revulsion to poetry. Remembering some of his own poems,
they struck him as vaguely unpleasant.
Frowning, he returned Stravinsky's question by asking:
'Are you a professor? '
To this Stravinsky, with engaging courtesy, inclined his head.
'Are you in charge here? ' Ivan went on.
To this, too, Stravinsky nodded.
'I must talk to you,' said Ivan Nikolayich in a significant tone.
'That's why I'm here,' answered Stravinsky.
'Well this is the situation,' Ivan began, sensing that his hour had
come. ' They say I'm mad and nobody wants to listen to me!'
'Oh no, we will listen very carefully to everything you have to say,'
verse he writes for May Day ... all that stuff about "onwards and upwards"
and "banners waving "! If you could look inside him and see what he's
thinking you'd be sickened! ' And Ivan Nikolayich gave a hoot of malicious
laughter.
Ryukhin, breathing heavily, turned red. There was only one thought in
his mind--that he had nourished a serpent in his bosom, that he had tried to
help someone who when it came to the pinch had treacherously rounded on him.
The worst of it was that he could not answer back--one mustn't swear at a
lunatic!
'Exactly why have they brought you here? ' asked the doctor, who had
listened to Bezdomny's outburst with great attention.
'God knows, the blockheads! They grabbed me, tied me up with some
filthy rags and dumped me in a lorry!'
'May I ask why you came into the restaurant in nothing but your
underwear?'
'There's nothing odd about it,' answered Ivan. ' I went for a swim in
the Moscow River and someone pinched my clothes and left me this junk
instead! I couldn't walk round Moscow naked, could I? I had to put on what
there was, because I was in a hurry to get to the Griboyedov restaurant.'
The doctor glanced questioningly at Ryukhin, who mumbled sulkily:
'Yes, that's the name of the restaurant.'
'Aha,' said the doctor, ' but why were you in such a hurry? Did you
have an appointment there? '
'I had to catch the professor,' replied Ivan Nikolayich, glancing
nervously round.
'What professor? ' ' Do you know Berlioz? ' asked Ivan with a meaning
look.
'You mean . . . the composer? '
Ivan looked puzzled. ' What composer? Oh, yes . . . no, no. The
composer just happens to have the same name as Misha Berlioz.'
Ryukhin was still feeling too offended to speak, but he had to explain:
'Berlioz, the chairman of MASSOLIT, was run over by a tram this
evening at Patriarch's.'
'Don't lie, you--you don't know anything about it,' Ivan burst out at
Ryukhin. ' I was there, not you! He made him fall under that tram on
purpose! '
'Did he push him? '
'What are you talking about?' exclaimed Ivan, irritated by his
listener's failure to grasp the situation. ' He didn't have to push him! He
can do things you'd never believe! He knew in advance that Berlioz was going
to fall under a tram! '
'Did anybody see this professor apart from you? '
'No, that's the trouble. Only Berlioz and myself.'
'I see. What steps did you take to arrest this murderer?' At this
point the doctor turned and threw a glance at a woman in a white overall
sitting behind a desk.
'This is what I did : I took this candle from the kitchen . . .'
'This one? ' asked the doctor, pointing to a broken candle lying on
the desk beside the ikon.
'Yes, that's the one, and . . .'
'Why the ikon? '
'Well, er, the ikon. . . .' Ivan blushed. ' You see an ikon frightens
them more than anything else.' He again pointed at Ryukhin. ' But the fact
is that the professor is ... well, let's be frank . . . he's in league with
the powers of evil . . . and it's not so easy to catch someone like him.'
The orderlies stretched their hands down their trouser-seams and stared
even harder at Ivan.
'Yes,' went on Ivan. ' He's in league with them. There's no arguing
about it. He once talked to Pontius Pilate. It's no good looking at me like
that, I'm telling you the truth! He saw it all --the balcony, the palm
trees. He was actually with Pontius Pilate, I'll swear it.'
'Well, now . . .'
'So, as I was saying, I pinned the ikon to my chest and ran .,.'
Here the clock struck twice.
'Oh, my God! ' exclaimed Ivan and rose from the divan. ' It's two
o'clock and here am I wasting time talking to you! Would you mind--where's
the telephone? '
'Show him the telephone,' the doctor said to the orderlies.
As Ivan grasped the receiver the woman quietly asked Ryukhin:
'Is he married? '
'No, he's a bachelor,' replied Ryukhin, startled.
'Is he a union member? '
'Yes.'
'Police? ' shouted Ivan into the mouthpiece. ' Police? Is that the
duty officer? Sergeant, please arrange to send five motor cycles with
sidecars, armed with machine-guns to arrest the foreign professor. What?
Take me with you, I'll show you where to go. . . . This is Bezdomny, I'm a
poet, and I'm speaking from the lunatic asylum. . . . What's your address? '
Bezdomny whispered to the doctor, covering the mouthpiece with his palm, and
then yelled back into the receiver: ' Are you listening? Hullo! . . . Fools!
. . .' Ivan suddenly roared, hurling the receiver at the wall. Then he
turned round to the doctor, offered him his hand, said a curt goodbye and
started to go.
'Excuse me, but where are you proposing to go?' said the doctor,
looking Ivan in the eye. ' At this hour of night, in your underwear . . .
You're not well, stay with us.'
'Come on, let me through,' said Ivan to the orderlies who had lined up
to block the doorway. ' Are you going to let me go or not? ' shouted the
poet in a terrible voice.
Ryukhin shuddered. The woman pressed a button on the desk ; a
glittering metal box and a sealed ampoule popped out on to its glass
surface.
'Ah, so that's your game, is it? ' said Ivan with a wild, hunted
glance around. ' All right then . . . Goodbye!! ' And he threw himself head
first at the shuttered window.
There was a loud crash, but the glass did not even crack, and a moment
later Ivan Nikolayich was struggling in the arms of the orderlies. He
screamed, tried to bite, then shouted :
'Fine sort of glass you put in your windows! Let me go! Let me go! '
A hypodermic syringe glittered in the doctor's hand, with one sweep the
woman pushed back the tattered sleeve of Ivan's blouse and clamped his arm
in a most un-feminine grip. There was a smell of ether, Ivan weakened
slightly in the grasp of the four men and the doctor skilfully seized the
moment to jab the needle into Ivan's arm. Ivan kept up the struggle for a
few more seconds, then collapsed on to the divan.
'Bandits! ' cried Ivan and leaped up, only to be pushed back. As soon
as they let him go he jumped up again, but sat down of his own accord. He
said nothing, staring wildly about him, then gave a sudden unexpected yawn
and smiled malevolently :
'So you're going to lock me up after all,' he said, yawned again, lay
down with his head on the cushion, his fist under his cheek like a child and
muttered in a sleepy voice but without malice : ' All right, then . . . but
you'll pay for it ... I warned you, but if you want to ... What interests me
most now is Pontius Pilate . . . Pilate . . .' And with that he closed his
eyes.
'Vanna, put him in No. 117 by himself and with someone to watch him.'
The doctor gave his instructions and replaced his spectacles. Then Ryukhin
shuddered again : a pair of white doors opened without a sound and beyond
them stretched a corridor lit by a row of blue night-bulbs. Out of the
corridor rolled a couch on rubber wheels. The sleeping Ivan was lifted on to
it, he was pushed off down the corridor and the doors closed after him.
'Doctor,' asked the shaken Ryukhin in a whisper, ' is he really ill?'
'Oh yes,' replied the doctor.
'Then what's the matter with him?' enquired Rvukhin timidly.
The exhausted doctor looked at Ryukhin and answered wearily:
'Overstimulation of the motor nerves and speech centres . . .
delirious illusions. . . . Obviously a complicated case. Schizophrenia, I
should think . . . touch of alcoholism, too. . . .'
Ryukhin understood nothing of this, except that Ivan Nikolayich was
obviously in poor shape. He sighed and asked :
'What was that he said about some professor? '
'I expect he saw someone who gave a shock to his disturbed
imagination. Or maybe it was a hallucination. . . .'
A few minutes later a lorry was taking Ryukhin back into Moscow. Dawn
was breaking and the still-lit street lamps seemed superfluous and
unpleasant. The driver, annoyed at missing a night's sleep, pushed his lorry
as hard as it would go, making it skid round the corners.
The woods fell away in the distance and the river wandered off in
another direction. As the lorry drove on the scenery slowly changed: fences,
a watchman's hut, piles of logs, dried and split telegraph poles with
bobbins strung on the wires between them, heaps of stones, ditches--in
short, a feeling that Moscow was about to appear round the next corner and
would rise up and engulf them at any moment.
The log of wood on which Ryukhin was sitting kept wobbling and
slithering about and now and again it tried to slide away from under him
altogether. The restaurant dish-cloths, which the policeman and the barman
had thrown on to the back of the lorry before leaving earlier by
trolley-bus, were being flung about all over the back of the lorry. Ryukhin
started to try and pick them up, but with a sudden burst of ill-temper he
hissed :
'To hell with them! Why should I crawl around after them? ' He pushed
them away with his foot and turned away from them.
Ryukhin was in a state of depression. It was obvious that his visit to
the asylum had affected him deeply. He tried to think what it was that was
disturbing him. Was it the corridor with its blue lamps, which had lodged so
firmly in his memory? Was it the thought that the worst misfortune in the
world was to lose one's reason? Yes, it was that, of course--but that after
all was a generalisation, it applied to everybody. There was something else,
though. What was it? The insult--that was it. Yes, those insulting words
that Bezdomny had flung into his face. And the agony of it was not that they
were insulting but that they were true.
The poet stopped looking about him and instead stared gloomily at the
dirty, shaking floor of the lorry in an agony of self-reproach.
Yes, his poetry . . . He was thirty-two! And what were his prospects?
To go on writing a few poems every year. How long--until he was an old man?
Yes, until he was an old man. What would these poems do for him? Make him
famous? ' What rubbish! Don't fool yourself. Nobody ever gets famous from
writing bad poetry. Why is it bad, though? He was right --he was telling the
truth! ' said Ryukhin pitilessly to himself. I don't believe in a single
word of what I've written . . .! '
Embittered by an upsurge of neurasthenia, the poet swayed. The floor
beneath had stopped shaking. Ryukhin lifted his head and saw that he was in
the middle of Moscow, that day had dawned, that his lorry had stopped in a
traffic-jam at a boulevard intersection and that right near him stood a
metal man on a plinth, his head inclined slightly forward, staring blankly
down the street.
Strange thoughts assailed the poet, who was beginning to feel ill. '
Now there's an example of pure luck .'--Ryukhin stood up on the lorry's
platform and raised his fist in an inexplicable urge to attack the harmless
cast-iron man--'. . . everything he did in life, whatever happened to him,
it all went his way, everything conspired to make him famous! But what did
he achieve? I've never been able to discover . . . What about that famous
phrase of his that begins " A storm of mist. . ."? What a load of rot! He
was lucky, that's all, just lucky! '--Ryukhin concluded venomously, feeling
the lorry start to move under him--' and just because that White officer
shot at him and smashed his hip, he's famous for ever . . .'
The jam was moving. Less than two minutes later the poet, now not only
ill but ageing, walked on to the Griboyedov verandah. It was nearly empty.
Ryukhin, laden with dish-cloths, was greeted warmly by Archibald
Archibaldovich and immediately relieved of the horrible rags. If Ryukhin had
not been so exhausted by the lorry-ride and by his experiences at the
clinic, he would probably have enjoyed describing everything that had
happened in the hospital and would have embellished the story with some
invented details. But for the moment he was incapable. Although Ryukhin was
not an observant man, now, after his agony on the lorry, for the first time
be looked really hard at the pirate and realised that although the man was
asking questions about Bezdomny and even exclaiming ' Oh, poor fellow! ' he
was in reality totally indifferent to Bezdomny's fate and did not feel sorry
for him at all. ' Good for him! He's right! ' thought Ryukhin with cynical,
masochistic relish and breaking off his description of the symptoms of
schizophrenia, he asked :
'Archibald Archibaldovich, could I possibly have a glass of vodka. .
.? '
The pirate put on a sympathetic expression and whispered :
'Of course, I quite understand . . . right away . . .' and signalled
to a waiter.
A quarter of an hour later Ryukhin was sitting in absolute solitude
hunched over a dish of sardines, drinking glass after glass of vodka,
understanding more and more about himself and admitting that there was
nothing in his life that he could put right--he could only try to forget.
The poet had wasted his night while others had spent it enjoying
themselves and now he realised that it was lost forever. He only had to lift
his head up from the lamp and look at the sky to see that the night had gone
beyond return. Waiters were hurriedly jerking the cloths off the tables. The
cats pacing the verandah had a morning look about them. Day broke inexorably
over the poet.
If next day someone had said to Stepa Likhodeyev 'Stepa! If vou don't
get up this minute you're going to be shot,' he would have replied in a
faint, languid voice : ' All right, shoot me. Do what you like to me, but
I'm not getting up! '
The worst of it was that he could not open his eyes, because when he
did so there would be a flash of lightning and his head would shiver to
fragments. A great bell was tolling in his head, brown spots with livid
green edges were swimming around somewhere between his eyeballs and his
closed lids. To cap it all he felt sick and the nausea was somehow connected
with the sound of a gramophone.
Stepa tried to remember what had happened, but could only recall one
thing--yesterday, somewhere. God knows where, he had been holding a table
napkin and trying to kiss a woman, promising her that he would come and
visit her tomorrow at the stroke of noon. She had refused, saying ' No, no,
I won't be at home,' but Stepa had insisted ' I don't care--I'll come
anyway!'
Stepa had now completely forgotten who that woman had been, what the
time was, what day of what month it was, and worst of all he had no idea
where he was. In an effort to find out, he unstuck his gummed-up left
eyelid. Something glimmered in the semi-darkness. At last Stepa recognised
it as a mirror. He was lying cross-wise on the bed in his own bedroom. Then
something hit him on the head and he closed his eyes and groaned.
Stepa Likhodeyev, manager of the Variety Theatre, had woken up thait
morning in the flat that he shared with Berlioz in a big six-stoirey block
of flats on Sadovaya Street. This flat--No. 50-- had a strange reputation.
Two years before, it had been owned by the widow of a jeweller called de
Fougere, Anna Frantzevna, a respectable and very business-like lady of
fifty, who let three of her five rooms to lodgers. One of them was, it
seems, called Belomut; the other's name has been lost.
Two years ago odd things began happening in that apartment-- people
started to vanish from it without trace. One Monday afternoon a policeman
called, invited the second lodger (the one whose name is no longer known)
into the hall and asked him to come along to the police station for a minute
or two to sign a document. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantzevna's devoted
servant of many years, to say that if anybody rang him up he would be back
in ten minutes. He then went out accompanied by the courteous policeman in
white gloves. But he not only failed to come back in ten minutes; he never
came back at all. Odder still, the policeman appeared to have vanished with
him.
Anfisa, a devout and frankly rather a superstitious woman, informed the
distraught Anna Frantsevna that it was witchcraft, that she knew perfectly
well who had enticed away the lodger and the policeman, only she dared not
pronounce the name at night-time.
Witchcraft once started, as we all know, is virtually unstoppable. The
anonymous lodger disappeared, you will remember, on a Monday ; the following
Wednesday Belomut, too, vanished from the face of the earth, although
admittedly in different circumstances. He was fetched as usual in the
morning by the car which took him to work, but it never brought him back and
never called again.
Words cannot describe the pain and distress which this caused to madame
Belomut, but alas for her, she was not fated to endure even this unhappy
state for long. On returning from her dacha that evening, whither she had
hastily gone with Anfisa, Anna Frantzevna found no trace of madame Belomut
in the flat and what was more, the doors of both rooms occupied by the
Belomuts had been sealed. Two days of uncertainty and insomnia passed for
Anna Frantzevna ; on the third day she made another hasty visit to her dacha
from whence, it need hardly be said, she never returned. Anfisa, left alone,
cried her eye s out and finally went to bed at two-o'clock in the morning.
Nobody knows what happened to her after that, but tenants of the
neighbouring flat described having heard knocking coming from No. 50 and
having seen lights burning in the windows all night. By morning Anfisa too
was gone. Legends of all kinds about the mysterious flat and its vanishing
lodgers circulated in the building for some time. According to one of them
the devout and spinsteriy Anfisa used to carry twenty-five large diamonds,
belonging to Anna Frantzevna, in a chamois-leather bag between her withered
breasts. It was said, too, that among other things a priceless treasure
consisting of those same diamonds and a hoard of tsarist gold coins were
somehow found in the coal-she'd behind Anna Frantzevna's dacha. Lacking
proof, of course, we shall never know how true these rumours were. However,
the flat only remained empty for a week before Berlioz and his wife and
Stepa and his wife moved into it. Naturally as soon as they took possession
of the haunted flat the oddest things started happening to them too. Within
a single month both wives had disappeared, although not without trace.
Rumour had it that Berlioz's wife had been seen in Kharkov with a
ballet-master, whilst Stepa's wife had apparently found her way to an
orphanage where, the story went, the manager of the Variety had used his
connections to get her a room on condition that she never showed her face in
Sadovaya Street again. . . .
So Stepa groaned. He wanted to call his maid, Grunya, and ask her for
an aspirin but he was conscious enough to realise that it would be useless
because Grunya most probably had no aspirin. He tried to call for Berlioz's
help and twice moaned ' Misha . . . Misha . . .', but as you will have
guessed, there was no reply. There was complete silence in the flat.
Wriggling his toes, Stepa deduced that he was lying in his socks. He
ran a trembling hand down his hip to test whether he had his trousers on or
not and found that he had not. At last, realising that he was alone and
abandoned, that there was nobody to help him, he decided to get up, whatever
superhuman effort it might cost him.
Stepa prised open his eyelids and saw himself reflected in the long
mirror in the shape of a man whose hair stuck out in all directions, with a
puffy, stubble-grown face, with watery eyes and wearing a dirty shirt, a
collar, tie, underpants and socks.
As he looked at himself in the mirror, he also noticed standing beside
it a strange man dressed in a black suit and a black beret.
Stepa sat up on the bed and did his best to focus his bloodshot eyes on
the stranger. The silence was broken by the unknown visitor, who said
gravely, in a low voice with a foreign accent:
'Good morning, my dear Stepan Bogdanovich! '
There was a pause. Pulling himself together with fearful effort Stepa
said:
'What do you want?' He did not recognise his own voice. He had spoken
the word ' what' in a treble, ' do you ' in a bass and ' want' had simply
not emerged at all.
The stranger gave an amiable smile, pulled out a large gold watch with
a diamond triangle on the cover, listened to it strike eleven times and said
:
'Eleven. I have been waiting exactly an hour for you to wake up. You
gave me an appointment to see you at your flat at ten so here I am!'
Stepa fumbled for his trousers on the chair beside his bed and
whispered:
'Excuse me. . . .' He put on his trousers and asked hoarsely :
'Please tell me--who are you? '
He found talking difficult, as with every word someone stuck a needle
into his brain, causing him infernal agony.
'What! Have you forgotten my name too? ' The stranger smiled.
'Sorry . . .' said Stepa huskily. He could feel his hangover
developing a new symptom : the floor beside his bed seemed to be on the move
and any moment now he was liable to take a dive head first down into hell.
'My dear Stepan Bogdanovich,' said the visitor with a shrewd smile. '
Aspirin will do you no good. Follow a wise old rule-- the hair of the dog.
The only thing that will bring you back to life is two measures of vodka
with something sharp and peppery to eat.'
Ill though Stepa was he had enough sense to realise that since he had
been found in this state he had better tell all.
'Frankly . . .' he began, scarcely able to move his tongue, ' I did
have a bit too . . .'
'Say no more! ' interrupted the visitor and pushed the armchair to one
side.
Stepa's eyes bulged. There on a little table was a tray, laid with
slices of white bread and butter, pressed caviare in a glass bowl, pickled
mushrooms on a saucer, something in a little saucepan and finally vodka in
one of the jeweller's ornate decanters. The decanter was so chilled that it
was wet with condensation from standing in a finger-bowl full of cracked
ice.
The stranger cut Stepa's astonishment short by deftly pouring him out
half a glass of vodka.
'What about you? ' croaked Stepa.
'With pleasure! '
With a shaking hand Stepa raised the glass to his lips and the
mysterious guest swallowed his at one gulp. As he munched his caviare Stepa
was able to squeeze out the words :
'Won't you have a bite to eat too? '
'Thank you, but I never eat when I'm drinking,' replied the stranger,
pouring out a second round. He lifted the lid of the saucepan. It contained
little frankfurters in tomato sauce.
Slowly the awful green blobs in front of his eyes dissolved, words
started to form and most important of all Stepa's memory began to come back.
That was it--he had been at Khustov's dacha at Skhodna and Khustov had
driven Stepa out there by taxi. He even remembered hailing the taxi outside
the Metropole. There had been another man with them--an actor ... or was he
an actor? . . . anyhow he had a portable gramophone. Yes, yes, they had all
gone to the dacha! And the dogs, he remembered, had started howling when
they played the gramophone. Only the woman Stepa had tried to kiss remained
a complete blank . . . who the hell was she? . . . Didn't she work for the
radio? Or perhaps she didn't. . . .
Gradually the previous day came back into focus, but Stepa was much
more interested in today and in particular in this odd stranger who had
materialised in his bedroom complete with snacks and vodka. If only someone
would explain it all!
'Well, now, I hope, you've remembered my name? '
Stepa could only grin sheepishly and spread his hands.
'Well, really! I suspect you drank port on top of vodka last night.
What a way to behave!'
'Please keep this to yourself,' said Stepa imploringly.
'Oh, of course, of course! But naturally I can't vouch for Khustov.'
'Do you know Khustov? '
'I saw that individual for a moment or two in your office yesterday,
but one cursory glance at his face was enough to convince me that he was a
scheming, quarrelsome, sycophantic swine.'
'He's absolutely right! ' thought Stepa, amazed at such a truthful,
precise and succinct description of Khustov.
The ruins of yesterday were piecing themselves together now, but the
manager of the Variety still felt vaguely anxious. There was still a gaping
black void in his memory. He had absolutely no recollection of having seen
this stranger in his office the day before.
'Woland, professor of black magic,' said the visitor gravely, and
seeing Stepa was still in difficulties he described their meeting in detail.
He had arrived in Moscow from abroad yesterday, had immediately called
on Stepa and offered himself as a guest artiste at the Variety. Stepa had
telephoned the Moscow District Theatrical Commission, had agreed to the
proposal (Stepa turned pale and blinked) and had signed a contract with
Professor Woland for seven performances (Stepa's mouth dropped open),
inviting Woland to call on him at ten o'clock the next morning to conclude
the details. ... So Woland had come. When he arrived he had been met by
Grunya the maid, who explained that she herself had only just arrived
because she lived out, that Berlioz wasn't at home and that if the gentleman
wanted to see Stepan Bogdanovich he should go into the bedroom.. Stepan
Bogdanovich had been sleeping so soundly that she had been unable to wake
him. Seeing the condition that Stepa was in, the artiste had sent Grunya out
to the nearest delicatessen for some vodka and snacks, to the chemist for
some ice and . . .
'You must let me settle up with you,' moaned Stepa, thoroughly
crushed, and began hunting for his wallet.
'Oh, what nonsense! ' exclaimed the artiste and would hear no more of
it.
So that explained the vodka and the food; but Stepa was miserably
confused: he could remember absolutely nothing about a contract and he would
die before admitting to having seen Woland the previous day. Khustov had
been there all right, but not Woland.
'Would you mind showing me the contract?' asked Stepa gently.
'Oh, but of course. . . .'
Stepa looked at the sheet of paper and went numb. It was all there :
his own bold signature, the backward-sloping signature of Rimsky, the
treasurer, sanctioning the payment to Woland of a cash advance of ten
thousand roubles against his total fee of thirty-five thousand roubles for
seven performances. And what was more--Woland's receipt for ten thousand
roubles!
'What the hell? ' thought the miserable Stepa. His head began to spin.
Was this one of his lapses of memory? Well, of course, now that the actual
contract had been produced any further signs of disbelief would merely be
rude. Stepa excused himself for a moment and ran to the telephone in the
hall,. On the way he shouted towards the kitchen :
'Grunya! '
There was no reply. He glanced at the door of Berlioz's study, which
opened off the hall, and stopped, as they say, dumbfounded. There, tied to
the door-handle, hung an enormous wax seal.
'My God! ' said a voice in Stepa's head. ' If that isn't the last
straw! ' It would be difficult to describe Stepa's mental confusion. First
this diabolical character with his black beret, the iced vodka and that
incredible contract. . . . And then, if you please, a seal on the door! Who
could ever imagine Berlioz getting into any sort of trouble? No one. Yet
there it was--a seal. H'm.
Stepa was at once assailed by a number of uncomfortable little thoughts
about an article which he had recently talked Mikhail Alexandrovich into
printing in his magazine. Frankly the article had been awful--stupid,
politically dubious and badly paid. Hard on the heels of his recollection of
the article came a memory of a slightly equivocal conversation which had
taken place, as far as he could remember, on 24th April here in the
dining-room when Stepa and Berlioz had been having supper together. Of
course their talk had not really been dubious (Stepa would not have joined
in any such conversation) but it had been on a rather unnecessary subject.
They could easily have avoided having it altogether. Before the appearance
of this seal the conversation would undoubtedly have been dismissed as
utterly trivial, but since the seal . . .
'Oh, Berlioz, Berlioz,' buzzed the voice in Stepa's head. ' Surely
he'll never mention it!'
But there was no time for regrets. Stepa dialled the office of Rimsky,
the Variety Theatre's treasurer. Stepa was in a delicate position: for one
thing, the foreigner might be offended at Stepa ringing up to check on him
after he had been shown the contract and for another, the treasurer was an
extremely difficult man to deal with. After all he couldn't just say to him
: ' Look here, did J sign a contract yesterday for thirty-five thousand
roubles with a professor of black magic? ' It simply wouldn't do!
'Yes? ' came Rimsky's harsh, unpleasant voice in the earphone.
'Hello, Grigory Danilovich,' said Stepa gently. ' Likhodeyev speaking.
It's about this ... er ... this fellow . . . this artiste, in my flat,
called, er, Woland . . . I just wanted to ask you about this evening--is
everything O.K.? '
'Oh, the black magician? ' replied Rimsky. ' The posters will be here
any minute now.'
'Uhuh . . .' said Stepa weakly. ' O.K., so long . . .'
'Will you be coming over soon? ' asked Rimsky.
'In half an hour,' answered Stepa and replacing the receiver he
clasped his feverish head. God, how embarrassing! What an appalling thing to
forget!
As it would be rude to stay in the hall for much longer, Stepa
concocted a plan. He had to use every possible means of concealing his
incredible forgetfulness and begin by cunningly persuading the foreigner to
tell him exactly what he proposed to do in his act at the Variety.
With this Stepan turned away from the telephone and in the hall mirror,
which the lazy Grunya had not dusted for years, he clearly saw a
weird-looking man, as thin as a bean-pole and wearing a pince-nez. Then the
apparition vanished. Stepa peered anxiously down the hallway and immediately
had another shock as a huge black cat appeared in the mirror and also
vanished.
Stepa's heart gave a jump and he staggered back.
'What in God's name . . .? ' he thought. ' Am I going out of my mind?
Where are these reflections coming from? ' He gave another look round the
hall and shouted in alarm :
'Grunya! What's this cat doing, sneaking in here? Where does it come
from? And who's this other character? '
'Don't worry, Stepan Bogdanovich,' came a voice, though not
Grunya's--it was the visitor speaking from the bedroom. ' The cat is mine.
Don't be nervous. And Grunya's not here--I sent her away to her family in
Voronezh. She complained that you had cheated her out of her leave.'
These words were so unexpected and so absurd that Stepa decided he had
not heard them. In utter bewilderment he bounded back into the bedroom and
froze on the threshold. His hair rose and a mild sweat broke out on his
forehead.
The visitor was no longer alone in the bedroom. The second armchair was
now occupied by the creature who had materialised in the hall. He was now to
be seen quite plainly--feathery moustache, one lens of his pince-nez
glittering, the other missing. But worst of all wa:s the third invader : a
black cat of revolting proportions sprawled in a nonchalant attitude on the
pouffe, a glass of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had just speared
a pickled mushroom, in the other.
Stepa felt the light in the bedroom, already weak enough, begin to
fade. ' This must be what it's like to go mad . . .' he thought, clutching
the doorpost.
'You seem slightly astonished, my dear Stepan Bogdanovich,' said
Woland. Stepai's teeth were chattering. ' But I assure you there is nothing
to be surprised at. These are my assistants.'
Here the cat drank its vodka and Stepa's hand dropped from the
doorpost.
'And my assistants need a place to stay,' went on Woland, ' so it
seems that there is one too many of us in this flat. That one, I rather
think, is you.'
'Yes, that's them! ' said the tall man in a goatish voice, speaking of
Stepa in the plural. ' They've been behaving disgustingly lately. Getting
drunk, carrying on with women, trading on their position and not doing a
stroke of work--not that they could do anything even if they tried because
they're completely incompetent. Pulling the wool over the boss's eyes,
that's what they've been doing! '
'Drives around in a free car! ' said the cat slanderously, chewing a
mushroom.
Then occurred the fourth and last phenomenon at which Stepa collapsed
entirely, his weakened hand scraping down the doorpost as he slid to the
floor.
Straight from the full-length mirror stepped a short but unusually
broad-she uldered man with a bowler hat on his head. A fang protruding from
his mouth disfigured an already hideous physiognomy that was topped with
fiery red hair.
'I cannot,' put in the new arrival, ' understand how he ever came to
be manager'--his voice grew more and more nasal-- ' he's as much a manager
as I am a bishop.'
'You don't look much like a bishop, Azazello,' remarked the cat,
piling sausages on his plate.
'That's what I mean,' snarled the man with red hair and turning to
Woland he added in a voice of respect: ' Will you permit us, messire, to
kick him out of Moscow? '
'Shoo!! ' suddenly hissed the cat, its hair standing on end.
The bedroom began to spin round Stepa, he hit his head on the doorpost
and as he lost consciousness he thought, ' I'm dying . . .'
But he did not die. Opening his eyes slightly he found himself sitting
on something made of stone. There was a roaring sound nearby. When he opened
his eyes fully he realised that the roaring was the sea; that the waves were
breaking at his feet, that he was in fact sitting on the very end of a stone
pier, a shining blue sky above him and behind him a white town climbing up
the mountainside.
Not knowing quite what to do in a case like this, Stepa raised himself
on to his shaking legs and walked down the pier to the shore.
On the pier stood a man, smoking and spitting into the sea. He glared
at Stepa and stopped spitting.
Stepa then did an odd thing--he kneeled down in front of the unknown
smoker and said :
'Tell me, please, where am I? '
'Well, I'm damned! ' said the unsympathetic smoker.
'I'm not drunk,' said Stepa hoarsely. ' Something's happened to me,
I'm ill. . . . Where am I? What town is this? '
'Yalta, of course. . . .'
Stepa gave a gentle sigh, collapsed and fainted as he struck his head
on the warm stonework of the pier.
At about half past eleven that morning, just as Stepa lost
consciousness in Yalta, Ivan Nikolayich Bezdomny regained it, waking from a
deep and prolonged sleep. For a while he tried to think why he was in this
strange room with its white walls, its odd little bedside table made of
shiny metal and its white shutters, through which the sun appeared to be
shining.
Ivan shook his head to convince himself that it was not aching and
remembered that he was in a hospital. This in turn reminded him of Berlioz's
death, but today Ivan no longer found this very disturbing. After his long
sleep Ivan Nikolayich felt calmer and able to think more clearly. After
lying for a while motionless in his spotlessly clean and comfortably sprung
bed, Ivan noticed a bell-push beside him. Out of a habit of fingering
anything in sight, Ivan pressed it. He expected a bell to ring or a person
to appear, but something quite different happened.
At the foot of Ivan's bed a frosted-glass cylinder lit up with the word
'DRINK'. After a short spell in that position, the cylinder began turning
until it stopped at another word:
'NANNY '. Ivan found this clever machine slightly confusing. ' NANNY '
was replaced by ' CALL THE DOCTOR '.
'H'm . . .' said Ivan, at a loss to know what the machine expected him
to do. Luck came to his rescue. Ivan pressed the button at the word ' NURSE
'. In reply the machine gave a faint tinkle, stopped and went out. Into the
room came a kind-looking woman in a clean white overall and said to Ivan :
'Good morning!'
Ivan did not reply, as he felt the greeting out of place in the
circumstances. They had, after all, dumped a perfectly healthy man in
hospital and were making it worse by pretending it was necessary! With the
same kind look the woman pressed a button and raised the blind. Sunlight
poured into the room through a light, wide-mesh grille that extended to the
floor. Beyond the grille was a balcony, beyond that the bank of a meandering
river and on the far side a cheerful pine forest.
'Bath time! ' said the woman invitingly and pushed aside a folding
partition to reveal a magnificently equipped bathroom.
Although Ivan had made up his mind not to talk to the woman, when he
saw a broad stream of water thundering into the bath from a glittering tap
he could not help saying sarcastically :
'Look at that! Just like in the Metropole! '
'Oh, no,' replied the woman proudly. ' Much better. There's no
equipment like this anywhere, even abroad. Professors and doctors come here
specially to inspect our clinic. We have foreign tourists here every day.'
At the words ' foreign tourist' Ivan at once remembered the mysterious
professor of the day before. He scowled and said :
'Foreign tourists . . . why do you all think they're so wonderful?
There are some pretty odd specimens among them, I can tell you. I met one
yesterday--he was a charmer! '
He was just going to start telling her about Pontius Pilate, but
changed his mind. The woman would never understand and it was useless to
expect any help from her.
Washed and clean, Ivan Nikolayich was immediately provided with
everything a man needs after a bath--a freshly ironed shirt, underpants and
socks. That was only a beginning : opening the door of a wardrobe, the woman
pointed inside and asked him:
'What would you like to wear--a dressing gown or pyjamas? '
Although he was a prisoner in his new home, Ivan found it hard to
resist the woman's easy, friendly manner and he pointed to a pair of crimson
flannelette pyjamas.
After that Ivan Nikolayich was led along an empty, soundless corridor
into a room of vast dimensions. He had decided to treat everything in this
wonderfully equipped building with
sarcasm and he at once mentally christened this room ' the factory
kitchen'.
And with good reason. There were cupboards and glass-fronted cabinets
full of gleaming nickel-plated instruments. There were armchairs of
strangely complex design, lamps with shiny, bulbous shades, a mass of
phials, bunsen burners, electric cables and various totally mysterious
pieces of apparatus.
Three people came into the room to see Ivan, two women and one man, all
in white. They began by taking Ivan to a desk in the corner to interrogate
him.
Ivan considered the situation. He had a choice of three courses. The
first was extremely tempting--to hurl himself at these lamps and other
ingenious gadgets and smash them all to pieces as a way of expressing his
protest at being locked up for nothing. But today's Ivan was significantly
different from the Ivan of yesterday and he found the first course dubious ;
it would only make them more convinced that he was a dangerous lunatic, so
he abandoned it. There was a second--to begin at once telling them the story
about the professor and Pontius Pilate. However yesterday's experience had
shown him that people either refused to believe the story or completely
misunderstood it, so Ivan rejected that course too, deciding to adopt the
third: he would wrap himself in proud silence.
It proved impossible to keep it up, and willy-nilly he found himself
answering, albeit curtly and sulkily, a whole series of questions. They
carefully extracted from Ivan everything about his past life, down to an
attack of scarlet fever fifteen years before. Having filled a whole page on
Ivan they turned it over and one of the women in white started questioning
him about his relatives. It was a lengthy performance--who had died, when
and why, did they drink, had they suffered from venereal disease and so
forth. Finally they asked him to describe what had happened on the previous
day at Patriarch's Ponds, but they did not pay much attention to it and the
story about Pontius Pilate left them cold.
The woman then handed Ivan over to the man, who took a different line
with him, this time in silence. He took Ivan's temperature, felt his pulse
and looked into his eyes while he shone a lamp into them. The other woman
came to the man's assistance and they hit Ivan on the back with some
instrument, though not painfully, traced some signs on the skin of his chest
with the handle of a little hammer, hit him on the knees with more little
hammers, making Ivan's legs jerk, pricked his finger and drew blood from it,
pricked his elbow joint, wrapped rubber bracelets round his arm . . .
Ivan could only smile bitterly to himself and ponder on the absurdity
of it all. He had wanted to warn them all of the danger threatening them
from the mysterious professor, and had tried to catch him, yet all he had
achieved was to land up in this weird laboratory just to talk a lot of
rubbish about his uncle Fyodor who had died of drink in Vologda.
At last they let Ivan go. He was led back to his room where he was
given a cup of coffee, two soft-boiled eggs and a slice of white bread and
butter. When he had eaten his breakfast, Ivan made up his mind to wait for
someone in charge of the clinic to arrive, to make him listen and to plead
for justice.
The man came soon after Ivan's breakfast. The door into Ivan's room
suddenly opened and in swept a crowd of people in white overalls. In front
strode a man of about forty-five, with a clean-shaven, actorish face, kind
but extremely piercing eyes and a courteous manner. The whole retinue showed
him signs of attention and respect, which gave his entrance a certain
solemnity. ' Like Pontius Pilate! ' thought Ivan.
Yes, he was undoubtedly the man in charge. He sat down on a stool.
Everybody else remained standing.
'How do you do. My name is doctor Stravinsky,' he said as he sat down,
looking amiably at Ivan.
'Here you are, Alexander Nikolayich,' said a neatly bearded man and
handed the chief Ivan's filled-in questionnaire.
'They've got it all sewn up,' thought Ivan. The man in charge ran a
practised eye over the sheet of paper, muttered' Mm'hh' and exchanged a few
words with his colleagues in a strange language. ' And he speaks Latin
too--like Pilate ', mused Ivan sadly. Suddenly a word made him shudder. It
was the word ' schizophrenia ', which the sinister stranger had spoken at
Patriarch's Ponds. Now professor Stravinsky was saying it. ' So he knew
about this, too! ' thought Ivan uneasily.
The chief had adopted the rule of agreeing with everybody and being
pleased with whatever other people might say, expressing it by the word '
Splendid . . .'
'Splendid! ' said Stravinsky, handing back the sheet of paper. He
turned to Ivan.
'Are you a poet? '
'Yes, I am,' replied Ivan glumly and for the first time he suddenly
felt an inexplicable revulsion to poetry. Remembering some of his own poems,
they struck him as vaguely unpleasant.
Frowning, he returned Stravinsky's question by asking:
'Are you a professor? '
To this Stravinsky, with engaging courtesy, inclined his head.
'Are you in charge here? ' Ivan went on.
To this, too, Stravinsky nodded.
'I must talk to you,' said Ivan Nikolayich in a significant tone.
'That's why I'm here,' answered Stravinsky.
'Well this is the situation,' Ivan began, sensing that his hour had
come. ' They say I'm mad and nobody wants to listen to me!'
'Oh no, we will listen very carefully to everything you have to say,'