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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.
His nerves gave out, as they say, and Rimsky fled to his office before
they finished drawing up the report. He sat at his desk and stared with
inflamed eyes at the magic banknotes lying before him. The findirector's
wits were addled. A steady hum came from outside. The audience poured in
streams from the Variety building into the street. Rimsky's extremely
sharpened hearing suddenly caught the distant trill of a policeman. That in
itself never bodes anything pleasant. But when it was repeated and, to
assist it, another joined in, more authoritative and prolonged, and to them
was added a clearly audible guffawing and even some hooting, the findirector
understood at once that something else scandalous and vile had happened in
the street. And that, however much he wanted to wave it away, it was closely
connected with the repulsive son to Sadovaya, his face twisted, and he did
not whisper but hissed:
'So I thought!'
In the bright glare of the strongest street lights he saw, just below
him on the sidewalk, a lady in nothing but a shift and violet bloomers.
True, there was a little hat on the lady's head and an umbrella in her
hands. The lady, who was in a state of utter consternation, now crouching
down, now making as if to run off somewhere, was surrounded by an agitated
crowd, which produced the very guffawing that had sent a shiver down the
fin-director's spine. Next to the lady some citizen was flitting about,
trying to tear off his summer coat, and in his agitation simply unable to
manage the sleeve in which his arm was stuck.
Shouts and roaring guffaws came from yet another place - namely, the
left entrance - and turning his head in that direction, Grigory Danilovich
saw a second lady, in pink underwear. She leaped from the street to the
sidewalk, striving to hide in the hallway, but the audience pouring out
blocked the way, and the poor victim other own flightiness and passion for
dressing up, deceived by vile Fagott's firm, dreamed of only one thing -
falling through the earth. A policeman made for the unfortunate woman,
drilling the air with his whistle, and after the policeman hastened some
merry young men in caps. It was they who produced the guffawing and hooting.
A skinny, moustachioed cabby flew up to the first undressed woman and
dashingly reined in his bony, broken-down nag. The moustached face was
grinning gleefully.
Rimsky beat himself on the head with his fist, spat, and leaped back
from the window. For some time he sat at his desk listening to the street.
The whistling at various points reached its highest pitch, then began to
subside. The scandal, to Rimsky's surprise, was somehow liquidated with
unexpected swiftness.
It came time to act. He had to drink the bitter cup of responsibility.
The telephones had been repaired during the third part. He had to make
calls, to tell what had happened, to ask for help, lie his way out of it,
heap everything on Likhodeev, cover up for himself, and so on. Pah, the
devil!
Twice the upset director put his hand on the receiver, and twice he
drew it back. And suddenly, in the dead silence of the office, the telephone
burst out ringing by itself right in the findirector's face, and he gave a
start and went cold. 'My nerves are really upset, though!' he thought, and
picked up the receiver. He recoiled from it instantly and turned whiter than
paper. A soft but at the same time insinuating and lewd female voice
whispered into the receiver:
'Don't call anywhere, Rimsky, it'll be bad ...'
The receiver straight away went empty. With goose-flesh prickling on
his back, the findirector hung up the telephone and for some reason turned
to look at the window behind him. Through the scant and still barely
greening branches of a maple, he saw the moon racing in a transparent cloud.
His eyes fixed on the branches for some reason, Rimsky went on gazing
at them, and the longer he gazed, the more strongly he was gripped by fear.
With great effort, the findirector finally turned away from the moonlit
window and stood up. There could no longer be any question of phone calls,
and now the findirector was thinking of only one thing - getting out of the
theatre as quickly as possible.
He listened: the theatre building was silent. Rimsky realized that he
had long been the only one on the whole second floor, and a childish,
irrepressible fear came over him at this thought. He could not think without
shuddering of having to walk alone now along the empty corridors and down
the stairs. Feverishly he seized the hypnotist's banknotes from the table,
put them in his briefcase, and coughed so as to cheer himself up at least a
little. The cough came out slightly hoarse, weak.
And here it seemed to him that a whiff of some putrid dankness was
coming in under the office door. Shivers ran down the findirector's spine.
And then the clock also rang out unexpectedly and began to strike midnight.
And even its striking provoked shivers in the findirector. But his heart
definitively sank when he heard the English key turning quietly in the lock.
Clutching his briefcase with damp, cold hands, the findirector felt that if
this scraping in the keyhole were to go on any longer, he would break down
and give a piercing scream.
Finally the door yielded to someone's efforts, opened, and Varenukha
noiselessly entered the office. Rimsky simply sank down into the armchair
where he stood, because his legs gave way. Drawing a deep breath, he smiled
an ingratiating smile, as it were, and said quietly:
'God, you frightened me...'
Yes, this sudden appearance might have frightened anyone you like, and
yet at the same time it was a great joy: at least one little end peeped out
in this tangled affair.
Well, tell me quickly! Well? Well?' Rimsky wheezed, grasping at this
little end. 'What does it all mean?!'
`Excuse me, please,' the entering man replied in a hollow voice,
closing the door, 'I thought you had already left.'
And Varenukha, without taking his cap off, walked to the armchair and
sat on the other side of the desk.
It must be said that Varenukha's response was marked by a slight oddity
which at once needled the findirector, who could compete in sensitivity with
the seismograph of any of the world's best stations. How could it be? Why
did Varenukha come to the findirector's office if he thought he was not
there? He had his own office, first of all. And second, whichever entrance
to the building Varenukha had used, he would inevitably have met one of the
night-watchmen, to all of whom it had been announced that Grigory Danilovich
was staying late in his office. But the findirector did not spend long
pondering this oddity - he had other problems.
'Why didn't you call? What are all these shenanigans about Yalta?'
"Well, it's as I was saying,' the administrator replied, sucking as if
he were troubled by a bad tooth. 'He was found in the tavern in Pushkino.'
`In Pushkino?! You mean just outside Moscow?! What about the telegrams
from Yalta?!'
'The devil they're from Yalta! He got a telegrapher drunk in Pushkino,
and the two of them started acting up, sending telegrams marked "Yalta",
among other things.'
'Aha ... aha ... Well, all right, all right...' Rimsky did not say but
sang out. His eyes lit up with a yellow light. In his head there formed the
festive picture of Styopa's shameful dismissal from his job. Deliverance!
The findirector's long-awaited deliverance from this disaster in the person
of Likhodeev! And maybe Stepan Bogdanovich would achieve something worse
than dismissal... The details!' said Rimsky, banging the paperweight on the
desk.
And Varenukha began giving the details. As soon as he arrived where the
findirector had sent him, he was received at once and given a most attentive
hearing. No one, of course, even entertained the thought that Styopa could
be in Yalta. Everyone agreed at once with Varenukha's suggestion that
Likhodeev was, of course, at the Yalta in Pushkino.
`Then where is he now?' the agitated findirector interrupted the
administrator.
'Well, where else could he be?' the administrator replied, grinning
crookedly. 'In a sobering-up cell, naturally!'
'Well, well. How nice!'
Varenukha went on with his story, and the more he told, the more
vividly there unfolded before the findirector the long chain of Likhodeev's
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.
His nerves gave out, as they say, and Rimsky fled to his office before
they finished drawing up the report. He sat at his desk and stared with
inflamed eyes at the magic banknotes lying before him. The findirector's
wits were addled. A steady hum came from outside. The audience poured in
streams from the Variety building into the street. Rimsky's extremely
sharpened hearing suddenly caught the distant trill of a policeman. That in
itself never bodes anything pleasant. But when it was repeated and, to
assist it, another joined in, more authoritative and prolonged, and to them
was added a clearly audible guffawing and even some hooting, the findirector
understood at once that something else scandalous and vile had happened in
the street. And that, however much he wanted to wave it away, it was closely
connected with the repulsive son to Sadovaya, his face twisted, and he did
not whisper but hissed:
'So I thought!'
In the bright glare of the strongest street lights he saw, just below
him on the sidewalk, a lady in nothing but a shift and violet bloomers.
True, there was a little hat on the lady's head and an umbrella in her
hands. The lady, who was in a state of utter consternation, now crouching
down, now making as if to run off somewhere, was surrounded by an agitated
crowd, which produced the very guffawing that had sent a shiver down the
fin-director's spine. Next to the lady some citizen was flitting about,
trying to tear off his summer coat, and in his agitation simply unable to
manage the sleeve in which his arm was stuck.
Shouts and roaring guffaws came from yet another place - namely, the
left entrance - and turning his head in that direction, Grigory Danilovich
saw a second lady, in pink underwear. She leaped from the street to the
sidewalk, striving to hide in the hallway, but the audience pouring out
blocked the way, and the poor victim other own flightiness and passion for
dressing up, deceived by vile Fagott's firm, dreamed of only one thing -
falling through the earth. A policeman made for the unfortunate woman,
drilling the air with his whistle, and after the policeman hastened some
merry young men in caps. It was they who produced the guffawing and hooting.
A skinny, moustachioed cabby flew up to the first undressed woman and
dashingly reined in his bony, broken-down nag. The moustached face was
grinning gleefully.
Rimsky beat himself on the head with his fist, spat, and leaped back
from the window. For some time he sat at his desk listening to the street.
The whistling at various points reached its highest pitch, then began to
subside. The scandal, to Rimsky's surprise, was somehow liquidated with
unexpected swiftness.
It came time to act. He had to drink the bitter cup of responsibility.
The telephones had been repaired during the third part. He had to make
calls, to tell what had happened, to ask for help, lie his way out of it,
heap everything on Likhodeev, cover up for himself, and so on. Pah, the
devil!
Twice the upset director put his hand on the receiver, and twice he
drew it back. And suddenly, in the dead silence of the office, the telephone
burst out ringing by itself right in the findirector's face, and he gave a
start and went cold. 'My nerves are really upset, though!' he thought, and
picked up the receiver. He recoiled from it instantly and turned whiter than
paper. A soft but at the same time insinuating and lewd female voice
whispered into the receiver:
'Don't call anywhere, Rimsky, it'll be bad ...'
The receiver straight away went empty. With goose-flesh prickling on
his back, the findirector hung up the telephone and for some reason turned
to look at the window behind him. Through the scant and still barely
greening branches of a maple, he saw the moon racing in a transparent cloud.
His eyes fixed on the branches for some reason, Rimsky went on gazing
at them, and the longer he gazed, the more strongly he was gripped by fear.
With great effort, the findirector finally turned away from the moonlit
window and stood up. There could no longer be any question of phone calls,
and now the findirector was thinking of only one thing - getting out of the
theatre as quickly as possible.
He listened: the theatre building was silent. Rimsky realized that he
had long been the only one on the whole second floor, and a childish,
irrepressible fear came over him at this thought. He could not think without
shuddering of having to walk alone now along the empty corridors and down
the stairs. Feverishly he seized the hypnotist's banknotes from the table,
put them in his briefcase, and coughed so as to cheer himself up at least a
little. The cough came out slightly hoarse, weak.
And here it seemed to him that a whiff of some putrid dankness was
coming in under the office door. Shivers ran down the findirector's spine.
And then the clock also rang out unexpectedly and began to strike midnight.
And even its striking provoked shivers in the findirector. But his heart
definitively sank when he heard the English key turning quietly in the lock.
Clutching his briefcase with damp, cold hands, the findirector felt that if
this scraping in the keyhole were to go on any longer, he would break down
and give a piercing scream.
Finally the door yielded to someone's efforts, opened, and Varenukha
noiselessly entered the office. Rimsky simply sank down into the armchair
where he stood, because his legs gave way. Drawing a deep breath, he smiled
an ingratiating smile, as it were, and said quietly:
'God, you frightened me...'
Yes, this sudden appearance might have frightened anyone you like, and
yet at the same time it was a great joy: at least one little end peeped out
in this tangled affair.
Well, tell me quickly! Well? Well?' Rimsky wheezed, grasping at this
little end. 'What does it all mean?!'
`Excuse me, please,' the entering man replied in a hollow voice,
closing the door, 'I thought you had already left.'
And Varenukha, without taking his cap off, walked to the armchair and
sat on the other side of the desk.
It must be said that Varenukha's response was marked by a slight oddity
which at once needled the findirector, who could compete in sensitivity with
the seismograph of any of the world's best stations. How could it be? Why
did Varenukha come to the findirector's office if he thought he was not
there? He had his own office, first of all. And second, whichever entrance
to the building Varenukha had used, he would inevitably have met one of the
night-watchmen, to all of whom it had been announced that Grigory Danilovich
was staying late in his office. But the findirector did not spend long
pondering this oddity - he had other problems.
'Why didn't you call? What are all these shenanigans about Yalta?'
"Well, it's as I was saying,' the administrator replied, sucking as if
he were troubled by a bad tooth. 'He was found in the tavern in Pushkino.'
`In Pushkino?! You mean just outside Moscow?! What about the telegrams
from Yalta?!'
'The devil they're from Yalta! He got a telegrapher drunk in Pushkino,
and the two of them started acting up, sending telegrams marked "Yalta",
among other things.'
'Aha ... aha ... Well, all right, all right...' Rimsky did not say but
sang out. His eyes lit up with a yellow light. In his head there formed the
festive picture of Styopa's shameful dismissal from his job. Deliverance!
The findirector's long-awaited deliverance from this disaster in the person
of Likhodeev! And maybe Stepan Bogdanovich would achieve something worse
than dismissal... The details!' said Rimsky, banging the paperweight on the
desk.
And Varenukha began giving the details. As soon as he arrived where the
findirector had sent him, he was received at once and given a most attentive
hearing. No one, of course, even entertained the thought that Styopa could
be in Yalta. Everyone agreed at once with Varenukha's suggestion that
Likhodeev was, of course, at the Yalta in Pushkino.
`Then where is he now?' the agitated findirector interrupted the
administrator.
'Well, where else could he be?' the administrator replied, grinning
crookedly. 'In a sobering-up cell, naturally!'
'Well, well. How nice!'
Varenukha went on with his story, and the more he told, the more
vividly there unfolded before the findirector the long chain of Likhodeev's