第2章 BOOK ONE (1)

Chapter 1

NEVER SPEAK TO STRANGERS

At the hour of sunset, on a hot spring day, two citizens appeared in the Patriarchs' Ponds Park. One, about forty, in a gray summer suit, was short, plump, dark-haired and partly bald. He carried his respectable pancake-shaped hat in his hand, and his clean-shaven face was adorned by a pair of supernaturally large eyeglasses in a black frame. The other was a broad-shouldered young man with a mop of shaggy red hair, in a plaid cap pushed well back on his head, a checked cowboy shirt, crumpled white trousers, and black sneakers.

The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, editor of an important literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the largest literary associations in Moscow, known by its initials as MASSOLIT. His young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the pen name of Homeless.

When they had reached the shade of the linden trees, which were just turning green, the literary gentlemen hurried toward the brightly painted stall with the sign

BEER AND SOFT DRINKS

Oh, yes, we must take note of the first strange thing about that dreadful May evening. Not a soul was to be seen around-not only at the stall, but anywhere along the entire avenue, running parallel to Malaya Bronnaya. At that hour, when it no longer seemed possible to breathe, when the sun was tumbling in a dry haze somewhere behind Sadovoye Circle, leaving Moscow scorched and gasping, nobody came to cool off under the lindens, to sit down on a bench. The avenue was deserted.

"Give us some Narzan," said Berlioz.

"We have no Narzan," answered the woman behind the stall in an offended tone.

"Do you have beer?" Homeless inquired in a hoarse voice.

"They'll bring beer in the evening," said the woman.

"What do you have?" asked Berlioz.

"Apricot soda, but it's warm," said the woman.

"All right, let's have that. Let's have it!"

The apricot soda produced an abundant yellow foam, and the air began to smell of a barber shop. Drinking it down, the writers immediately began to hiccup, paid, and settled on a bench facing the pond, with their backs to Bronnaya.

And now came the second strange thing, which involved only Berlioz. He suddenly stopped hiccuping, his heart thumped and dropped somewhere for a second, then returned, but with a blunt needle stuck in it. Besides, Berlioz was gripped with fear, unreasonable but so strong that he had the impulse to rush out of the park without a backward glance.

He looked around anxiously, unable to understand what had frightened him. He turned pale, mopped his forehead with his handkerchief, and thought, "What's wrong with me? This never happened before. My heart is playing up…. I'm overworked…. Perhaps I ought to drop everything and run down to Kislovodsk…."

At this moment the fiery air before him condensed and spun itself into a transparent citizen of the strangest appearance. A jockey's cap on a tiny head, a checked jacket, much too short for him and also woven of air…. The citizen was seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, incredibly lean, and, if you please, with a jeering expression on his physiognomy.

The life which Berlioz had led until that moment had not prepared him for extraordinary phenomena. Turning still paler, he stared with bulging eyes and thought with consternation, "This cannot be!"

But, alas, it was. And the elongated citizen that he could see through swayed before his eyes, to left and right, without touching the ground.

Berlioz was so panic-stricken that he closed his eyes. And when he opened them again, he saw that everything was over, the apparition had dissolved, the checkered character had vanished, and with him, the needle had slipped out of his heart.

"What the devil!" the editor exclaimed. "You know, Ivan, I nearly had a heatstroke just now! There was even a kind of hallucination…." He tried to smile, but anxiety still flickered in his eyes, and his hands trembled. Gradually, however, he recovered his composure, fanned himself with his handkerchief, and, saying quite briskly, "Well, then… ," he continued the conversation interrupted by the drinking of the apricot soda.

This conversation, as we learned subsequently, was about Jesus Christ. The point is that the editor had commissioned the poet to write a long antireligious poem for the coming issue of his journal. Ivan Nikolayevich composed the poem, and quickly, too. Unfortunately, the editor was not at all pleased with it. Homeless had portrayed the principal character of his poem, Jesus, in very dark hues. Nevertheless, in the editor's opinion, the poem had to be rewritten. And so the editor was giving the poet something of a lecture on Jesus, in order to stress the poet's basic error.

It is difficult to say precisely what had tripped up Ivan Nikolayevich-his imaginative powers or complete unfamiliarity with the subject. But his Jesus turned out, well… altogether alive-the Jesus who had existed once upon a time, although invested, it is true, with a full range of negative characteristics.

Berlioz, on the other hand, wanted to prove to the poet that the main point was not whether Jesus had been good or bad, but that he had never existed as an individual, and that all the stories about him were mere inventions, simple myths.

It must be added that the editor was a well-read man; he skillfully interlarded his speech with references to ancient historians, such as the famed Philo of Alexandria and the brilliantly learned Flavius Josephus, none of whom had ever mentioned the existence of Jesus. Showing his solid erudition, Mikhail Alexandrovich informed the poet, among other things, that the passage of Book Fifteen, Chapter 44 of Tacitus' famous Annals, which speaks of the execution of Jesus, was nothing but a later spurious insertion.

The poet, to whom everything the editor said was new, listened to Mikhail Alexandrovich attentively, staring at him with his slightly impudent green eyes, and merely hiccuped from time to time, damning the apricot soda under his breath.

"There is not a single Eastern religion," said Berlioz, "where you will not find an immaculate maiden giving birth to a god. And the Christians invented nothing new, but used a similar legend to create their Jesus, who in fact had never existed. And this is what needs to be stressed above all…."

The editor's high tenor resounded in the deserted avenue. And, as he delved deeper and deeper into jungles where only a highly educated man could venture without risking his neck, the poet learned more and more fascinating and useful facts about the Egyptian Osiris, the beneficent god who was the son of Sky and Earth, and about the Phoenician god Marduk, and about Tammuz, and even about the more obscure god Huitzilopochtli, who had once been worshiped by the Aztecs in Mexico. And just at the moment when Mikhail Alexandrovich was telling the poet how the Aztecs had used dough to make figurines of Huitzilopochtli, the first stroller made an appearance in the avenue.

Afterward, when-frankly speaking-it was already too late, various official institutions filed reports describing this man. A comparison of these reports can only cause astonishment. Thus, the first says that the man was short, had gold teeth, and limped on the right foot. The second, that the man was of enormous height, had platinum crowns, and limped on the left foot. The third states laconically that the man had no special distinguishing characteristics. We must discard all these reports as quite worthless.

To begin with, the man described did not limp on either foot, and was neither short nor enormous in height, but simply tall. As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns on the left side of his mouth, and gold ones on the right. He wore an expensive gray suit and foreign shoes of the same color. His gray beret was worn at a jaunty angle over his ear, and under his arm he carried a cane with a black handle in the form of a poodle's head. He appeared to be in his forties. His mouth was somehow twisted. He was smooth shaven. A brunet. His right eye was black; the left, for some strange reason, green. Black eyebrows, but one higher than the other. In short, a foreigner.

Passing the bench where the editor and the poet were sitting, the foreigner glanced at them out of the corner of his eye, stopped, and suddenly sat down on the next bench, two steps away from the friends.

"A German," thought Berlioz. "An Englishman," thought Homeless. "Doesn't he feel too warm in gloves?"

The foreigner's eyes ran over the tall buildings that formed a square, bordering the pond, and it was obvious that he was seeing this place for the first time and that it interested him. His glance stopped on the upper floors, where the windowpanes dazzlingly reflected the fragmented sun that was departing from Mikhail Alexandrovich forever, then slid down to where the panes were darkening with evening. He smiled condescendingly, screwed up his eyes, placed his hands on the cane handle, and his chin on his hands.

"You described such scenes as the birth of Christ, the Son of God, satirically and extremely well, Ivan," said Berlioz. "But the point is that a whole string of sons of god preceded Jesus-the Phoenician Adonis, the Phrygian Attis, the Persian Mithras. And, to make it short, none of them was born, and none existed, including Jesus. Instead of dwelling on the birth or the coming of the Magi, you must show how the preposterous rumors were spread about this coming. Otherwise, as you tell the story, it appears that he was really born!"

Homeless tried to suppress the tormenting hiccups by holding his breath, which made him hiccup still more painfully and loudly, and at the same moment Berlioz broke off his oration because the foreigner suddenly got up and walked toward the writers. They looked at him with astonishment.

"Excuse me, please," the man began, speaking with a foreign accent, but in correct Russian, "for taking the liberty… although we have not met… But the topic of your learned discourse is so interesting that…"

He courteously removed his beret, and the friends had little choice but to raise themselves a little and bow.

"No, he's more like a Frenchman…" thought Berlioz.

"A Pole…" thought Homeless.

It must be added that the poet was repelled by the foreigner from his very first words, while Berlioz rather liked him. Well, perhaps it was not so much that he liked him, but, how shall I put it… was intrigued by him, I guess.

"May I join you?" the foreigner asked civilly, and the friends involuntarily moved apart. The foreigner slipped in between them and immediately entered the conversation. "If I heard correctly, you said that Jesus never existed?" he asked, turning his green left eye to Berlioz.

"You heard correctly," Berlioz answered courteously. "That was precisely what I said."

"Ah, how interesting!" exclaimed the foreigner.

"What the devil does he want?" Homeless thought, frowning.

"And did you agree with your friend?" inquired the stranger, turning right, toward Homeless.

"One hundred per cent!" said the poet, who liked fanciful and figurative expressions.

"Astonishing!" exclaimed the uninvited companion. Then, for some strange reason, he threw a furtive glance over his shoulder like a thief, and, hushing his low voice still further, he said, "Forgive my importunity, but I understood that, in addition to all else, you don't believe in God either?" He opened his eyes wide with mock fright and added, "I swear I will not tell anyone!"

"No, we do not believe in God," Berlioz replied, smiling faintly at the tourist's fear. "But we can speak of it quite openly."

The foreigner threw himself back against the bench and asked, his voice rising almost to a squeal with curiosity, "You are atheists?"

"Yes, we are atheists," Berlioz answered, smiling, and Homeless thought angrily, "Latched onto us, the foreign goose!"

"Oh, how delightful!" cried the amazing foreigner, his head turning back and forth from one writer to the other.

"In our country atheism does not surprise anyone," Berlioz said with diplomatic courtesy. "Most of our population is intelligent and enlightened, and has long ceased to believe the fairy tales about God."

At this point the foreigner suddenly jumped up and pressed the astonished editor's hand, saying, "Permit me to thank you from the bottom of my heart!"

"What do you thank him for?" inquired Homeless, blinking.

"For a most important bit of information, which is of the highest interest to me as a traveler," the foreign eccentric explained, raising his finger significantly.

The important information had evidently indeed produced a strong impression on the traveler, for his eyes made a frightened round of the buildings, as though expecting to see an atheist in every window.

"No, he is not an Englishman," thought Berlioz. And Homeless thought, frowning again, "I'd like to know where he picked up his Russian."

"But permit me to ask you," the foreign guest resumed after a troubled silence, "what about the proofs of God's existence? As we know, there are exactly five of them."

"Alas!" Berlioz answered with regret. "None of these proofs is worth a thing, and humanity has long since scrapped them. You must agree that, in the realm of reason, there can be no proof of God's existence."

"Bravo!" cried the foreigner. "Bravo! These are exactly the words of the restless old Immanuel on this subject. But curiously enough, he demolished all five arguments and then, as if to mock himself, constructed his own sixth one."

"Kant's argument," the educated editor countered with a subtle smile, "is equally unconvincing. No wonder Schiller said that only slaves could find Kant's reasoning on this subject satisfactory. And Strauss simply laughed at his proof."

As Berlioz spoke, he thought to himself, "But still, who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?"

"This Kant ought to be sent to Solovki for three years for such arguments!" Ivan Nikolayevich burst out suddenly.

"Ivan!" Berlioz whispered with embarrassment.

But the suggestion that Kant be sent to Solovki not only did not shock the foreigner, but pleased him immensely.

"Exactly, exactly," he cried, and his green left eye, turned to Berlioz, glittered. "That's just the place for him! I told him that day at breakfast, 'Say what you will, Professor, but you have thought up something that makes no sense. It may be clever, but it's altogether too abstruse. People will laugh at you.'"

Berlioz gaped at him. "At breakfast?… Told Kant?… What is he babbling about?" he wondered.

"No," continued the stranger, undeterred by the editor's astonishment and addressing the poet. "It is impossible to send him to Solovki for the simple reason that he has resided for the past hundred-odd years in places considerably more remote than Solovki, and, I assure you, it is quite impossible to get him out of there."

"A pity," the belligerent poet responded.

"Indeed, a pity, I say so too," the stranger agreed, his eye flashing. Then he went on, "But what troubles me is this: if there is no God, then, you might ask, who governs the life of men and, generally, the entire situation here on earth?"

"Man himself governs it," Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this frankly rather unclear question.

"Sorry," the stranger responded mildly. "But in order to govern, it is, after all, necessary to have a definite plan for at least a fairly decent period of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how man can govern if he cannot plan for even so ridiculously short a span as a thousand years or so, if, in fact, he cannot guarantee his own next day?

"And really," the stranger turned to Berlioz, "imagine yourself, for example, trying to govern, to manage both others and yourself, just getting into the swing of it, when suddenly you develop… hm, hm… cancer of the lung…." The foreigner smiled sweetly, as though the idea of cancer of the lung gave him intense pleasure. "Yes, cancer…" he relished the word, closing his eyes like a tom cat. "And all your management is done with!

"You are no longer interested in anyone's destiny but your own. Your relatives begin to lie to you. Sensing the end, you rush to doctors, then to charlatans, or even to fortunetellers, although you know yourself that all are equally useless. And everything ends tragically: he who had but recently believed that he was managing something, now lies stretched motionless in a wooden box, and those around him, realizing that he is no longer good for anything, incinerate him in an oven.

"Or it may be even worse. A man may plan to go to Kislovodsk," and the stranger squinted at Berlioz. "A trifling undertaking, one might think. But even this is not within his power to accomplish, for he may suddenly, for no known reason, slip and fall under a streetcar! Would you say that he had managed this himself? Would it not be more accurate to think that it was someone else entirely who had disposed of him?" And the stranger broke into an odd little laugh.

Berlioz listened to the unpleasant story about cancer and the streetcar with close attention, and vaguely anxious feelings began to stir in him. "He is not a foreigner… he is not a foreigner…." he thought. "A most peculiar individual… but then, who can he be?"

"I see you'd like to smoke?" the stranger suddenly asked Homeless. "What brand do you prefer?"

"Why, do you carry different brands?" the poet, who had run out of cigarettes, asked scowling.

"Which do you prefer?" the stranger repeated.

"Well, Our Brand," Homeless replied crossly.

The stranger immediately drew a cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to him.

"Our Brand…"

Both the editor and the poet were struck by the cigarette case even more than by the fact that it contained precisely Our Brand. It was huge, made of red gold, and its lid, as it was being opened, flashed with the blue and white fire of a diamond triangle.

The literary gentlemen had different thoughts. Berlioz said to himself, "No, he is a foreigner!" And Homeless thought, "The devil… have you ever!…"

The poet and the owner of the cigarette case lighted up, while Berlioz, a nonsmoker, declined.

"My counterargument," decided Berlioz, "must be: 'Yes, man is mortal, no one questions that. But the point is…'"

But before he had time to utter the words, the foreigner resumed:

"Yes, man is mortal, but this is not the worst of it. What is bad is that he sometimes dies suddenly. That's the trouble! And, generally, he can never say what he will do that very same evening."

"What an absurd way of posing the problem," Berlioz thought, and retorted:

"Well, this is an exaggeration. I know more or less definitely what to expect this evening. Of course, if a brick should drop on my head on Bronnaya…"

"A brick," the stranger interrupted with a magisterial air, "will never drop on anyone's head just out of the blue. And specifically, I can assure you that you are in no danger of it. You shall die another death."

"Do you happen to know which precisely?" Berlioz inquired with entirely natural irony, allowing himself to be drawn into a truly preposterous conversation. "And if so, would you mind telling me?"

"Willingly," responded the stranger. He looked Berlioz up and down as though measuring him for a new suit, and muttered through his teeth something that sounded like "One, two… Mercury in the second house… the Moon is gone… six-misfortune… evening-seven…" Then he announced loudly and gaily, "Your head will be cut off!"

Homeless stared with wild rage at the presumptuous stranger, and Berlioz asked with a crooked smile:

"And who precisely will do it? Enemies? Interventionists?"

"No," replied the stranger, "a Russian woman, a member of the Young Communist League."

"Hmm…" Berlioz grunted, irritated by the little joke. 'This, if you will excuse me, is not very likely."

"I beg your pardon," the foreigner replied, "but it is so. Oh, yes, I meant to ask you: what do you expect to do this evening, if it is not a secret?"

"It is no secret. I shall now stop off at home, on Sadovaya, and later, at ten o'clock, there will be a meeting of MASSOLIT, at which I shall be chairman."

"No, it is impossible," the foreigner rejoined firmly.

"And why?"

"Because," replied the foreigner, squinting up at the sky where black birds darted silently in anticipation of the coolness of the evening, "because Annushka has already bought sunflower oil, and not only bought it, but spilled it too. So that the meeting will not take place."

At this point, as may well be understood, there was silence under the lindens.

"Forgive me," Berlioz spoke after a pause, glancing at the foreigner who was babbling such nonsense, "but what has sunflower oil to do with it? And who is Annushka?"

"Sunflower oil has nothing to do with anything," Homeless suddenly broke in, evidently deciding to declare war on their uninvited companion. "Have you ever, by any chance, been in a hospital for the mentally ill?"

"Ivan!…" Mikhail Alexandrovich exclaimed in a low voice.

But the foreigner was not in the least offended. He burst into gay laughter.

"Oh, yes, I have, many times!" he cried, laughing, but fixing the poet with his unsmiling eye. "Name a place I have not been to! It is a pity, though, I have never asked any of the professors the meaning of schizophrenia. So that you will have to ask this question yourself, Ivan Nikolayevich!"

"How do you know my name?"

"Why, is there anyone who does not know you, Ivan Nikolayevich?" The foreigner took from his pocket last night's Literary Gazette, and Ivan Nikolayevich saw his face and his own verse on the very first page. But this evidence of his fame and popularity, which had been such a source of joy to him the day before, now gave the poet no pleasure whatsoever.

"I am sorry," he said and his face darkened. "Can you excuse us a moment? I want to say a few words to my friend."

"Oh, certainly!" exclaimed the stranger. "It is so pleasant here under the lindens, and I am, incidentally, in no hurry to go anywhere."

"Listen, Misha," the poet whispered, drawing Berlioz aside. "He is no tourist, he's a spy. He is a Russian émigré who has wormed his way back here. Ask to see his documents before he goes away…"

"You think so?" Berlioz whispered with alarm, thinking, "He's right…."

"Take my word," the poet hissed into his ear. "He is pretending to be a fool so he can get some information. You heard how he speaks Russian," the poet said, watching the stranger out of the corner of his eye lest he escape. "Come on, let's stop him before he makes off…."

And the poet drew Berlioz by his hand back to the bench.

The stranger was no longer sitting, but standing near the bench. In his hands was a little notebook in a dark-gray binding, a thick envelope made of good paper, and a calling card.

"Excuse me for failing to introduce myself in the heat of our argument. Here is my card, my passport, and the invitation to visit Moscow for a consultation," he said impressively, with a penetrating look at the two literary gentlemen.

The friends were embarrassed. "Damn it, he heard everything…." Berlioz thought, and gestured politely to indicate that there was no need to show documents. While the stranger held them out to the editor, the poet had time to catch the word "Professor" printed on the card in a foreign alphabet, and the first letter of his name-a "W."

"Very pleased," the editor mumbled in confusion, and the foreigner put the documents into his pocket.

Thus, relations were restored and all three sat down on the bench once more.

"Were you invited to our country as a consultant, Professor?" asked Berlioz.

"Yes, as a consultant."

"Are you German?" inquired Homeless.

"I?" asked the professor and suddenly fell into a reverie. "Yes, perhaps I am…" he said.

"You speak excellent Russian," remarked Homeless.

"Oh, I am generally polyglot, I know a great many languages," replied the professor.

"And what is your field?" asked Berlioz.

"I am a specialist in black magic."

"Now what!" flashed through the mind of Mikhail Alexandrovich.

"And… it was in this capacity that you were invited here?" he stuttered.

"Yes, in this capacity," confirmed the professor, and explained: "They have found in your State Library authentic manuscripts by the tenth-century necromancer, Herbert d'Aurillac. And I was asked to decipher them. I am the only specialist in the world."

"Aah! You are a historian?" Berlioz asked respectfully, with great relief.

"I am a historian," confirmed the scholar, and added irrelevantly, "There will be a most interesting occurrence at the Patriarchs' Ponds this evening!"

Both the editor and the poet were extremely astonished again. The professor beckoned to them, and when they bent over closer, he whispered:

"And keep in mind that Jesus existed."

"You see, Professor," Berlioz answered with a strained smile, "we respect your great erudition, but we ourselves maintain a different view on this question."

"There is no need for points of view," replied the strange professor. "He simply existed, that is all."

"But there must be some proof…." began Berlioz.

"There is no need for proof, either," answered the professor, and said in a low voice, suddenly without any accent: "Everything is very simple: In the early morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, wearing a white cloak with a blood-red lining and walking with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman…"

Chapter 2

PONTIUS PILATE

In the early morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, wearing a white cloak with a blood-red lining and walking with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, the Procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate, came out into the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great.

More than anything in the world, the Procurator detested the smell of rose oil, and everything now promised a bad day, since this smell had pursued the Procurator since dawn.

It seemed to the Procurator that the cypresses and palms in the garden gave off the smell of roses, that the accursed whiff of roses was mingled with the odors of the convoy's leather gear and sweat.

A faint smoke reached the colonnade across the upper terrace of the garden from the outbuildings behind the palace where the First Cohort of the Twelfth Lightning-Swift Legion, which had come to Yershalayim with the Procurator, was billeted. And this slightly acrid smoke, which attested that the century cooks had begun to prepare dinner, was also mingled with the cloying rose smell.

"Gods, gods, why do you punish me? Yes, no doubt it is upon me again, again this terrible, invincible affliction… this hemicrania which grips half of the head with pain… without remedy, without escape… I must try not to move my head…."

A chair stood waiting for him on the mosaic floor near the fountain, and the Procurator sat down in it without looking at anyone and stretched his hand sideways. His secretary deferentially placed a sheet of parchment in his hand. Unable to suppress a pained grimace, the Procurator ran through the text out of the corner of his eye, returned the parchment to the secretary and said with an effort:

"The accused is from Galilee? Was the case sent to the Tetrarch?"

"Yes, Procurator," replied the secretary.

"What did he say?"

"He refused to give a decision in the case and ordered that the Sanhedrin's death sentence be submitted to you for confirmation," explained the secretary.

The Procurator's cheek twitched, and he said quietly:

"Bring in the accused."

Two legionaries immediately led in a man of about twenty-seven from the garden onto the balcony under the columns, and brought him before the Procurator's chair. The man was dressed in an old and torn pale-blue chiton. His head was covered with a white headcloth, with a leather thong around his forehead. His hands were tied behind his back. Under his left eye there was a large, dark bruise, and the corner of his mouth was cut and caked with blood. The prisoner looked at the Procurator with anxious curiosity.

The latter was silent for a while, then he asked in a low voice in Aramaic:

"So it was you who incited the people to destroy the Temple of Yershalayim?"

The Procurator sat motionless like a figure of stone, and only his lips moved faintly as he spoke. The Procurator sat like a figure of stone because he was afraid to move his fiercely aching head.

The man with the bound hands leaned forward slightly and began to speak:

"Good man! Believe me…"

But the Procurator, still motionless and without raising his voice, interrupted him at once:

"Is it me that you call a good man? You are mistaken. In Yershalayim everyone whispers about me that I am a vicious monster, and this is entirely true." And he added in the same monotonous voice: "Call Centurion Rat-Killer."

It seemed to everyone that the air on the balcony darkened when Mark, the centurion of the First Century, nicknamed Rat-Killer, presented himself to the Procurator. Rat-Killer was a head taller than the tallest legionary, and so broad in the shoulders that he entirely shut out the sun, which was still low in the sky.

The Procurator addressed the centurion in Latin:

"This criminal calls me 'good man.' Take him out of here for a moment and explain to him how he must address me. But do not maim him."

Everyone, except the motionless Procurator, followed Mark Rat-Killer with his eyes as the centurion motioned to the prisoner with his hand that he must come with him. Rat-Killer generally drew all eyes to himself wherever he appeared because of his height. And those who saw him for the first time looked at him also because the centurion's face was disfigured: his nose had once been broken by a blow of a German cudgel.

Mark's heavy boots clattered across the mosaic. The bound man followed him noiselessly, and complete silence fell under the colonnade. All that could be heard was the cooing of pigeons in the garden near the balcony, and the water singing a complicated, pleasant song in the fountain.

The Procurator would have liked to get up and let the water run over his temple, and stay so, motionless. But he knew that even this would not help.

Bringing the prisoner from the colonnade into the garden, Rat-Killer took a lash from the hands of a legionary standing at the foot of a bronze statue. Swinging lightly, he struck the prisoner across the shoulders. The centurion's movement was careless and easy, but the bound man instantly crashed to the ground as though someone had cut him down; he gasped for air, the color drained out of his face, and his eyes became expressionless.

With his left hand, Mark lightly lifted up the fallen man as though he were an empty sack, set him on his feet, and spoke nasally, mispronouncing the Aramaic words:

"The Roman Procurator must be addressed as Hegemon. Speak no other words. Stand still. Do you understand me, or shall I hit you again?"

The prisoner swayed, but mastered himself. His color returned. He drew his breath and answered hoarsely:

"I understand you. Don't hit me."

A moment later he stood again before the Procurator.

The flat, sick voice asked:

"Name?"

"Mine?" hastily asked the prisoner, expressing with all his being his readiness to answer clearly and provoke no further anger.

The Procurator said in a low voice:

"I know mine. Don't pretend to be more stupid than you are. Yours."

"Yeshua," the prisoner answered promptly.

"Any surname?"

"Ha-Nozri."

"Where are you from?"

"From the city of Gamala," the prisoner replied, indicating with his head that somewhere far away, to the right of him, in the north, there was a city called Gamala.

"Who are you by birth?"

"I do not know exactly," the prisoner answered quickly. "I don't remember my parents. I was told that my father was a Syrian…."

"Where is your permanent home?"

"I have no permanent dwelling place," the prisoner answered shyly. "I travel from town to town."

"This can be put more briefly, in a single word-a vagrant," said the Procurator, and asked: "Any relatives?"

"None. I am alone in the world."

"Are you literate?"

"Yes."

"Do you know any language besides Aramaic?"

"Yes. Greek."

A swollen eyelid rose a little, and an eye blurred with suffering stared at the prisoner. The other eye remained shut.

Pilate spoke in Greek:

"So you intended to destroy the Temple and called upon the people to do it?"

The prisoner became animated again and his eyes lost their expression of fear. He answered in Greek:

"No, goo…" tenor flashed in his eyes because he had almost made a slip. "No, Hegemon, I have never in my life intended to destroy the Temple and have never urged anyone to such senseless action."

Astonishment flickered in the face of the secretary, who sat huddled over a low table, writing down the testimony. He raised his head, but immediately bent it back to his parchment.

"Many people gather in this city for the holidays. Among them there are Magi, astrologers, diviners, and murderers," the Procurator spoke monotonously. "There are also liars. You are a liar. It is clearly written: Incited people to destroy the Temple. People testified to this."

"Those good people," the prisoner began, and added hastily, "Hegemon," then continued, "have no learning of any kind and have confused all that I said. I am beginning to fear that this confusion will continue for a very long time. And all because he writes things down incorrectly."

There was a silence. Now both sick eyes stared heavily at the prisoner.

"I repeat, but for the last time, stop pretending madness, rogue," Pilate said softly and monotonously. "Not much is written down, but enough is written to hang you."

"No, no, Hegemon," the prisoner spoke, all of his being straining in the effort to convince. "There is one who follows and follows me with a goatskin parchment, writing all the time. But once I glanced into this parchment and was horrified. I never said a word of what was written there. I pleaded with him: 'Burn your parchment, I beg of you!' But he tore it from my hands and ran away."

"Who is he?" Pilate asked squeamishly and touched his hand to his temple.

"Matthu Levi," the prisoner explained willingly. "He was a tax collector, and I first met him on the road in Bethphage, where the fig orchard comes out at an angle, and talked with him. At first he treated me with enmity and even insulted me, or rather thought he was insulting me by calling me a dog." The prisoner smiled. "Personally, I see nothing bad in this animal to take offense at this word…"

The secretary stopped writing and stealthily threw an astonished glance-not at the prisoner, but at the Procurator.

"… However, after listening to me, he began to soften," continued Yeshua. "And finally he threw his money away on the road and said that he would come wandering with me…."

Pilate smiled wryly with one cheek, baring his yellow teeth, and said, turning his whole body to the secretary:

"O city of Yershalayim! What stories you will hear in it! A tax collector, throwing money on the road!"

The secretary, not knowing how to reply to this, chose to mimic Pilate's smile.

"He said that money had become hateful to him," Yeshua explained Matthu's strange behavior, and added, "And ever since that day he has been my traveling companion."

Still showing his teeth, the Procurator glanced at the prisoner, then at the sun which was relentlessly rising over the equestrian statues of the hippodrome that lay far below on the right. And suddenly, with unbearable distress, he thought that it would be simplest of all to get rid of this strange rascal by pronouncing two short words, "Hang him." To get rid of the convoy as well, to leave the colonnade and go to the interior of the palace, to order the room to be darkened, to throw himself on the couch, demand cold water, call his dog Banga in a piteous voice and complain to him about the hemicrania. And the thought of poison suddenly flashed temptingly through the Procurator's sick head.

He looked at the prisoner with bleary eyes and sat in silence for a time, painfully trying to remember why this prisoner with a face maimed and bruised by blows was standing before him under the pitiless morning sun of Yershalayim, and what unnecessary questions he still had to ask the man.

"Matthu Levi?" the sick Procurator asked hoarsely and closed his eyes.

"Yes, Matthu Levi," he heard the high, tormenting voice.

"But what, after all, did you say about the Temple to the crowd in the market place?"

The answering voice seemed to stab at Pilate's temples, was unbearably painful as it spoke:

"I said, Hegemon, that the Temple of the old faith would fall and that a new temple of truth would arise. I said it in these words to make it easier to understand."

"But why did you disturb the people in the market place, wandering beggar, talking to them about the truth, of which you do not have any conception? What is truth?"

And the Procurator thought, "Oh, gods! I am asking him questions about things that have nothing to do with the trial… my mind does not serve me any more…." And again he had a vision of a cup of dark liquid. "Poison, give me poison…."

And once again he heard the voice:

"The truth is, first of all, that your head aches and aches so badly that you are giving yourself over to cowardly thoughts of death. It is not only more than you can bear to talk to me, but it is even difficult for you to look at me. And at this moment I am involuntarily your torturer, which grieves me. You cannot even think of anything, and you are dreaming only of being with your dog, which is evidently the only creature you are attached to. But your suffering will be over soon, your headache will pass."

The secretary stared at the prisoner with bulging eyes and stopped writing in the middle of a word.

Pilate raised his tormented eyes to the prisoner and saw that the sun was already quite high over the hippodrome, that a ray had penetrated under the colonnade and was creeping up to Yeshua's worn sandals, and that he was trying to step out of the sun.

The Procurator rose from his chair, pressed his head with his hands, and his yellowish, shaven face expressed awe. But he immediately suppressed it by an effort of will and lowered himself into the chair again.

The prisoner, meantime, continued to speak, but the secretary recorded nothing more and merely drank in every word, stretching out his neck like a goose.

"Well, now it is over," said the prisoner, looking at Pilate with good will. "And I am very glad. I would advise you, Hegemon, to leave the palace for a while and take a stroll somewhere in the vicinity-perhaps in the gardens on Mount Eleon. The storm will break…" the prisoner turned and squinted at the sun, "… later, toward evening. A stroll would do you much good, and I would be pleased to accompany you. Some new thoughts have come to my mind, and I believe that they might interest you. I should be glad to share them with you, especially since you impress me as a very intelligent man."

The secretary turned deathly pale and dropped the scroll on the floor.

"The trouble," continued the bound prisoner without being stopped by anyone, "is that you keep to yourself too much and have lost all faith in men. After all, you must agree, a man cannot place all of his affection in a dog. Your life is too barren, Hegemon." And the speaker permitted himself to smile.

The secretary's mind was now on a single question: could he, or could he not believe his ears? He had no choice but to believe. Then he tried to imagine what fantastic forms the wrath of the fiery-tempered Procurator would take at this unprecedented impertinence of the prisoner. But even this defied the secretary's imagination, although he knew the Procurator well.

Then came the cracked, husky voice of the Procurator, who said in Latin:

"Untie his hands."

One of the legionaries of the convoy clicked his spear, handed it to another, approached the prisoner and removed the rope. The secretary picked up the scroll and decided for the time being to write nothing down and to be surprised by nothing.

"Admit it," Pilate said in an undertone in Greek, "you are a great physician?"

"No, Procurator, I am not a physician," the prisoner answered, rubbing his crumpled, red and swollen wrist with obvious pleasure.

Frowning, Pilate drilled the prisoner with his eyes, which were no longer blurred but flashed with their well-known sparks.

"I did not ask you," said Pilate. "Do you know Latin?"

"Yes, I do," said the prisoner.

The color rose in Pilate's sallow cheeks, and he asked in Latin:

"How did you know I wanted to call my dog?"

"Very simply," the prisoner replied in Latin. "You moved your hand in the air," and he repeated Pilate's gesture, "as if you wanted to stroke, and your lips…"

"Yes," said Pilate.

They were silent a while. Then Pilate asked in Greek:

"So you are a physician?"

"No, no," the prisoner answered quickly. "Believe me, I am not a physician."

"Very well, if you wish to keep it secret, do. This has no direct bearing on the case. So you say that you did not urge anyone to destroy… or set fire to the Temple, or to demolish it in any other way?"

"I repeat, Hegemon, I have never urged anyone to do such things. Do I look like a half-wit?"

"Oh, no, you don't look like a half-wit," the Procurator said quietly and smiled a strange and terrible smile. "Swear to me, then, that this has never happened."

"What do you want me to swear by?" asked the unbound prisoner with animation.

"Well, let us say by your life," said the Procurator. "This is just the time to swear by it, for it hangs by a hair-you must know that."

"And is it your belief that you have hung it so, Hegemon?" asked the prisoner. "If so, you are very mistaken."

Pilate started and spoke through his teeth:

"I can cut this hair."

"There, too, you are mistaken," the prisoner said with a luminous smile, shielding himself from the sun with his hand. "You must agree that the hair can surely be cut only by him who had hung it?"

"Well, well," Pilate said, smiling. "Now I do not doubt that the idlers of Yershalayim followed your every step. I do not know who hung your tongue on its hinges, but it is hung well. Incidentally, tell me, is it true that you came to Yershalayim through the Susa Gate mounted on an ass and followed by a multitude crying welcome to you as to a prophet?" and the Procurator pointed to the parchment scroll.

The prisoner gave the Procurator a puzzled look.

"I have no ass, Hegemon," he said. "It is true that I came to Yershalayim through the Susa Gate, but I came on foot. My only companion was Matthu Levi, and nobody cried anything to me, for nobody knew me then in Yershalayim."

"And do you know these men," continued Pilate without taking his eyes away from the prisoner, "a certain Dismas, Gestas, and Bar-Rabban?"

"These good men I do not know," said the prisoner.

"Is this the truth?"

"It is the truth."

"And now tell me, why do you use the words 'good men' all the time? Do you call everyone that?"

"Everyone," answered the prisoner. "There are no bad people in the world."

"I hear this for the first time," said Pilate, with a wry smile. "But perhaps I know life too little!… You need not write any more," he turned to the secretary, although the latter was no longer writing down anything. Then he continued, addressing the prisoner: "Did you read this in some Greek book?"

"No, I came to it by myself."

"And you preach it?"

"Yes."

"And what about a man like the centurion Mark, who was nicknamed Rat-Killer. Is he good?"

"Yes," answered the prisoner. "But he is an unhappy man. Since good men maimed him, he has become cruel and hard. I should like to know who mutilated him."

"I shall be glad to tell you," responded Pilate, "for I witnessed it. The good men threw themselves upon him like dogs upon a bear. The Germans hung on his neck, his arms, his feet. Our infantry maniple was caught in a pocket, and if the cavalry turma, which I commanded, had not cut in, you would not have had your conversation with Rat-Killer, philosopher. This happened in the battle of Idistaviso, in the Valley of the Maidens."

"If I could have a talk with him," the prisoner said dreamily, "I am certain that he would change completely."

"I imagine," said Pilate, "that you would give the legate of the legion small reason to rejoice if you took it into your head to talk to any of his officers or soldiers. However, this will not happen, to our general relief. And the first who will see to it is I."

At this moment a swallow darted into the colonnade, described a circle under the golden ceiling, swept down, its wing almost brushing the face of the bronze statue in one of the niches, and disappeared behind the capital of the column. Perhaps it had decided to build a nest there.

While it was flying, a formula shaped itself in the now clear and light head of the Procurator. It was as follows: the Hegemon had heard the case of the itinerant philosopher Yeshua, called Ha-Nozri, and found no evidence of crime. Specifically, he found no connection whatsoever between Yeshua's actions and the disorders which had recently occurred in Yershalayim. The itinerant philosopher turned out to be mentally deranged, and hence the Procurator did not confirm the death sentence passed upon Ha-Nozri by the Small Sanhedrin. However, since the mad Utopian speeches of Ha-Nozri could cause unrest in Yershalayim, the Procurator exiled Yeshua from Yershalayim and sentenced him to confinement in Strato-Caesarea on the Mediterranean Sea-that is, where the Procurator had his residence.

All that remained was to dictate this to the secretary.

The swallow's wings flicked over the Hegemon's head; the bird darted toward the bowl of the fountain, and escaped to freedom. The Procurator raised his eyes to the prisoner and saw that a column of dust had taken fire next to him.

"Is this all about him?" Pilate asked the secretary.

"Unfortunately, no," the secretary replied unexpectedly, and handed Pilate another sheet of parchment.

"What else now?" asked Pilate, frowning.

After he read the parchment, his face changed even more. Perhaps because the dark blood had risen to his neck and face, or for some other reason, but his skin lost its yellow tinge, turning purple, and his eyes seemed to have sunk into their sockets.

Again, this may have been the blood rushing up to his temples and throbbing there, but something happened to the Procurator's vision. It seemed to him that the prisoner's head had dissolved, and another appeared in its place. A golden crown with widely spaced points sat on this bald head. On its forehead was a round ulcer, eating away the skin and covered with a salve. It had a sunken, toothless mouth with a pendent, capricious lower lip. It seemed to Pilate that everything around him-the pink columns of the balcony, the roofs of Yershalayim in the distance below, beyond the garden-had disappeared, had drowned in the dense greenery of Capreaen gardens. Something strange had also happened to the Procurator's ears: it was as though he heard a distant, low, and menacing sound of trumpets, and a distinct, nasal voice haughtily drawled out the words, "The law concerning lese majesty…"

Short, incoherent and extraordinary thoughts rushed through Pilate's mind. "Lost!" Then, "We are lost!" And then an altogether absurd idea among the others, about some sort of immortality, and for some reason the thought of immortality gave him intolerable anguish.

With a great effort, Pilate drove out the apparition and his glance returned to the balcony. And once again the prisoner's eyes were before him.

"Listen, Ha-Nozri," the Procurator began, looking at Yeshua with a strange expression; the Procurator's face was glowering, but his eyes were troubled. "Did you ever say anything about the great Caesar? Answer me! Did you? Or… did you… not?" Pilate stretched out the word "not" somewhat more than was proper in court, and his glance sent Yeshua a thought that he seemed anxious to suggest to the prisoner.

"It is easy and pleasant to speak the truth," said the prisoner.

"I am not interested," Pilate spoke in a choked, angry voice, "whether you find it pleasant or unpleasant to speak the truth. You shall have to speak it. But as you do, weigh every word if you want to avoid not only an inevitable, but an agonizing death."

No one knows what had come over the Procurator of Judea, but he allowed himself to raise his hand as if to shut out the sun, and from behind this hand, as from behind a shield, to send the prisoner a message with his eyes.

"And so," he went on, "answer me whether you know a certain Yehudah of Kerioth. And tell me exactly what you said to him, if you did, about Caesar?"

"This is what happened," the prisoner spoke readily. "The evening before last I met a young man near the Temple, who said that he was Yehudah of the town of Kerioth. He invited me to his house in the Lower City and treated me to…"

"A good man?" Pilate asked, with a diabolic spark in his eyes.

"A very good man," nodded the prisoner, "and eager for knowledge. He showed the greatest interest in my thoughts and welcomed me warmly…."

"He lit the lamps…" Pilate spoke through his teeth, echoing the prisoner's tone, and his eyes glittered.

"Why, yes," Yeshua continued, a bit surprised at the Procurator's knowledge. "He asked me about my views concerning state authority. He was extremely interested in this question."

"And what did you say?" asked Pilate. "Or will you tell me that you do not remember what you said?" Pilate's tone was hopeless now.

"I said, among other things," the prisoner answered, "that every form of authority means coercion over men, and that a time will come when there shall be neither Caesars, nor any other rulers. Man will come into the kingdom of truth and justice, where there will be no need for any authority."

"And then?"

"Then there was nothing," said the prisoner. "Men ran in and bound me and led me off to prison."

The secretary, trying not to miss a word, rapidly inscribed the words on his parchment.

"There was not, is not, and shall never be any rule in the world greater and more beneficent to men than the rule of the Emperor Tiberius!" Pilate's broken, sick voice rose and spread around him. The Procurator looked at his secretary and the convoy with hatred.

"And it is not for you, criminal madman, to talk about it! Let the convoy leave the balcony!" he cried suddenly, and added, turning to the secretary: "Leave me alone with the criminal. This is an affair of state!"

The soldiers of the convoy raised their spears and, clanking rhythmically with their metal-shod sandals, walked out into the garden. The secretary followed.

For a time the silence on the balcony was interrupted only by the song of the water in the fountain. Pilate saw the water swell over the bowl, breaking off after a while and running down in rivulets.

The prisoner spoke first.

"I see that some misfortune came of my talking to the young man of Kerioth. I have a premonition, Hegemon, that he will come to grief, and I am very sorry for him."

"I think," the Procurator answered with a strange grin, "that there is someone in the world who needs your pity more than Yehudah of Kerioth, and who will fare much worse than Yehudah!… So Mark Rat-Killer, a cold and confirmed hangman, the people," the Procurator pointed to Yeshua's mutilated face, "who beat you for your sermons, the outlaws Dismas and Gestas, who with their henchmen killed four soldiers, and, finally, the filthy informer Yehudah-all these are good men?"

"Yes," answered the prisoner.

"And the kingdom of truth will come?"

"It will come, Hegemon," Yeshua answered with conviction.

"It will never come!" Pilate cried suddenly in such a dreadful voice that Yeshua started back. In this voice, many years ago, Pilate had cried to his horsemen in the Valley of the Maidens, "Slash at them! Slash them! The giant Rat-Killer is trapped!"

He raised his voice, cracked from years of shouting commands, still higher, crying out the words so that they would be heard in the garden: "Criminal! Criminal! Criminal!" Then, lowering his voice, he asked, "Yeshua Ha-Nozri, do you believe in any gods?"

"There is one God," answered Yeshua. "And I believe in Him."

"Pray to him, then! Pray harder! However…" Pilate's voice dropped, "it will not help. You have no wife?" he asked with anguish, unable to understand what was happening to him.

"No, I am alone."

"Hateful city…" the Procurator muttered suddenly, and his shoulders twitched as if he were chilled. He rubbed his hands as though washing them. "It would have been much better, really, if someone had cut your throat before you met Yehudah of Kerioth."

"Why don't you let me go, Hegemon," the prisoner asked suddenly, and his voice became anxious. "I see they want to kill me."

Pilate's face contorted with a spasm; he turned the inflamed, red-veined whites of his eyes to Yeshua and said:

"Do you suppose, wretched man, that the Roman Procurator will release a man who said what you have said? Oh, gods, gods! Or do you think I am prepared to take your place? I do not share your thoughts! And listen to me: from this moment on, if you will say a single word, if you address anyone at all, beware of me! I repeat to you-beware!"

"Hegemon…"

"Silence!" cried Pilate and with a furious glance followed the swallow which had again darted into the balcony. "Here!" he shouted.

And when the secretary and the convoy returned to their places, Pilate declared that he confirmed the death sentence passed by the Small Sanhedrin upon the criminal Yeshua Ha-Nozri. The secretary wrote down Pilate's words.

A moment later Mark Rat-Killer stood before the Procurator. He was ordered by the Procurator to turn the criminal over to the chief of the secret service, and to relay the Procurator's command that Yeshua Ha-Nozri be kept apart from the other condemned, and also that the soldiers of the secret service detachment be forbidden, under threat of severe punishment, to speak with Yeshua about anything, or to answer any of his questions.

At a sign from Mark, the convoy closed around Yeshua and led him from the balcony.

After that a handsome, fair-bearded man appeared before the Procurator. Eagle feathers crested his helmet, gold lion heads glittered on his chest, and golden spangles adorned the hilt of his sword, the laced knee-high footwear on triple soles, and the purple cloak thrown over his left shoulder. He was the legate in command of the legion.

The Procurator asked him where the Sebastian cohort was at the moment. The legate reported that the Sebastians served as the cordon around the square before the hippodrome, where the sentences over the criminals were to be announced to the people.

The Procurator instructed the legate to select two centuries from the Roman cohort. One, under Rat-Killer's command, was to convoy the criminals, the carriages with the instruments of execution, and the executioners to Bald Mountain, and then to join the upper cordon on arrival there. The other century was to be sent immediately to Bald Mountain and set up a cordon without delay. The Procurator asked the legate to assign an auxiliary cavalry regiment-a Syrian ala-to the same task, that is, to guard the mountain.

When the legate had departed from the balcony, the Procurator commanded his secretary to summon to the palace the president of the Sanhedrin, two of its members, and the chief of the temple service of Yershalayim, but added that he wanted an opportunity to speak to the president alone before conferring with all those people.

The Procurator's command was carried out promptly and exactly. The sun, which was scorching Yershalayim during those days with extraordinary fury, had not yet reached its zenith when the Procurator and the president of the Sanhedrin, High Priest of the Hebrews, Yoseph Kaiyapha, met on the upper terrace of the garden, near the two white marble lions guarding the stairway.

The garden was silent. When the Procurator came out from under the colonnade onto the sun-flooded upper level of the garden with its palms on monstrous elephant feet, he could see, spread out before him, the entire hateful city of Yershalayim with its hanging bridges, fortresses, and, worst of all, that utterly indescribable hulk of marble with golden dragon scales instead of a roof-the Temple of Yershalayim. And now his sharp ears caught from far below, where the stone wall divided the lower terraces of the palace garden from the city square, a low rumble, over which there rose from time to time faint, feeble sounds-either moans or cries.

The Procurator understood that a countless multitude of Yershalayim residents, agitated over the latest disorders, had already assembled there, and that this multitude was waiting impatiently for the proclamation of the sentences. The cries he heard came from the restless vendors who sold water.

The Procurator began by inviting the High Priest to the balcony, out of the merciless heat. But Kaiyapha politely excused himself, explaining that it was impossible for him to accept this invitation on the eve of the holiday. Pilate threw a hood over his head, which was beginning to go bald, and opened the conversation. This conversation took place in Greek.

Pilate said that he had looked into the case of Yeshua Ha-Nozri and had confirmed the death sentence.

Thus, three outlaws had been condemned to be executed that day-Dismas, Gestas and Bar-Rabban, and also this Yeshua Ha-Nozri. The former two, who had taken it into their heads to instigate the people to rebellion against Caesar, had been taken fighting by the Roman authorities; they were under the Procurator's jurisdiction and were not in question here. But the latter two, Bar-Rabban and Ha-Nozri, had been seized by the local authorities and sentenced by the Sanhedrin. According to the law, and according to custom, one of these two criminals would have to be released in honor of the great holiday of Passover that was about to begin that day. And so, the Procurator wished to know which of the two criminals the Sanhedrin intended to release: Bar-Rabban or Ha-Nozri?

Kaiyapha inclined his head to signify that the question was clear to him, and replied:

"The Sanhedrin begs to release Bar-Rabban."

The Procurator knew very well that this would be the High Priest's answer, but it was his purpose to show that he was astonished at it.

Pilate did this with great skill. The eyebrows on the haughty face rose, and the Procurator looked with amazement straight into the High Priest's eyes.

"I confess, I am astounded by your answer," the Procurator spoke mildly. "I am afraid there may be some misunderstanding here."

Pilate explained himself. The Roman government had no wish whatsoever to interfere with the prerogatives of the local spiritual authorities. The High Priest surely knew this, but in this case there seemed to be an obvious error. And the Roman government was, of course, interested in correcting this error.

Indeed, the crimes of Bar-Rabban and Ha-Nozri were in no wise comparable in their gravity. If the latter, who was clearly a madman, was guilty of absurd utterances in Yershalayim and certain other places, the former bore the burden of far heavier guilt. Not only had he permitted himself direct appeals to rebellion, but he had also killed a soldier during the attempt to capture him. Bar-Rabban was far more dangerous than Ha-Nozri.

By virtue of the foregoing, the Procurator begged the High Priest to review the decision and liberate the less harmful of the two condemned, and that was unquestionably Ha-Nozri. And so?…

Kaiyapha replied in a low, but firm voice, that the Sanhedrin had made a careful study of the case, and hence he would repeat that he intended to free Bar-Rabban.

"Indeed? Even after my intercession? The intercession of him who speaks for Rome? High Priest, repeat it for the third time."

"I tell you for the third time that we shall release Bar-Rabban," Kaiyapha said quietly.

Everything was over; there was nothing more to be said. Ha-Nozri was departing forever, and there was no one any longer who could heal the Procurator's dreadful, cruel attacks of pain. There was no remedy against them, except death. But it was not this thought that troubled Pilate now. His whole being was pierced again by the incomprehensible anguish that had gripped him earlier on the balcony. He tried to explain it to himself, but the explanation was a strange one: the Procurator had the vague feeling that he had left something unsaid in his talk with the condemned, or perhaps that he had not heard him to the end.

Pilate drove the thought away, and it vanished as instantly as it had come. It vanished, and the anguish remained without explanation, for how could it be explained by the other fragment of thought that flashed like lightning and immediately went out-"Immortality… immortality has come…." Whose immortality? The Procurator did not understand it, but the thought of this mysterious immortality made him turn cold in the blazing sun.

"Well," said Pilate, "so be it."

He glanced around him, at the visible world, and was astonished at the change. The rose bush weighted down by flowers was gone, as were the cypresses bordering the upper terrace, and the pomegranate tree, and the white statue within the greenery, and the greenery itself. Instead of all this, an opaque purple wave swam before him; strange water weeds swayed within it, floating away somewhere, and carrying Pilate with them. He was now swept away, burning and suffocating with the most terrible of wraths-the wrath of impotence.

"I cannot breathe," said Pilate, "I cannot breathe!"

He tore the buckle from the collar of his cloak with a cold, moist hand, and it fell onto the sand.

"It is sultry today, a storm is coming," answered Kaiyapha, never taking his eyes from the Procurator's flushed face and foreseeing all the ordeals still before him. "What a terrible month of Nisan we have this year!"

"No," said Pilate. "It is not because the day is sultry, but because you crowd me, Kaiyapha," and Pilate smiled, narrowing his eyes, and nodded, "Take heed of yourself, High Priest."

The High Priest's dark eyes flashed, and-no less skillfully than the Procurator some moments earlier-his face assumed an expression of astonishment.

"What do I hear, Procurator?" Kaiyapha replied with calm pride. "You threaten me after confirming the sentence yourself? Can this be? We are accustomed to see the Roman Procurator choose his words carefully before speaking. What if someone should hear us, Hegemon?"

Pilate looked at the High Priest with dead eyes. Then, baring his teeth, he showed a smile.

"What are you saying, High Priest? Who can hear us now in this place? Am I a boy, Kaiyapha? I know what I speak and where I speak it. The garden is surrounded by guards, and the palace is guarded so well that not a mouse could slip in through a crack. A mouse! Not even that one, whatever his name… of the town of Kerioth. By the way, do you know such a man, High Priest? Oh, yes… if such a man slipped in here, he would be bitterly sorry for himself. You will surely believe me when I say this, High Priest? Know, then, High Priest, that henceforth you shall have no peace! Neither you, nor your people," and Pilate pointed to the distance on the right, where the Temple blazed on the hill. "These are my words to you, the words of Pontius Pilate, Rider of the Golden Spear!"

"I know, I know!" fearlessly replied black-bearded Kaiyapha, and his eyes glinted. He raised his hand to heaven and continued: "The people of Judea know that you hate them with a black hatred, and you will bring them much suffering, but you shall never destroy them utterly! God shall protect them! The mighty Caesar will hear us, he will hear us and shield us from the murderous Pilate!"

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Pilate, and every word removed a weight from his heart. There was no longer any need for pretense, no need to choose his words. "You have complained to Caesar against me too much, and now my hour has come, Kaiyapha! Now word will fly from me-not to the Imperial Governor in Antioch, and not to Rome, but straight to Capreae, to the Emperor himself, word of how you shelter known rebels in Yershalayim from death. And it is not water from Solomon's pond that I will bring to Yershalayim, as I had meant to do for your good, no, it is not water that shall flood your streets. Remember well how I had to take the shields with the Emperor's insignia down from the walls, how I had to move the troops, how-as you see-I had to come myself to look into what goes on here! Remember my word, High Priest: you shall see more than a single cohort in Yershalayim. No, the entire legion of Fulminatus will come to the walls of the city, the Arab horsemen will come, and you shall hear bitter weeping and moans! You shall then remember Bar-Rabban, whom you saved!"

The High Priest's face was covered with spots, his eyes burned. Like the Procurator, he smiled, showing his teeth, and said:

"Do you believe your own words, Procurator? No, you do not! You wanted to release him so that he might incite the populace, mock the faith, and bring the people under Roman swords! But while I, the High Priest of Judea, am alive, I will allow no profanation of the faith, I will protect the people! Do you hear, Pilate?" and Kaiyapha lifted his hand. "Listen, Procurator!"

Kaiyapha was silent, and the Procurator heard once again a sound like the noise of the sea, rolling up against the very walls of the garden of Herod the Great. The noise rose from below to the feet and the face of the Procurator. And behind his back, beyond the wings of the palace, he heard the trumpets blowing alarm signals, the heavy crunching of hundreds of feet, the clanking of iron. The Procurator understood that the Roman foot soldiers, in obedience to his command, were already streaming out to the death march, terrible for mutineers and brigands.

"Do you hear, Procurator?" the High Priest repeated in a low voice.

The Procurator wiped his cold, wet brow with the back of his hand, looked down at the ground, then squinted at the sky, and saw that the fiery sphere was almost overhead, and Kaiyapha's shadow had shrunk to nothing by the lion's tail. And he said quietly and indifferently:

"It is almost noon. We have been carried away by our conversation, but we must proceed."

Excusing himself before the High Priest with exquisite courtesy, he invited him to sit down on a bench in the shade of the magnolia and wait until he called the others, whose presence was required at the final brief conference, and issued one last command bearing on the execution.

Kaiyapha bowed politely, his hand over his heart, and remained in the garden while Pilate returned to the balcony. There, he commanded the waiting secretary to invite into the garden the legate of the legion and the tribune of the cohort, as well as the two members of the Sanhedrin and the chief of the temple guard who were waiting for the summons on the lower terrace of the garden, in the round arbor with the fountain. Pilate added that he himself would come down directly, and withdrew to the interior of the palace.

While the secretary was assembling the conference, the Procurator spoke to a certain man in a room shaded against the sun with dark hangings. The man's face was half-concealed by his hood, although the sun's rays could not possibly disturb him in this room. This meeting was very brief. The Procurator quietly spoke a few words to the man, after which the latter left, and Pilate came into the garden through the colonnade.

There, in the presence of all he had asked to see, the Procurator solemnly and drily stated that he had confirmed the death sentence of Yeshua Ha-Nozri, and officially inquired of the members of the Sanhedrin whom among the criminals they wished to reprieve. When he heard the reply, naming Bar-Rabban, the Procurator said:

"Very well," and bade the secretary to enter this at once in the record. He gripped the buckle picked up by his secretary, and solemnly proclaimed, "It is time!"

All present started down the wide marble staircase between two walls of roses which were pouring out their numbing scent. They descended lower and lower, toward the palace wall and the gates that led to the large, smoothly paved square, at the end of which could be seen the columns and statues of the Yershalayim hippodrome.

As soon as the group had come out of the garden into the square and mounted the stone dais that dominated the square, Pilate looked around through narrowed eyelids and assessed the situation.

The space he had just traversed, that is, the space between the palace wall and the dais, was empty. But ahead of him Pilate could no longer see the square: it was engulfed by the crowd. The crowd would have flooded the dais and the cleared space as well if it were not held off by the triple ranks of Sebastian soldiers on Pilate's left and the soldiers of the Itureian auxiliary cohort on his right.

And so, Pilate ascended the dais, mechanically crushing the unnecessary buckle in his hand and squinting. The Procurator did not squint because the sun dazzled him. No! For some reason, he did not want to see the group of condemned men who, as he well knew, were being escorted now behind him onto the platform.

As soon as the white cloak with the scarlet lining rose on the stone cliff over the edge of the human sea, the unseeing Pilate's ears were struck by a wave of sound, "Ha-a-a…" It began quietly, starting somewhere in the distance near the hippodrome, then rose until it was like thunder. After several seconds, it began to subside.

"They've seen me," thought the Procurator. The wave had not yet reached its lowest ebb when suddenly it began to rise again. Swaying, it rose higher than the first, and over this second wave, like foam boiling up on the crest, there seethed up a whistling and, here and there, the outcries of women distinguishable through the thunder. "They were brought up onto the platform," thought Pilate. "And those were moans of women who were crushed as the crowd surged forward."

He waited for a time, knowing that no force could silence the crowd until it screamed out everything that had accumulated within it and quieted down by itself.

When this moment arrived, the Procurator threw up his right hand, and the last breath of sound was blown away.

Then Pilate inhaled as much of the fiery air as he could and shouted, his broken voice carrying over thousands of heads:

"In the name of Caesar Imperator!…"

His ears were assaulted by choppy iron shouts, repeated several times. Throwing up their spears and ensigns, the soldiers of the cohorts sent up a deafening cry:

"Long live Caesar!"

Pilate threw back his head and thrust it up directly at the sun. A green light flashed under his eyelids; it set his brain afire, and the hoarse Aramaic words flew over the crowd:

"Four criminals, arrested in Yershalayim for murder, incitement to rebellion, and mockery of the laws and faith, have been condemned to an ignominious death-by hanging from posts! This execution shall take place presently on Bald Mountain! The names of the malefactors are: Dismas, Gestas, Bar-Rabban, and Ha-Nozri. They are here before you!"

Pilate pointed with his right hand, without seeing any malefactors but knowing they were there, in the place where they had to be.

The crowd answered with a long rumbling sound, as of astonishment or relief. When it subsided, Pilate continued:

"But only three of them shall be hanged. For, according to law and custom, the all-generous Caesar Imperator shall, in honor of the holiday of Passover, bestow on one of the condemned-as chosen by the Small Sanhedrin and confirmed by the authority of Rome-the gift of his contemptible life!"

Pilate shouted the words and at the same time listened to the great silence following the wave of sound. Not a sigh or a whisper reached his ears now, until a moment came when Pilate felt as though everything around him had vanished utterly. The city he hated died, and he alone stood there, scorched by the vertical rays, his face thrust up into the sky. Pilate clung to the silence for a moment, then cried out:

"The name of him who shall now, in your presence, be released…."

He paused again, holding back the name, checking in his mind whether he had said everything that needed to be said, for he knew that the dead city would return to life after he uttered the name of the fortunate one, and no other words would be heard thereafter.

"All?" Pilate whispered soundlessly to himself. "All. The name!"

And, rolling the "r" over the silent city, he cried:

"Bar-Rabban!"

It seemed to him that the sun rang out and burst over his head and filled his ears with fire. Within this fire there was a storm of roars, screeches, moans, whistles, and laughter.

Pilate turned and walked across the dais back to the steps, looking at nothing except the varicolored tiles underfoot in order not to trip. He knew that a shower of bronze coins and dates was flying now behind his back onto the dais, that in the howling mob people climbed on their neighbors' shoulders, crushing one another, to behold with their own eyes the miracle of a man who had already been in the jaws of death, and yet escaped them! To see the legionaries remove the ropes that bound him, involuntarily causing him burning pain in the arms twisted during the interrogations; to see him, groaning and grimacing with pain, yet smiling a crazy, vacant smile.

Pilate knew that the convoy was already escorting three men with bound hands to the side stairs, to the road leading west, beyond the city, to Bald Mountain. It was not until he was behind the dais that Pilate opened his eyes, knowing that he was safe now-he could no longer see the condemned.

The vast moan of the crowd, which was beginning to subside, was now mingled with the piercing, clearly distinguishable voices of the criers repeating all that the Procurator had shouted from the dais, some in Aramaic, others in Greek. The Procurator also heard the rapid clicking of approaching horses and the trumpet uttering a short, gay blast. These sounds were answered by the shrill whistles of the urchins on the rooftops along the street that led from the market place to the hippodrome square, and cries of "Look out!"

A soldier who stood alone in a cleared area of the square with an ensign in his hand, waved it anxiously, and the Procurator, the legate of the legion, the secretary, and the convoy halted.

The cavalry ala, speeding up its trot, flew out into the square to cross it at the edge, bypassing the crowd, and galloped to Bald Mountain by the shortest road, along the lane past the stone wall overgrown with vines.

As he passed Pilate, the commander of the ala, a Syrian, small as a boy and dark as a mulatto, uttered a cry in a high, thin voice, pulling his sword out of its sheath. His vicious, lathered, black horse shied and reared. Thrusting the sword back into its sheath, the commander lashed the horse across the neck, straightened it and galloped off into the lane. Behind him-three in a row-flew the horsemen in a cloud of dust. The tips of their light bamboo lances bobbed up and down. A stream of faces that seemed still darker under their white turbans dashed past the Procurator with gaily bared, glittering, white teeth.

Raising a towering pillar of dust, the ala burst into the lane, and the last to gallop past Pilate was a soldier with a trumpet on his back, flaming in the sun.

Shielding himself with his hand against the dust and wrinkling his face with displeasure, Pilate moved on toward the palace garden gate. The legate, the secretary, and the convoy followed him.

It was about ten o'clock in the morning.

Chapter 3

THE SEVENTH PROOF

"Yes, it was about ten o'clock in the morning, my most esteemed Ivan Nikolayevich," said the professor.

The poet passed his hand over his face, like a man who had just regained consciousness, and saw that it was evening at the Patriarchs' Ponds. The water in the pond had turned black, and a light boat was gliding over it. There was a splash of oars. A woman giggled. People had now appeared on the benches in the avenues, but again only along three sides of the square, and not where our companions sat.

The sky over Moscow seemed to have blanched. The full moon, not yet golden but white, was clearly visible above. It had become much easier to breathe, and the voices under the lindens sounded softer now, as voices do in the evening.

"But how is it I never noticed while he managed to spin out a whole tale?" thought Homeless with astonishment. "And suddenly it's evening!… Or perhaps it was not he who told the tale, perhaps I simply fell asleep and dreamed it all?"

But it must have been the professor, after all, who had told the tale, or one would have to assume that Berlioz had had the same dream, for he said, looking intently at the foreigner's face:

"Your story is extremely interesting, Professor, although it is entirely different from that of the Gospels."

"Oh, well," the professor responded with an indulgent smile. "You of all people should know that nothing that is told in the Gospels has ever really happened, and if we begin to cite the Gospels as a source of historical data…" he smiled again, and Berlioz stopped short, for he had said exactly the same thing to Homeless as they walked down Bronnaya toward the Patriarchs' Ponds.

"That is true," answered Berlioz. "But I am afraid no one can confirm to us that the things you spoke of really happened."

"Oh, no! This one can confirm!" the professor said with utmost assurance, but suddenly in broken Russian. And he mysteriously motioned the two friends to come nearer.

They bent toward him from either side, and he said, without any accent-which for some strange reason now appeared, now disappeared:

"The point is…" the professor threw an apprehensive look over his shoulder and began to whisper, "that I was personally present when all this took place. I was on Pontius Pilate's balcony, and in the garden, when he spoke with Kaiyapha, and on the dais. But I was there in secret, incognito, so to speak, and I must ask you not to say a word about it to anyone… it must be a total secret, tsss…."

A silence fell, and Berlioz turned pale.

"You… how long have you been in Moscow?" he asked in a shaken voice.

"Oh, I have just arrived this very minute," the professor replied in confusion. And it was only now that the friends bethought themselves to take a good look at his eyes, and discovered that his green left eye was utterly insane, and his right eye was empty, black, and dead.

"Now everything's explained!" thought Berlioz, disconcerted. "A lunatic from Germany. Or maybe he has just gone mad here, at the Patriarchs' Ponds? What a business!"

And, indeed, now everything was clear: the most peculiar breakfast with the late philosopher Kant, the crazy talk about sunflower oil and Annushka, the prediction that the editor's head would be cut off, and all the rest. The professor was a madman.

Berlioz immediately decided what he must do. Leaning back against the bench, he winked at Homeless behind the professor's back, as though to say, "Don't contradict him." But the bewildered poet did not understand these signals.

"Yes, yes, of course," Berlioz spoke nervously. "All this is possible… very possible… yes… Pontius Pilate, and the balcony, and the rest of it…. And did you come here alone, or with your wife?"

"Alone, alone, I am always alone," the professor answered bitterly.

"And where are your things, Professor?" Berlioz asked ingratiatingly. "At the Metropole? Where did you stop?"

"I?… Nowhere," the half-witted German answered, his green eye wandering wildly and with anguish over the Partriarchs' Ponds.

"Really?… But… but where will you live?"

"In your apartment," the madman suddenly answered familiarly and winked.

"I… I am very pleased…" Berlioz mumbled. "But, really, it will not be convenient for you… and at the Metropole there are excellent rooms, it is a first-rate hotel…."

"And there's no devil either?" the sick man suddenly asked Ivan Nikolayevich gaily.

"No devil either…."

"Don't contradict him," Berlioz whispered with his lips only, throwing himself behind the professor's back and grimacing.

"There is no devil!" Ivan Nikolayevich, confused by all this nonsense, exclaimed, saying the wrong thing altogether. "What the hell! Stop your crazy antics!"

At this point the madman burst into such a fit of laughter that a sparrow came darting out of the linden tree above them.

"Oh, but this is really interesting," the professor cried, shaking with laughter. "It seems, no matter what you name here, it doesn't exist!" He stopped laughing abruptly and, as usual in mental illness, went from laughter to the other extreme. He became irritated and asked sternly, "So he does not exist at all, does he?"

"Calm down, calm down, calm down, Professor," Berlioz muttered, afraid to excite the sick man. "Just stay a moment here with Comrade Homeless, while I run around the corner to make a telephone call. Then we'll escort you wherever you wish to go. After all, you do not know the city…."

We must admit that the editor's plan was quite reasonable: he wanted to hurry to the nearest public telephone and report to the department in charge of foreign visitors that a consultant from abroad was sitting in the Patriarchs' Ponds park in a clearly deranged condition. And hence that it was necessary to take the proper steps, for this was leading to an absurd and unpleasant situation.

"A telephone call? Very well, make your call," the patient consented sadly, and suddenly begged passionately: "But I implore you in parting, believe at least in the devil's existence! I will not ask you for more. Keep in mind that there is a seventh proof of this, and the most convincing of all! And it is just about to be presented to you!"

"Fine, fine," Berlioz said with feigned amiability. Then, with a wink to the disconcerted poet, who did not in the least relish the idea of guarding the crazy German, he hurried toward the exit from the Patriarchs' Ponds that opens on the corner of Bronnaya and Yermolayev Lane.

And the professor immediately seemed to brighten up and recover.

"Mikhail Alexandrovich!" he called after Berlioz.

Berlioz started and turned, but reassured himself with the thought that his name and patronymic were also known to the professor from some newspaper.

And the professor shouted through his folded hands as through a megaphone:

"Shall I send a telegram at once to your uncle in Kiev?"

Berlioz was shaken again. How did this madman know about the existence of his uncle in Kiev? This, surely, was never mentioned in any newspapers! Could Homeless have been right? What if the man's documents were forged? What a fantastic character…. But he must call, he must call without delay! They'll quickly get the facts about the man.

And, listening to nothing further, Berlioz ran on.

At the exit to Bronnaya, the very citizen who had earlier spun himself out of the dense heat in the sunlight rose from a bench to meet the editor. But now he was not made of air. He was of ordinary flesh and blood, and in the falling twilight Berlioz could clearly see that his mustache looked like chicken feathers, his eyes were small, ironic and half-drunk, and his tight trousers were of a checkered material and pulled up so high that they exposed the dirty white socks.

Mikhail Alexandrovich was so startled that he backed away, but instantly he reassured himself: it was a stupid coincidence, and he had no time to think about it at the moment anyway.

"Are you looking for a turnstile, citizen?" the checkered character inquired in a cracked tenor. "This way, if you please! Straight ahead, and you'll come out right. And how about a tip for pointing the way?… for a little drink, to repair the health of an ex-choirmaster!…" Clowning and grimacing, the beggar swept off his jockey's cap with a wide gesture.

Berlioz did not stop to listen to the choirmaster's begging and clowning; he ran toward the turnstile and put his hand on it. He turned it and was ready to step across the rails, when a burst of red and white light flashed into his face: the glass case lit up with a warning, "Look out for the streetcar!"

And all at once the streetcar careened around the corner of the newly-laid line from Yermolayev Lane to Bronnaya. As it straightened out, the electric lights suddenly blazed inside it. It roared and put on speed.

Although the cautious Berlioz was standing in a safe place, he decided to return behind the gate and, shifting his hand, he took a backward step. But his hand lost its grip and slipped off, his foot slid without resistance, as though on ice, over the cobblestones that lined the slope leading down to the rails, his other foot shot up, and Berlioz was thrown onto the rails.

Trying to grasp at something, Berlioz sprawled on his back, his head lightly striking the cobblestones. He glimpsed the gilded moon above him, but he no longer knew whether the moon was on his left or on his right. All he had time for was to turn on his side, at the same moment convulsively pulling his knees up to his stomach, and, as he turned, to catch sight of the red armband and the utterly white, horrified face of the woman conductor rushing down upon him with irresistible force. Berlioz did not cry out, but the whole street around him was filled with women's desperate shrieks.

The conductor tore wildly at the electric brake, the nose of the car dug into the ground, then the car leaped up, and fragments of its windowpanes flew clattering and ringing in all directions. In Berlioz' brain someone cried out frantically, "Really?…" The moon flashed for the last time, already splintered into bits, and everything was dark.

The streetcar was over Berlioz, and a round dark object was thrown up the cobbled slope under the grating of the Patriarchs' Ponds avenue. Rolling down the slope, it bounced away along the cobbled pavement of the street.

It was the severed head of Berlioz.

Chapter 4

PURSUIT

The hysterical women's cries and the shrilling of the militia whistles had died down. Two ambulances had driven away-one, with the headless body and the severed head, to the morgue; the other, with the beautiful conductor, wounded by the flying glass. Janitors in white aprons removed the broken glass and scattered sand over the pools of blood. And Ivan Nikolayevich, who had dropped onto a bench before he reached the turnstile, stayed on it motionless. He had tried repeatedly to get up, but his feet refused to obey him: Homeless was stricken by something akin to paralysis.

The poet had rushed toward the turnstile at the first scream, and saw the bouncing head on the pavement. Crazed with horror, he dropped onto a bench and bit his own hand till it bled. He naturally forgot the insane German and tried to grasp one thing only: how could it be that he had just a moment earlier spoken to Berlioz, and now-his head…

Frantic people ran down the avenue past the poet, exclaiming something, but Ivan Nikolayevich did not understand what they said. Suddenly two women collided near him, and one of them, sharp-nosed and disheveled, shouted to the other, right over the poet's ears:

"… Annushka, our Annushka! From Sadovaya! It's her work…. She bought some sunflower oil at the store, and broke the bottle on the turnstile! She got it all over her skirt, and swore and swore! And that poor man, he slipped on it, and right down on the rails…."

Of all the words the woman shouted, only one word stuck in the deranged brain of Ivan Nikolayevich, "Annushka"….

"Annushka… Annushka?…" the poet muttered, looking around him anxiously. "But wait, wait…."

The word "Annushka" connected itself to the words "sunflower oil," and then, for some reason, to "Pontius Pilate." The poet rejected Pilate and began to weave a chain, beginning with "Annushka." The chain was linked very fast, and immediately led to the crazy professor.

"Wait! But he said that the meeting would not be held because Annushka had spilled the oil. And now, if you please, it won't be held! But that isn't all. He said to Berlioz directly that a woman would cut off his head! Yes, yes! And the conductor was a woman! But what can it mean?"

There was not a grain of doubt that the mysterious consultant had exact foreknowledge of the entire picture of the editor's horrible death. And two thoughts pierced the poet's mind. The first was: "He is not a madman, that's nonsense!" And the second: "Could he have planned it all himself?"

"But how, if you allow me to ask? Oh, no, we must find out!"

Making a great effort, Ivan Nikolayevich rose from the bench, and rushed back to where he had spoken to the professor. And, fortunately, he found that the latter had not yet gone.

The street lights were already on along Bronnaya, and a golden moon shone over the Patriarchs' Ponds. And in the light of the moon, always deceptive, it seemed to Ivan Nikolayevich that the man stood, holding under his arm not a cane, but a sword.

The importunate ex-choirmaster sat where Ivan Nikolayevich himself had sat a little while before. Now the choirmaster saddled his nose with an obviously unnecessary pair of pince-nez, in which one lens was entirely absent, and the other cracked. This made the checkered citizen even more repulsive than when he had directed Berlioz to the rails.

With a chill in his heart, Ivan approached the professor and, glancing into his face, he found that it did not bear and had, indeed, never borne any marks of madness.

"Confess to me, who are you?" Ivan asked in a hollow voice.

The foreigner scowled, looked up as though he was seeing the poet for the first time, and answered in a hostile tone, "No understand… no speak Russian…."

"The gentleman does not understand," the choirmaster intruded into the conversation from his bench, although no one had asked him to interpret the foreigner's words.

"Stop pretending," Ivan said threateningly, and felt a chill at the pit of his stomach. "You have just been speaking excellent Russian. You are no German, and no professor! You are a murderer and a spy!… Your documents!" Ivan cried in a rage.

The mysterious professor squeamishly twisted his crooked mouth and shrugged his shoulders.

"Citizen," the vile choirmaster broke in again. "Why are you upsetting the tourist? You'll answer for it, remember!"

And the suspicious professor made a haughty face, turned and walked away from Ivan. Iven felt that he was losing his grip. Suffocating, he turned to the choirmaster:

"Hey, citizen, help me catch the criminal! You must do it!"

The choirmaster jumped up with extraordinary animation and shouted:

"Which criminal? Where is he? A foreign criminal?" His little eyes shone with glee. "That one? If he is a criminal, the first thing we must do is shout 'Help!' or he will get away. Come on, together now!" and the choirmaster opened his maw.

In his confusion, Ivan obeyed the prankster-choirmaster and shouted, "Help!" But the choirmaster had tricked him and did not shout anything.

The solitary, hoarse cry sent up by Ivan brought no desired results. Two young ladies shied away from him, and he heard the word "drunk."

"Ah, so you are in with him?" Ivan cried, bursting into fury. "Making a fool of me? Get out of my way!"

Ivan rushed right, and the choirmaster did the same. Ivan rushed left, and the scoundrel followed.

"Getting into my way on purpose?" Ivan cried, choking with rage. "I'll turn you over to the militia too!"

Ivan tried to catch the rogue by the sleeve, but missed and caught exactly nothing: the choirmaster seemed to have vanished into thin air.

Ivan gasped, looked up and saw the hateful stranger in the distance. He was already at the exit to Patriarchs' Lane, and he was not alone. The more than dubious choirmaster had already managed to join him. But this was not all. There was a third member of this company, who had appeared from heaven knows where: a tom cat, huge as a hog, black as pitch or a crow, and with a huge mustache, for all the world like a rakish cavalryman's. The trio marched off into Patriarchs' Lane, the tom cat walking on his hind legs.

Ivan hurried after the malefactors, but he saw at once that it would be difficult to catch up with them.

The trio dashed through the lane in an instant and was emerging on Spiridonovka. No matter how much Ivan increased his pace, the distance between him and those he pursued never diminished. Before he knew it, he was out of the quiet Spiridonovka and at the Nikitsky Gate. And here the milling crowds made his position still more hopeless. Besides, the criminal band resorted to the favorite stratagem of thieves, and scattered.

The choirmaster nimbly whirled himself into a bus speeding toward Arbat Square and disappeared. Having lost one of the gang, Ivan concentrated his attention on the tom cat and saw how this strange tom walked over to the boarding step of an "A" streetcar waiting at the stop, brazenly elbowed aside a woman who squealed as she saw him, grasped the hand rails and even attempted to give the conductor a coin through the window, which was open because of the heat.

The tom's behavior struck Ivan with such amazement that he stopped transfixed near the grocery store on the corner. And now he was struck again, even more forcibly, by the behavior of the woman conductor. As soon as she saw the tom trying to climb into the streetcar, she screamed, trembling with rage:

"No cats allowed here! Nobody with cats allowed! Scram! Get off, or I'll call the militia!"

Neither the conductor, nor the passengers were as astounded by the situation itself-a cat climbing into a streetcar!-which would not have been half so bad, as by his wish to pay his fare!

The tom, it turned out, was not only a solvent, but also a disciplined beast. At the conductor's first cry, he ceased his advance, got down from the step, and sat down at the curb, rubbing his whisker with the coin. But as soon as the conductor pulled the cord and the cars started, the tom proceeded to do what anyone else would who had been expelled from a streetcar but must nevertheless get to his destination. Allowing all three cars to go by, the tom jumped up onto the rear of the last one, sank his claws into a rubber tube projecting from the wall, and rode away, thus saving himself the fare.

Preoccupied with the wretched tom, Ivan had nearly lost the principal offender-the professor. Luckily, he had not yet managed to escape. Ivan caught sight of the gray beret in the thick of the crowd at the opening into Bolshaya Nikitskaya or Herzen Street. In the twinkling of an eye Ivan was there. But his object eluded him. The poet tried to walk faster; he even broke into a trot, shoving the other pedestrians. But he never got nearer the professor even by an inch.

Disturbed as he was, Ivan was nevertheless astonished by the unnatural speed of the chase. Twenty seconds had not elapsed when, after passing the Nikitsky Gate, Ivan Nikolayevich was already dazzled by the lights of Arbat Square. Another few seconds, and he was in some dark alley with broken sidewalks, where he fell and hurt his knee. Another brightly lit thoroughfare-Kropotkin Street-then a lane, then Ostozhenka and yet another lane, dreary, filthy, and poorly lit. And it was here that Ivan Nikolayevich finally lost the man he was pursuing so desperately. The professor disappeared.

Ivan Nikolayevich was disconcerted, but not for long, because he suddenly knew that the professor must be in No. 13, and in no other apartment but 47.

Bursting into the entrance, Ivan Nikolayevich flew up to the second floor, immediately found this apartment and rang impatiently. He did not have to wait long. The door was opened by a little girl of about five who withdrew somewhere at once without asking the guest any questions.

In the huge, extremely ill-kept foyer, feebly lit by a tiny carbon lamp under the high dirty ceiling, there stood an enormous, iron-covered chest. On the wall hung a bicycle without tires. And on a shelf over the clothes rack lay a winter hat, its long earflaps hanging down. Behind one of the doors, a resonant man's voice angrily declaimed something in verse over a radio set.

Ivan Nikolayevich, not in the least confused by the unfamiliar surroundings, walked straight into the hallway, thinking to himself: "He naturally hid himself in the bathroom." The hallway was dark. Bumping into the wall a few times, Ivan finally discerned a faint streak of light under a door, felt for the handle, and pulled it. The hook flew off, and Ivan found himself precisely in the bathroom, thinking that he was in luck.

However, his luck was not quite what it should have been! A wave of moist heat came at Ivan, and, in the light of the coals glowing in the boiler, he saw large troughs hanging on the wall, and the bathtub, full of ugly black spots left by the chipped enamel. And in this bathtub stood a naked woman, all covered with soap and with a washrag in her hands. She squinted nearsightedly at the intruder and, evidently mistaking him for someone else in the infernal light, said quietly and gaily:

"Kirushka! Stop your games! Have you lost your mind?… Fyodor Ivanych will be here any minute. Get out, get out right away!" and she swung her washrag at Ivan.

The misunderstanding was obvious, and, of course, it was all the fault of Ivan Nikolayevich. But he refused to admit it and cried out reproachfully, "Ah, you slut!…" and immediately found himself in the kitchen. The kitchen was empty. About a dozen unlit primus stoves stood on the oven in the dusk. A single moonbeam, peeping in through the dusty window that had not been washed for years, dimly lit up the corner where a forgotten icon hung in dust and cobwebs. Behind its case, Ivan could see the tips of two wedding candles. Under the large icon there was pinned a little one, made of paper.

Nobody knows what idea possessed Ivan at this point, but before running out to the back stairs he appropriated one of the candles and the paper icon. With these objects, he left the strange apartment, muttering something, embarrassed by his recent experience in the bathroom, involuntarily trying to guess the identity of that brazen Kirushka and wondering whether he was the owner of the disgusting hat with the earflaps.

In the dismal, empty alley the poet glanced around, looking for the fugitive. But he was nowhere to be seen. Then Ivan said to himself firmly, "But, of course, he is at the Moskva River! Onward!"

One might, perhaps, ask Ivan Nikolayevich why he assumed that the professor would be precisely near the Moskva River and not anywhere else. But the trouble is that there was no one to ask this. The foul alley was totally deserted.

After a short time, Ivan Nikolayevich could be seen on the granite steps of the amphitheater by the Moskva River.

Removing his clothes, Ivan left them in the care of a sympathetic bearded man who was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette as he sat near a torn white Tolstoy blouse and a pair of unlaced worn shoes. Waving his arms to cool off, Ivan plunged into the water like a swallow. The water was so cold that it stopped his breath, and for a moment the thought flashed through his mind that he might not be able to surface. However, he succeeded in coming up and, blowing and snorting, his eyes bulging with terror, Ivan Nikolayevich began to swim in the black water that reeked of oil, between the broken zigzags of the lights along the bank.

When the wet Ivan came skipping up the stairs to where his clothing had been left under the protection of the bearded man, he found that not only the former, but the latter had been abducted. On the spot where there had been a pile of clothes, there were now only the striped underpants, the torn Tolstoy blouse, the candle, the icon, and a box of matches. Shaking his fist at someone in the distance with impotent fury, Ivan dressed himself in the remaining rags.

At this point he was gripped by two anxieties: first, that the MASSOLIT identification, with which he never parted, was gone; and, second-would he be able to cross Moscow unmolested in this outfit? After all, in underpants… True, whose business was it? And yet, there was a possibility that he might be halted and detained.

Ivan pulled the buttons off the underpants, where they fastened at the ankle, hoping that in this form they might be taken for summer slacks. Then he picked up the little icon, the candle and the matches, and started out, saying to himself, "To Griboyedov! No question that he's there."

The city was already busy with its evening life. Clanking their chains, trucks flew through clouds of dust, and on their platforms, on sacks, men lay stretched out, with their stomachs up. All windows were open. In each window there was a lamp under an orange shade, and from all windows, all doors, all gateways, roofs and attics, cellars and courtyards, came the hoarse blasts of the polonaise from the opera Yevgeny Onegin.

The apprehensions of Ivan Nikolayevich were fully realized. Passers-by looked at him and turned to stare. Consequently, he resolved to leave the thoroughfares and make his way through back alleys, where people were not so importunate and were less likely to harass a barefoot man and worry him with questions about underpants that stubbornly refused to look like trousers.

Ivan plunged into the mysterious network of Arbat alleys and began to slink along walls, anxiously squinting, glancing over his shoulder, sometimes hiding in gateways, and avoiding crossings lit by street lights and the luxurious entrances of consular mansions.

And all along his difficult journey, he was inexpressibly tormented for some reason by the ubiquitous orchestra accompanying a heavy basso who sang of his love for Tatyana.

Chapter 5

THE AFFAIR AT GRIBOYEDOV'S

The old, two-story, cream-colored mansion was situated in a boulevard circle. It was set deep within a run-down garden, divided from the sidewalk by a wrought-iron fence. The small court before the building was paved with asphalt. In wintertime a pile of snow rose from it, surmounted by a shovel; in summer it turned into a most magnificent outdoor section of the restaurant under a canvas awning.

The building was called Griboyedov House, since it was said to have belonged at one time to an aunt of the writer Alexandre Sergeyevich Griboyedov. Whether it did or did not belong to her we do not know. But if we remember rightly, it seems to us that Griboyedov had never had any such home-owning aunt. Nevertheless, this was what the building was called. In fact, a certain Moscow liar used to say that the famous writer read scenes from his Woe from Wit to this very aunt, who listened reclining on a sofa in the round hall with the columns, on the second floor. But what the devil, who knows, perhaps he did read to her. That's not the point, anyway!

The point is that currently the house belonged to that same MASSOLIT which had been headed, until his appearance at the Patriarchs' Ponds, by the unfortunate Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz.

The members of MASSOLIT never troubled to use the full name, Griboyedov House. They simply called it Griboyedov's.

"I spent two hours at Griboyedov's yesterday."

"How did it go?"

"Got myself a month in Yalta."

"Good work!"

Or else:

"Go and see Berlioz, he is receiving today from four to six at Griboyedov's."

And so on.

MASSOLIT made itself at home in Griboyedov's in the cosiest and most comfortable way imaginable. The visitor at Griboyedov's was greeted first of all by the announcements of a variety of sports clubs, and by the collective as well as individual photographs of members of MASSOLIT, which (photographs) covered the walls of the staircase leading to the upper floor.

On the door of the very first room upstairs there was a large sign, FISHING AND VACATION SECTION, which displayed a carp caught on a line.

On the door of room No. 2 there was a somewhat obscure inscription, ONE-DAY CREATIVE TRIPS, SEE M. V. PODLOZHNAYA.

The next door bore a short but altogether cryptic sign, PERELYGINO. Next, the chance visitor at Griboyedov's was all but dizzied by the multitude of signs peppering the aunt's heavy walnut doors: REGISTER FOR PAPER WITH POKLEVKINA, PAY OFFICE, SKETCH WRITERS' PERSONAL ACCOUNTS…

Cutting across the longest queue, which stretched all the way down to the foyer, one could see the sign HOUSING QUESTION on a door that was constantly being assailed by a crowd of people.

Beyond the housing question a magnificent poster opened to view: a cliff, and riding on its crest, a horseman in a felt cloak, with a rifle behind his back. A little lower were some palms and a balcony, and, sitting on the balcony, a young man with a tidy tuft of hair over his forehead and a fountain pen in his hand, staring off somewhere into the heights with overconfident, overbold eyes. The legend read:

FULL-SCALE CREATIVE VACATIONS FROM TWO WEEKS (SHORT STORY) TO ONE YEAR (NOVEL, TRILOGY)-YALTA, SUUK-SU, BOROVOYE, TSIHIDZIRI, MAHINDZHAURI, LENINGRAD (WINTER PALACE).

At this door there was also a line, but not an excessive one-about one hundred persons in all.

Next, obedient to the fanciful twists and turns, ascents and descents of the Griboyedov building, followed the MASSOLIT EXECUTIVE BOARD, CHAIRMAN OF MASSOLIT, BILLIARD ROOM, a variety of auxiliary institutions and, finally, the hall with columns where the aunt had delighted in the comedy of her illustrious nephew.

Any visitor at Griboyedov's, unless, of course, he was a hopeless dunce, immediately realized how well those lucky chosen ones-the members of MASSOLIT-were living, and was attacked at once by the blackest envy. And began at once to send up bitter reproaches to heaven because it had not endowed him at birth with literary talent, without which one naturally could not even dream of coming into possession of a MASSOLIT membership card-brown, smelling of good leather, with a wide gilt edge-a card well-known throughout Moscow.

Who will say anything in defense of envy? It is a nasty emotion. Nevertheless, one should consider the visitor's position too. For what he had seen upstairs was not yet all; it was, in fact, quite far from all. The entire lower floor of the aunt's house was occupied by a restaurant, and what a restaurant! It was justly considered the best in Moscow. And not only because it was housed in two large rooms with vaulted ceilings, adorned by lilac horses with Assyrian manes; not only because on every table there was a lamp with a silk shawl draped around the shade; not only because it was impossible for the man in the street to gain admission to it; but also because, in the quality of its fare, Griboyedov's beat any restaurant in Moscow, and because this fare was served at the most moderate, most reasonable prices.

Hence there was nothing surprising in a conversation such as the following, which the author of these absolutely authentic lines once heard near the wrought-iron fence of Griboyedov's:

"Where are you dining tonight, Amvrosy?"

"What a question-here, of course, my dear Foka! Archibald Archibaldovich dropped me a hint today that they'll be serving perch au naturel, cooked to order. A virtuoso dish!"

"Ah, you know how to live, Amvrosy!" sighed the lean, shabby Foka with a carbuncle on his neck to the red-lipped giant-the golden-haired, ruddy-cheeked poet Amvrosy.

"It takes no special skill," protested Amvrosy, "just an ordinary desire to live like a human being. You are trying to tell me, Foka, that perch can be had at the Coliseum as well? But at the Coliseum a portion of perch costs thirteen rubles and fifteen kopeks, and here it is five-fifty! Besides, at the Coliseum the perch is three days old. And moreover, at the Coliseum there's no guarantee that you won't get a bunch of grapes slapped in your face by some young hoodlum breaking in from Theater Drive. No, no, I categorically oppose the Coliseum," the gourmet Amvrosy thundered across the entire boulevard. "Don't try to persuade me, Foka!"

"I'm not trying to persuade you, Amvrosy," squeaked Foka. "A man can dine at home too."

"Thanks a million," boomed Amvrosy. "I can imagine your wife trying to cook perch au naturel in a saucepan in the communal kitchen at home! He-he-he!… Au revoir, Foka!" And, humming gaily, Amvrosy hurried off to the veranda under the awning.

Ah, yes… There was a time, there was, indeed! The old Moscow residents remember the famous Griboyedov's! You speak of perch cooked to order! A cheap trifle, my dear Amvrosy! What of the sterlet, the sterlet in a silvery dish, served sliced and interlarded with lobster tails and fresh roe? And eggs-cocotte with purée of mushrooms in individual ramekins? And what about the fillet of thrushes, was that bad? With truffles? And the quail Genoese? Nine-fifty! And the jazz, and the service! And in July, when the family was away in the country and you were detained in the city by urgent literary business-the plate of soup printanier, glowing in the golden sunspot on the immaculate tablecloth on the veranda, in the shade of the climbing vine? Do you remember, Amvrosy? But why ask? I see by your lips that you do. Talk of whitefish, perch! And what about the partridge, the snipe, the woodcocks in season, the quail? The sparkling Narzan? But enough, you are digressing, reader! Follow me!…

At half-past ten in the evening, on the day when Berlioz perished at the Patriarchs' Ponds, there were lights in only one room upstairs at Griboyedov's, where twelve writers, assembled for a meeting, languished in expectation of Mikhail Alexandrovich.

They sat on chairs, on tables, and even on the two window sills in the office of the MASSOLIT Executive Board, suffering extremely from lack of air. Not a breath of freshness came through the open windows. Moscow was exuding the heat accumulated all day long in the asphalt, and it was obvious that the night would bring no relief. The smell of onions rose from the cellar of the aunt's house, where the restaurant kitchen was at work, and everybody was thirsty, everybody was nervous and irritated.

The novelist Beskudnikov-a quiet, neatly dressed man with attentive yet elusive eyes-took out his watch. The hand crept toward eleven. Beskudnikov tapped his finger on the face of the watch and showed it to his neighbor, the poet Dvubratsky, who sat on a table, miserably swinging his feet in yellow, rubber-soled shoes.

"Well," muttered Dvubratsky.

"The fellow must have gotten stuck on the Klyazma," responded the low contralto of Nastasya Lukinishna Nepremenova, an orphaned lady of Moscow merchant origin who had become a writer specializing in stories of sea battles under the pen name of Pilot George.

"If I may say so," boldly spoke up the author of popular sketches, Zagrivov, "I would much rather be sipping tea on a balcony myself now, instead of broiling here. After all, the meeting was called for ten."

"It must be beautiful on the Klyazma," Pilot George egged on her colleagues, knowing that the vacation village of Perelygino on the Klyazma River was everybody's sore spot. "The nightingales must be singing already. Somehow, I always work better in the country, especially in spring."

"For the third year now I've paid in my good money to send my wife with her goiter to this paradise, but there's not a sail in sight," the short-story writer Ieronym Poprikhin said acridly.

"Some people are lucky," the critic Ababkov boomed from the window sill.

Gleeful lights flickered in the little eyes of Pilot George, and she said, softening her contralto:

"We must not be envious, comrades. There are only twenty-two houses in the village, and only seven more are being built-and there are three thousand of us in MASSOLIT."

"Three thousand, one hundred and eleven," someone put in from the corner.

"You see?" continued Pilot. "What can be done? It's only natural that the most talented among us were given summer homes there…."

"The generals!" Glukharev the scenario writer broke into the chorus of complaints.

Beskudnikov pretended to yawn and walked out of the room.

"All by himself in five rooms in Perelygino," Glukharev said after him.

"Lavrovich has six to himself," cried Deniskin. "And his dining room is paneled in oak!"

"Ah, that's not the point now," boomed Ababkov. "The point is that it's half-past eleven."

The room became noisy. Everyone was on the verge of rebellion. They tried to telephone the hated Perelygino and got the wrong number. Instead of Berlioz, they were given Lavrovich and, told that Lavrovich was out on the river, they lost their tempers altogether. They tried to call the Commission on Fine Literature at No. 930, and, naturally, found no one there.

"He could have called!" cried Deniskin, Glukharev, and Kvant.

Ah, but they cried unjustly. Mikhail Alexandrovich could not have called anywhere. Far, far from Griboyedov's, in a huge hall illuminated with thousand-watt lights, what had so recently been Mikhail Alexandrovich lay on three zinc tables.

On the first lay the naked body with the broken arm and crushed chest, caked with blood; on the other, the head, with the front teeth knocked out, with dim, open eyes untroubled by the sharpest light; on the third, a heap of blood-stiffened rags.

Near the beheaded body stood a professor of forensic medicine, a pathological anatomist and his dissector, representatives of the inquest office, and the writer Zheldybin, deputy chairman of MASSOLIT, who had been summoned by a telephone call.

A car had called for Zheldybin and took him first, together with the inquest officials (this was about midnight), to the dead man's apartment, where all his papers were sealed up. After that they went to the morgue.

And now the group around the body conferred on what was best: to sew the severed head back to the neck, or bring the body as it was to the Griboyedov hall, simply covering it to the chin with a black shawl?

No, Mikhail Alexandrovich could not have telephoned anywhere, and the indignant exclamations of Deniskin, Glukharev, Kvant, and Beskudnikov were quite unjust. Exactly at midnight all twelve writers left the upper floor and descended to the restaurant. Here each one again thought unkindly to himself of Mikhail Alexandrovich, for, naturally, all the tables on the veranda were occupied and they had no choice left but to dine in the beautiful but airless rooms.

And exactly at midnight something crashed, rang, scattered, and jumped in the first room. And all at once a man's high voice shrieked desperately to the music, "Hallelujah!" Those were the opening notes of the famous Griboyedov jazz band. The faces of the diners, covered with perspiration, lit up, the painted horses on the ceiling seemed to come to life, the lights appeared to have brightened, and suddenly both rooms broke into dance, and with them the veranda.

Glukharev danced with the poetess Tamara Polumesyats. Kvant danced. Zhukopov the novelist danced with some movie actress in a yellow dress. Everyone danced: Dragunsky, Cherdakchi, the short Deniskin with the giant Pilot George, the beautiful architect Semeikina-Gall in the tight clutch of a stranger in white homespun trousers; members and invited guests, Moscovites and visitors from out of town, the writer Johann from Kronstadt, a certain Vitya Kuftik from Rostov with a purple patch over his whole cheek (I believe he was a movie director), the most eminent representatives of the MASSOLIT poetry section-Pavianov, Bogokhulsky, Sladky, Shpichkin and Adelphina Buzdyak; young men of unknown professions with crew cuts and padded shoulders; a very elderly man with a beard to which a bit of scallion still clung, his arms around a sickly girl devoured by anemia, in a crumpled orange silk dress.

Dripping with perspiration, the waiters carried sweating beer mugs high over their heads, shouting hoarsely and with hatred, "Sorry, citizen!" Somewhere in a loudspeaker a voice commanded: "Karsky shashlik, one! Zubrovka, two! Tripe polonais!" The thin high voice no longer sang but howled, "Hallelujah!" The clashing of the golden cymbals occasionally covered even the clatter of the dishes which the dishwashers were sending down the chute into the kitchen. In short, hell.

And at midnight there was a vision in hell. A dazzlingly handsome black-eyed man with a dagger-shaped beard, in a frock coat, came out on the veranda and cast a royal eye around his domain. It was said, it was said by mystics that there had been a time when the handsome man did not wear a frock coat, but a wide leather belt with revolvers tucked into it, and his raven hair was tied with scarlet silk, and he commanded a brig that sailed the Caribbean under a dead black flag bearing the sign of the skull.

But no, no! The seductive mystics are lying. There are no Caribbean Seas in the world, no reckless buccaneers are sailing them, and no corvettes are chasing them, no cannon smoke drifts low over the waves. There is nothing, and there never was! There is only a stunted linden tree out there, an iron fence, and the boulevard beyond it…. And ice melting in the bowl, and someone's bovine bloodshot eyes at the next table, and fear, fear… Oh, gods, gods, poison, give me poison!…

And suddenly the name "Berlioz" fluttered up over a table. Suddenly the jazz collapsed as though someone had crushed it with a fist. "What, what, what, what?!" "Berlioz!" And everyone jumped up, everyone cried out.

Yes, a wave of grief rose at the terrible news about Mikhail Alexandrovich. Somebody ran and shouted that they must all, at once, without leaving the spot compose a collective telegram and send it off immediately.

But what telegram, we ask you, and where? And what would be the purpose in sending it? And, indeed, where? And what need of telegrams has he whose crumpled skull is now being squeezed together in the rubber gloves of the dissector, whose neck the professor is now piercing with curved needles? He is dead, and no longer has any need of telegrams. Everything is finished. Let us not trouble the telegraph office any more.

Yes, he is dead, dead… But we-we are alive!

Yes, a wave of grief had swept up, but it lasted a while and began to subside, and here and there someone has already gone back to his table, and, stealthily at first, then openly, taken a sip from his glass, then a chaser. And really, who can allow cutlets de volaille to go to waste? Can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich? How? By going hungry? After all, we are alive!

Naturally, the piano was locked up, the jazz band went home, several journalists hurried off to their newspapers to write obituaries. It was learned that Zheldybin had arrived from the morgue. He installed himself in the dead man's office upstairs and there was an instant rumor that he would take over the duties of Berlioz. Zheldybin summoned all twelve members of the Executive Board from the restaurant, and a meeting was immediately opened in Berlioz' office to discuss the urgent questions regarding the décor of the columned Griboyedov hall, the transfer of the body from the morgue to this hall, its placement on public view, and all the rest of the matters connected with the sad event.

And the restaurant resumed its customary life and would have gone on peacefully until closing time, at four o'clock in the morning, had it not been for an utterly unprecedented occurrence, which struck the guests far more than the news of Berlioz' death.

First to react were the coachmen waiting at the gates of the Griboyedov House. One of them, rising on his box, was heard to exclaim:

"Whew! Look at that!"

After that a little light flared up from out of nowhere near the wrought-iron fence and floated toward the veranda. The diners began to rise in their seats to peer at it, and noticed that a white ghost was moving toward the restaurant together with the light. When it approached the trellis, they sat petrified at the tables with pieces of sterlet on their forks, and goggled at it. The doorman, who had just stepped out of the restaurant coatroom into the yard to have a smoke, crushed the cigarette with his foot and started out toward the ghost with the patent aim of barring its access to the restaurant. For some reason, however, he did not carry out his intention and stopped with a vacuous smile.

And the ghost, entering the opening in the trellis, stepped unhindered on the veranda. At this point everybody realized that it was not a ghost at all, but Ivan Nikolayevich Homeless, the famous poet.

He was barefoot, in a tattered whitish Tolstoy blouse, with a paper icon depicting an unknown saint pinned to his chest with a diaper pin, and in striped, white underpants. In his hand, Ivan Nikolayevich carried a burning wedding candle. His right cheek had a fresh scratch. It would be difficult to measure the depth of the silence that fell over the veranda. One of the waiters let a beer mug hang slanting from his hand, and the beer dripped on the floor.

The poet raised the candle overhead and loudly pronounced:

"Hail, friends!"

After that he glanced under the nearest table and exclaimed despairingly, "No, he is not here!"

Two voices were heard. A basso said with pitiless finality:

"He's done for. Delirium tremens."

A second, frightened female voice said:

"But how did the militia allow him in the street in this condition?"

Ivan Nikolayevich heard this and answered:

"They tried to stop me twice, on Skatertny and here, on Bronnaya, but I swung over a fence, and, as you see, I got my cheek scratched!" Then Ivan Nikolayevich raised his candle again and cried: "Brethren in literature!" His hoarse voice became stronger and more fervent, "Hear me, one and all! He has appeared! Catch him at once, or he will work untold disasters!"

"What? What? What did he say? Who has appeared?" voices cried from all sides.

"The consultant," answered Ivan. "And this consultant has just murdered Misha Berlioz at the Patriarchs' Ponds."

Now people rushed from the inner rooms to the veranda and a crowd converged around Ivan's light.

"Excuse me, but tell us more precisely," a quiet and courteous voice spoke into Ivan's ear. "Tell us, how did he murder him? Who murdered him?"

"The foreign consultant, a professor and a spy," Ivan Nikolayevich answered, looking around.

"And what is his name?" the voice whispered.

"That's just the trouble-the name!" Ivan cried in anguish. "If I only knew the name! I didn't see it clearly on his calling card… I remember only the first letter, 'W,' the name begins with 'W.' But what name begins with 'W?" Ivan asked himself, clutching his forehead, and began to mutter: "W, W, We… Wa… Wo… Washner? Wagner? Weiner? Wegner? Winter?" The hair on Ivan's head began to stir with his effort to remember.

"Woolf?" a woman cried sympathetically.

Ivan turned angrily.

"Idiot!" he shouted, searching for the woman with his eyes. "What has Woolf to do with it? Woolf is not to blame! Wo, Wa… No, I can't remember! Well, now, citizens, the thing to do is to telephone at once to the militia. Let them send out five motorcycles with machine guns to hunt down the professor. And don't forget to tell them that he has two others with him: a stringy fellow, checkered, with a cracked pince-nez, and a tom cat, black, fat… And I will look around Griboyedov's, I have a feeling he's here!"

Ivan fell into a state of anxiety, pushed his way out of the crowd and began to swing the candle, spattering himself with wax, and to look under the tables. Someone's voice said, "a doctor!" And someone's ingratiating, fleshy face, plump and shaven, in horn-rimmed glasses, appeared before Ivan.

"Comrade Homeless," the face began in an oily voice, "calm down! You are shaken by the death of our beloved Mikhail Alexandrovich… no, of Misha Berlioz. We all understand it very well. You need rest. The comrades will help you get to bed now, and you will take a nap…."

"You!" Ivan bared his teeth at him. "Don't you understand that the professor must be caught? And here you bother me with your nonsense! Cretin!"

''Comrade Homeless, pardon me!…" the face replied, flushing, backing away and already regretting that it had let itself be drawn into the affair.

"Oh, no, anyone else, but not you! You I will not pardon," Ivan Nikolayevich said with quiet hatred.

A spasm twisted his face, he quickly shifted the candle from the right hand to the left, swung widely and landed the sympathetic face a blow on the ear.

At this point the others bethought themselves to rush at Ivan-and they rushed. The candle went out, and the glasses which had been knocked off the helpful face were instantly trampled. Ivan let out a curdling battle cry, heard temptingly even on the boulevard, and began to defend himself. Dishes flew clattering to the floor, women screamed.

While the waiters were tying up the poet with towels, a conversation went on in the coatroom between the commander of the brig and the doorman.

"Did you see that he was in his underpants?" the pirate asked coldly.

"But, Archibald Archibaldovich," the doorman answered, cowed, "how could I keep him out if he is a member of MASSOLIT?"

"Did you see that he was in his underpants?" the pirate repeated.

"But please, Archibald Archibaldovich," the doorman said, turning purple. "What could I do? I understand myself that there are ladies on the veranda…."

"Ladies have nothing to do with it, the ladies do not care," the pirate answered, literally incinerating the doorman with his eyes. "But the militia does care! A man in underwear can walk through the streets of Moscow only if he is accompanied by the militia, and if he is on his way to one place only-the nearest militia precinct! And you, if you're a doorman, ought to know that the moment you catch sight of such a man you must begin to whistle. Do you hear? Do you hear what is happening on the veranda?"

The half-crazed doorman heard a peculiar booming and grunting from the veranda, the sound of breaking dishes, women's screams.

"Well, what shall I do to you for this?" asked the buccaneer.

The doorman's face assumed the hue of a typhoid patient's and his eyes stared with horror. It seemed to him that the black hair, neatly combed and parted, was suddenly covered with flaming silk. The dress shirt and the frock coat vanished, and the handle of a gun appeared behind a leather belt. The doorman imagined himself hanged from the fore-topgallant. With his own eyes he saw his own protruding tongue and lifeless head, lolling on his shoulder; he even heard the splashing of the waves against the ship. The doorman's knees buckled. But here the buccaneer took pity on him and extinguished his burning stare.

"Take care now, Nikolay, this is the last time! We don't need such doormen at the restaurant, even for nothing. Get yourself a job as watchman in a church." Having pronounced these words, the commander issued a command, clear, sharp, and quick: "Get Panteley from the buffet. Get a militiaman. A report. A car. To the psychiatric ward." And he added: "Whistle!"

Fifteen minutes later the astounded public, not only in the restaurant, but on the boulevard itself and in the windows of the buildings facing the restaurant garden, saw Panteley, the doorman, a militiaman, a waiter, and the poet Ryukhin carry out through the Griboyedov gates a young man swaddled like a doll, streaming with tears, spitting, aiming particularly at Ryukhin, and screaming over the whole boulevard:

"Swine!… Swine!…"

A furious-faced truck driver was starting up his motor. Next to him a coachman whipped his horse's flanks with violet reins, shouting:

"Why not get a racer? I have taken others to the psychiatric ward!"

The crowd hummed around them, discussing the unprecedented occurrence. In short, there was a low, vile, enticing, ugly scandal which ended only when the truck rolled away from the Griboyedov gates with the unfortunate Ivan Nikolayevich, the militiaman, Panteley, and Ryukhin.

Chapter 6

SCHIZOPHRENIA, AS SAID BEFORE

When the man with a pointed beard, in a white coat, came out into the waiting room of the famous psychiatric clinic recently built near the river bank on the outskirts of Moscow, it was half-past one in the morning. Three attendants kept their eyes unremittingly on Ivan Nikolayevich, who sat on the sofa. The poet Ryukhin was also there, in a state of extreme agitation. The towels which had bound Ivan Nikolayevich lay in a heap on the same sofa. The poet's hands and feet were free.

Seeing the man who entered, Ryukhin turned pale, cleared his throat and said timidly:

"How do you do, Doctor."

The doctor bowed to Ryukhin, but as he bowed his eyes were not on Ryukhin but on Ivan Nikolayevich. The poet sat utterly motionless, with knitted brows and a furious face, and did not even stir when the doctor entered.

"This, Doctor," Ryukhin began for some reason in a mysterious whisper, casting apprehensive glances at Ivan Nikolayevich, "is the well-known poet Ivan Homeless…. You see… we were afraid it might be delirium tremens…."

"Did he drink much?" the doctor asked through his teeth.

"No, he drank a bit, but not too…"

"Was he trying to catch cockroaches, rats, devils, or running dogs?"

"No," Ryukhin answered with a start. "I saw him yesterday and this morning…. He was perfectly well."

"And why is he wearing underpants? Did you get him out of bed?"

"No, Doctor, he came to the restaurant like that…."

"Uhum, uhum," the doctor said with great satisfaction. "And why the scratches? Was he fighting with anyone?"

"He fell off a fence, and then he hit a man in the restaurant… and one or two others…."

"I see, I see, I see," said the doctor and, turning to Ivan, he added, "How do you do!"

"Hello, saboteur!" Ivan replied loudly, with venom.

Ryukhin was so embarrassed that he did not dare to look up at the courteous doctor. But the latter was not in the least offended. With a neat, practiced gesture he took off his glasses, lifted the flaps of his coat and put the glasses in the back pocket of his trousers. Then he asked Ivan:

"How old are you?"

"Go to the devil, all of you! Really!" Ivan cried rudely and turned away.

"But why are you angry? Did I say anything unpleasant?"

"I am twenty-three years old," Ivan broke out excitedly, "and I will lodge a complaint against all of you. And you, especially, vermin!" he addressed himself separately to Ryukhin.

"Why will you complain?"

"Because I am a perfectly healthy man, and I was grabbed and brought by force to an insane asylum!" Ivan said savagely.

Ryukhin looked closely at Ivan and went numb: there was no trace of madness in his eyes. They were no longer wandering as they had been at Griboyedov's, but bright and lucid, as usual.

"Good heavens!" Ryukhin thought with alarm. "But he is really normal! What a mess! Why did we drag him here, after all? He is normal, quite normal, only his face is scratched…."

"You are not in an insane asylum," the doctor said calmly, sitting down on a white stool with a shiny base, "but in a hospital, where no one will detain you without need."

Ivan Nikolayevich looked at him distrustfully out of the corner of his eye; nevertheless he muttered:

"Thank God! At last there is one normal man among all those idiots, the worst of whom is this blockhead without a shred of talent, Sashka!"

"Who is this blockhead Sashka?" the doctor inquired.

"This Ryukhin, here," Ivan replied, pointing a dirty finger at him.

Ryukhin flushed with indignation. "That's what I get instead of thanks," he thought bitterly, "for trying to help him! What a louse!"

"A typical little kulak in his psychology," Ivan Nikolayevich continued, evidently determined to expose Ryukhin to the end. "And a little kulak who carefully pretends to be a proletarian. Take a look at his pious physiognomy and compare it with the ringing verses he concocts. Ha!… Just take a look inside him, and see what he really thinks…. You'll gasp!" and Ivan Nikolayevich laughed balefully.

Ryukhin was breathing hard. His face was scarlet, and his one thought was that he had warmed a serpent on his breast, that he had taken the trouble to help a man who turned out to be a vicious enemy. And worst of all, nothing could be done about it. How can you argue with a madman?

"And why were you brought here?" asked the doctor, after listening attentively to Ivan's accusations.

"The devil only knows, the imbeciles! They grabbed me, tied me up with rags, and dragged me off in a truck!"

"May I ask you why you came to the restaurant in nothing but your underwear?"

"There's nothing strange about it," said Ivan. "I went to take a swim in the Moskva River, and someone filched my clothes and left me this trash! I couldn't have gone naked across Moscow! I put on what was there because I was in a hurry to get to the Griboyedov restaurant."

The doctor looked questioningly at Ryukhin, who muttered glumly:

"That's the name of the restaurant."

"Ah," said the doctor. "And why were you in such a hurry? A business meeting?"

"I'm trying to catch the consultant," answered Ivan Nikolayevich and looked around anxiously.

"What consultant?"

"Do you know Berlioz?" Ivan asked significantly.

"The… composer?"

Ivan became upset.

"What composer? Oh, yes… Oh, no. The composer was a namesake of Misha Berlioz."

Ryukhin did not feel like saying anything, but he had to explain:

"Berlioz, the secretary of MASSOLIT, was ran over by a streetcar today at the Patriarchs' Ponds."

"Don't babble about things you don't know anything about!" Ivan said angrily to Ryukhin. "You weren't there, I was! He deliberately got him under the streetcar!"

"Did he push him?"

"'Push him!' What has that to do with it?" Ivan cried, angered at everyone's obtuseness. "That kind does not have to push! He can pull such tricks, just hold on! He knew beforehand that Berlioz would fall under the streetcar!"

"Did anyone else see this consultant?"

"That's the whole trouble-only Berlioz and myself."

"I see. And what did you do to catch this murderer?" The doctor turned and glanced at the woman in the white coat who sat at a table near the wall. She took out a sheet of paper and began to fill out the blank spaces in its columns.

"This is what I did: I took a candle in the kitchen…"

"This one?" asked the doctor, pointing at the broken candle lying on the table before the woman, next to the icon.

"Yes, that's it. And…"

"And what is the icon for?"

"Oh, well, the icon…" Ivan blushed. "It was the icon that frightened them most of all." He poked a finger at Ryukhin again. "But you see, the consultant… he… let us speak frankly… he's in league with the evil ones… and it is not so simple to catch him."

The attendants for some reason stretched their hands at their sides and did not take their eyes away from Ivan.

"Oh, yes," continued Ivan, "he's in with them! This is a fact! He had conversations with Pontius Pilate. Don't look at me like that, I am telling you the truth! He saw everything-the balcony, the palms. In a word, he visited Pontius Pilate, I'll swear to that."

"Well, well?…"

"Well, then, I pinned the icon on my chest and ran…"

The clock suddenly struck twice.

"Oh!" cried Ivan, getting up from the sofa. "Two o'clock, and I'm wasting time with you here! I'm sorry, where is the telephone?"

"Let him get to the telephone," the doctor told the attendants.

Ivan seized the receiver, and the woman in the meantime asked Ryukhin quietly:

"Is he married?"

"Single," Ryukhin answered, frightened.

"Member of a trade union?"

"Yes."

"Militia?" Ivan shouted into the telephone. "Militia? Comrade officer, see that five motorcycles with machine guns are sent out at once to catch the foreign consultant. What? Call for me, I'll come with you myself…. This is the poet Homeless, calling from the insane asylum…. What's your address?" Homeless asked the doctor in a whisper, covering the receiver with his hand. Then he shouted again: "Are you listening? Hello!… Outrageous!" Homeless roared and threw the receiver against the wall. Then he turned to the doctor, held out his hand, said drily, "Good-by," and turned to go.

"But wait, where will you go now?" the doctor protested, peering into Ivan's eyes. "So late at night, and in your underwear… You are not feeling very well, why not stay with us?"

"Let me pass," Ivan said to the attendants who closed in at the door. "Will you, or won't you?" the poet shouted in a furious voice.

Ryukhin shook with fear. The woman pressed a button on the table, and a shiny box with a sealed ampoule leaped out onto its glass surface.

"Ah, so?!" Ivan spoke wildly, looking around him like a beast at bay. "Very well, then… Good-by!" and he dived headfirst into the drapery over the window.

There was a rather loud crash, but the glass behind the drapery did not even crack, and a moment later Ivan was struggling desperately in the hands of the attendants. He panted, tried to bite, and screamed:

"So that's the kind of windows you've put in here! Let go! Let go!…"

The syringe flashed in the doctor's hands. The woman slit the sleeve of the Tolstoy blouse with a single stroke and clutched the poet's arm with unfeminine strength. There was a smell of ether, Ivan drooped in the grip of four people, and the skilled doctor used the moment to plunge the needle into Ivan's arm. Ivan was held a few more seconds, then he was lowered on the sofa.

"Bandits!" he yelled and jumped up, but was reinstated on the sofa. As soon as they released him, he jumped again, but a moment later he sat down by himself. He was silent a while, looking around, somewhat bewildered. Suddenly he yawned, then smiled maliciously.

"Imprisoned, after all," he said, and yawned again. Then suddenly he lay down, put his head upon the pillow, slipped his fist under his cheek like a child, and mumbled sleepily, this time without rancor: "Very well… you'll pay for everything yourselves… I warned you, now you can do what you want…. Right now, I am interested in Pontius Pilate most of all… Pilate…" He closed his eyes.

"A bath, a separate room, number 117, and a guard to watch him," the doctor ordered, putting on his glasses. Ryukhin started again. The white door opened noiselessly and beyond it he could see a corridor illuminated by blue night lights. A couch on rubber wheels rolled out of the corridor, the quieted Ivan was transferred to it, wheeled into the corridor, and the door closed behind him.

"Doctor," the shaken Ryukhin asked in a whisper, "so he is really sick?"

"Oh, yes," answered the doctor.

"But what is the matter with him?" Ryukhin asked timidly.

The weary doctor glanced at Ryukhin and answered listlessly:

"Motor and speech excitation… delirium… morbid interpretations… It seems to be a complex case. Schizophrenia, I suppose. Aggravated by alcoholism…."

Ryukhin understood nothing from the doctor's words except that Ivan Nikolayevich seemed to be in a bad way. He sighed and asked:

"And what is this consultant he kept talking about?"

"He must have seen someone who struck his disordered imagination. Or it may have been a hallucination…."

A few minutes later the truck was taking Ryukhin back to Moscow. It was beginning to dawn; the still-burning lights along the highway were now unnecessary and irritating. The driver, angry over the wasted night, drove at top speed, and the truck skidded at every turn.

And now the wood receded, remained far behind, and the river veered off somewhere. A variety of sights rushed out helter-skelter to meet the truck: fences with sentry boxes, stacks of wood, tremendously high poles and masts with spools strung on them, piles of rubble, earth slashed with canals. The traveler felt that Moscow was right there, around the corner; in a moment it would pile itself upon him, suck him in.

Ryukhin was jolted and thrown in all directions. He sat on some sort of a stump that was constantly trying to slip out from under him. The restaurant towels, left by the militiaman and Panteley, who returned earlier by bus, slid all over the floor of the truck. Ryukhin had tried at first to collect them, then he hissed with rage, "To hell with them! Why am I exerting myself like an idiot?…" He kicked them away with his foot and did not look at them again.

Ryukhin was in a terrible mood. It was clear that his visit to the house of sorrow had left a most painful mark upon him. He tried to understand just what it was that tormented him. The corridor with the blue lamps that stuck in his memory? The thought that there was no greater misfortune in the world than loss of reason? Yes, yes, of course, this too. But what else? The insult! That was it. Yes, the insulting words thrown into his face by Homeless. And the worst of it was not that they were insulting, but that they were true.

The poet no longer looked to the sides; staring at the dirty, quivering floor, he began to mutter something, whining and nagging at himself.

Yes, poems… He was thirty-two years old! And really, what next? Was he to go on writing his several poems a year? Until a ripe old age? Yes, yes, until a ripe old age. And what would these poems bring him? Fame? "What nonsense! Don't fool yourself, at least. Fame will never come to the man who writes bad poems. Why are they bad? He spoke the truth, he spoke the truth!" Ryukhin flayed himself mercilessly.

Thoroughly poisoned by this burst of neurasthenia, the poet swayed, and the floor under him stopped shaking. Ryukhin raised his head and realized that he was long in Moscow, that, furthermore, the dawn had risen over Moscow, that the cloud overhead was rimmed with gold, that his truck was standing, caught in a traffic jam at the turn to the boulevard, and that a metal man stood on a pedestal a step or two away, his head slightly bowed, looking indifferently at the boulevard.

A flood of strange ideas rushed through the brain of the afflicted poet. "There is an example of real luck…." Ryukhin stood up in the truck to his full height and lifted his hand, ready, for some reason, to attack the cast-iron man who was doing no one any harm.[*] "Every step he took in his life, everything that happened to him, worked to his benefit, increased his fame! But what did he do? I don't see it…. What is so special in the words, 'The storm in darkness…'? I don't understand it! He was lucky, just lucky!" Ryukhin suddenly concluded with venom and felt the truck stir under him. "That White Guard fired and fired at him, and got him in the hip, and assured him of immortality…."

The column of traffic began to move. Not more than two minutes later, the poet, feeling utterly sick and even aged by his experience, stepped on the Griboyedov veranda. It was almost empty now. In the corner, several people were finishing their drinks; at the center of this company was a bustling actor Ryukhin knew, wearing an embroidered skullcap, with a glass of "Abrau" in his hand.

Archibald Archibaldovich met Ryukhin, burdened with the towels, with an affable smile, and relieved him of the accursed rags. Had he not been so lacerated by his ordeals at the clinic and in the truck, Ryukhin would probably have taken pleasure in describing the events at the hospital and embellishing his story with improvised details. But now he was past such things. Now, after the truck ride, Ryukhin looked at the pirate closely for the first time. And, generally unobservant as he was, he realized that, although the other asked about Homeless and even cried commiseratingly, "Oh, no, oh, no!" he was in essence totally indifferent to the sick man's fate and did not feel a shred of pity. "Right! That's the way to be!" Ryukhin thought with cynical, self-demolishing hatred. And, breaking off his story about the schizophrenic, he said:

"Archibald Archibaldovich, I could do with a drink…."

The pirate whispered, with an understanding look:

"I know… just a moment…." and he motioned to the waiter.

Fifteen minutes later, Ryukhin sat huddled in total solitude over a plate of carp, drinking glass after glass of vodka, understanding and admitting to himself that nothing in his life could be repaired any more, that all he could do was to forget.

The poet had wasted his night while others feasted, and now he knew that it could never be recovered. He needed only to raise his face from the lamp to the sky to realize that the night was lost beyond redemption. The waiters hurriedly pulled the tableclothes off the tables. The tom cats slinking around the veranda had a morning air about them. The day was irresistibly bearing down upon the poet.

* * *

* The "cast-iron man" is a statue of Pushkin. "The storm in darkness" are the opening words of a famous poem by Pushkin.-Translator's note

Chapter 7

THE SINISTER APARTMENT

If anyone said to Styopa Likhodeyev the next morning, "Styopa! If you don't get up at once, you will be shot!" he would have answered in a faint, languid voice, "Shoot me, do anything you like to me-I won't get up."

Get up? He could not even open his eyes. He felt that if he did, there would be a flash of lightning, and his head would instantly explode to bits. A heavy bell boomed in his head. Brown spots with fiery green rims were swimming between his eyeballs and his closed lids. And, on top of all this, he felt acute nausea-this nausea seemingly connected with the sounds of a persistent phonograph.

Styopa tried to remember, but the only thing he could recall was standing with a napkin in his hand in some unknown place (it must have been the night before), trying to kiss some unknown lady, and promising that he would visit her the next day exactly at noon. The lady demurred, saying, "No, no, I won't be home!" But Styopa obstinately insisted, "I will come, see if I don't!"

Who the lady was, Styopa could not imagine. Nor did he have any idea of what time it was now, or what day, or what month. Worst of all, he could not understand where he was. Attempting to determine at least the latter fact, he made an effort and unglued the eyelid of his left eye. Something glinted dimly in the dusk. Styopa finally recognized the wall mirror and realized that he was lying flat on his back in his own bed, that is, in the bed of the ex-jeweler's wife, in the bedroom. At this point, he felt such a stab in his head that he closed his eyes and moaned.

Let us explain: Styopa Likhodeyev, director of the Variety Theater, woke in the morning in the very apartment he shared with the late Berlioz, in a large six-story building on Sadovaya.

It must be said that this apartment, Number 50, had long enjoyed, if not a bad, at least a dubious reputation. Only two years ago it still belonged to the widow of the jeweler de Fougère. Anna Frantsevna de Fougère, a respectable and very efficient lady of fifty, let three of her five rooms to roomers: one, whose name, I believe, was Belomut, and another, whose name is lost.

Two years ago, however, a series of inexplicable events began to plague the apartment: people began to disappear from it without a trace.

For a long time, all sorts of legends circulated in the house about the cursed apartment and its lost residents. Then it was rented by the late Berlioz with his wife, and by this Styopa, also with his wife. Naturally, the moment they moved into the damned apartment, all sorts of infernal things began to happen. Namely, both wives disappeared within a single month. But these did not disappear without a trace. Of Berlioz' wife it was said that she was seen in Kharkov with a ballet master. As for Styopa's wife, she was allegedly discovered on Bozhedomka Street where, gossip had it, the director of the Variety Theater had managed, with the aid of his innumerable acquaintances, to find her a room, but on one condition: she was never to show her face on Sadovaya….

And so, Styopa moaned. He wanted to call the house maid, Grunya, and ask her for an aspirin, but even in his present state he realized that it was stupid, for Grunya would, of course, have no aspirin. He tried to call Berlioz and groaned twice, "Misha… Misha…" But, as you can easily surmise, he got no answer. The apartment was utterly silent.

Wriggling his toes, Styopa guessed that he was in his socks. He passed his shaking hand along his thigh to determine whether he had his trousers on, but could determine nothing. At length, seeing that he was solitary and abandoned, with no one to help him, he decided to get up, no matter what inhuman effort it might cost him.

Styopa tore his eyelids open and saw himself reflected in the wall mirror in the shape of a man with his hair standing up in all directions, with a bloated physiognomy overgrown with black stubble, with swollen eyes, in a soiled shirt with a collar and tie, in underpants and socks.

This was his image in the glass, and next to the glass he saw an unknown man dressed in black, with a black beret.

Styopa sat up in bed and his bloodshot eyes bulged, as much as they could, at the stranger. It was the stranger who broke the silence, saying in a low, heavy voice with a foreign accent:

"Good morning, my most charming Stepan Bogdanovich!"

There was a pause, after which, making a violent effort, Styopa asked:

"What do you wish?" And was astonished, not recognizing his own voice. The "what" was said in a treble; the "do you" in a basso; and "wish" did not come out at all.

The stranger smiled amiably, took out a large, gold pocket watch with a diamond triangle on the lid. It rang eleven times and he said:

"Eleven. I have waited for your awakening exactly an hour, for you asked me to come at ten. And here I am!"

Styopa felt for his trousers on the chair next to the bed and whispered:

"Sorry…" He put on his trousers and asked hoarsely, "Will you please tell me your name?"

He found it difficult to speak. At every word, somebody stuck a needle into his brain, causing him infernal pain.

"Oh! So you've forgotten my name too?" the stranger smiled.

"Forgive me…." Styopa croaked, feeling that his hangover was generously presenting him with a new symptom: it seemed to him as though the floor by the bed had vanished somewhere and that he was about to fly headfirst to the devil's own mother in hell.

"My dear Stepan Bogdanovich," the visitor spoke with an understanding smile. "No aspirin will help you. Obey the wise old rule: cure like with like. The only thing that will restore you is a glass or two of vodka and a hot, spicy snack."

Styopa was a shrewd man. Sick though he was, he knew that, once he was caught in this condition, he had best admit everything.

"Frankly speaking," he began, barely able to turn his tongue, "last night I went on a bit of…"

"Not another word!" the visitor cried, and slid away sideways with his chair.

Styopa's eyes goggled as he saw, on the small table, a tray with sliced white bread, caviar in a dish, white marinated mushrooms on a plate, something in a saucepan, and, finally, some vodka in a good-sized decanter that had once belonged to the ex-jeweler's wife. It struck him particularly that the decanter was misted with cold. However, this was easily explained: it rested in a bowl packed with ice. In short, the service was expert and immaculate.

The stranger did not allow Styopa's astonishment to reach the painful stage and deftly poured him half a tumbler of vodka.

"And you?" squeaked Styopa.

"With pleasure!"

Styopa brought his tumbler to his lips with a shaking hand, and the stranger emptied his in a single gulp. Chewing a forkful of caviar, Styopa managed to squeeze out the words:

"And you?… have a bite?"

"Thank you, I never do," answered the stranger and poured a second drink. They uncovered the saucepan and found that it contained sausages with tomato sauce.

And soon the accursed green clouds before Styopa's eyes melted away, words began to come more easily, and, best of all, his memory began to clear. He recalled that he had been in Skhodnya the night before, at the summer home of the sketch writer Khustov, where this Khustov had taken him in a taxi. He also remembered how they hired the taxi at the Metropole, in company of a third man, an actor, no, not an actor… somebody with a phonograph in a suitcase. Yes, yes, it was at the summer home! He also remembered that the phonograph made the dogs howl. But the lady Styopa was trying to kiss remained unexplained… the devil knew who she was… it seemed she worked at the radio station… but maybe she didn't….

Thus, the previous day was slowly coming into focus. But Styopa was far more interested in the present day, and particularly in the appearance of a stranger in his bedroom, with vodka and an elegant snack at that. That was something he would not mind having explained!

"Well, I hope that you remember my name now?"

But Styopa merely smiled with embarrassment and raised his hands.

"But really! I have an idea you drank port after the vodka. My dear man, don't you know this is not done?"

"I want to ask you-please let this remain between us," Styopa begged obsequiously.

"But of course, of course! But naturally, I cannot vouch for Khustov."

"So you know Khustov too?"

"I saw him at your office yesterday, but a single glance at him is enough to see that he is a scoundrel, a gossip, a toady, and parasite."

"How true!" Styopa thought, amazed at this brief, sharp, and accurate description of Khustov.

Yes, the previous day was coming together piece by piece, but the director of the Variety Theater continued to feel anxious. There was a huge black gaping hole in the day. Say what you will, but Styopa had not seen this stranger in the beret at his office at all.

"Professor of black magic, Woland," the visitor said importantly, seeing Styopa's confusion. And he told him everything in order.

Yesterday afternoon he arrived in Moscow from abroad and immediately called at Styopa's office to offer his services to the theater. Styopa telephoned the Moscow Regional Theatrical Commission to get approval (Styopa turned pale and blinked), and then he signed a contract with Professor Woland for seven performances (Styopa opened his mouth), and asked Woland to come this morning at ten o'clock to discuss details…. And here he was. On arrival, he met the house maid Grunya, who explained that she had just come in herself, that she was a day maid, that Berlioz was out, and, if the visitor wished to see Stepan Bogdanovich, he could go to his bedroom himself. Stepan Bogdanovich, she said, was a heavy sleeper, and she would not try to wake him. When he saw the condition Stepan Bogdanovich was in, the artist sent Grunya to the nearest gourmet shop for vodka and food and to the drug store for ice, and…

"Allow me to pay you," the crushed Styopa whimpered and began to look for his wallet.

"Oh, what nonsense!" exclaimed the artist and would not hear of it again.

And so, the vodka and the snack were explained. And yet, Styopa was still pathetic to behold: he remembered absolutely nothing about a contract, and he was ready to stake his life that he had not seen this Woland yesterday. Yes, Khustov had been there, but not Woland.

"May I see the contract?" Styopa asked quietly.

"Certainly, certainly…."

Styopa glanced at the paper and froze. Everything was in its proper place: first, Styopa's own dashing signature… a slanting note on the margin in the hand of the theater's financial manager Rimsky, authorizing the payment of ten thousand rubles to the artist Woland as an advance against the thirty-five thousand due him for seven performances. And even Woland's signature, attesting to his receipt of the ten thousand.

"What is this?" Styopa thought miserably and his head began to spin. Was he beginning to suffer ominous lapses of memory? But, of course, after the contract was presented, further expression of astonishment would have been improper. Styopa excused himself for a moment and ran to the hallway as he was, in socks, intending to telephone. On the way he cried in the direction of the kitchen:

"Grunya!"

But no one answered. He glanced at the door of Berlioz' study, which was next to the foyer, and stood, as they say, petrified. On the door handle there was a huge circle of sealing wax on a cord.

"What now!" somebody barked in Styopa's head. "That's all we need!" And Styopa's thoughts raced off along double tracks, but, as always in times of disaster, in tangential directions, and generally God knows where. It would be difficult to convey the confusion in his head. First, that infernal business with the black beret, chilled vodka, and the incredible contract…. And now, if you please, the seal on the door! You could tell anyone else that Berlioz had gotten into mischief, but not to Styopa… by God, he wouldn't believe it! And yet, there was the seal! Well…

And then some nasty little thoughts began to stir in Styopa's brain. As if in spite, he had just recently given Mikhail Alexandrovich an article for publication in his magazine. Between us, the article was idiotic. It was worthless, and the money was nothing to speak of….

Immediately after the article, he recalled the somewhat dubious conversation that had occurred, if he remembered rightly, on April 24, right here in the dining room, as Styopa was having dinner with Mikhail Alexandrovich. That is, of course, the conversation could not be described as dubious in the full sense of the word (Styopa would never have entered into such a conversation), but it was on a useless topic. He could just as well, my dear citizens, have stayed away from such conversations. Before the appearance of the seal this could unquestionably have been regarded as a mere trifle, but after the seal….

"Ah, Berlioz, Berlioz!" Styopa's mind rebelled. "Who would imagine it!"

But he had no time for wailing, and Styopa dialed the number of the financial manager of the Variety Theater, Rimsky. Styopa's position was delicate: to begin with, the foreigner might take offense at Styopa's attempt to verify his words after he had shown the contract; besides, it was difficult to speak to the financial manager. After all, one could not say, "Tell me, did I sign a contract yesterday with a professor of black magic for thirty-five thousand rubles?" No, such a question would not do!

"Yes!" he heard Rimsky's sharp, unpleasant voice in the receiver.

"Good morning, Grigory Danilovich," Styopa spoke quietly. "This is Likhodeyev. I'm calling you… hm… hm… well, I have this… umm… this artist Woland, here… and… I wanted to ask you, how about this evening?…"

"Ah, the magician?" Rimsky answered. "The posters will be ready momentarily."

"Aha…" Styopa said in a faint voice. "Well, see you…

"Are you coming in soon?" asked Rimsky.

"In thirty minutes," answered Styopa and, hanging up, clutched his burning head with his hands. It was a nasty business! What was happening to his memory, dear citizens, huh?

However, it was awkward to remain in the foyer any longer, and Styopa formed an immediate plan: he would do all he could to conceal his incredible forgetfulness and slyly maneuver the foreigner into telling him what exactly he intended to show that night at the theater entrusted to Styopa's management.

Styopa turned from the telephone and in the hallway mirror, which the lazy Grunya had not dusted for a long time, he clearly saw a most peculiar individual, lanky as a pole and in pince-nez (ah, if only Ivan Nikolayevich had been there! He would have recognized this character at once!). The individual was reflected for a moment and vanished. Styopa anxiously peered further into the hallway, and was jolted a second time, for a huge black tom passed through the mirror and also disappeared.

Styopa's heart dropped and he swayed.

"What is this?" he thought. "Am I going mad? Where do these reflections come from?" He looked into the hallway and cried in alarm:

"Grunya! What is this cat slinking around here? Where does he come from? And who else is here?"

"Don't worry, Stepan Bogdanovich," a voice replied from the bedroom, but it was not Grunya's voice. "The tom is mine. Don't be nervous. And Grunya is not here, I sent her to Voronezh. She complained that you had cheated her out of her vacation."

The words were so absurd and unexpected that Styopa decided he had not heard right. In total confusion he trotted back to the bedroom and froze on the threshold. His hair stirred on his head, and small drops of sweat broke out on his forehead.

His guest was no longer alone in the bedroom. The second chair was occupied by the character he had just glimpsed in the hallway. Now he was clearly visible: a tiny feather mustache, one lens glinting in the pince-nez, the other missing. But there were even worse things in the bedroom. A third visitor sprawled insolently on the padded ottoman that had once belonged to the jeweler's lady-namely, a black tom of terrifying proportions, with a glass of vodka in one paw and a fork in the other with which he had already managed to impale a pickled mushroom.

The dim light in the bedroom began to fade out altogether in Styopa's eyes. "So that's how people lose their minds…." he thought and caught at the doorpost.

"I see that you are a little surprised, my dearest Stepan Bogdanovich?" Woland inquired of Styopa who stared at the room with chattering teeth. "But there is nothing to wonder at. This is my retinue."

The tom emptied his glass of vodka, and Styopa's hand began to slide down the doorpost.

"And this retinue requires space," continued Woland. "So that we have one too many in the apartment. And it seems to me that the one is you."

"They, they!" the lanky checkered character bleated like a goat, referring to Styopa in the plural. "Generally, they've been behaving like a dreadful swine lately. Drinking, having affairs with women on the strength of their position in the theater, not doing a stitch of work and really incapable of doing any, since they don't know the first thing about the job. Putting things over on their superiors!"

"Using the government car for nothing," the tom tattled as he chewed his mushroom.

And now came the fourth and final appearance in the apartment, while Styopa, who had already slipped down to the floor, was clawing at the doorpost.

A new visitor stepped straight out of the mirror, small but extraordinarily wide in the shoulders, in a derby and with a fang projecting from his mouth, which made his incredibly odious physiognomy still more revolting. And on top of everything, with fiery-red hair.

"I," the new arrival entered the conversation, "generally fail to see how he ever got to be a director." The redhead's voice became more and more nasal: "If he is a director, I am an archbishop."

"You don't look like an archbishop, Azazello," remarked the tom, piling sausages on his plate.

"That's what I am saying," the redhead drawled nasally. And, turning to Woland, he added deferentially, "Permit me, Messire, to throw him the hell out of Moscow?"

"Scat!" the tom roared suddenly, his fur bristling.

And then the bedroom began to spin around Styopa. His head struck the doorpost and the thought flashed through his mind as he lost consciousness, "I'm dying…."

But he did not die. Opening his eyes a little, he found himself sitting on something made of stone. He heard a rushing noise. When he opened his eyes properly, he saw that the noise came from the sea and that the waves rocked at his very feet. In short, he was sitting at the very end of a jetty, with a dazzling blue sky over him and a white city on a mountainside behind him.

Not knowing how people behave in such cases, Styopa got up on his trembling feet and walked along the jetty toward the shore.

A man stood on the jetty, smoking and spitting into the sea. He looked at Styopa wildly and stopped spitting.

Then Styopa pulled a crazy stunt; he dropped on his knees before the unknown smoker and asked:

"I implore you, tell me what city is this?"

"Well!" said the heartless smoker.

"I am not drunk," Styopa said hoarsely. "Something happened to me… I am sick…. Where am I? What city is this?"

"Oh, well, Yalta…"

With a quiet sigh, Styopa toppled sideways, his head striking the sun-warmed rock of the jetty. Consciousness abandoned him.

Chapter 8

DUEL BETWEEN THE PROFESSOR AND THE POET

At the very moment when consciousness abandoned Styopa in Yalta, that is, about half-past eleven in the morning, it returned to Ivan Nikolayevich Homeless, who awakened from a deep and prolonged sleep. For a while he tried to understand how he had gotten to this unfamiliar room with its white walls, its strange night table of some light metal, and its white window shade behind which there seemed to be bright sunshine.

Ivan shook his head, discovered that it did not hurt, and remembered that he was in the hospital. This thought brought with it the memory of Berlioz' death, but now it did not cause him violent shock. The long rest calmed Ivan and he began to think more clearly. He remained motionless for a time on the immaculately clean, soft, and comfortable spring bed, then he saw the bell button near him. From his old habit of touching things without need, Ivan pressed it. He waited for a ring or someone's appearance, but something altogether different took place.

A frosted cylinder at the foot of Ivan's bed lit up, with the word "Drink" on it. After a few moments, the cylinder began to revolve until a new inscription appeared: "Attendant." Ivan was struck by the clever cylinder. Soon the "Attendant" gave way to "Call the doctor."

"Hm…" said Ivan, not knowing what to do with the cylinder next. But luck intervened. Ivan pressed the button again at the word "Nurse." The cylinder rang quietly in response and stopped. The light went out, and a plump, pleasant woman in a clean white uniform came in and said to Ivan:

"Good morning."

Ivan did not reply, considering such a greeting to be out of place under the circumstances. Indeed, they had locked up a perfectly sound man in a hospital and pretended that it was right and proper!

Meanwhile, without losing her good humor, the woman raised the shade by pressing a button and the sun streamed into the room through the light, widely-spaced grating which reached down to the floor. Behind the grating was a balcony, and beyond it, a winding river, with a gay pine wood on the opposite bank.

"You may have your bath now," the woman invited him, and under her hands the inner wall slid open, revealing an excellently equipped bathroom with a toilet.

Although Ivan had decided not to speak to the woman, his resolve broke down at the sight of the wide jet of water gushing into the bathtub from a gleaming faucet, and he said ironically:

"Just look at it! As good as at the Metropole!"

"Oh, no," the woman answered with pride. "Much better. You won't find such equipment anywhere, not even abroad. Doctors and scientists make special trips to see our hospital. We have foreign tourists here every day."

The words "foreign tourists" instantly brought back the memory of yesterday's consultant. Ivan's face darkened; he scowled and said:

"Foreign tourists… How you all adore them! But I can tell you there are all sorts among them. The one I met yesterday, for example-a delight to know!"

And he almost began to tell her about Pontius Pilate, but he checked himself, realizing that the woman was not interested in his stories, and could not help him anyway.

The freshly bathed Ivan Nikolayevich was given everything a man needs after a bath: a nicely ironed shirt, underpants, socks. Then the woman opened the door of a wardrobe and asked, pointing inside:

"What would you like to put on-a bathrobe, or pajamas?"

Ivan, forcibly attached to his new dwelling place, all but gasped at the woman's familiarity. He silently indicated a pair of pajamas of crimson flannel.

After that Ivan Nikolayevich was led down a silent and empty corridor to a room of enormous proportions. Determined to treat everything in this marvel-filled establishment with irony, Ivan immediately christened the room a "factory kitchen."

And there was good reason for it. The room was lined with cases and glass cabinets filled with shiny instruments. It was furnished with chairs of extraordinarily complicated construction, potbellied lamps with gleaming shades, a multitude of jars, gas burners, electric wires, and apparatus that no one could make head or tail of.

Three persons-two women and one man, all of them in white-busied themselves with Ivan. To begin with, they led him to a small table in the corner, with the obvious aim of getting information out of him.

Ivan began to assess the situation. He had three alternatives. The first and most tempting one was to throw himself upon all these lamps and intricate devices and smash them all to hell, thus showing his protest against being detained without reason. However, today's Ivan differed considerably from yesterday's, and the first alternative seemed to be of doubtful value. Those people might really become convinced that he was a violent madman. Hence, Ivan rejected this line of action. The second alternative was to launch at once into the story about the consultant and Pontius Pilate. But yesterday's experience showed that people either did not believe this story or else placed a peculiarly distorted interpretation on it. Consequently, Ivan rejected this choice as well, deciding on the third alternative: he would withdraw into proud silence.

However, he did not succeed in carrying out this decision to the full. Willy-nilly, he was obliged to answer a number of questions, if only briefly and morosely. And Ivan was questioned about absolutely everything in his past life, even including the scarlet fever he had had fifteen years before. After covering a whole page with information about Ivan, the woman in white turned it over and went on to question him about his relatives. It was an endless flood of nonsense: who died, and when, and how; did the departed drink, did he have any venereal diseases, and on and on in the same vein. In conclusion, they asked him to tell about yesterday's events at the Patriarchs' Ponds, but here they were not too insistent, and showed no astonishment over Pontius Pilate.

Then the woman yielded up Ivan to the man, and he went to work on him differently, without asking any questions. He took Ivan's temperature, counted his pulse, looked into Ivan's eyes, directing a bright light at them. Afterward another woman came to assist the man, and they stuck something into his back, though not painfully; they traced designs on his chest with the handle of a mallet, tapped his knees, which made Ivan's legs jerk, pricked his finger and drew blood from it, stuck needles into the crook of his elbow, put rubber bracelets around his arms….

Ivan merely grinned bitterly to himself, reflecting on how stupidly and strangely things had turned out. Just think! He wanted to warn everyone of the danger from the unknown consultant and to catch him, but all he achieved was to be brought to this mysterious room to talk about Uncle Fyodor who drank himself to death in Vologda. Insufferably stupid!

At last, Ivan was allowed to go. He was escorted back to his room, where he was given a cup of coffee, two soft-boiled eggs, and buttered white bread. He ate and drank everything offered him, and resolved to wait for someone of importance in this institution, whom he would finally convince to give him due attention and justice.

He did not have to wait long. Soon after he had eaten his breakfast, the door was suddenly flung open and a crowd of people in white coats piled in. In the van of this crowd walked a man of about forty-five, as carefully shaved as an actor, with pleasant but very penetrating eyes, and a courteous manner. His entire suite showed him marked respect and attention, and this lent his entrance an air of great solemnity. "Just like Pontius Pilate," thought Ivan.

Yes, this was unquestionably the chief. He sat down on a stool, while the rest remained standing.

"Doctor Stravinsky," the seated man introduced himself to Ivan and glanced at him in a friendly manner.

"Here, Alexandre Nikolayevich," someone with a small, neatly trimmed beard said in a low voice, handing the chief the paper on Ivan, covered with writing on both sides.

"They've cooked up a whole case," thought Ivan. And the chief ran through the sheet with a practiced eye, muttered "U-hum, u-hum…" and exchanged a few phrases with his retinue in a little-known language. "Speaks Latin too, just like Pilate," Ivan thought sadly. At this point one word made him start; it was "schizophrenia"-a word, alas, spoken but yesterday by the accursed foreigner at the Patriarchs' Ponds, and now repeated here by Professor Stravinsky. "He knew this too," Ivan thought anxiously.

The chief had evidently made it a rule to agree with everything and to rejoice in everything his companions said to him, and to express this with the words, "Fine, fine…."

"Fine!" said Stravinsky, returning the sheet to someone, and turned to Ivan:

"You are a poet?"

"A poet," Ivan answered gloomily and for the first time suddenly felt an inexplicable aversion to poetry. His own verses which he recalled at the moment seemed most unpleasant now.

Wrinkling his face, he asked Stravinsky in turn:

"You are a professor?"

Stravinsky nodded politely.

"And you're the chief here?" continued Ivan.

Stravinsky nodded again.

"I must speak to you," Ivan Nikolayevich said significantly.

"That's what I came for," replied Stravinsky.

"The point is this," began Ivan, feeling that his hour had come. "They've rigged me out here as a madman, and no one wants to listen to me!…"

"Oh, no, we shall listen to you with utmost attention," Stravinsky said earnestly and reassuringly. "And we shall certainly allow no one to rig you out as a madman."

"Well, listen to me then: last evening I met a mysterious individual at the Patriarchs' Ponds, perhaps a foreigner, or perhaps not. He knew beforehand that Berlioz would die, and he had personally seen Pontius Pilate."

The group listened to the poet silently, without moving.

"Pilate? The Pilate who lived at the time of Jesus Christ?" Stravinsky asked, narrowing his eyes at Ivan.

"That's the one."

"Ah," said Stravinsky. "And this Berlioz died under a streetcar?"

"Exactly. He was killed by a streetcar last night at the Patriarchs' Ponds in my presence, and this mysterious citizen…."

"The acquaintance of Pontius Pilate?" asked Stravinsky, obviously a man with a quick mind.

"Yes, the same one," confirmed Ivan, studying Stravinsky. "Well, then, he said beforehand that Annushka had spilled the sunflower oil… and this was exactly the spot where he slipped! What do you think of that?" Ivan inquired significantly, expecting his words to produce an effect.

But the effect did not follow, and Stravinsky simply asked him the next question:

"And who is this Annushka?"

This question somewhat unsettled Ivan, and his face twitched.

"Annushka is absolutely irrelevant here," he said, becoming nervous. "The devil knows who she is. Some fool from Sadovaya. The important thing, you see, is that he knew about the sunflower oil in advance! Do you understand me?"

"I understand very well," Stravinsky answered seriously and, touching the poet's knee, he added: "Don't get upset. Continue please."

"I will continue," said Ivan, trying to strike the same tone and knowing from bitter experience that only a calm approach could help him. "Well, then, this dreadful character (and he is lying about being a consultant) possesses extraordinary powers!… For example, you chase him, but you can never catch up with him…. And he has a pair of cronies-gems of their own kind! A stringy type with broken glasses and a tom cat of incredible size, who travels in streetcars by himself. Besides," Ivan, uninterrupted by anyone, spoke with increasing heat and persuasiveness, "he was personally on Pontius Pilate's balcony-that is beyond all doubt. And how can such things be allowed? He must be arrested immediately, or he will work untold disasters."

"And you are trying to get him arrested? Do I understand you correctly?" asked Stravinsky.

"He is clever," thought Ivan. "One must admit that even among intellectuals there are sometimes highly intelligent men; this cannot be denied." And he answered:

"Exactly! What else can you do? Think for yourself! And yet they've forcibly detained me here, they shine lamps into my eyes, they bathe me, and ask idiotic questions about Uncle Fedya who's been dead for years! I demand to be released at once!"

"Certainly. That's fine, fine!" replied Stravinsky. "Now everything is cleared up. Indeed, what sense is there in keeping a healthy man in a hospital? Very well, I shall sign you out immediately if you will tell me that you are normal. I do not say 'prove to me,' only 'tell me.' And so, are you normal?"

There was total silence, and the plump woman who had tended to Ivan that morning looked at the professor with adoring eyes. Ivan thought again, "Positively clever!"

He liked the professor's offer immensely. However, before replying he thought it over carefully, wrinkling his forehead. After a while, he said firmly:

"I am normal."

"Fine," Stravinsky exclaimed with relief. "And if so, let us talk things over logically. Let us consider your experiences the other day." He turned and someone instantly handed him Ivan's information sheet. "In attempting to find the stranger who introduced himself to you as an acquaintance of Pontius Pilate, you did the following things." Stravinsky began to bend one long finger after another, glancing now at the paper and now at Ivan. "You hung an icon on your chest. Right?"

"Right," Ivan agreed glumly.

"You fell off a fence and bruised your face. Yes? You made an appearance at the restaurant with a lighted candle in your hand, dressed only in underwear, and beat someone up. You were brought here with your hands tied. Here you telephoned the militia and asked them to send out machine guns. Then you tried to throw yourself out of the window. Right? Let me ask you: is it possible by pursuing such a course of action to catch or arrest anyone? And if you are indeed a normal man, you will answer yourself: entirely impossible. You wish to leave? Very well. But allow me to ask you: where will you go?"

"To the militia, of course," Ivan replied, but now with less assurance and becoming somewhat flustered under the professor's stare.

"Directly from here?"

"Uhum…."

"And you will not stop off at home first?" Stravinsky asked quickly.

"But there's no time for stopping off! While I go home, he'll slip away!"

"I see. And what will you tell the militia to begin with?"

"I'll tell them about Pontius Pilate," answered Ivan Nikolayevich, and his eyes darkened.

"Fine!" cried Stravinsky, entirely won over. And, turning to the man with the goatee, he ordered: "Fyodor Vasilievich, please sign out citizen Homeless. He may go back to town. But keep his room open, and there is no need to change the bedding. Citizen Homeless will be back here inside two hours. Well," he turned to the poet, "I shall not wish you success, for I do not have an iota of confidence in your success. See you soon!" He rose, and his retinue stirred to follow.

"Why do you say I will be back?" Ivan asked anxiously.

Stravinsky seemed to have expected the question. He sat down again and said:

"Because I know that, as soon as you appear at the militia in your underwear and report that you met a man who was personally acquainted with Pontius Pilate, you shall instantly be brought here, and you will find yourself in the very same room."

"What does underwear have to do with it?" Ivan asked, looking around in confusion.

"Chiefly, it's Pontius Pilate. But the underwear too. After all, we shall have to take away the hospital clothes and give you back your own. And you were brought here in underwear. Yet you had no intention of stopping off at home, although I hinted at it. Then will come Pilate… and you're ready."

Something strange happened to Ivan Nikolayevich. His will seemed to crack, and he felt weak and in need of advice.

"But what is to be done?" he asked timidly.

"Fine!" answered Stravinsky. "A most reasonable question. Now I shall tell you exactly what happened to you. Yesterday, someone upset and frightened you badly by the story of Pontius Pilate and the rest of it. And so, with your nerves frayed to the breaking point, you went all over the city, talking about Pontius Pilate. It is quite natural that people took you for a madman. There is only one salvation for you now-complete rest. And you must beyond all question remain here."

"But he must be caught!" Ivan exclaimed, now in a pleading tone.

"Very well, but why must you run after him yourself? Write down all your suspicions and accusations against this man. There is nothing simpler than sending your statement to the proper authorities, and if-as you suppose-we are dealing with a criminal, the matter will be cleared up very shortly. But one condition: do not strain your mind, and try to think as little as possible about Pontius Pilate. People will tell you all sorts of stories! We cannot believe everything we hear."

"I understand!" Ivan declared resolutely. "Please see to it that they give me a pen and paper."

"Give him paper and a short pencil," Stravinsky ordered the plump woman, and turned to Ivan, "But I advise you not to write today."

"No, no, today, this very day!" Ivan cried in alarm.

"Very well. But do not strain your mind. If the report does not come out today, it will come out tomorrow."

"But he'll escape!"

"Oh, no," Stravinsky said confidently. "He will not escape, I guarantee it. And remember that we shall help you here in every possible way, otherwise you won't get anywhere. Do you hear me?" Stravinsky suddenly asked significantly, taking both of Ivan's hands into his own. Holding them, he stared hard into Ivan's eyes for a long time, repeating: "You shall be helped here… do you hear me?… You shall be helped here… you shall be relieved… it is quiet here, everything is peaceful… you shall be helped here…."

Ivan Nikolayevich yawned suddenly, and his expression softened.

"Yes, yes," he said quietly.

"Fine!" Stravinsky concluded the conversation with his usual comment and rose. "Good-by!" He pressed Ivan's hand and, already on his way out, said to the man with the tidy beard: "Yes, try oxygen… and baths."

A few moments later Ivan no longer saw either Stravinsky or his retinue. There was only the gay spring wood across the river behind the grating in the window, and the river sparkling in the midday sun.

Chapter 9

KOROVIEV'S ANTICS

Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, house chairman of No. 302-b Sadovaya Street in Moscow, where the late Berlioz resided, had had his hands full since Wednesday night.

At midnight, as we know, the commission, of which Zheldybin was a member, had come and summoned Nikanor Ivanovich. He was informed of Berlioz' death and asked to escort the commission to apartment Number 50.

There, an official seal was placed on the late editor's manuscripts and belongings. Neither Grunya, the day maid, nor the frivolous Stepan Bogdanovich was present at the time. The commission declared to Nikanor Ivanovich that it would take the late editor's manuscripts; that his three rooms (the former study, parlor and dining room of the jeweler's widow) would revert to the tenants' organization to be used as it saw fit; and that the editor's belongings were to be kept in safety in said rooms until the appearance of his heirs.

The news of Berlioz' death spread through the house with unnatural speed, and on Thursday Bosoy's telephone began to ring at seven o'clock in the morning. Very soon tenants began to arrive in person with applications asserting their claims to the dead man's rooms. Within two hours, Nikanor Ivanovich received thirty-two such applications.

They contained pleas, threats, slanders, denunciations, promises to renovate at the applicant's own expense, complaints of intolerable crowding and of utter impossibility to continue in the present apartment with thieving neighbors. Among other things, there were two suicide threats, a most vivid narrative describing the theft of dumplings, which the thief put right into his coat pocket, in apartment Number 31, and a confession of secret pregnancy.

People repeatedly called Nikanor Ivanovich out into the hallway of his apartment, plucked him by the sleeve, whispered into his ear, winked at him, and promised not to forget him.

This torture went on till noon, when Nikanor Ivanovich simply fled from his apartment to the office at the gate. But when he saw the tenants lying in wait for him there, he ran from the office too. He managed somehow to shake off his pursuers, who followed on his heels across the asphalt courtyard, and disappeared in the entrance of building No. 6, where that wretched apartment Number 50 was situated.

After halting on the landing for a moment to catch his breath, the corpulent Nikanor Ivanovich rang the bell, but no one answered. He rang again and again, and began to mutter and curse to himself. Still no one answered. His patience exhausted, he took from his pocket a bundle of duplicate keys belonging to the house management, imperiously unlocked the door, and entered.

"Hey, Grunya!" Nikanor Ivanovich shouted in the dim hallway. "Grunya?… Aren't you there?"

No one answered.

Nikanor Ivanovich took a folding ruler from his briefcase, removed the seal from the door to the study, and stepped inside. He stepped in, but on the threshold he halted in astonishment and even alarm.

Behind the dead man's desk sat a gaunt, lanky stranger in a tight checkered coat, a jockey's cap and pince-nez…. In short, the same one.

"And who may you be, citizen?" Nikanor Ivanovich asked in a frightened voice.

"Ah! Nikanor Ivanovich!" the unexpected citizen cried in a quavering tenor and jumped up to welcome the chairman with a sudden and violent handshake. This greeting did not in the least reassure Nikanor Ivanovich.

"Excuse me," he began suspiciously, "but who are you? Are you an official visitor?"

"Ah, Nikanor Ivanovich!" the stranger exclaimed warmly, "What is official and what is unofficial? It all depends on the point of view. It is all vague and conditional, Nikanor Ivanovich. Today I am an unofficial person, and tomorrow, before you know it, I am official! And sometimes it happens the other way around-and how it happens!"

This reasoning did not satisfy the house chairman in the slightest. Generally a man of suspicious nature, he concluded that the citizen declaiming before him was an unofficial-perhaps even a frivolous-person.

"But who are you? What is your name?" the chairman persisted with increasing severity and even began to advance upon the stranger.

"My name," the citizen replied, undaunted by the severity, "is… well… let us say, Koroviev. But perhaps you would like a bite of food, Nikanor Ivanovich? Don't stand on ceremony, eh?"

"Sorry," Nikanor Ivanovich became indignant. "Don't talk to me of food!" (We must confess, unpleasant though it is, that Nikanor Ivanovich was a somewhat uncouth man.) "No one is permitted in the late man's rooms! What are you doing here?"

"But do sit down, Nikanor Ivanovich," the citizen yelled, unabashed, and began to fuss, offering the chairman an armchair.

Infuriated, Nikanor Ivanovich rejected the chair and shouted:

"But who are you?"

"Well, you see, I am an interpreter, I am with the foreign gentleman who resides in this apartment," the man who called himself Koroviev introduced himself and clicked the heels of his rusty, unpolished shoes.

Nikanor Ivanovich opened his mouth. The presence in this apartment of an unknown foreigner, and with an interpreter, too, was a complete surprise to him, and he demanded an explanation.

The interpreter willingly explained the situation. The foreign artist, Mr. Woland, had kindly been invited by the director of the Variety Theater, Stepan Bogdanovich Likhodeyev, to stay at his apartment for the duration of their visit-about a week or so. In fact, he had written Nikanor Ivanovich to this effect the day before, requesting him to register the foreigner temporarily, while Likhodeyev himself took a trip to Yalta.

"He never wrote me anything," the chairman said with amazement.

"Take a look in your briefcase, Nikanor Ivanovich," Koroviev suggested in a honeyed tone.

Nikanor Ivanovich shrugged his shoulders and opened the briefcase, where he found Likhodeyev's letter.

"But how could I have forgotten it?" Nikanor Ivanovich muttered, looking stupidly at the opened envelope.

"It happens, Nikanor Ivanovich. All sorts of things happen!" Koroviev chattered. "Absent-mindedness, absent-mindedness, fatigue, an increase in the blood pressure, my dear Nikanor Ivanovich! I am dreadfully absent-minded myself! One day, over a glass of vodka, I shall tell you a few incidents from my own experience, you'll die laughing!"

"And when is Likhodeyev going to Yalta?"

"Why, he's gone, he's gone already!" shouted the interpreter. "Oh, he is way out by now! The devil knows how far he is!" and the interpreter waved his hands like a windmill.

Nikanor Ivanovich declared that he must see this foreigner in person, but the interpreter said it was impossible. He was busy. He was training his cat.

"I can show you the cat if you wish," Koroviev offered.

This, in turn, was rejected by Nikanor Ivanovich. And the interpreter immediately made an unexpected, but rather interesting request: since Mr. Woland absolutely refused to live in a hotel, and since he was accustomed to a great deal of space, would the house organization consent to rent him the entire apartment, including the dead man's rooms, for the duration of his visit, for about a week?

"After all, it is all the same to him-to the dead man," Koroviev hissed in a loud whisper. "You will agree yourself, Nikanor Ivanovich, that he has no use for the apartment now?"

Nikanor Ivanovich replied uncertainly that foreigners were supposed to live at the Metropole, not in private apartments….

"I tell you, he is cranky as the devil!" whispered Koroviev. "He refuses, and that's all! He hates hotels! Those foreign tourists, I've got them up to here!" Koroviev complained confidentially, poking his finger at his scrawny neck. "Believe me, they take your heart out! They'll come and spy around, like sons of bitches, or else they'll wear you out with their demands: this isn't right; and that isn't right!… And your house, Nikanor Ivanovich, stands only to gain-it's a clear profit! Money's no object with him." Koroviev looked around, then whispered into the chairman's ear, "A millionaire!"

The interpreter's proposal was clearly practical. It was a solid proposal. Yet there was something remarkably unsolid and disreputable in his manner of speech, his dress, and his revolting, utterly useless pince-nez. Consequently, the chairman felt vaguely troubled, and yet he decided to accept the proposal. The point is that the house, alas, was faced with a good-sized deficit. By fall he would have to buy oil for heating, and what on earth was he to buy it with? With the tourist's money he might just manage. Nevertheless, the businesslike and cautious Nikanor Ivanovich said that he must first clear the matter with the Intourist Office.

"I understand!" exclaimed Koroviev. "Naturally, how can it be done without clearance? Certainly! Here is the telephone, Nikanor Ivanovich. Call them at once and clear it! As for money, don't worry about it," he added in a whisper, drawing the chairman toward the telephone in the hallway. "If you don't charge him, whom can you charge? You ought to see his villa in Nice! When you go abroad next summer, drop in and see it-you'll gasp!"

The Intourist Office settled the matter with extraordinary, quite astonishing speed. It turned out that they were already informed of Mr. Woland's intention to stay in Likhodeyev's private apartment and had nothing against it.

"Marvelous!" yelled Koroviev.

Somewhat dazed by his chatter, the chairman declared that the house was willing to rent apartment Number 50 to the artist Woland for one week at the rate of… Nikanor Ivanovich hesitated a moment, and said:

"Five hundred rubles a day."

At this point Koroviev completely stunned the chairman. Winking thievishly in the direction of the bedroom, from which they could hear the soft leaps of a heavy cat, he wheezed:

"That would come to three and a half thousand a week, wouldn't it?"

Nikanor Ivanovich thought that he would add: "You've quite an appetite, Nikanor Ivanovich!" But Koroviev said something altogether different:

"What kind of money is that? Ask for five, he'll pay it."

With a confused grin, Nikanov Ivanovich found himself at the late editor's desk, where Koroviev, with the greatest speed and agility, scribbled out two copies of the contract. Then he dashed into the bedroom and returned with both copies bearing the foreigner's sprawling signature. The chairman also signed the contract, and Koroviev asked for a receipt for five thousand.

"Write it out, write it out, Nikanor Ivanovich!… thousand rubles…" and suddenly, in a manner somehow quite inappropriate to serious business, he began to count "ein, zwei, drei…" as he stacked five bundles of new bank notes before the chairman.

There was a careful count, interspersed with Koroviev's little quips and pleasantries, such as "money loves to be counted," "your own eye is the best spy," and so on in the same vein.

After he had counted the money, the chairman received from Koroviev the foreigner's passport for purposes of temporary registration, put it, together with the contract and the money, into his briefcase, and, yielding to temptation, he sheepishly asked for a free pass to the theater.

"Certainly, certainly," roared Koroviev. "How many tickets do you wish, Nikanor Ivanovich-twelve, fifteen?"

The overwhelmed chairman explained that he wanted only two, for himself and Pelageya Antonovna, his wife.

Koroviev immediately snatched up a note pad and wrote out a pass for two persons in the front row. And, as he nimbly handed Nikanor Ivanovich the pass with his left hand, he slipped a thick rustling bundle into the chairman's other hand with his right. Throwing a quick glance at it, Nikanor Ivanovich flushed darkly and tried to push it away.

"We're not supposed to…" He muttered.

"I won't hear of it," Koroviev whispered right into his ear. "Here we're not supposed to, but among foreigners it is the only proper thing. You will offend him, Nikanor Ivanovich, and that will be awkward. After all, your time and effort…"

"It is severely punished," the chairman whispered almost inaudibly and looked over his shoulder.

"But where are the witnesses?" Koroviev breathed into his other ear. "I ask you, where are they? Don't think of it!…"

And here, as the chairman asserted later, a marvelous thing occurred: the bundle crept into his briefcase by itself. After that, the chairman, faint and a bit dazed, found himself on the staircase. A storm of ideas raged in his brain: they revolved around the villa in Nice, the trained cat, the fact that there had, indeed, been no witnesses. He also thought how delighted Pelageya Antonovna would be with the pass. These thoughts were disconnected, but generally pleasant. Nevertheless, a little needle seemed to prick the chairman somewhere deep down in his heart. It was the needle of anxiety. Besides, a sudden thought struck him like a blow: "But how did the interpreter get into the study when the door was sealed? And how was it that he had not asked him about it?" For a while, the chairman stared dumbly at the stairs, then he decided to forget it and stop tormenting himself with complicated questions.

As soon as the chairman had left, a low voice came from the bedroom:

"I did not like this Nikanor Ivanovich. He is a swindler and a thief. Can you see to it that he does not come here any more?"

"Messire, your word is law…." Koroviev responded from somewhere, but his voice no longer quavered; it was clear and loud.

And in a moment the damned interpreter was in the hallway, dialed a number, and began to speak into the receiver in lugubrious tones:

"Hello! I consider it my duty to report that our house chairman, Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, of 302-b Sadovaya, speculates in foreign exchange. At this moment he has four hundred dollars wrapped in newspaper in the ventilator flue in his toilet, in apartment Number 35. This is Timofey Kvastsov, a tenant of the same building, apartment Number 11. But I beg you to keep my name in confidence. I am afraid the above chairman will try to get back at me."

And he hung up, the scoundrel!

What took place after that in apartment Number 50 is unknown, but the events in the home of Nikanor Ivanovich are known. He locked himself up in the toilet, pulled out of his briefcase the wad of bills forced on him by the interpreter, and found that it contained four hundred rubles. He wrapped the bills in a piece of newspaper and pushed the bundle up into the ventilator flue.

Five minutes later the chairman sat at the table in his small dining room. His wife brought from the kitchen a neatly sliced herring, thickly sprinkled with chopped scallions. Nikanor Ivanovich poured himself a glass of vodka, drank it down, poured himself another, drank it, and picked up three slices of herring with his fork… at this moment the doorbell rang. And Pelageya Antonovna brought in a steaming saucepan. One glance was enough to guess that it contained fiery cabbage soup and, in the thick of it, the tastiest thing in the world-a marrow bone.

Swallowing his saliva, Nikanor Ivanovich growled like a dog:

"Why don't they go to hell! A man can't eat in peace…. Don't let anybody in, I am out, out…. If it's about the apartment, tell them to stop bothering me, we'll have a meeting next week."

His wife ran out into the foyer, and Nikanor Ivanovich ladled out of the fire-breathing lake the object of his desire-the bone, cracked lengthwise. At this moment two citizens entered the dining room, followed by a very pale Pelageya Antonovna. At the sight of the citizens, Nikanor Ivanovich turned white too and got up.

"Where's the toilet?" the first man, in a white blouse, asked in a worried tone.

Something banged against the dinner table: Nikanor Ivanovich dropped his spoon on the oilcloth.

"This way, this way," Pelageya Antonovna jabbered.

And the visitors proceeded directly into the hallway.

"What's the matter?" Nikanor Ivanovich asked in a low voice, following the visitors. "We have nothing suspicious in our apartment…. And what about your documents… if you pardon me…."

The first man showed his documents to Nikanor Ivanovich without stopping, and the second one immediately climbed up on a stool in the toilet and pushed his hand into the flue. Everything turned dark before Nikanor Ivanovich. The newspaper was removed, but the bundle turned out to contain, instead of rubles, some unfamiliar bills-bluish or greenish, with the picture of an unknown old man. However, all this Nikanor Ivanovich saw only vaguely, for spots were swimming before his eyes.

"Dollars in the ventilator flue…" the first man said reflectively, and asked Nikanor Ivanovich softly and politely: "Is this your little bundle?"

"No!" Nikanor Ivanovich answered in a terrible voice. "It was planted by enemies!"

"This happens," the first man agreed, and added softly: "I guess you'll have to turn in the rest."

"I have nothing! I swear to God, I've never held these things in my hands!" the chairman cried desperately.

He rushed to the bureau, noisily pulled out the drawer and snatched out his briefcase, crying incoherently:

"Here is the contract… the interpreter-that vermin-planted it… Koroviev… in pince-nez!…"

He opened the briefcase, looked in, put his hand in, turned blue in the face and dropped the briefcase into the soup. There was nothing in the briefcase-no letter from Styopa, no contract, no passport, no money, and no theater passes. In short, nothing except the folding ruler.

"Comrades!" the chairman screamed frantically. "Hold them! Unholy powers are at work in our house!"

And now, heaven knows what came over Pelageya Antonovna, but she clapped her hands and cried:

"Confess, Ivanych! They'll cut your term!"

With bloodshot eyes, Nikanor Ivanovich raised his fists over his wife's head, spluttering:

"Oh, you damned idiot!"

Then he felt faint and collapsed into a chair, evidently resolved to submit to the inevitable.

Throughout all this, Timofey Kondratievich Kvastsov, out on the landing, bent now his ear and now his eye to the keyhole in the door of the chairman's apartment, dying of curiosity.

Five minutes later the tenants of the building who happened to be in the yard saw the chairman walk directly to the gate in the company of two strangers. It was said that Nikanor Ivanovich was pale as a ghost, that he swayed like a drunkard, and mumbled something indistinct.

And an hour later, just as Timofey Kondratievich, fairly gulping with pleasure, was recounting to the other tenants how the chairman had gotten what was coming to him, an unknown citizen appeared in apartment Number 11 and beckoned him out of the kitchen into the hallway. There he said something to him, and both disappeared.