‘So, it’s me, Varenukha answered hostilely.’
‘Very, very glad,’ the cat-like fat man responded in a squeaky voice and, suddenly swinging his arm, gave Varenukha such a blow on the ear that the cap flew off the administrator’s head and vanished without a trace down the hole in the seat.
At the fat man’s blow, the whole toilet lit up momentarily with a tremulous light, and a roll of thunder echoed in the sky. Then came another flash and a second man emerged before the administrator — short, but with athletic shoulders, hair red as fire, albugo in one eye, a fang in his mouth … This second one, evidently a lefty, socked the administrator on the other ear. In response there was another roll of thunder in the sky, and rain poured down on the wooden roof of the toilet.
‘What is it, comr …’ the half-crazed administrator whispered, realized at once that the word ‘comrades’ hardly fitted bandits attacking a man in a public toilet, rasped out: ’citiz …‘ — figured that they did not merit this appellation either, and received a third terrible blow from he did not know which of them, so that blood gushed from his nose on to his Tolstoy blouse.
‘What you got in the briefcase, parasite?’ the one resembling a cat cried shrilly. ‘Telegrams? Weren’t you warned over the phone not to take them anywhere? Weren’t you warned, I’m asking you?’
‘I was wor … wer … warned …’ the administrator answered, suffocating.
‘And you skipped off anyway? Gimme the briefcase, vermin!’ the second one cried in the same nasal voice that had come over the telephone, and he yanked the briefcase from Varenukha’s trembling hands.
And the two picked the administrator up under the arms, dragged him out of the garden, and raced down Sadovaya with him. The storm raged at full force, water streamed with a noise and howling down the drains, waves bubbled and billowed everywhere, water gushed from the roofs past the drainpipes, foamy streams ran from gateways. Everything living got washed off Sadovaya, and there was no one to save Ivan Savelyevich. Leaping through muddy rivers, under flashes of lightning, the bandits dragged the half-alive administrator in a split second to no. 302-bis, flew with him through the gateway, where two barefoot women, holding their shoes and stockings in their hands, pressed themselves to the wall. Then they dashed into the sixth entrance, and Varenukha, nearly insane, was taken up to the fifth floor and thrown down in the semi-dark front hall, so well known to him, of Styopa Likhodeev’s apartment.
Here the two robbers vanished, and in their place there appeared in the front hall a completely naked girl — red-haired, her eyes burning with a phosphorescent gleam.
Varenukha understood that this was the most terrible of all things that had ever happened to him and, moaning, recoiled against the wall. But the girl came right up to the administrator and placed the palms of her hands on his shoulders. Varenukha’s hair stood on end, because even through the cold, water-soaked cloth of his Tolstoy blouse he could feel that those palms were still colder, that their cold was the cold of ice.
‘Let me give you a kiss,’ the girl said tenderly, and there were shining eyes right in front of his eyes. Then Varenukha fainted and never felt the kiss.
Chapter 11, Ivan Splits in Two
The woods on the opposite bank of the river, still lit up by the May sun an hour earlier, turned dull, smeary, and dissolved.
Water fell down in a solid sheet outside the window. In the sky, threads flashed every moment, the sky kept bursting open, and the patient’s room was flooded with a tremulous, frightening light.
Ivan quietly wept, sitting on his bed and looking out at the muddy river boiling with bubbles. At every clap of thunder, he cried out pitifully and buried his face in his hands. Pages covered with Ivan’s writing lay about on the floor. They had been blown down by the wind that flew into the room before the storm began.
The poet’s attempts to write a statement concerning the terrible consultant had gone nowhere. As soon as he got the pencil stub and paper from the fat attendant, whose name was Praskovya Fyodorovna, he rubbed his hands in a business-like way and hastily settled himself at the little table. The beginning came out quite glibly.
To the police. From Massolit member Ivan Nikolaevich Homeless. A statement. Yesterday evening I came to the Patriarch’s Ponds with the deceased M. A. Berlioz …‘
And right there the poet got confused, mainly owing to the word ‘deceased’. Some nonsensicality emerged at once: what’s this – came with the deceased? The deceased don’t go anywhere! Really, for all he knew, they might take him for a madman!
Having reflected thus, Ivan Nikolaevich began to correct what he had written. What came out this time was: ‘… with M. A. Berlioz, subsequently deceased…’ This did not satisfy the author either. He had to have recourse to a third redaction, which proved still worse than the first two: ‘Berlioz, who fell under the tram-car …’ — and that namesake composer, unknown to anyone, was also dangling here, so he had to put in: ‘not the composer…’
After suffering over these two Berliozes, Ivan crossed it all out and decided to begin right off with something very strong, in order to attract the reader’s attention at once, so he wrote that a cat had got on a tram-car, and then went back to the episode with the severed head. The head and the consultant’s prediction led him to the thought of Pontius Pilate, and for greater conviction Ivan decided to tell the whole story of the procurator in full, from the moment he walked out in his white cloak with blood-red lining to the colonnade of Herod’s palace.
Ivan worked assiduously, crossing out what he had written, putting in new words, and even attempted to draw Pontius Pilate and then a cat standing on its hind legs. But the drawings did not help, and the further it went, the more confusing and incomprehensible the poet’s statement became.
By the time the frightening cloud with smoking edges appeared from far off and covered the woods, and the wind began to blow, Ivan felt that he was strengthless, that he would never be able to manage with the statement, and he would not pick up the scattered pages, and he wept quietly and bitterly. The good-natured nurse Praskovya Fyodorovna visited the poet during the storm, became alarmed on seeing him weeping, closed the blinds so that the lightning would not frighten the patient, picked up the pages from the floor, and ran with them for the doctor.
He came, gave Ivan an injection in the arm, and assured him that he would not weep any more, that everything would pass now, everything would change, everything would be forgotten.
The doctor proved right. Soon the woods across the river became as before. It was outlined to the last tree under the sky, which cleared to its former perfect blue, and the river grew calm. Anguish had begun to leave Ivan right after the injection, and now the poet lay calmly and looked at the rainbow that stretched across the sky.
So it went till evening, and he did not even notice how the rainbow melted away, how the sky saddened and faded, how the woods turned black.
Having drunk some hot milk, Ivan lay down again and marvelled himself at how changed his thinking was. The accursed, demonic cat somehow softened in his memory, the severed head did not frighten him any more, and, abandoning all thought of it, Ivan began to reflect that, essentially, it was not so bad in the clinic, that Stravinsky was a clever man and a famous one, and it was quite pleasant to deal with him. Besides, the evening air was sweet and fresh after the storm.
The house of sorrow was falling asleep. In quiet corridors the frosted white lights went out, and in their place, according to regulations, faint blue night-lights were lit, and the careful steps of attendants were heard more and more rarely on the rubber matting of the corridor outside the door.
Now Ivan lay in sweet languor, glancing at the lamp under its shade, shedding a softened light from the ceiling, then at the moon rising behind the black woods, and conversed with himself.
‘Why, actually, did I get so excited about Berlioz falling under a tram-car?’ the poet reasoned. ‘In the final analysis, let him sink! What am I, in fact, his chum or in-law?
If we air the question properly, it turns out that, in essence, I really did not even know the deceased. What, indeed, did I know about him? Nothing except that he was bald and terribly eloquent. And furthermore, citizens,’ Ivan continued his speech, addressing someone or other, ‘let’s sort this out: why, tell me, did I get furious at this mysterious consultant, magician and professor with the black and empty eye? Why all this absurd chase after him in underpants and with a candle in my hand, and then those wild shenanigans in the restaurant?’
‘Uh-uh-uh!’ the former Ivan suddenly said sternly somewhere, either inside or over his ear, to the new Ivan. ‘He did know beforehand that Berlioz’s head would be cut off, didn’t he? How could I not get excited?’
‘What are we talking about, comrades?’ the new Ivan objected to the old, former Ivan. That things are not quite proper here, even a child
