‘“Poor dear, my poor dear,” I said to her. “I won’t allow you to do it. Things won’t go well for me, and I don’t want you to perish with me.”
‘“Is that the only reason?” she asked, and brought her eyes close to mine.
“‘The only one.”
‘She became terribly animated, she clung to me, put her arms around my neck and said:
‘“I’m perishing with you. In the morning I’ll be here.”
‘And so, the last thing I remember from my life is a strip of light from my front hall, and in that strip of light an uncurled strand of hair, her beret and her eyes filled with determination. I also remember the black silhouette in the outside doorway and the white package.
“‘I’d see you home, but it’s beyond my strength to come back alone. I’m afraid.”
‘“Don’t be afraid. Bear with it for a few hours. Tomorrow morning I’ll be here.”
‘Those were her last words in my life … ·Shh!…’ the patient suddenly interrupted himself and raised a finger. ‘It’s a restless moonlit night tonight.’
He disappeared on to the balcony. Ivan heard little wheels roll down the corridor, someone sobbed or cried out weakly.
When everything grew still, the guest came back and announced that room 120 had received an occupant. Someone had been brought, and he kept asking to be given back his head. The two interlocutors fell anxiously silent, but, having calmed down, they returned to the interrupted story. The guest was just opening his mouth, but the night was indeed a restless one. There were still voices in the corridor, and the guest began to speak into Ivan’s ear, so softly that what he told him was known only to the poet, apart from the first phrase:
‘A quarter of an hour after she left me, there came a knock at my window …’
What the patient whispered into Ivan’s ear evidently agitated him very much. Spasms repeatedly passed over his face. Fear and rage swam and flitted in his eyes. The narrator pointed his hand somewhere in the direction of the moon, which had long since left the balcony. Only when all sounds from outside ceased to reach them did the guest move away from Ivan and begin to speak more loudly:
‘Yes, and so in mid-January, at night, in the same coat but with the buttons torn off,5 I was huddled with cold in my little yard. Behind me were snowdrifts that hid the lilac bushes, and before me and below – my little windows, dimly lit, covered with shades. I bent down to the first of them and listened – a gramophone was playing in my rooms. That was all I heard, but I could not see anything.
I stood there a while, then went out the gate to the lane. A blizzard was frolicking in it. A dog, dashing under my feet, frightened me, and I ran away from it to the other side. The cold, and the fear that had become my constant companion, were driving me to frenzy. I had nowhere to go, and the simplest thing, of course, would have been to throw myself under a tram-car on the street where my lane came out.
From far off I could see those light-filled, ice-covered boxes and hear their loathsome screeching in the frost. But, my dear neighbour, the whole thing was that fear possessed every cell of my body. And, just as I was afraid of the dog, so I was afraid of the tram-car. Yes, there is no illness in this place worse than mine, I assure you!’
‘But you could have let her know,’ said Ivan, sympathizing with the poor patient. ‘Besides, she has your money. She did keep it, of course?’
‘You needn’t doubt that, of course she kept it. But you evidently don’t understand me. Or, rather, I’ve lost the ability I once had for describing things. However, I’m not very sorry about that, since I no longer have any use for it. Before her,’ the guest reverently looked out at the darkness of the night, ‘there would lie a letter from a madhouse. How can one send letters from such an address … a mental patient? … You’re joking, my friend! Make her unhappy? No, I’m not capable of that.’
Ivan was unable to object to this, but the silent Ivan sympathized with the guest, he commiserated with him. And the other, from the pain of his memories, nodded his head in the black cap and spoke thus:
‘Poor woman … However, I have hopes that she has forgotten me…’
‘But you may recover …’ Ivan said timidly.
‘I am incurable,’ the guest replied calmly. ‘When Stravinsky says he will bring me back to life, I don’t believe him. He is humane and simply wants to comfort me. I don’t deny, however, that I’m much better now. Yes, so where did I leave off? Frost, those flying trams … I knew that this clinic had been opened, and set out for it on foot across the entire city. Madness! Outside the city I probably would have frozen to death, but chance saved me.
A truck had broken down, I came up to the driver, it was some three miles beyond the city limits, and to my surprise he took pity on me. The truck was coming here. And he took me along. I got away with having my left toes frostbitten. But they cured that. And now this is the fourth month that I’ve been here. And, you know, I find it not at all bad here. One mustn’t make grandiose plans, dear neighbour, really! I, for instance, wanted to go all around the globe.
Well, so it turns out that I’m not going to do it. I see only an insignificant piece of that globe. I suppose it’s not the very best there is on it, but, I repeat, it’s not so bad. Summer is coming, the ivy will twine up on to the balcony. So Praskovya Fyodorovna promises. The keys have broadened my possibilities. There’ll be the moon at night. Ah, it’s gone! Freshness. It’s falling past midnight. Time to go.’
“Tell me, what happened afterwards with Yeshua and Pilate?‘ Ivan asked. ’I beg you, I want to know.‘
‘Ah, no, no,’ the guest replied with a painful twitch. ‘I cannot recall my novel without trembling. And your acquaintance from the Patriarch’s Ponds would do it better than I. Thank you for the conversation. Goodbye.’
And before Ivan could collect his senses, the grille closed with a quiet clang, and the guest vanished.
Chapter 14, Glory to the Cock!
His nerves gave out, as they say, and Rimsky fled to his office before they finished drawing up the report. He sat at his desk and stared with inflamed eyes at the magic banknotes lying before him. The findirector’s wits were addled. A steady hum came from outside. The audience poured in streams from the Variety building into the street. Rimsky’s extremely sharpened hearing suddenly caught the distant trill of a policeman.
That in itself never bodes anything pleasant. But when it was repeated and, to assist it, another joined in, more authoritative and prolonged, and to them was added a clearly audible guffawing and even some hooting, the findirector understood at once that something else scandalous and vile had happened in the street. And that, however much he wanted to wave it away, it was closely connected with the repulsive seance presented by the black magician and his assistants.
The keen-eared findirector was not mistaken in the least. As soon as he cast a glance out the window on to Sadovaya, his face twisted, and he did not whisper but hissed:
‘So I thought!’
In the bright glare of the strongest street lights he saw, just below him on the sidewalk, a lady in nothing but a shift and violet bloomers. True, there was a little hat on the lady’s head and an umbrella in her hands. The lady, who was in a state of utter consternation, now crouching down, now making as if to run off somewhere, was surrounded by an agitated crowd, which produced the very guffawing that had sent a shiver down the findirector’s spine. Next to the lady some citizen was flitting about, trying to tear off his summer coat, and in his agitation simply unable to manage the sleeve in which his arm was stuck.
Shouts and roaring guffaws came from yet another place – namely, the left entrance — and turning his head in that direction, Grigory Danilovich saw a second lady, in pink underwear. She leaped from the street to the sidewalk, striving to hide in the hallway, but the audience pouring out blocked the way, and the poor victim of her own flightiness and passion for dressing up, deceived by vile Fagott’s firm, dreamed of only one thing — falling through the earth. A policeman made for the unfortunate woman, drilling the air with his whistle, and after the policeman hastened some merry young men in caps. It was they who produced the guffawing and hooting.
A skinny, moustachioed cabby flew up to the first undressed woman and dashingly reined in his bony, broken-down nag. The moustached face was grinning gleefully.
Rimsky beat himself on the head with his fist, spat, and leaped back from the window. For some time he sat at his desk listening to the street. The whistling at various points reached its highest pitch, then began to subside. The scandal, to Rimsky’s surprise, was somehow liquidated with unexpected swiftness.
It came time to act. He had to drink the bitter cup of responsibility. The telephones had been repaired during the third part. He had to make
