Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about the cancer and the tram-car, and certain alarming thoughts began to torment him. ‘He’s not a foreigner … he’s not a foreigner …’ he thought, ‘he’s a most peculiar specimen … but, excuse me, who is he then?…’
‘You’d like to smoke, I see?’ the stranger addressed Homeless unexpectedly. ‘Which kind do you prefer?’
‘What, have you got several?’ the poet, who had run out of cigarettes, asked glumly.
‘Which do you prefer?’ the stranger repeated.
‘Okay — Our Brand,’ Homeless replied spitefully.
The unknown man immediately took a cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to Homeless:
‘Our Brand …’
Editor and poet were both struck, not so much by Our Brand precisely turning up in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was of huge size, made of pure gold, and, as it was opened, a diamond triangle flashed white and blue fire on its lid.
Here the writers thought differently. Berlioz: ‘No, a foreigner!’, and Homeless: ‘Well, devil take him, eh! …’
The poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, but the non-smoker Berlioz declined.
‘I must counter him like this,’ Berlioz decided, ‘yes, man is mortal, no one disputes that. But the thing is …’
However, before he managed to utter these words, the foreigner spoke:
‘Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal — there’s the trick! And generally he’s unable to say what he’s going to do this same evening.’
‘What an absurd way of putting the question …’ Berlioz thought and objected:
‘Well, there’s some exaggeration here. About this same evening I do know more or less certainly. It goes without saying, if a brick should fall on my head on Bronnaya …’
‘No brick,’ the stranger interrupted imposingly, ‘will ever fall on anyone’s head just out of the blue. In this particular case, I assure you, you are not in danger of that at all. You will die a different death.’
‘Maybe you know what kind precisely?’ Berlioz inquired with perfectly natural irony, getting drawn into an utterly absurd conversation. ‘And will tell me?’
‘Willingly,’ the unknown man responded. He looked Berlioz up and down as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something like: ‘One, two … Mercury in the second house … moon gone … six — disaster … evening — seven …’ then announced loudly and joyfully: ‘Your head will be cut off!’
Homeless goggled his eyes wildly and spitefully at the insouciant stranger, and Berlioz asked, grinning crookedly:
‘By whom precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?’23
‘No,’ replied his interlocutor, ‘by a Russian woman, a Komsomol24 girl.’
‘Hm …’ Berlioz mumbled, vexed at the stranger’s little joke, ‘well, excuse me, but that’s not very likely.’
‘And I beg you to excuse me,’ the foreigner replied, ‘but it’s so. Ah, yes, I wanted to ask you, what are you going to do tonight, if it’s not a secret?’
‘It’s not a secret. Right now I’ll stop by my place on Sadovaya, and then at ten this evening there will be a meeting at Massolit, and I will chair it.’
‘No, that simply cannot be,’ the foreigner objected firmly.
‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ the foreigner replied and, narrowing his eyes, looked into the sky, where, anticipating the cool of the evening, black birds were tracing noiselessly, ‘Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place.’
Here, quite understandably, silence fell under the lindens.
‘Forgive me,’ Berlioz spoke after a pause, glancing at the drivel-spouting foreigner, ‘but what has sunflower oil got to do with it … and which Annushka?’
‘Sunflower oil has got this to do with it,’ Homeless suddenly spoke, obviously deciding to declare war on the uninvited interlocutor. ‘Have you ever happened, citizen, to be in a hospital for the mentally ill?’
‘Ivan! …’ Mikhail Alexandrovich exclaimed quietly.
But the foreigner was not a bit offended and burst into the merriest laughter.
‘I have, I have, and more than once!’ he cried out, laughing, but without taking his unlaughing eye off the poet. ‘Where haven’t I been! Only it’s too bad I didn’t get around to asking the professor what schizophrenia is. So you will have to find that out from him yourself, Ivan Nikolaevich!’
‘How do you know my name?’
‘Gracious, Ivan Nikolaevich, who doesn’t know you?’ Here the foreigner took out of his pocket the previous day’s issue of the Literary Gazette, and Ivan Nikolaevich saw his own picture on the very first page and under it his very own verses. But the proof of fame and popularity, which yesterday had delighted the poet, this time did not delight him a bit.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, and his face darkened, ‘could you wait one little moment? I want to say a couple of words to my friend.’
‘Oh, with pleasure!’ exclaimed the stranger. ‘It’s so nice here under the lindens, and, by the way, I’m not in any hurry.’
‘Listen here, Misha,’ the poet whispered, drawing Berlioz aside, ‘he’s no foreign tourist, he’s a spy. A Russian émigré25 who has crossed back over. Ask for his papers before he gets away…’
‘You think so?’ Berlioz whispered worriedly, and thought: ‘Why, he’s right …’
‘Believe me,’ the poet rasped into his ear, ‘he’s pretending to be a fool in order to find out something or other. Just hear how he speaks Russian.’ As he spoke, the poet kept glancing sideways, to make sure the stranger did not escape. ‘Let’s go and detain him, or he’ll get away …’
And the poet pulled Berlioz back to the bench by the arm.
The unknown man was not sitting, but was standing near it, holding in his hands some booklet in a dark-grey binding, a sturdy envelope made of good paper, and a visiting card.
‘Excuse me for having forgotten, in the heat of our dispute, to introduce myself. Here is my card, my passport, and an invitation to come to Moscow for a consultation,’ the stranger said weightily, giving both writers a penetrating glance.
They were embarrassed. ‘The devil, he heard everything …’ Berlioz thought, and with a polite gesture indicated that there was no need to show papers. While the foreigner was pushing them at the editor, the poet managed to make out the word ‘Professor’ printed in foreign type on the card, and the initial letter of the last name — a double ’V’ — ‘W’.
‘My pleasure,’ the editor meanwhile muttered in embarrassment, and the foreigner put the papers back in his pocket.
Relations were thus restored, and all three sat down on the bench again.
‘You’ve been invited here as a consultant, Professor?’ asked Berlioz.
‘Yes, as a consultant.’
‘You’re German?’ Homeless inquired.
‘I? …’ the professor repeated and suddenly fell to thinking. ‘Yes, perhaps I am German…’ he said.
‘You speak real good Russian,’ Homeless observed.
‘Oh, I’m generally a polyglot and know a great number of languages,’ the professor replied.
‘And what is your field?’ Berlioz inquired.
‘I am a specialist in black magic.’
‘There he goes! …’ struck in Mikhail Alexandrovich’s head.
‘And … and you’ve been invited here in that capacity?’ he asked, stammering.
‘Yes, in that capacity,’ the professor confirmed, and explained: ‘In a state library here some original manuscripts of the tenth-century necromancer Gerbert of Aurillac26 have been found. So it is necessary for me to sort them out. I am the only specialist in the world.’
‘Aha! You’re a historian?’ Berlioz asked with great relief and respect.
‘I am a historian,’ the scholar confirmed, and added with no rhyme or reason: ‘This evening there will be an interesting story at the Ponds!’
Once again editor and poet were extremely surprised, but the professor beckoned them both to him, and when they leaned towards him, whispered:
‘Bear in mind that Jesus did exist.’
‘You see, Professor,’ Berlioz responded with a forced smile, ‘we respect your great learning, but on this question we hold to a different point of view.’
There’s no need for any points of view,‘ the strange professor replied, ’he simply existed, that’s all.‘
‘But there’s need for some proof…’ Berlioz began.
‘There’s no need for any proofs,’ replied the professor, and he began to speak softly, while his accent for some reason disappeared: ‘It’s all very simple: In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan…’27
Chapter 2, Pontius Pilate
In a white cloak with blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, there came out to the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great1 the procurator of Judea,2 Pontius Pilate.3
More than anything in the world the procurator hated the smell of rose oil, and now everything foreboded a bad day, because this smell had been pursuing the procurator since dawn.
It seemed to the procurator that a rosy smell exuded from the cypresses and palms in the garden, that the smell of leather trappings and sweat from the convoy was mingled with the cursed rosy flux.
From the outbuildings at the back of the palace, where the first cohort of the Twelfth Lightning legion,4 which had come to Yershalaim5 with the procurator, was quartered,
