“Who is this?” Varenukha bellowed. “Stop these jokes, citizen! You’ll be found out at once! What’s your number?”
“Varenukha,” the same nasty voice returned, ‘do you understand Russian?
Don’t take the telegrams anywhere.”
“Ah, so you won’t stop?” the administrator cried furiously. “Look out, then! You’re going to pay for it!” He shouted some other threat, but fell silent, because he sensed that no one was listening to him any longer in the receiver.
Here it somehow began to grow dark very quickly in his little office.
Varenukha ran out, slammed the door behind him, and rushed through the side entrance into the summer garden.
The administrator was agitated and full of energy. After the insolent phone call he had no doubts that it was a band of hooligans playing nasty tricks, and that these tricks were connected with the disappearance of Likhodeev. The administrator was choking with the desire to expose the malefactors, and, strange as it was, the anticipation of something enjoyable was born in him. It happens that way when a man strives to become the centre of attention, to bring sensational news somewhere.
In the garden the wind blew in the administrator’s face and flung sand in his eyes, as if blocking his way, as if cautioning him. A window on the second floor slammed so that the glass nearly broke, the tops of the maples and lindens rustled alarmingly. It became darker and colder. The administrator rubbed his eyes and saw that a yellow-bellied storm cloud was creeping low over Moscow. There came a dense, distant rumbling.
However great Varenukha’s hurry, an irrepressible desire pulled at him to run over to the summer toilet for a second on his way, to check whether the repairman had put a wire screen over the light-bulb.
Running past the shooting gallery, Varenukha came to a thick growth of lilacs where the light-blue toilet building stood. The repairman turned out to be an efficient fellow, the bulb under the roof of the gentlemen’s side was covered with a wire screen, but the administrator was upset that even in the pre-storm darkness one could make out that the walls were already written all over in charcoal and pencil.
“Well, what sort of...” the administrator began and suddenly heard a voice purring behind him: “Is that you, Ivan Savelyevich?”
Varenukha started, turned around, and saw before him a short, fat man with what seemed to him a cat-like physiognomy.
“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.502-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, sdll 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 attemp
ted 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 can understand. He’s a one-hundred-per-cent outstanding and mysterious person!
But that’s the most interesting thing! The man was personally acquainted with Pontius Pilate, what could be more interesting than that? And, instead of raising a stupid rumpus at the Ponds, wouldn’t it have been more intelligent to question him politely about what happened further on with Pilate and his prisoner Ha-Nozri? And I started devil knows what! A major occurrence, really – a magazine editor gets run over! And so, what, is the magazine going to shut down for that? Well, what can be done about it? Man is mortal and, as has rightly been said, unexpectedly mortal. Well, may he rest in peace! Well, so there’ll be another editor, and maybe even more eloquent than the previous one!”
After dozing for a while, the new Ivan asked the old Ivan sarcastically: “And what does it make me, in that case?”
“A fool!” a bass voice said distinctly somewhere, a voice not belonging to either of the Ivans and extremely like the bass of the consultant.
Ivan, for some reason not offended by the word “fool”, but even pleasantly surprised at it, smiled and drowsily grew quiet. Sleep was stealing over Ivan, and he was already picturing a palm tree on its elephant’s leg, and a cat passing by – not scary, but merry – and, in short, sleep was just about to come over Ivan, when the grille suddenly moved noiselessly aside, and a mysterious figure appeared on the balcony, hiding from the moonlight, and shook its finger at Ivan.
Not frightened in the least, Ivan sat up in bed and saw that there was a man on the balcony. And this man, pressing a finger to his lips, whispered: “Shhh!...”
Chapter 12. Black Magic and Its Exposure
A small man in a yellow bowler-hat full of holes and with a pear-shaped, raspberry-coloured nose, in checkered trousers and patent-leather shoes, rolled out on to the stage of the Variety on an ordinary two-wheeled bicycle. To the sounds of a foxtrot he made a circle, and then gave a triumphant shout, which caused his bicycle to rear up. After riding around on the back wheel, the little man turned upside down, contrived while in motion to unscrew the front wheel and send it backstage, and then proceeded on his way with one wheel, turning the pedals with his hands.
On a tall metal pole with a seat at the top and a single wheel, a plump blonde rolled out in tights and a little skirt strewn with silver stars, and began riding in a circle. As he met her, the little man uttered cries of greeting, doffing his bowler-hat with his foot.
Finally, a little eight-year-old with an elderly face came rolling out and began scooting about among the adults on a tiny two-wheeler furnished with an enormous automobile horn.
After making several loops, the whole company, to the alarming drum-beats of the orchestra, rolled to the very edge of the stage, and the spectators in the front rows gasped and drew back, because it seemed to the public that the whole trio with its vehicles was about to crash down into the orchestra pit.
But the bicycles stopped just at the moment when the front wheels threatened to slide into the abyss on the heads of the musicians. With a loud shout of “Hup!” the cyclists jumped off their vehicles and bowed, the blonde woman blowing kisses to the public, and the little one tooting a funny signal on his horn.
Applause shook the building, the light-blue curtain came from both sides and covered the cyclists, the green “Exit” lights by the doors went out, and in the web of trapezes under the cupola white spheres lit up like the sun. It was the intermission before the last part.
The only man who was not the least bit interested in the wonders of the Giulli family’s cycling technique was Grigory Danilovich Rimsky.
In complete solitude he sat in his office, biting his thin lips, a spasm passing over his face from time to time. To the extraordinary disappearance of Likhodeev had now been added the wholly unforeseen disappearance of Varenukha.
Rimsky knew where he had gone, but he had gone and ... not come back!
Rimsky shrugged his shoulders and whispered to himself: “But what for?”
And it was strange: for such a practical man as the findirector, the simplest thing would, of course, have been to call the place where Varenukha had gone and find out what had befallen him, yet until ten o’clock at night”he had been unable to force himself to do it.
At ten, doing outright violence to himself, Rimsky picked up the receiver and here discovered that his telephone was dead. The messenger reported that the other telephones in the building were also out of order.
This certainly unpleasant, though hardly supernatural, occurrence for some reason thoroughly shocked the findirector, but at the same time he was glad: the need to call fell away.
Just as the red light over the findirector’s head lit u
p and blinked, announcing the beginning of the intermission, a messenger came in and informed him of the foreign artiste’s arrival. The findirector cringed for some reason, and, blacker than a storm cloud, went backstage to receive the visitor, since there was no one else to receive him.
Under various pretexts, curious people kept peeking into the big dressing room from the corridor, where the signal bell was already ringing.
Among them were conjurers in bright robes and turbans, a skater in a white knitted jacket, a storyteller pale with powder and the make-up man.
The newly arrived celebrity struck everyone by his marvellously cut tailcoat, of a length never seen before, and by his having come in a black half-mask. But most remarkable of all were the black magician’s two companions: a long checkered one with a cracked pince-nez, and a fat black cat who came into the dressing room on his hind legs and quite nonchalantly sat on the sofa squinting at the bare make-up lights.
Rimsky attempted to produce a smile on his face, which made it look sour and spiteful, and bowed to the silent black magician, who was seated on the sofa beside the cat. There was no handshake. Instead, the easygoing checkered one made his own introductions to the fin-director, calling himself “the gent’s assistant”. This circumstance surprised the findirector, and unpleasantly so: there was decidedly no mention of any assistant in the contract.
Quite stiffly and drily, Grigory Danilovich inquired of this fallen-from-the-sky checkered one where the artiste’s paraphernalia was.
“Our heavenly diamond, most precious mister director,” the magician’s assistant replied in a rattling voice, “the paraphernalia is always with us.
Here it is! Ein, zwei, drei!” And, waving his knotty fingers before Rimsky’s eyes, he suddenly took from behind the cat’s ear Rimsky’s own gold watch and chain, hitherto worn by the findirector in his waistcoat pocket, under his buttoned coat, with the chain through a buttonhole.