General amazement was aroused by a man edging his way on-stage. He announced that his wife had the flu, and he therefore asked that something be sent to her through him. As proof that he was indeed married, the citizen was prepared to show his passport. The solicitous husband’s announcement was met with guffaws. Fagott shouted that he believed him like his own self, even without the passport, and handed the citizen two pairs of silk stockings, and the cat for his part added a little tube of lipstick.
Late-coming women tore on to the stage, and off the stage the lucky ones came pouring down in ball gowns, pyjamas with dragons, sober formal outfits, little hats tipped over one eyebrow.
Then Fagott announced that owing to the lateness of the hour, the shop would close in exactly one minute until the next evening, and an unbelievable scramble arose on-stage. Women hastily grabbed shoes without trying them on. One burst behind the curtain like a storm, got out of her dress there, took possession of the first thing that came to hand — a silk dressing-gown covered with huge bouquets — and managed to pick up two cases of perfume besides.
Exactly a minute later a pistol shot rang out, the mirrors disappeared, the display windows and stools dropped away, the carpet melted into air, as did the curtain. Last to disappear was the high mountain of old dresses and shoes, and the stage was again severe, empty and bare.
And it was here that a new character mixed into the affair. A pleasant, sonorous, and very insistent baritone came from box no. 2: “All the same it is desirable, citizen artiste, that you expose the technique of your tricks to the spectators without delay, especially the trick with the paper money. It is also desirable that the master of ceremonies return to the stage. The spectators are concerned about his fate.”
The baritone belonged to none other than that evening’s guest of honour, Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, chairman of the Acoustics Commission of the Moscow theatres.
Arkady Apollonovich was in his box with two ladies: the older one dressed expensively and fashionably, the other one, young and pretty, dressed in a simpler way. The first, as was soon discovered during the drawing up of the report, was Arkady Apollonovich’s wife, and the second was his distant relation, a promising debutante, who had come from Saratov and was living in the apartment of Arkady Apollonovich and his wife.
Tardone!” Fagott replied. “I’m sorry, there’s nothing here to expose, it’s all clear.”
“No, excuse me! The exposure is absolutely necessary. Without it your brilliant numbers will leave a painful impression. The mass of spectators demands an explanation.”
“The mass of spectators,” the impudent clown interrupted Sempleyarov, ‘doesn’t seem to be saying anything. But, in consideration of your most esteemed desire, Arkady Apollonovich, so be it – I will perform an exposure.
But, to that end, will you allow me one more tiny number?”
“Why not?” Arkady Apollonovich replied patronizingly. “But there must be an exposure.”
“Very well, very well, sir. And so, allow me to ask, where were you last evening, Arkady Apollonovich?”
At this inappropriate and perhaps even boorish question, Arkady Apollonovich’s countenance changed, and changed quite drastically.
“Last evening Arkady Apollonovich was at a meeting of the Acoustics Commission,” Arkady Apollonovich’s wife declared very haughtily, "but I don’t understand what that has got to do with magic.”
“Ouee, madame!” Fagott agreed. “Naturally you don’t understand. As for the meeting, you are totally deluded. After driving off to the said meeting, which incidentally was not even scheduled for last night, Arkady Apollonovich dismissed his chauffeur at the Acoustics Commission building on Clean Ponds” (the whole theatre became hushed), “and went by bus to Yelokhovskaya Street to visit an actress from the regional itinerant theatre, Militsa Andreevna Pokobatko, with whom he spent some four hours.”
“Aie!” someone cried out painfully in the total silence. Arkady Apollonovich’s young relation suddenly broke into a low and terrible laugh.
“It’s all clear!” she exclaimed. “And I’ve long suspected it. Now I see why that giftless thing got the role of Louisa!”[85]
And, swinging suddenly, she struck Arkady Apollonovich on the head with her short and fat violet umbrella.
Meanwhile, the scoundrelly Fagott, alias Koroviev, was shouting: “Here, honourable citizens, is one case of the exposure Arkady Apollonovich so importunately insisted on!”
“How dare you touch Arkady Apollonovich, you vile creature!” Arkady Apollonovich’s wife asked threateningly, rising in the box to all her gigantic height.
A second brief wave of satanic laughter seized the young relation. “Who else should dare touch him,” she answered, guffawing, “if not me!” And for the second time there came the dry, crackling sound of the umbrella bouncing off the head of Arkady Apollonovich.
“Police! Seize her!!” Sempleyarov’s wife shouted in such a terrible voice that many hearts went cold.
And here the cat also leaped out to the footlights and suddenly barked in a human voice for all the theatre to hear: The séance is over! Maestro! Hack out a march!” The half-crazed conductor, unaware of what he was doing, waved his baton, and the orchestra did not play, or even strike up, or even bang away at, but precisely, in the cat’s loathsome expression, hacked out some incredible march of an unheard-of brashness.
For a moment there was an illusion of having heard once upon a time, under southern stars, in a cafe-chantant, some barely intelligible, half-blind, but rollicking words to this march: His Excellency reached the stage
Of liking barnyard fowl.
He took under his patronage
Three young girls and an owl!!!
Or maybe these were not the words at all, but there were others to the same music, extremely indecent ones. That is not the important thing, the important thing is that, after all this, something like babel broke loose in the Variety. The police went running to Sempleyarov’s box, people were climbing over the barriers, there were bursts of infernal guffawing and furious shouts, drowned in the golden clash of the orchestra’s cymbals.
And one could see that the stage was suddenly empty, and that the hoodwinker Fagott, as well as the brazen tom-cat Behemoth, had melted into air, vanished as the magician had vanished earlier in his armchair with the faded upholstery.
Chapter 13. The Hero Enters
And so, the unknown man shook his finger at Ivan and whispered: “Shhh!...”
Ivan lowered his legs from the bed and peered. Cautiously looking into the room from the balcony was a clean-shaven, dark-haired man of approximately thirty-eight, with a sharp nose, anxious eyes, and a wisp of hair hanging down on his forehead.
Having listened and made sure that Ivan was alone, the mysterious visitor took heart and stepped into the room. Here Ivan saw that the man was dressed as a patient. He was wearing long underwear, slippers on his bare feet, and a brown dressing-gown thrown over his shoulders.
The visitor winked at Ivan, hid a bunch of keys in his pocket, inquired in a whisper: “May I sit down?” — and receiving an affirmative nod, placed himself in an armchair.
“How did you get here?” Ivan asked in a whisper, obeying the dry finger shaken at him. “Aren’t the balcony grilles locked?”
The grilles are locked,” the guest agreed, “but Praskovya Fyodorovna, while the dearest person, is also, alas, quite absent-minded. A month ago I stole a bunch of keys from her, and so gained the opportunity of getting out on to the common balcony, which runs around the entire floor, and so of occasionally calling on a neighbour.”
“If you can get out on to the balcony, you can escape. Or is it high up?” Ivan was interested.
“No,” the guest replied firmly, “I cannot escape from here, not because it’s high up, but because I have nowhere to escape to.” And he added, after a pause: ‘so, here we sit.”
“Here we sit,” Ivan replied, peering into the man’s brown and very restless eyes.
>
“Yes ...” here the guest suddenly became alarmed, “but you’re not violent, I hope? Because, you know, I cannot stand noise, turmoil, force, or other things like that. Especially hateful to me are people’s cries, whether cries of rage, suffering, or anything else. Set me at ease, tell me, you’re not violent?”
“Yesterday in a restaurant I socked one type in the mug,” the transformed poet courageously confessed.
“Your grounds?” the guest asked sternly.
"No grounds, I must confess,” Ivan answered, embarrassed.
“Outrageous,” the guest denounced Ivan and added: “And besides, what a way to express yourself: ‘socked in the mug" ... It is not known precisely whether a man has a mug or a face. And, after all, it may well be a face.
So, you know, using fists ... No, you should give that up, and for good.”
Having thus reprimanded Ivan, the guest inquired: “Your profession?”
“Poet,” Ivan confessed, reluctantly for some reason.
The visitor became upset.
“Ah, just my luck!” he exclaimed, but at once reconsidered, apologized, and asked: “And what is your name?”
“Homeless.”
“Oh-oh ...” the guest said, wincing.
“What, you mean you dislike my poetry?” Ivan asked with curiosity.
“I dislike it terribly.”
“And what have you read.”
“I’ve never read any of your poetry!” the visitor exclaimed nervously.
Then how can you say that?”
“Well, what of it?” the guest replied. “As if I haven’t read others. Or else ... maybe there’s some miracle? Very well, I’m ready to take it on faith. Is your poetry good? You tell me yourself.”
“Monstrous!” Ivan suddenly spoke boldly and frankly.
“Don’t write any more!” the visitor asked beseechingly.
“I promise and I swear!” Ivan said solemnly.
The oath was sealed with a handshake, and here soft footsteps and voices were heard in the corridor.
“Shh!” the guest whispered and, jumping out to the balcony, closed the grille behind him.
Praskovya Fyodorovna peeked in, asked Ivan how he was feeling and whether he wished to sleep in the dark or with a light. Ivan asked her to leave the light on, and Praskovya Fyodorovna withdrew, wishing the patient a good night. And when everything was quiet, the guest came back again.
He informed Ivan in a whisper that there was a new arrival in room 119 — some fat man with a purple physiognomy, who kept muttering something about currency in the ventilation and swearing that unclean powers were living in their place on Sadovaya.
“He curses Pushkin up and down and keeps shouting: ‘Kurolesov, encore, encore!’” the guest said, twitching nervously. Having calmed himself, he sat down, said: “Anyway, God help him,” and continued his conversation with Ivan: ‘so, how did you wind up here?”
“On account of Pontius Pilate,” Ivan replied, casting a glum look at the floor.
“What?!” the guest cried, forgetting all caution, and clapped his hand over his own mouth. “A staggering coincidence! Tell me about it, I beg you, I beg you!”
Feeling trust in the unknown man for some reason, Ivan began, falteringly and timorously at first, then more boldly, to tell about the previous day’s story at the Patriarch’s Ponds. Yes, it was a grateful listener that Ivan Nikolaevich acquired in the person of the mysterious stealer of keys! The guest did not take Ivan for a madman, he showed great interest in what he was being told, and, as the story developed, finally became ecstatic. Time and again he interrupted Ivan with exclamations: “Well, well, go on, go on, I beg you! Only, in the name of all that’s holy, don’t leave anything out!”
Ivan left nothing out in any case, it was easier for him to tell it that way, and he gradually reached the moment when Pontius Pilate, in a white mantle with blood-red lining, came out to the balcony.
Then the visitor put his hands together prayerfully and whispered: “Oh, how I guessed! How I guessed it all!”
The listener accompanied the description of Berlioz’s terrible death with an enigmatic remark, while his eyes flashed with spite: “I only regret that it wasn’t the critic Latunsky or the writer Mstislav Lavrovich instead of this Berlioz!”, and he cried out frenziedly but soundlessly: “Go on!”
The cat handing money to the woman conductor amused the guest exceedingly, and he choked with quiet laughter watching as Ivan, excited by the success of his narration, quietly hopped on bent legs, portraying the cat holding the coin up next to his whiskers.
“And so,” Ivan concluded, growing sad and melancholy after telling about the events at Griboedov’s, “I wound up here.”
The guest sympathetically placed a hand on the poor poet’s shoulder and spoke thus: “Unlucky poet! But you yourself, dear heart, are to blame for it all.
You oughtn’t to have behaved so casually and even impertinently with him. So you’ve paid for it. And you must still say thank you that you got off comparatively cheaply.”
“But who is he, finally?” Ivan asked, shaking his fists in agitation.
The guest peered at Ivan and answered with a question: “You’re not going to get upset? We’re all unreliable here ... There won’t be any calling for the doctor, injections, or other fuss?”
“No, no!” Ivan exclaimed. “Tell me, who is he?”
“Very well,” the visitor replied, and he said weightily and distinctly: “Yesterday at the Patriarch’s Ponds you met Satan.”
Ivan did not get upset, as he had promised, but even so he was greatly astounded.
“That can’t be! He doesn’t exist!”
“Good heavens! Anyone else might say that, but not you. You were apparently one of his first victims. You’re sitting, as you yourself understand, in a psychiatric clinic, yet you keep saying he doesn’t exist.
Really, it’s strange!”
Thrown off, Ivan fell silent.
“As soon as you started describing him,” the guest went on, “I began to realize who it was that you had the pleasure of talking with yesterday. And, really, I’m surprised at Berlioz! Now you, of course, are a virginal person,” here the guest apologized again, “but that one, from what I’ve heard about him, had after all read at least something! The very first things this professor said dispelled all my doubts. One can’t fail to recognize him, my friend! Though you ... again I must apologize, but I’m not mistaken, you are an ignorant man?”
“Indisputably,” the unrecognizable Ivan agreed.
“Well, so ... even the face, as you described it, the different eyes, the eyebrows! ... Forgive me, however, perhaps you’ve never even heard the opera Faust?
Ivan became terribly embarrassed for some reason and, his face aflame, began mumbling something about some trip to a sanatorium ... to Yalta ...
“Well, so, so ... hardly surprising! But Berlioz, I repeat, astounds me
... He’s not only a well-read man but also a very shrewd one. Though I must say in his defence that Woland is, of course, capable of pulling the wool over the eyes of an even shrewder man.”
“What?!” Ivan cried out in his turn.
“Hush!”
Ivan slapped himself roundly on the forehead with his palm and rasped: “I see, I see. He had the letter "W" on his visiting card. Ai-yai-yai, what a thing!” He lapsed into a bewildered silence for some time, peering at the moon floating outside the grille, and then spoke: ‘so that means he might actually have been at Pontius Pilate’s? He was already born then? And they call me a madman!” Ivan added indignantly, pointing to the door.
A bitter wrinkle appeared on the guest’s lips.
“Let’s look the truth in the eye.” And the guest turned his face towards the nocturnal luminary racing through a cloud. “You and I are both madmen, there’s no denying that! You see, he shocked you – and you came unhinged, since you evidently had the ground prepared for it. But what you describe undoubtedly took place in reality. But
it’s so extraordinary that even Stravinsky, a psychiatrist of genius, did not, of course, believe you.
Did he examine you?” (Ivan nodded.) “Your interlocutor was at Pilate’s, and had breakfast with Kant, and now he’s visiting Moscow.”
“But he’ll be up to devil knows what here! Oughtn’t we to catch him somehow?” the former, not yet definitively quashed Ivan still raised his head, though without much confidence, in the new Ivan.
“You’ve already tried, and that will do for you,” the guest replied ironically. “I don’t advise others to try either. And as for being up to something, rest assured, he will be! Ah, ah! But how annoying that it was you who met him and not I. Though it’s all burned up, and the coals have gone to ashes, still, I swear, for that meeting I’d give Praskovya Fyodorovna’s bunch of keys, for I have nothing else to give. I’m destitute.”
“But what do you need him for?”
The guest paused ruefully for a long time and twitched, but finally spoke: “You see, it’s such a strange story, I’m sitting here for the same reason you are – namely, on account of Pontius Pilate.” Here the guest looked around fearfully and said: The thing is that a year ago I wrote a novel about Pilate.”
“You’re a writer?” the poet asked with interest.
The guest’s face darkened and he threatened Ivan with his fist, then said: “I am a master.” He grew stern and took from the pocket of his dressing-gown a completely greasy black cap with the letter “M” embroidered on it in yellow silk. He put this cap on and showed himself to Ivan both in profile and full face, to prove that he was a master. “She sewed it for me with her own hands,” he added mysteriously.
“And what is your name?”
“I no longer have a name,” the strange guest answered with gloomy disdain. “I renounced it, as I generally did everything in life. Let’s forget it.”