Then at least tell me about the novel,” Ivan asked delicately.
“If you please, sir. My life, it must be said, has taken a not very ordinary course,” the guest began.
... A historian by education, he had worked until two years ago at one of the Moscow museums, and, besides that, had also done translations.
“From what languages?” Ivan interrupted curiously.
“I know five languages besides my own,” replied the guest, “English, French, German, Latin and Greek. Well, I can also read Italian a little.”
“Oh, my!” Ivan whispered enviously.
... The historian had lived solitarily, had no family anywhere and almost no acquaintances in Moscow. And, just think, one day he won a hundred thousand roubles.
“Imagine my astonishment,” the guest in the black cap whispered, “when I put my hand in the basket of dirty laundry and, lo and behold, it had the same number as in the newspaper. A state bond,”[86] he explained, “they gave it to me at the museum.”
... Having won a hundred thousand roubles, Ivan’s mysterious guest acted thus: bought books, gave up his room on Myasnitskaya ...
“Ohh, that accursed hole! ...” he growled.
... and rented from a builder, in a lane near the Arbat, two rooms in the basement of a little house in the garden. He left his work at the museum and began writing a novel about Pontius Pilate.
“Ah, that was a golden age!” the narrator whispered, his eyes shining.
“A completely private little apartment, plus a front hall with a sink in it,” he underscored for some reason with special pride, “little windows just level with the paved walk leading from the gate. Opposite, only four steps away, near the fence, lilacs, a linden and a maple. Ah, ah, ah! In winter it was very seldom that I saw someone’s black feet through my window and heard the snow crunching under them. And in my stove a fire was eternally blazing!
But suddenly spring came and through the dim glass I saw lilac bushes, naked at first, then dressing themselves up in green. And it was then, last spring, that something happened far more delightful than getting a hundred thousand roubles. And that, you must agree, is a huge sum of money!”
That’s true,” acknowledged the attentively listening Ivan. “I opened my little windows and sat in the second, quite minuscule room.” The guest began measuring with his arms: “Here’s the sofa, and another sofa opposite, and a little table between them, with a beautiful night lamp on it, and books nearer the window, and here a small writing table, and in the first room — a huge room, one hundred and fifty square feet! — books, books and the stove. Ah, what furnishings I had! The extraordinary smell of the lilacs!
And my head was getting light with fatigue, and Pilate was flying to the end...”
“White mantle, red lining! I understand!” Ivan exclaimed. “Precisely so! Pilate was flying to the end, to the end, and I already knew that the last words of the novel would be: "... the fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate". Well, naturally, I used to go out for a walk. A hundred thousand is a huge sum, and I had an excellent suit. Or I’d go and have dinner in some cheap restaurant. There was a wonderful restaurant on the Arbat, I don’t know whether it exists now.” Here the guest’s eyes opened w^de, and he went on whispering, gazing at the moon: ‘she was carrying repulsive, alarming yellow flowers in her hand. Devil knows what they’re called, but for some reason they’re the first to appear in Moscow. And these flowers stood out clearly against her black spring coat. She was carrying yellow flowers! Not a nice colour. She turned down a lane from Tverskaya and then looked back. Well, you know Tverskaya! Thousands of people were walking along Tverskaya, but I can assure you that she saw me alone, and looked not really alarmed, but even as if in pain. And I was struck not so much by her beauty as by an extraordinary loneliness in her eyes, such as no one had ever seen before! Obeying this yellow sign, I also turned down the lane and followed her. We walked along the crooked, boring lane silently, I on one side, she on the other. And, imagine, there was not a soul in the lane. I was suffering, because it seemed to me that it was necessary to speak to her, and I worried that I wouldn’t utter a single word, and she would leave, and I’d never see her again. And, imagine, suddenly she began to speak: “ ‘do you like my flowers?"
“I remember clearly the sound other voice, rather low, slightly husky, and, stupid as it is, it seemed that the echo resounded in the lane and bounced off the dirty yellow wall. I quickly crossed to her side and, coming up to her, answered: “No!”
“She looked at me in surprise, and I suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, understood that all my life I had loved precisely this woman! Quite a thing, eh? Of course, you’ll say I’m mad?”
“I won’t say anything,” Ivan exclaimed, and added: “I beg you, go on!”
And the guest continued.
“Yes, she looked at me in surprise, and then, having looked, asked thus: ‘You generally don’t like flowers?’ It seemed to me there was hostility in her voice. I was walking beside her, trying to keep in step, and, to my surprise, did not feel the least constraint. ‘No, I like flowers, but not this kind,’ I said. ‘Which, then?’ ‘I like roses.’ ‘Then I regretted having said it, because she smiled guiltily and threw the flowers into the gutter. Slightly at a loss, I nevertheless picked them up and gave them to her, but she, with a smile, pushed the flowers away, and I carried them in my hand.”
“So we walked silently for some time, until she took the flowers from my hand and threw them to the pavement, then put her own hand in a black glove with a bell-shaped cuff under my arm, and we walked on side by side.”
“Go on,” said Ivan, “and please don’t leave anything out!”
“Go on?” repeated the visitor. “Why, you can guess for yourself how it went on.” He suddenly wiped an unexpected tear with his right sleeve and continued: “Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn’t so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other, and that she was living with a different man ... as I was, too, then ... with that, what’s her...”
“With whom?” asked Homeless.
With that... well... with ...” replied the guest, snapping his fingers.
“You were married?”
“Why, yes, that’s why I’m snapping ... With that ... Varenka ...
Manechka ... no, Varenka ... striped dress, the museum ... Anyhow, I don’t remember.
“Well, so she said she went out that day with yellow flowers in her hand so that I would find her at last, and that if it hadn’t happened, she would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty.
“Yes, love struck us instantly. I knew it that same day, an hour later, when, without having noticed the city, we found ourselves by the Kremlin wall on the embankment.
We talked as if we had parted only the day before, as if we had known each other for many years. We arranged to meet the next day at the same place on the Moscow River, and we did. The May sun shone down on us. And soon, very soon, this woman became my secret wife.
“She used to come to me every afternoon, but I would begin waiting for her in the morning. This waiting expressed itself in the moving around of objects on the table. Ten minutes before, I would sit down by the little window and begin to listen for the banging of the decrepit gate. And how curious: before my meeting with her, few people came to our yard — more simply, no one came — but now it seemed to me that the whole city came flocking there.
“Bang goes the gate, bang goes my heart, and, imagine, it’s inevitably somebody’s dirty boots level with my face behind the window. A knife-grinder. Now, who needs a knife-grinder in our house? To sharpen what?
What knives?
“She would come through the gate once, but my heart would pound no less than ten times before that, I’m
not lying. And then, when her hour came and the hands showed noon, it even wouldn’t stop pounding until, almost without tapping, almost noiselessly, her shoes would come even with my window, their black suede bows held tightly by steel buckles.
“Sometimes she would get mischievous, pausing at the second window and tapping the glass with her toe. That same instant I would be at the window, but the shoe would be gone, the black silk blocking the light would be gone—I’d go and open the door for her.”
“No one knew of our liaison, I assure you of that, though it never happens. Her husband didn’t know, her acquaintances didn’t know. In the old house where I had that basement, people knew, of course, they saw that some woman visited me, but they didn’t know her name.”
“But who is she?” asked Ivan, intrigued in the highest degree by this love story.
The guest made a gesture signifying that he would never tell that to anyone, and went on with his story.
Ivan learned that the master and the unknown woman loved each other so deeply that they became completely inseparable. Ivan could clearly picture to himself the two rooms in the basement of the house, where it was always twilight because of the lilacs and the fence. The worn red furniture, the bureau, the clock on it which struck every half hour, and books, books, from the painted floor to the sooty ceiling, and the stove.
Ivan learned that his guest and his secret wife, from the very first days of their liaison, had come to the conclusion that fate itself had thrown them together at the corner of Tverskaya and that lane, and that they had been created for each other for all time.
Ivan learned from the guest’s story how the lovers would spend the day.
She would come, and put on an apron first thing, and in the narrow front hall where stood that same sink of which the poor patient was for some reason so proud, would light the kerosene stove on the wooden table, prepare lunch, and set it out on the oval table in the first room. When the May storms came and water rushed noisily through the gateway past the near-sighted windows, threatening to flood their last refuge, the lovers would light the stove and bake potatoes in it. Steam rose from the potatoes, the black potato skins dirtied their fingers. Laughter came from the basement, the trees in the garden after rain shed broken twigs, white clusters.
When the storms ended and sultry summer came, there appeared in the vase the long-awaited roses they both loved. The man who called himself a master worked feverishly on his novel, and this novel also absorbed the unknown woman.
“Really, there were times when I’d begin to be jealous of it on account of her,” the night visitor come from the moonlit balcony whispered to Ivan.
Her slender fingers with sharply filed nails buried in her hair, she endlessly reread what he had written, and after rereading it would sit sewing that very same cap. Sometimes she crouched down by the lower shelves or stood by the upper ones and wiped the hundreds of dusty spines with a cloth. She foretold fame, she urged him on, and it was then that she began to call him a master. She waited impatiently for the already promised last words about the fifth procurator of Judea, repeated aloud in a sing-song voice certain phrases she liked, and said that her life was in this novel.
It was finished in the month of August, was given to some unknown typist, and she typed it in five copies. And finally the hour came when he had to leave his secret refuge and go out into life.
“And I went out into life holding it in my hands, and then my life ended,” the master whispered and drooped his head, and for a long time nodded the woeful black cap with the yellow letter “M” on it. He continued his story, but it became somewhat incoherent, one could only understand that some catastrophe had then befallen Ivan’s guest.
“For the first time I found myself in the world of literature, but now, when it’s all over and my ruin is clear, I recall it with horror!” the master whispered solemnly and raised his hand. “Yes, he astounded me greatly, ah, how he astounded me!”
“Who?” Ivan whispered barely audibly, fearing to interrupt the agitated narrator.
“Why, the editor, I tell you, the editor! Yes, he read it all right. He looked at me as if I had a swollen cheek, looked sidelong into the corner, and even tittered in embarrassment. He crumpled the manuscript needlessly and grunted. The questions he asked seemed crazy to me. Saving nothing about the essence of the novel, he asked me who I was, where I came from, and how long I had been writing, and why no one had heard of me before, and even asked what in my opinion was a totally idiotic question: who had given me the idea of writing a novel on such a strange theme? Finally I got sick of him and asked directly whether he would publish the novel or not. Here he started squirming, mumbled something, and declared that he could not decide the question on his own, that other members of the editorial board had to acquaint themselves with my work — namely, the critics Latunsky and Ariman, and the writer Mstislav Lavrovich.[87] He asked me to come in two weeks. I came in two weeks and was received by some girl whose eyes were crossed towards her nose from constant lying.”
That’s Lapshennikova, the editorial secretary,” Ivan said with a smirk.
He knew very well the world described so wrathfully by his guest.
“Maybe,” the other snapped, “and so from her I got my novel back, already quite greasy and dishevelled. Trying to avoid looking me in the eye, Lapshennikova told me that the publisher was provided with material for two years ahead, and therefore the question of printing my novel, as she put it, ‘did not arise".
“What do I remember after that?” the master muttered, rubbing his temple. “Yes, red petals strewn across the tide page, and also the eyes of my friend. Yes, those eyes I remember.”
The story of Ivan’s guest was becoming more confused, more filled with all sorts of reticences. He said something about slanting rain and despair in the basement refuge, about having gone elsewhere. He exclaimed in a whisper that he did not blame her in the least for pushing him to fight — oh, no, he did not blame her!
Further on, as Ivan heard, something sudden and strange happened. One day our hero opened a newspaper and saw in it an article by the critic Ariman,[88] in which Ariman warned all and sundry that he, that is, our hero, had attempted to foist into print an apology for Jesus Christ.
“Ah, I remember, I remember!” Ivan cried out. “But I’ve forgotten your name!”
“Let’s leave my name out of it, I repeat, it no longer exists,” replied the guest. “That’s not the point. Two days later in another newspaper, over the signature of Mstislav Lavrovich, appeared another article, in which its author recommended striking, and striking hard, at Pilatism and at the icon-dauber who had ventured to foist it (again that accursed word!) into print.
“Dumbfounded by this unheard-of word "Pilatism", I opened a third newspaper. There were two articles in it, one by Latunsky, the other signed with the initials "N.E." I assure you, the works of Ariman and Lavrovich could be counted as jokes compared with what Latunsky wrote. Suffice it to say that Latunsky’s article was entitled "A Militant Old Believer".[89] I got so carried away reading the article about myself that I didn’t notice (I had forgotten to lock the door) how she came in and stood before me with a wet umbrella in her hand and wet newspapers as well. Her eyes flashed fire, her trembling hands were cold. First she rushed to kiss me, then, in a hoarse voice, and pounding the table with her fist, she said she would poison Latunsky.”
Ivan grunted somewhat embarrassedly, but said nothing.
“Joyless autumn days set in,” the guest went on. “The monstrous failure with this novel seemed to have taken out a part of my soul. Essentially speaking, I had nothing more to do, and I lived from one meeting with her to the next. And it was at that time that something happened to me. Devil knows what, Stravinsky probably figured it out long ago. Namely, anguish came over me and certain forebodings appeared.
"The articles, please note, did not cease. I laughed at the first of them. But the more of them that appeared, the more my attitude towards them changed
. The second stage was one of astonishment. Some rare falsity and insecurity could be sensed literally in every line of these articles, despite their threatening and confident tone. I had the feeling, and I couldn’t get rid of it, that the authors of these articles were not saying what they wanted to say, and that their rage sprang precisely from that. And then, imagine, a third stage came – of fear. No, not fear of these articles, you understand, but fear of other things totally unrelated to them or to the novel. Thus, for instance, I began to be afraid of the dark. In short, the stage of mental illness came. It seemed to me, especially as I was falling asleep, that some very cold and pliant octopus was stealing with its tentacles immediately and directly towards my heart. And I had to sleep with the light on.
“My beloved changed very much (of course, I never told her about the octopus, but she could see that something was going wrong with me), she became thinner and paler, stopped laughing, and kept asking me to forgive her for having advised me to publish an excerpt. She said I should drop everything and go to the south, to the Black Sea, and spend all that was left of the hundred thousand on the trip.
“She was very insistent, and to avoid an argument (something told me I was not to go to the Black Sea), I promised her that I’d do it one of those days. But she said she would buy me the ticket herself. Then I took out all my money – that is, about ten thousand roubles – and gave it to her.”
"Why so much?" she was surprised.
“I said something or other about being afraid of thieves and asked her to keep the money until my departure. She took it, put it in her purse, began kissing me and saying that it would be easier for her to die than to leave me alone in such a state, but that she was expected, that she must bow to necessity, that she would come the next day. She begged me not to be afraid of anything.
“This was at dusk, in mid-October. And she left. I lay down on the sofa and fell asleep without turning on the light. I was awakened by the feeling that the octopus was there. Groping in the dark, I barely managed to turn on the light. My pocket watch showed two o’clock in the morning. I was falling ill when I went to bed, and I woke up sick. It suddenly seemed to me that the autumn darkness would push through the glass and pour into the room, and I would drown in it as in ink. I got up a man no longer in control of himself. I cried out, the thought came to me of running to someone, even if it was my landlord upstairs. I struggled with myself like a madman. I had strength enough to get to the stove and start a fire in it. When the wood began to crackle and the stove door rattled, I seemed to feel slightly better. I dashed to the front room, turned on the light diere, found a botde of white wine, uncorked it and began drinking from the botde. This blunted the fear somewhat — at least enough to keep me from running to me landlord