“Well, well. How nice!”
Varenukha went on with his story, and the more he told, the more vividly there unfolded before the findirector the long chain of Likhodeev’s boorish and outrageous acts, and every link in this chain was worse than the one before. The drunken dancing in the arms of the telegrapher on the lawn in front of the Pushkino telegraph office to the sounds of some itinerant barrel-organ was worth something! The chase after some female citizens shrieking with terror! The attempt at a fight with the barman in the Yalta itself! Scattering green onions all over the floor of the same Yalta.
Smashing eight bottles of dry white Ai-Danil. Breaking the meter when the taxi-driver refused to take Styopa in his cab. Threatening to arrest the citizens who attempted to stop Styopa’s obnoxiousness ... In short, black horror!
Styopa was well known in Moscow theatre circles, and everyone knew that the man was no gift. But all the same, what the administrator was telling about him was too much even for Styopa. Yes, too much. Even much too much ...
Rimsky’s needle-sharp glance pierced the administrator’s face from across the desk, and the longer the man spoke, the grimmer those eyes became. The more lifelike and colourful the vile details with which the administrator furnished his story, the less the findirector believed the storyteller. And when Varenukha told how Styopa had let himself go so far as to try to resist those who came to bring him back to Moscow, the findirector already knew firmly that everything the administrator who had returned at midnight was telling him, everything, was a lie! A lie from first word to last!
Varenukha never went to Pushkino, and there was no Styopa in Pushkino.
There was no drunken telegrapher, there was no broken glass in the tavern, Styopa did not get tied up with ropes ... none of it happened.
As soon as the findirector became firmly convinced that the administrator was lying to him, fear crept over his body, starting from the legs, and twice again the findirector fancied that a putrid malarial dankness was wafting across the floor. Never for a moment taking his eyes off the administrator — who squirmed somehow strangely in his armchair, trying not to get out of the blue shade of the desk lamp, and screening himself with a newspaper in some remarkable fashion from the bothersome light — the findirector was thinking of only one thing: what did it all mean? Why was he being lied to so brazenly, in the silent and deserted building, by the administrator who was so late in coming back to him? And the awareness of danger, an unknown but menacing danger, began to gnaw at Rimsky’s soul. Pretending to ignore Varenukha’s dodges and tricks with the newspaper, the findirector studied his face, now almost without listening to the yarn Varenukha was spinning. There was something that seemed still more inexplicable than the calumny invented. God knows why, about adventures in Pushkino, and that something was the change in the administrator’s appearance and manners.
No matter how the man pulled the duck-like visor of his cap over his eyes, so as to throw a shadow on his face, no matter how he fidgeted with the newspaper, the findirector managed to make out an enormous bruise on the right side of his face just by the nose. Besides that, the normally full-blooded administrator was now pale with a chalk-like, unhealthy pallor, and on this stifling night his neck was for some reason wrapped in an old striped scarf. Add to that the repulsive manner the administrator had acquired during the time of his absence of sucking and smacking, the sharp change in his voice, which had become hollow and coarse, and the furtiveness and cowardliness in his eyes, and one could boldly say that Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable.
Something else burningly troubled the findirector, but he was unable to grasp precisely what it was, however much he strained his feverish mind, however hard he peered at Varenukha. One thing he could affirm, that there was something unprecedented, unnatural in this combination of the administrator and the familiar armchair.
"Well, we finally overpowered him, loaded him into the car,” Varenukha boomed, peeking from behind the paper and covering the bruise with his hand.
Rimsky suddenly reached out and, as if mechanically, tapping his fingers on the table at the same time, pushed the electric-bell button with his palm and went numb. The sharp signal ought to have been heard without fail in the empty building. But no signal came, and the button sank lifelessly into the wood of the desk. The button was dead, the bell broken.
The findirector’s stratagem did not escape the notice of Varenukha, who asked, twitching, with a clearly malicious fire flickering in his eyes: “What are you ringing for?”
“Mechanically,” the findirector replied hollowly, jerking his hand back, and asked in turn, in an unsteady voice: "What’s that on your face?”
“The car skidded, I bumped against the door-handle,” Varenukha said, looking away.
“He’s lying!” the findirector exclaimed mentally. And here his eyes suddenly grew round and utterly insane, and he stared at the back of the armchair.
Behind the chair on the floor two shadows lay criss-cross, one more dense and black, the other faint and grey. The shadow of the back of the chair and of its tapering legs could be seen distinctly on the floor, but there was no shadow of Varenukha’s head above the back of the chair, or of the administrator’s legs under its legs.
“He casts no shadow!” Rimsky cried out desperately in his mind. He broke into shivers.
Varenukha, following Rimsky’s insane gaze, looked furtively behind him at the back of the chair, and realized that he had been found out.
He got up from the chair (the findirector did likewise) and made one step back from the desk, clutching his briefcase in his hands.
“He’s guessed, damn him! Always was clever,” Varenukha said, grinning spitefully right in the findirector’s face, and he sprang unexpectedly from the chair to the door and quickly pushed down the catch on the lock. The findirector looked desperately behind him, as he retreated to the window giving on to the garden, and in this window, flooded with moonlight, saw the face of a naked girl pressed against the glass and her naked arm reaching through the vent-pane and trying to open the lower latch. The upper one was already open.
It seemed to Rimsky that the light of the desk lamp was going out and the desk was tilting. An icy wave engulfed Rimsky, but – fortunately for him – he got control of himself and did not fall. He had enough strength left to whisper, but not cry out: “Help ...”
Varenukha, guarding the door, hopped up and down by it, staying in air for a long time and swaying there. Waving his hooked fingers in Rimsky’s direction, he hissed and smacked, winking to the girl in the window.
She began to hurry, stuck her red-haired head through the vent, reached her arm down as far as she could, her nails clawing at the lower latch and shaking the frame. Her arm began to lengthen, rubber-like, and became covered with a putrid green. Finally the dead woman’s green fingers got hold of the latch knob, turned it, and the frame began to open. Rimsky cried out weakly, leaned against the wall, and held his briefcase in front of him like a shield. He realized that his end had come.
The frame swung wide open, but instead of the night’s freshness and the fragrance of the lindens, the smell of a cellar burst into the room. The dead woman stepped on to the window-sill. Rimsky clearly saw spots of decay on her breast.
And just then the joyful, unexpected crowing of a cock came from the garden, from that low building beyond the shooting gallery where birds participating in the programme were kept. A loud, trained cock trumpeted, announcing that dawn was rolling towards Moscow from the east.
Savage fury distorted the girl’s face, she emitted a hoarse oath, and at the door Varenukha shrieked and dropped from the air to the floor.
The cock-crow was repeated, the girl clacked her teeth, and her red hair stood on end. With the third crowing of the cock, she turned and flew out And after her, jumping up and stretching himself horizontally in the air, looking like a flying cupid, Varenukha slowly floated over the desk and out the window.
White as snow, with n
ot a single black hair on his head, the old man who still recently had been Rimsky rushed to the door, undid the catch, opened the door, and ran hurtling down the dark corridor. At the turn to the stairs, moaning with fear, he felt for the switch, and the stairway lighted up. On the stairs the shaking, trembling old man fell because he imagined that Varenukha had softly tumbled on top of him.
Having run downstairs, Rimsky saw a watchman asleep on a chair by the box office in the lobby. Rimsky stole past him on tiptoe and “ slipped out the main entrance. Outside he felt slightly better. He recovered his senses enough to realize, clutching his head, that his hat had stayed behind in the office.
Needless to say, he did not go back for it, but, breathless, ran across the wide street to the opposite corner by the movie theatre, near which a dull reddish light hovered. In a moment he was there. No one had time to intercept the cab.
“Make the Leningrad express, I’ll tip you well,” the old man said, breathing heavily and clutching his heart.
“I’m going to the garage,” the driver answered hatefully and turned away.
Then Rimsky unlatched his briefcase, took out fifty roubles, and handed them to the driver through the open front window.
A few moments later, the rattling car was flying like the wind down Sadovoye Ring. The passenger was tossed about on his seat, and in the fragment of mirror hanging in front of the driver, Rimsky saw now the driver’s happy eyes, now his own insane ones.
Jumping out of the car in front of the train station, Rimsky cried to the first man he saw in a white apron with a badge: “First class, single, I’ll pay thirty,” he was pulling the banknotes from his briefcase, crumpling them, “no first class, get me second ... if not — a hard bench!”
The man with the badge kept glancing up at the lighted clock face as he tore the banknotes from Rimsky’s hand.
Five minutes later the express train disappeared from under the glass vault of the train station and vanished clean away in the darkness. And with it vanished Rimsky.
Chapter 15. Nikanor Ivanovich’s Dream
It is not difficult to guess that the fat man with the purple physiognomy who was put in room 119 of the clinic was Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy.
He got to Professor Stravinsky not at once, however, but after first visiting another place.[91] Of this other place little remained in Nikanor Ivanovich’s memory. He recalled only a desk, a bookcase and a sofa.
There a conversation was held with Nikanor Ivanovich, who had some sort of haze before his eyes from the rush of blood and mental agitation, but the conversation came out somehow strange, muddled, or, better to say, did not come out at all.
The very first question put to Nikanor Ivanovich was the following: “Are you Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, chairman of the house committee at no.502-bis on Sadovaya Street?”
To this Nikanor Ivanovich, bursting into terrible laughter, replied literally thus: “I’m Nikanor, of course I’m Nikanor! But what the deuce kind of chairman am I?”
“Meaning what?” the question was asked with a narrowing of eyes.
“Meaning,” he replied, “that if I was chairman, I should have determined at once that he was an unclean power! Otherwise — what is it? A cracked pince-nez, all in rags ... what kind of foreigner’s interpreter could he be?”
“Who are you talking about?” Nikanor Ivanovich was asked.
“Koroviev!” Nikanor Ivanovich cried out. “Got himself lodged in our apartment number fifty. Write it down – Koroviev! He must be caught at once.
Write it down – the sixth entrance. He’s there.”
“Where did you get the currency?” Nikanor Ivanovich was asked soul fully.
“As God is true, as God is almighty,” Nikanor Ivanovich began, Tie sees everything, and it serves me right. I never laid a finger on it, never even suspected what it was, this currency! God is punishing me for my iniquity,” Nikanor Ivanovich went on with feeling, now buttoning, now unbuttoning his shirt, now crossing himself. “I took! I took, but I took ours. Soviet money! I’d register people for money, I don’t argue, it happened. Our secretary Bedsornev is a good one, too, another good one! Frankly speaking, there’s nothing but thieves in the house management ... But I never took currency!”
To the request that he stop playing the fool and tell how the dollars got into the ventilation, Nikanor Ivanovich went on his knees and swayed, opening his mouth as if he meant to swallow a section of the parquet.
“If you want,” he mumbled, “I’ll eat dirt that I didn’t do it! And Koroviev — he’s the devil!”
All patience has its limits, and the voice at the desk was now raised, hinting to Nikanor Ivanovich that it was time he began speaking in human language.
Here the room with that same sofa resounded with Nikanor Ivanovich’s wild roaring, as he jumped up from his knees: “There he is! There, behind the bookcase! He’s grinning! And his pince-nez ... Hold him! Spray the room with holy water!”
The blood left Nikanor Ivanovich’s face. Trembling, he made crosses in the air, rushing to the door and back, intoned some prayer, and finally began spouting sheer gibberish.
It became perfectly clear that Nikanor Ivanovich was unfit for any conversation. He was taken out and put in a separate room, where he calmed down somewhat and only prayed and sobbed.
They did, of course, go to Sadovaya and visit apartment no.50. But they did not find any Koroviev there, and no one in the house either knew or had seen any Koroviev. The apartment occupied by the late Berlioz, as well as by the Yalta-visiting Likhodeev, was empty, and in the study wax seals hung peacefully on the bookcases, unbroken by anyone. With that they left Sadovaya, and there also departed with them the perplexed and dispirited secretary of the house management, Bedsornev.
In the evening Nikanor Ivanovich was delivered to Stravinsky’s clinic.
There he became so agitated that an injection, made according to Stravinsky’s recipe, had to be given him, and only after midnight did Nikanor Ivanovich fall asleep in room 119, every now and then emitting a heavy, painful moan.
But the longer he slept, the easier his sleep became. He stopped tossing and groaning, his breathing became easy and regular, and he was left alone. Then Nikanor Ivanovich was visited by a dream, at the basis of which undoubtedly lay the experience of that day. It began with Nikanor Ivanovich seeing as it were some people with golden trumpets in their hands leading him, and very solemnly, to a big lacquered door. At this door his companions played as it were a nourish for Nikanor Ivanovich, and then from the sky a resounding bass said merrily: “Welcome, Nikanor Ivanovich, turn over your currency!”
Exceedingly astonished, Nikanor Ivanovich saw a black loudspeaker above him.
Then he found himself for some reason in a theatre house, where crystal chandeliers blazed under a gilded ceiling and Quinquet lamps[92] on the walls. Everything was as it ought to be in a small-sized but very costly theatre. There was a stage closed off by a velvet curtain, its dark cerise background spangled, as if with stars, with oversized gold pieces, there was a prompter’s box, and there was even an audience.
What surprised Nikanor Ivanovich was that this audience was all of the same sex – male – and all for some reason bearded. Besides that, it was striking that there were no seats in the theatre, and the audience was all sitting on the floor, splendidly polished and slippery.
Abashed in this new and big company, Nikanor Ivanovich, after a brief hesitation, followed the general example and sat down on the parquet Turkish-fashion, huddled between some stalwart, bearded redhead and another citizen, pale and quite overgrown. None of the sitters paid any attention to the newly arrived spectator.
Here the soft ringing of a bell was heard, the lights in the house went out, and the curtain opened to reveal a lighted stage with an armchair, a little table on which stood a golden bell, and a solid black velvet backdrop.
An artiste came out from the wings in an evening jacket, smoothly shaven, his hair neatly parted, young and with very pleasant feat
ures. The audience in the house livened up, and everyone turned towards the stage. The artiste advanced to the prompter’s box and rubbed his hands.
“All sitting?”[93] he asked in a soft baritone and smiled to the house. “sitting, sitting,” a chorus of tenors and basses answered from the house.
“Hm ...” the artiste began pensively, “and how you’re not sick of it.
I just don’t understand! Everybody else is out walking around now, enjoying the spring sun and the warmth, and you’re stuck in here on the floor of a stuffy theatre! Is the programme so interesting? Tastes differ, however,” the artiste concluded philosophically.
Then he changed both the timbre of his voice and its intonation, and announced gaily and resoundingly: “And now for the next number on our programme — Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, chairman of a house committee and director of a dietetic kitchen.
Nikanor Ivanovich, on-stage!”
General applause greeted the artiste. The surprised Nikanor Ivanovich goggled his eyes, while the master of ceremonies, blocking the glare of the footlights with his hand, located him among the sitters and tenderly beckoned him on-stage with his finger. And Nikanor Ivanovich, without knowing how, found himself on-stage. Beams of coloured light struck his eyes from in front and below, which at once caused the house and the audience to sink into darkness.
“Well, Nikanor Ivanovich, set us a good example, sir,” the young artiste said soulfully, “turn over your currency.”
Silence ensued. Nikanor Ivanovich took a deep breath and quietly began to speak: “I swear to God that I...”
But before he had time to get the words out, the whole house burst into shouts of indignation. Nikanor Ivanovich got confused and fell silent.
“As far as I understand you,” said the programme announcer, “you wanted to swear to God that you haven’t got any currency?”, and he gazed sympathetically at Nikanor Ivanovich.
“Exactly right, I haven’t,” replied Nikanor Ivanovich.