Glukharev danced with the poetess Tamara Polumesyats, Quant danced, Zhukopov the novelist danced with some movie actress in a yellow dress.
Dragunsky danced, Cherdakchi danced, little Deniskin danced with the enormous Bos”n George, the beautiful Semeikina-Gall, an architect, danced in the tight embrace of a stranger in white canvas trousers. Locals and invited guests danced, Muscovites and out-of-towners, the writer Johann from Kronstadt, a certain Vitya Kuftik from Rostov, apparently a stage director, with a purple spot all over his cheek, the most eminent representatives of the poetry section of Massolit danced – that is, Baboonov, Blasphemsky, Sweetkin, Smatchstik and Addphina Buzdyak — young men of unknown profession, in crew cuts, with cotton-padded shoulders, danced, someone very elderly danced, a shred of green onion stuck in his beard, and with him danced a sickly, anaemia-consumed girl in a wrinkled orange silk dress.
Streaming with sweat, waiters carried sweating mugs of beer over their heads, shouting hoarsely and with hatred: “Excuse me, citizen!” Somewhere through a megaphone a voice commanded: “One Karsky shashlik! Two Zubrovkas!
Home-style tripe!” The high voice no longer sang, but howled “Hallelujah!”
The clashing of golden cymbals in the band sometimes even drowned out the clashing of dishes which the dishwashers sent down a sloping chute to the kitchen. In short – hell.
And at midnight there came an apparition in hell. A handsome dark-eyed man with a dagger-like beard, in a tailcoat, stepped on to the veranda and cast a regal glance over his domain. They used to say, the mystics used to say, that there was a time when the handsome man wore not a tailcoat but a wide leather belt with pistol butts sticking from it, and his raven hair was tied with scarlet silk, and under his command a brig sailed the Caribbean under a black death flag with a skull and crossbones.
But no, no! The seductive mystics are lying, there are no Caribbean Seas in the world, no desperate freebooters sail them, no corvette chases after them, no cannon smoke drifts across the waves. There is nothing, and there was nothing! There is that sickly linden over there, there is the cast-iron fence, and the boulevard beyond it ... And the ice is melting in the bowl, and at the next table you see someone’s bloodshot, bovine eyes, and you’re afraid, afraid ... Oh, gods, my gods, poison, bring me poison! ...
And suddenly a word fluttered up from some table: “Berlioz!!” The jazz broke up and fell silent, as if someone had hit it with a fist. “What, what, what, what?!!” “Berlioz!!!” And they began jumping up, exclaiming...
Yes, a wave of grief billowed up at the terrible news about Mikhail Alexandrovich. Someone fussed about, crying that it was necessary at once, straight away, without leaving the spot, to compose some collective telegram and send it off immediately.
But what telegram, may we ask, and where? And why send it? And where, indeed? And what possible need for any telegram does someone have whose flattened pate is now clutched in the dissector’s rubber hands, whose neck the professor is now piercing with curved needles? He’s dead, and has no need of any telegrams. It’s all over, let’s not burden the telegraph wires any more.
Yes, he’s dead, dead ... But, as for us, we’re alive!
Yes, a wave of grief billowed up, held out for a while, but then began to subside, and somebody went back to his table and — sneakily at first, then openly – drank a little vodka and ate a bite. And, really, can one let chicken cutlets de volatile perish? How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich?
By going hungry? But, after all, we’re alive!
Naturally, the grand piano was locked, the jazz band dispersed, several journalists left for their offices to write obituaries. It became known that Zheldybin had come from the morgue. He had installed himself in the deceased’s office upstairs, and the rumour spread at once that it was he who would replace Berlioz. Zheldybin summoned from the restaurant all twelve members of the board, and at the urgently convened meeting in Berlioz’s office they started a discussion of the pressing questions of decorating the hall with columns at Griboedov’s, of transporting the body from the morgue to that hall, of opening it to the public, and all else connected with the sad event.
And the restaurant began to live its usual nocturnal life and would have gone on living it until closing time, that is, until four o’clock in the morning, had it not been for an occurrence which was completely out of the ordinary and which struck the restaurant’s clientele much more than the news of Berlioz’s death.
The first to take alarm were the coachmen[67] waiting at the gates of the Griboedov house. One of them, rising on his box, was heard to cry out: “Hoo-ee! Just look at that!”
After which, from God knows where, a little light flashed by the cast-iron fence and began to approach the veranda. Those sitting at the tables began to get up and peer at it, and saw that along with the little light a white ghost was marching towards the restaurant. When it came right up to the trellis, everybody sat as if frozen at their tables, chunks of sterlet on their forks, eyes popping. The doorman, who at that moment had stepped out of the restaurant coat room to have a smoke in the yard, stamped out his cigarette and made for the ghost with the obvious intention of barring its way into the restaurant, but for some reason did not do so, and stopped, smiling stupidly.
And the ghost, passing through an opening in the trellis, stepped unhindered on to the veranda. Here everyone saw that it was no ghost at all, but Ivan Nikolaevich Homeless, the much-renowned poet.
He was barefoot, in a torn, whitish Tolstoy blouse, with a paper icon bearing the image of an unknown saint pinned to the breast of it with a safety pin, and was wearing striped white drawers. In his hand Ivan Nikolaevich carried a lighted wedding candle. Ivan Nikolaevich’s right cheek was freshly scratched. It would even be difficult to plumb the depths of the silence that reigned on the veranda. Beer could be seen running down on to the floor from a mug tilted in one waiter’s hand.
The poet raised the candle over his head and said loudly: “Hail, friends!” After which he peeked under the nearest table and exclaimed ruefully: “No, he’s not there!”
Two voices were heard. A basso said pitilessly: That’s it. Delirium tremens.”
And the second, a woman’s, frightened, uttered the words: “How could the police let him walk the streets like that?”
This Ivan Nikolaevich heard, and replied: They tried to detain me twice, in Skaterny and here on Bronnaya, but I hopped over the fence and, as you can see, cut my cheek!” Here Ivan Nikolaevich raised the candle and cried out: “Brethren in literature!” (His hoarse voice grew stronger and more fervent.) “Listen to me everyone! He has appeared. Catch him immediately, otherwise he’ll do untold harm!”
“What? What? What did he say? Who has appeared?” voices came from all sides.
The consultant,” Ivan replied, “and this consultant just killed Misha Berlioz at the Patriarch’s Ponds.”
Here people came flocking to the veranda from the inner rooms, a crowd gathered around Ivan’s flame.
“Excuse me, excuse me, be more precise,” a soft and polite voice said over Ivan Nikolaevich’s ear, “tell me, what do you mean "killed"?
Who killed?”
“A foreign consultant, a professor, and a spy,” Ivan said, looking around.
“And what is his name?” came sofdy to Ivan’s ear. That’s just it – his name!” Ivan cried in anguish. “If only I knew his name! I didn’t make out his name on his visiting card ... I only remember the first letter, "W", his name begins with "W"! What last name begins with "W"?” Ivan asked himself, clutching his forehead, and suddenly started muttering: “Wi, we, wa ... Wu
... Wo ... Washner? Wagner? Weiner? Wegner? Winter?” The hair on Ivan’s head began to crawl with the tension.
“Wolf?” some woman cried pitifully.
Ivan became angry.
“Fool!” he cried, seeking the woman with his eyes. "What has Wolf got to do with it? Wolf’s not to blame for anything! Wo, wa ... No, I’ll never remember this way! Here’s
what, citizens: call the police at once, let them send out five motor cycles with machine-guns to catch the professor. And don’t forget to tell them that there are two others with him: a long checkered one, cracked pince-nez, and a cat, black and fat ... And meanwhile I’ll search Griboedov’s, I sense that he’s here!”
Ivan became anxious, pushed away the people around him, started waving the candle, pouring wax on himself, and looking under the tables. Here someone said: “Call a doctor!” and someone’s benign, fleshy face, clean shaven and well nourished, in horn-rimmed glasses, appeared before Ivan.
“Comrade Homeless,” the face began in a guest speaker’s voice, “calm down! You’re upset at the death of our beloved Mikhail Alexandrovich ...
no, say just Misha Berlioz. We all understand that perfectly well. You need rest. The comrades will take you home to bed right now, you’ll forget...”
“You,” Ivan interrupted, baring his teeth, "but don’t you understand that the professor has to be caught? And you come at me with your foolishness! Cretin!”
“Pardon me. Comrade Homeless!...” the face replied, blushing, retreating, and already repentant at having got mixed up in this affair.
“No, anyone else, but you I will not pardon,” Ivan Nikolaevich said with quiet hatred.
A spasm distorted his face, he quickly shifted the candle from his right hand to his left, swung roundly and hit the compassionate face on the ear.
Here it occurred to them to fall upon Ivan – and so they did. The candle went out, and the glasses that had fallen from the face were instantly trampled. Ivan let out a terrible war cry, heard, to the temptation of all, even on the boulevard, and set about defending himself.
Dishes fell clattering from the tables, women screamed.
All the while the waiters were tying up the poet with napkins, a conversation was going on in the coat room between the commander of the brig and the doorman.
“Didn’t you see he was in his underpants?” the pirate inquired coldly.
“But, Archibald Archibaldovich,” the doorman replied, cowering, “how could I not let him in, if he’s a member of Massolit?” ‘didn’t you see he was in his underpants?” the pirate repeated. “Pardon me, Archibald Archibaldovich,” the doorman said, turning purple, “but what could I do? I understand, there are ladies sitting on the veranda ...”
“Ladies have nothing to do with it, it makes no difference to the ladies,” the pirate replied, literally burning the doorman up with his eyes, “but it does to the police! A man in his underwear can walk the streets of Moscow only in this one case, that he’s accompanied by the police, and only to one place — the police station! And you, if you’re a doorman, ought to know that on seeing such a man, you must, without a moment’s delay, start blowing your whistle. Do you hear? Do you hear what’s going on on the veranda?”
Here the half-crazed doorman heard some sort of hooting coming from the veranda, the smashing of dishes and women’s screams.
“Now, what’s to be done with you for that?” the freebooter asked.
The skin on the doorman’s face acquired a typhoid tinge, his eyes went dead. It seemed to him that the black hair, now combed and parted, was covered with flaming silk. The shirt-front and tailcoat disappeared and a pistol butt emerged, tucked into a leather belt. The doorman pictured himself hanging from the fore-topsail yard. His eyes saw his own tongue sticking out and his lifeless head lolling on his shoulder, and even heard the splash of waves against the hull. The doorman’s knees gave way. But here the freebooter took pity on him and extinguished his sharp gaze.
“Watch out, Nikolai, this is the last time! We have no need of such doormen in the restaurant. Go find yourself a job as a beadle.” Having said this, the commander commanded precisely, clearly, rapidly: “Get Pantelei from the snack bar. Police. Protocol. A car. To the psychiatric clinic.” And added: “Blow your whistle!”
In a quarter of an hour an extremely astounded public, not only in the restaurant but on the boulevard itself and in the windows of houses looking on to the restaurant garden, saw Pantelei, the doorman, a policeman, a waiter and the poet Riukhin carry through the gates of Griboedov’s a young man swaddled like a doll, dissolved in tears, who spat, aiming precisely at Riukhin, and shouted for all the boulevard to hear: “You bastard! ... You bastard! ...”
A truck-driver with a spiteful face was starting his motor. Next to him a coachman, rousing his horse, slapping it on the croup with violet reins, shouted: “Have a run for your money! I’ve taken “em to the psychics before!”
Around them the crowd buzzed, discussing the unprecedented event. In short, there was a nasty, vile, tempting, swinish scandal, which ended only when the truck carried away from the gates of Griboedov’s the unfortunate Ivan Nikolaevich, the policeman, Pantelei and Riukhin.
Chapter 6. Schizophrenia, as was Said
It was half past one in the morning when a man with a pointed beard and wearing a white coat came out to the examining room of the famous psychiatric clinic, built recently on the outskirts of Moscow by the bank of the river. Three orderlies had their eyes fastened on Ivan Nikolaevich, who was sitting on a couch. The extremely agitated poet Riukhin was also there.
The napkins with which Ivan Nikolaevich had been bed up lay in a pile on the same couch. Ivan Nikolaevich’s arms and legs were free.
Seeing the entering man, Riukhin turned pale, coughed, and said timidly: “Hello, Doctor.”
The doctor bowed to Riukhin but, as he bowed, looked not at him but at Ivan Nikolaevich. The latter sat perfectly motionless, with an angry face and knitted brows, and did not even stir at the doctor’s entrance.
“Here, Doctor,” Riukhin began speaking, for some reason, in a mysterious whisper, glancing timorously at Ivan Nikolaevich, “is the renowned poet Ivan Homeless ... well, you see ... we’re afraid it might be delirium tremens ...”
“Was he drinking hard?” the doctor said through his teeth.
“No, he drank, but not really so ...”
“Did he chase after cockroaches, rats, little devils, or slinking dogs?”
“No,” Riukhin replied with a shudder, “I saw him yesterday and this morning ... he was perfectly well.”
“And why is he in his drawers? Did you get him out of bed?”
“No, Doctor, he came to the restaurant that way ...”
“Aha, aha,” the doctor said with great satisfaction, “and why the scratches? Did he have a fight?”
“He fell off a fence, and then in the restaurant he hit somebody ...
and then somebody else ...”
“So, so, so,” the doctor said and, turning to Ivan, added: “Hello there!”
“Greetings, saboteur!”[68] Ivan replied spitefully and loudly.
Riukhin was so embarrassed that he did not dare raise his eyes to the courteous doctor. But the latter, not offended in the least, took off his glasses with a habitual, deft movement, raised the skirt of his coat, put them into the back pocket of his trousers, and then asked Ivan: “How old are you?”
“You can all go to the devil!” Ivan shouted rudely and turned away.
“But why are you angry? Did I say anything unpleasant to you?”
“I’m twenty-three years old,” Ivan began excitedly, “and I’ll file a complaint against you all. And particularly against you, louse!” he adverted separately to Riukhin.
“And what do you want to complain about?”
“About the fact that I, a healthy man, was seized and dragged by force to a madhouse!” Ivan replied wrathfully.
Here Riukhin looked closely at Ivan and went cold: there was decidedly no insanity in the man’s eyes. No longer dull as dicy had been at Griboedov’s, they were now clear as ever.
“Good God!” Riukhin thought fearfully. “So he’s really normal! What nonsense! Why, in fact, did we drag him here? He’s normal, normal, only his mug got scratched ...”
“You are,” the doctor began calmly, sitting down on a white stool with a shiny foot,
“not in a madhouse, but in a clinic, where no one will keep you if it’s not necessary.”
Ivan Nikolaevich glanced at him mistrustfully out of the comer of his eye, but still grumbled: “Thank the Lord! One normal man has finally turned up among the idiots, of whom the first is that giftless goof Sashka!”
“Who is this giftless Sashka?” the doctor inquired.
“This one here – Riukhin,” Ivan replied, jabbing his dirty finger in Riukhin’s direction.
The latter flushed with indignation. That’s the thanks I get,” he thought bitterly, “for showing concern for him! What trash, really!”
“Psychologically, a typical little kulak,”[69] Ivan Nikolaevich began, evidently from an irresistible urge to denounce Riukhin, “and, what’s more, a little kulak carefully disguising himself as a proletarian. Look at his lenten physiognomy, and compare it with those resounding verses he wrote for the First of May[70] – heh, heh, heh ... ‘Soaring up!’ and ‘soaring down!!’ But if you could look inside him and see what he thinks ... you’d gasp!” And Ivan Nikolaevich burst into sinister laughter.
Riukhin was breathing heavily, turned red, and thought of just one thing, that he had warmed a serpent on his breast, that he had shown concern for a man who turned out to be a vicious enemy. And, above all, there was nothing to be done: there’s no arguing with the mentally ill!
“And why, actually, were you brought here?” the doctor asked, after listening attentively to Homeless’s denunciations.
“Devil take them, the numskulls! They seized me, tied me up with some rags, and dragged me away in a truck!”
“May I ask why you came to the restaurant in just your underwear?”
There’s nothing surprising about that,” Ivan replied. “I went for a swim in the Moscow River, so they filched my clothes and left me this trash!