The Master and Margarita 13 страница

"So, one day during that accursed time the gate to our garden opened. It was, as I recall, a pleasant fall day. She was out. And a man came through the gate who had some sort of business to discuss with my landlord. After it was over, he came down into the garden and quickly introduced himself to me. He said he was a journalist. I took such a liking to him that, imagine, I sometimes think of him even now and miss him. So we got to be friends, and he started to visit me. I found out he was a bachelor and lived next door, in an apartment very like mine, but that he felt cramped there, and so on. He never invited me over. My wife took an extreme dislike to him. But I stood up for him. She told me, 'Do as you like, but that man strikes me as repulsive.'

"That made me laugh. Yes, but strictly speaking, what was it about him that made him so appealing to me? The fact is that a man who has no surprises inside, up his sleeve, is uninteresting. But Aloisy (oh, I for-

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got to say that my new acquaintance was named Aloisy Mogarych) did have a surprise up his sleeve. Namely, that up until then I had never met, nor did I think I ever would meet, someone with a mind like his. If I didn't understand the meaning of some remark in the paper, Aloisy explained it to me in literally a minute. And it was obvious that such explanations came easily to him. It was the same with things and issues in everyday life. But that was the least of iL Aloisy won my heart because of his passion for literature. He didn't rest until he had persuaded me to let him read my novel from cover to cover. Moreover, his response was very flattering, but he said everything the editor had said to me about the novel, with striking precision, just as if he'd been there himself. He hit the mark ten times out of ten. He even explained to me, and I suspect faultlessly, why my novel couldn't be published. He didn't mince words either: such and such a chapter will not do...

"The articles, take note, did not cease. The first ones made me laugh, but the more of them there were, the more my attitude to them changed. The next stage was amazement. There was something uncommonly fake and uncertain in every line of these articles, despite their threatening and self-assured tone. I kept thinking—and I couldn't rid myself of the thought—that the authors of these articles weren't saying what they wanted to say, and that that was why they were so furious. And then, imagine, a third stage set in: fear. No, not fear of the articles, mind you, but fear of things totally unrelated to either the articles or the novel. For example, I started being afraid of the dark. In short, the stage of mental illness had set in. It seemed to me, especially when I was going to sleep, that some octopus with supple and cold tentacles was stealing up to me, coming straight for my heart. So I had to sleep with the light on.

"My beloved had changed greatly (naturally, I didn't say a word to her about the octopus, but she could see that something was wrong with me): she had become thin and pale, had stopped laughing, and was always asking me to forgive her for advising me to publish the excerpt from the novel. She said that I should give everything up and spend what remained of the 100,000 on a trip south to the Black Sea.

"She was very insistent, and so as to avoid a quarrel with her (something told me that I wouldn't make it to the Black Sea), I promised to do it right away. But she said she would get me the ticket herself. Then I took out all my money, that is, around 10,000 rubles, and gave it to her.

"'Why so much?' she asked me in amazement.

"I told her something about my being afraid of thieves and wanting her to take care of the money for me until my departure. She took it, put it in her bag, and began kissing me, saying that she would rather die than leave me alone in the condition I was in, but that she was expected at home, was bowing to necessity, and would be back the next day. She begged me not to be afraid of anything.

"That was at dusk, in mid-October. And she left. I lay down on the

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couch and fell asleep without turning on the light. I woke up with the feeling that the octopus was nearby. Fumbling around in the dark, I barely managed to put on the light. My pocket watch said it was 2 a.m. When I went to bed, I felt as if I was getting sick, and when I woke up, I was sick. It suddenly seemed to me as if the autumn darkness would break through the windowpanes and pour into the room, and that I would drown in it as in ink. When I got out of bed, I was no longer in control of myself. I let out a scream and thought of running to someone for help, if only to my landlord upstairs. I struggled with myself the way a madman does. I had just enough strength to crawl over to the stove and light the wood. When the logs began to crackle, and the stove door began to knock, I seemed to feel a little better... I ran out into the hallway and turned on the light. Then I found a bottle of white wine, uncorked it and started drinking it straight out of the bottle. That helped my fear abate somewhat, enough, at least, to stop me from running off to my landlord and to return to the stove instead. I opened the stovedoor so that the heat began to warm my face and hands, and I whispered, 'Guess that something awful has happened to me... Come to me, come, cornel 1'

"But nobody came. The fire roared in the stove, and the rain beat against the windows. Then came the final blow. I took the heavy typescripts and notebook drafts of the novel out of the desk drawer and started to burn them. It's a fiendishly difficult thing to do because paper that has been written on doesn't burn easily. I broke my nails tearing the notebooks apart, then I stood the pages upright between the logs and jabbed at them with the poker. At times the ashes would get the best of me and choke out the fire, but I fought back, and the novel, despite stubborn resistance, was perishing. Familiar words flashed before me, and a yellowness crept relentlessly up the pages, but you could still make out the words. They disappeared only when the paper turned black and I beat them viciously with the poker.

"It was then that someone began scratching softly at the window. My heart gave a leap, I hurled the last notebook into the flames and rushed to open the door. Brick steps led up from the basement to the door into the yard. I stumbled up to the door and asked quietly, 'Who's there?'

"And a voice, her voice, answered me, 'It's me...'

"I don't remember how I managed the key and chain. The minute she stepped inside, she fell against me, completely soaked, shivering, with wet cheeks and tousled hair. The only thing I could say was, 'Is it you?' and then my voice broke, and we ran downstairs. She left her coat in the hall, and we went quickly into the first room. She let out a soft cry, and with her bare hands threw what was left in the stove onto the floor, a packet of sheets burning on the bottom. Smoke immediately filled the room. I stamped out the flames and she threw herself on the couch and started to cry convulsively and uncontrollably.

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"When she calmed down, I said, 'I came to hate that novel, and I'm afraid. I'm sick. I'm terrified.'

"She got up and started to speak. 'My God, you are sick. Why did you do it, why? But I'll save you. I'll save you. What's this all about?'

"I saw her eyes, swollen from smoke and tears, and I felt her cold hands stroking my forehead.

"'I'll cure you, I'll cure you,' she murmured, clutching me by the shoulders. 'You'll reconstruct it. Why, oh why didn't I keep a copy myself!'

"She bared her teeth in fury and said something else that I couldn't make out. Then, with her lips pursed, she started gathering and sorting the burnt pages. It was a chapter from the middle of the novel, I don't remember which. She stacked the pages neatly, wrapped them in paper and tied them with a ribbon. All her movements showed decisiveness and self-control. She asked for some wine and after drinking it, began to speak more calmly.

"'This is what we get for lying,' she said, 'and I don't want to lie anymore. I'd stay with you right now, but that's not the way I want to do iL I don't want to leave him with the memory of my running off at night. He never did me any harm... He was called out suddenly, there was a fire at his factory. But he'll be back soon. I'll tell him everything in the morning, I'll tell him that I love someone else, and then I'll come back to you forever. Tell me, though, perhaps that isn't what you want?'

"'My poor thing, my poor dear,' I said to her. 'I won't let you do that. Things will go badly for me, and I don't want you to perish with me.'

"'Is that the only reason?' she asked, drawing her eyes close to mine.

"The only one.'

"She became terribly animated, pressed herself against me, wrapped her arms around my neck and said, 'I will perish with you. And I'll be back with you in the morning.'

"The last thing that I remember in my life is the strip of light coming from the entryway, and in that light a loosened curl, her beret, and her eyes, full of determination. I also remember a black silhouette in the outer doorway and a white package.

"i'd see you home, but I don't have the strength to come back here alone, I'm afraid.'

"'Don't be afraid. Just be patient for a few hours. I'll be back with you in the morning.'

"Those were her last words in my life... Shh!" the sick man interrupted himself suddenly and raised his finger. "This moonlit night is restless."

He disappeared out onto the balcony. Ivan heard the sound of wheels in the corridor and a faint cry or sob.

When everything had quieted down, the guest came back and told Ivan that Room 120 had a new occupant. Someone had been brought in who kept asking to have his head returned. An anxious silence

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passed between the interlocutors, but once they calmed down, they returned to the story that had been interrupted. The guest was about to open his mouth, but the night was indeed a restless one. Voices could still be heard in the corridor, and the guest whispered in Ivan's ear so quietly that what he was saying was heard only by the poet, with the exception of the opening sentence, "Fifteen minutes after she left me, there was a knock at the window..."

What the sick man was whispering into Ivan's ear obviously made the sick man very upset. Convulsive spasms kept contorting his face. Fear and fury swam and raged in his eyes. The storyteller pointed toward the moon which had long since disappeared from the balcony. Only after all the outside noises ceased did the guest move away from Ivan and start speaking a little more loudly.

"Yes, so there I was in my yard in the middle of January, at night, wearing the same coat, but with the buttons torn off, shivering from the cold. Behind me were snow drifts, covering the lilac bushes, and in front of me and down below—my feebly lit, blind-covered windows. I leaned over and listened at the first window: a phonograph was playing inside my apartment. That was all I could hear, and I couldn't see anything. After standing there for awhile, I went out through the gate into the lane. The snow was falling heavily. A dog dashed under my feet and frightened me, and I ran across the street to get away from it. The cold and the fear, which had become my constant companion, had brought me to the breaking point. I had nowhere to go, and the simplest thing for me to do, of course, would have been to throw myself under one of the streetcars that passed along the main street at the end of my lane. I could see those light-filled, iced-over boxes in the distance and could hear the ghastly grating sound that they made on the frost and ice. But, my dear neighbor, the whole point was that fear had invaded every cell in my body. And I was as afraid of the streetcar as I had been of the dog. Yes, my illness is the worst in the building, I assure you."

"But you could have let her know," said Ivan, sympathizing with the poor patient. "Besides, didn't she have your money? Naturally, she kept it, didn't she?"

"Don't worry, of course she kept it. But you don't seem to understand me. Either that, or I've lost the facility I once had for describing things. However, I don't miss it very much, since I have no further use for it. If I had let her know," the guest stared reverently into the darkness of the night, "the letter she received would have come from an insane asylum. How can you send letters with an address like that? A mental patient? Surely you're joking, my friend! Make her unhappy? No, I'm not capable ofthat."

Ivan could offer no objection to that, but he sympathized with his guest in silence and felt compassion for him. And die latter, feeling the pain of his memories, nodded his black-capped head and said, "Poor

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woman... But I'm hoping that she's forgotten me..."

"But you may get well..." said Ivan timidly.

"I'm incurable," the guest replied calmly. "When Stravinsky says that he'll bring me back to life, I don't believe him. He's humane and simply wants to comfort me. I don't deny, by the way, that I'm much better now. But where was I? Oh, yes, the ice and cold, the speeding streetcars. I knew that this clinic had already opened, and I set out for it on foot across the whole city. What madness! I would certainly have frozen to death when I got outside the city if a chance occurrence hadn't saved me. A truck had broken down about four kilometers outside the city, and I went over to speak to the driver. To my surprise, he took pity on me. He was on his way here, and he gave me a lift. The worst thing that happened to me was that I got frostbite on the toes of my left foot. But they fixed that. And this is my fourth month here. And, you know, I don't find it so bad here, not bad at all. One really shouldn't make big plans for oneself, dear neighbor. Take me, for example, I wanted to travel around the globe. Well, it turned out that wasn't meant to be. I can see only an insignificant little piece of it I don't think it's the best piece of it either, but, as I said, it's not so bad. Summer will be here soon, and the balcony will be covered with ivy, just as Praskovya Fyodorovna promises. Having her keys has given me new possibilities. There'll be a moon at night. Ah, it's gone! The air is fresher. It's getting on past midnight. It's time for me to go."

"Tell me," asked Ivan, "what happened next to Yeshua and Pilate. Please, I want to know."

"Oh, no, no," the guest answered, twitching painfully, "I can't think of my novel without a shudder. Your friend from Patriarch's Ponds could have done it better than I. Thanks for the conversation. Good-bye."

And before Ivan could realize what was happening, the window grille shut softly, and the guest was gone.

XIV

Praise Be to the Rooster

H

IS nerves couldn't take it, as they say, and Rimsky ran off to his office without waiting for the police to finish their report of what had happened. He sat at his desk and stared with swollen eyes at the magic ten-ruble bills that lay before him. The financial director was at his wit's end. A steady roar rose from the street as the public streamed out of the theater. The financial director's overly sensitive ears suddenly heard the sharp trill of a police whistle, which is hardly ever a good omen. When that sound was repeated and then accompanied by another more imperious and prolonged one, only then to be joined by loud cackles of laughter and hoots, the ñnantíal director knew immediately that something scandalous and nasty had happened outside, and that, however much he wanted to brush it aside, it was intimately connected with the disgusting show put on by the black magician and his assistants. The quickwitted financial director was not mistaken.

No sooner had he looked out the window onto Sadovaya Street, than his face became distorted, and he said in a hiss rather than a whisper, "I knew it!"

In the bright light of the high-intensity streetlamps, he saw on the sidewalk below a woman wearing nothing but a chemise and violet drawers. True, there was a hat on her head and an umbrella in her hands.

Milling around the woman, who was completely distraught and alternately crouching down or trying to run away, was an excited crowd, cackling in a way that sent shivers down the director's spine. Hovering next to the woman was a man struggling to get out of his summer coat, who was so upset that he was unable to extricate his arm from the sleeve.

Cries and screams of laughter also came from another direction— from the motor entrance on the left, and when he turned to look, Grigory Danilovich saw another woman, this time in pink underwear. She jumped from the pavement to the sidewalk, in an effort to hide herself in the entranceway, but her way was barred by people streaming out of the theater. Victimized by her own frivolity and her mania for

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clothes, and deceived by Fagot and his vile company, the poor creature dreamed of only one thing: falling through the earth. A policeman was headed in her direction, drilling the air with his whistle, and behind the policeman came a pack of cheery young men wearing caps. They were the ones cackling and hooting.

A thin mustachioed cabbie drove up to the first naked woman and reined in his bony, broken-down nag with a flourish. The cabbie's whiskered face was plastered with a grin.

Rimsky hit his head with his fist, spat, and moved away from the window.

He sat at the desk for awhile, listening to the noise from the street. The whisüing reached full pitch at various points and then started to subside. To Rimsky's surprise, the scandal came to an unexpectedly speedy conclusion.

The time to act was approaching, he would have to drink the bitter cup of responsibility. The telephones had been repaired during the third part of the program, and he had to make calls, report what had happened, ask for help, lie himself out of any responsibility, blame everything on Iikhodeyev, get himself off the hook, and so forth. Confound you, devil!

Twice the flustered director put his hand on the receiver and twice he picked it up. And suddenly the deadly silence of the office was shattered by the sound of the telephone itself, blasting in the financial director's face. He shuddered and grew cold. "Boy, my nerves are really shot," he thought and picked up the receiver, whereupon he recoiled and turned white as a sheet. A soft but at the same time insinuating and depraved female voice whispered into the phone, "Don't make any calk, Rimsky, or you'll be sorry..."

The phone then went dead. Feeling his flesh crawl, the financial director put down the receiver and glanced for some reason at the window behind his back. Through the sparse and barely green branches of the maple tree outside the window he glimpsed the moon slipping behind a translucent cloud. Inexplicably transfixed by the branches, Rimsky stared at them, and the more he did, the more strongly he felt the grip of fear.

Making an effort to regain his composure, the financial director finally turned away from the moon-filled window and got up. To call anyone was now out of the question, and the financial director had only one thought on his mind—to get away from the theater as fast as possible.

He listened: the building was silent. Rimsky realized that he had been all alone on the second floor for some time, and the thought filled him with an uncontrollable childlike dread. When he thought of having to walk down the empty corridors and go down the staircase alone, he shuddered. He feverishly grabbed the hypnotist's ten-ruble bills off the desk, stuffed them into his briefcase and coughed, in order to build up his courage. The cough came out sounding hoarse and feeble.

And here it seemed to him that a smell of damp decay had suddenly seeped under the office door. A shudder ran down the financial dircc-

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tor's spine. And a clock chimed suddenly and began to strike midnight. Even that made the financial director shudder. But his heart really sank when he heard a key turning softly in the lock. The financial director clutched his briefcase with cold damp hands and felt that he would not be able to contain himself and would burst out screaming if the scraping in the keyhole lasted one more minute.

Finally the door yielded to someone's push, opened, and who stepped quietly into the office but Varenukha. Rimsky's legs buckled beneath him and he plopped down into his chair. Sucking air into his lungs, he smiled a kind of ingratiating smile and said softly, "God, what a fright you gave me..."

Indeed, that sudden appearance could have frightened anyone, and yet, at the same time, it came as a great joy: at least one small thread in this tangled business had unraveled.

"Well, get it out! Tell me! Well!" rasped Rimsky, pulling at the thread. "What's the meaning of all this?!"

"Please, forgive me," the man who had come in replied in a hollow voice, closing the door. "I thought you had already left."

Without taking off his cap Varenukha went over to the armchair and sat down opposite Rimsky at the desk.

It must be said there was something slightly odd about Varenukha's reply which was immediately picked up by the financial director, who was as sensitive to vibrations as any seismograph in the world. What was going on? Why had Varenukha come into the financial director's office if he had assumed he wasn't there? After all, he had his own office. That was for starters. And second, no matter which entrance Varenukha had used, he would have bumped into one of the night watchmen, all of whom had been told that Grigory Danilovich would be in his office for some time.

But the financial director did not dwell on this oddity for very long. He didn't feel up to it.

"Why didn't you call? What was all that nonsense about Yalta?"

"Well, it's just as I said," the manager answered, and he made a smacking sound with his lips as if he had a toothache. "They found him in a tavern in Pushkino."

"What do you mean Pushkino?! Isn't that right near Moscow? And didn't the telegrams come from Yalta?!"

"Yalta like hell! He got the Pushkino telegrapher drunk, they started fooling around and that meant, among other things, sending telegrams marked 'Yalta.'"

"I see, I see... Well, OK, OK..." said Rimsky, crooning rather than speaking. A yellowish light shone in his eyes. A festive vision of Styopa having to leave work in disgrace formed in his head. He'd be free! Free at least of that disaster known as Likhodeyev! And maybe Stepan Bogdanovich was in for more than just getting fired... "Give me the details," said Rimsky, tapping the paperweight against the desk.

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And Varenukha began to recount the details. As soon as he had arrived at the place where the financial director had sent him, he had been received right away and listened to with great attention. No one, of course, had ever seriously believed that Styopa was in Yalta. Everyone now agreed with Varenukha that Likhodeyev had obviously been at the Yalta restaurant in Pushkino.

"Where is he now?" asked the agitated financial director, interrupting the manager's account.

"Well, where could he be?" replied the manager with a crooked smile. "Naturally, in a drunk tank!"

"Of course, of coursel Where else!"

And Varenukha continued his story. And the more he talked, the more vivid an impression the financial director formed of Likhodeyev's long chain of outrageous and disgraceful misdeeds. And each successive link in the chain was worse than the last. Take, for example, the drunken dance with the telegraph clerk on the lawn outside the Pushkino telegraph office to the strains of some idler's accordion! The chase after some women who were screeching in terror! The attempt to start a fight with the bartender at the Yalta! Throwing green onions all over the floor of that same Yalta. Smashing eight bottles of dry white "Ai-Danil" wine. Breaking the meter of a cab when the driver refused to take him as a passenger. Threatening to arrest the citizens who were trying to end his spree... In short, holy terror!

Styopa was well known in Moscow theater circles, and everyone knew that he was hardly—a gift to humanity. But what the manager was saying about him now was too much, even for Styopa. Yes, too much. In fact, much too much...

Rimsky's piercing eyes bore into the manager's face from across the desk, and the more the manager talked, the gloomier Rimsky looked. The manager embellished his story with various vile details, and the more vivid and piquant they became, the less Rimsky believed him. When Varenukha reported that Styopa had gone so far as to resist those who had come to take him back to Moscow, the financial director knew for sure that everything the manager was saying—the manager who had returned at midnight—everything was a lie! A lie from beginning to end.

Varenukha had not gone to Pushkino, nor had Styopa himself been in Pushkino. There was no drunken telegraph clerk, no broken glass in the bar, Styopa had not been tied up... none of it had happened.

Once the financial director became convinced that the manager was lying to him, fear crept over his body, starting with his feet, and for the second time it seemed to the financial director that a putrid malarial dampness had spread over the floor. Without ever taking his eyes off the manager—who was sitting in the armchair in an oddly contorted way, trying always to stay within the bluish shadow cast by the desk lamp and rather peculiarly shielding his eyes from the lamp light with a

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newspaper—the financial director thought of only one thing: what did it all mean? Why would the manager, who had returned too late to see him, be lying to him so blatantly in an empty and quiet building? And a sense of danger, unidentified but imminent, began to take hold of Rimsky's heart. While pretending not to notice the manager's maneuvers and his tricks with the newspaper, the financial director examined his face, hardly listening any more to the tale Varenukha was spinning. There was something that seemed even more inexplicable than the slanderous story of Styopa's escapades in Pushkino, fabricated for no discernible reason whatsoever, and that something was the change in the manager's appearance and manners.

Despite the manager's efforts to keep his face in shadow by pulling the visor of his cap down over his eyes, and despite his maneuvers with the newspaper as well, the financia! director did manage to observe a huge bruise that began at his nose and extended across his right cheek. In addition, the manager's customarily ruddy complexion had taken on an unhealthy chalky pallor, and, despite the sultriness of the night, his neck was wrapped in an old striped muffler. If one added to this the manager's new habit, evidently acquired during his absence, of making disgusting sucking and smacking sounds with his lips, the sharp change in his voice, which had become rough and hollow, and the furtive and cowardly look in his eyes, then one could say without hesitation that Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable.

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