13. The Coming of the Hero

And so, a stranger wagged his finger at Ivan and whispered: “Shhh!”

Ivan lowered his legs from the bed and peered. Looking cautiously 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 lock of hair hanging down over his forehead.

Having satisfied himself that Ivan was alone, and after listening intently, the mysterious visitor grew bold and entered the room. At this point Ivan saw that the arrival was dressed in hospital things. He was wearing underclothes, slippers on sockless feet, and a brown dressing gown was thrown over his shoulders.

The visitor winked at Ivan, put a bunch of keys away in his pocket, enquired in a whisper: “May I sit down?” and, receiving an affirmative nod, settled in an armchair.

“How on earth did you get in here?” Ivan asked in a whisper, obeying the lean, wagging finger. “The balcony grilles are on locks, aren’t they?”

“The grilles are on locks,” confirmed the guest, “but Praskovya Fyodorovna, the nicest of people, is yet, alas, absent-minded. I pinched a bunch of keys from her a month ago and thus acquired the capacity for getting out onto the shared balcony, which stretches around the entire floor, and thus of sometimes calling on a neighbour.”

“If you can get out onto the balcony, then you can get away. Or is it too high?” Ivan wondered.

“No,” the guest replied firmly, “I can’t get away from here, not because it’s too high, but because I’ve got nowhere to get away to.” And after a pause he added: “And so, we’re stuck in here?”

“We are,” replied Ivan, peering into the stranger’s brown and very restless eyes.

“Yes…” – here the guest suddenly grew anxious – “but I hope you’re not violent? Because I can’t endure noise, you know, and trouble and the use of force and all that sort of thing. I find people’s cries particularly hateful, whether it be a cry of suffering, of rage, or some other kind of cry. Reassure me, say you’re not violent?”

“In a restaurant yesterday I socked a fellow in the snout,” the transfigured poet confessed manfully.

“The reason?” asked the guest sternly.

“To be honest, without reason,” replied Ivan, embarrassed.

“Disgraceful,” the guest censured Ivan, and added: “And besides, what are you doing, expressing yourself like that: socked in the snout? I mean, there’s no knowing what the person actually has, a snout or a face. But it’s quite likely a face, you know, after all. So using fists, you know… No, you give that up, and for good.”

Having told Ivan off in this way, the guest enquired:

“Profession?”

“Poet,” Ivan admitted, for some reason reluctantly.

The visitor was distressed.

“Oh, I’m so unlucky!” he exclaimed, but immediately pulled himself up, apologized and asked: “And what’s your name?”

“Bezdomny.”

“Oh dear, oh dear.” said the guest, frowning.

“What’s the matter then, don’t you like my poems?” asked Ivan curiously.

“Not one little bit.”

“What have you read?”

“I’ve not read any of your poems!” exclaimed the visitor edgily.

“So how can you say?”

“Well, what’s the problem?” replied the guest. “It’s not as though I haven’t read any others. Still. a miracle, perhaps? All right, I’m prepared to take it on trust. Are your poems any good, tell me yourself?”

“They’re monstrous!” Ivan suddenly pronounced boldly and candidly.

“Don’t write any more!” the visitor requested imploringly.

“I promise and swear to it!” Ivan pronounced solemnly.

The oath was sealed with a handshake, and at this point the sounds of soft footsteps and voices carried in from the corridor.

“Shh,” whispered the guest and, slipping out onto the balcony, he closed the grille behind him.

Praskovya Fyodorovna glanced in and asked how Ivan was feeling, and whether he wished to sleep in the dark or with the light on. Ivan asked for the light to be left on, and, after wishing the patient good night, Praskovya Fyodorovna withdrew. And when all had gone quiet, the guest returned once more.

He informed Ivan in a whisper that someone new had been brought to room 119, a fat man with a crimson physiognomy, who was muttering all the time about some sort of foreign currency in the ventilation and swearing that unclean spirits had moved into their building on Sadovaya.

“He’s cursing Pushkin like nothing on earth and shouting all the time: ‘Kurolesov, bis, bis!'" said the guest, twitching uneasily. Calming himself, he sat down and said: “But still, never mind him," and continued his conversation with Ivan: “So why is it you’ve ended up in here?”

“Because of Pontius Pilate,” replied Ivan with a gloomy look at the floor.

“What?!" the guest cried, forgetting caution, then stopped his mouth with his own hand. “An amazing coincidence! Please tell me, I implore you!”

For some reason Ivan felt confidence in the stranger, and, initially halting and shy, but then growing bolder, he began to recount the previous day’s incident at Patriarch’s Ponds. Yes, Ivan Nikolayevich found a grateful listener in the person of the mysterious snatcher of keys! The guest did not dress Ivan up as a madman, manifested the greatest interest in what he was being told, and, as the tale developed, he finally went into raptures. He kept on interrupting Ivan with exclamations:

“Well, well, carry on, carry on, I implore you! Only, for the sake of all that s holy, don’t leave anything out!”

Ivan was indeed missing nothing out, he found it easier to tell it that way himself, and gradually he got to the moment when Pontius Pilate in a white mantle with a blood-red lining emerged onto the balcony.

The guest then put his hands together in prayer and whispered:

“Oh, I got it so right! Oh, I got it all so right!”

The listening man accompanied the description of Berlioz’s terrible death with an enigmatic remark, and malice flared up in his eyes:

“One thing I regret: that it wasn’t the critic Latunsky or the writer Mstislav Lavrovich in place of this Berlioz.” And frenziedly, yet soundlessly he exclaimed: “Carry on!”

The cat paying the conductress amused the guest greatly, and he choked with quiet laughter watching Ivan, excited by the success of his narrative, hopping on his haunches, portraying the cat with the ten-copeck piece beside his whiskers.

“And so,” Ivan concluded, after recounting the occurrence at Griboyedov and growing sad and misty-eyed: “I ended up here.”

The guest put his hand sympathetically on the poor poet’s shoulder and spoke thus:

“Unhappy poet! But, my dear fellow, you yourself are to blame for everything. You shouldn’t have been so casual with him, even a bit insolent. And now you’ve paid for it. And you ought to say thank you for getting away with it all comparatively cheaply too.”

“But who on earth is he in the end?” asked Ivan, shaking his fists in excitement.

The guest peered at Ivan and answered with a question:

“You won’t become disturbed, no? We’re all unreliable people here… We won’t have a doctor being called, injections and all sorts of other trouble?”

“No, no!” exclaimed Ivan. “Tell me, who is he?”

“Very well then,” the guest replied, and said weightily and distinctly: “Yesterday at Patriarch’s Ponds you met with Satan.”

As he had promised, Ivan did not become disturbed, but he was nonetheless very greatly shaken.

“That cannot be! He doesn’t exist!”

“For pity’s sake! You of all people can’t say that. You were evidently one of the first to suffer at his hands. You’re stuck here, as you can see for yourself, in a psychiatric clinic, but you keep on talking about his not existing. That is truly strange.”

Confused, Ivan fell silent.

“As soon as you began describing him,” continued the guest, “I already started to guess who you’d had the pleasure of chatting with yesterday. And truly, I’m amazed at Berlioz. Well, you, of course, are an innocent” – here the guest apologized again – “but he, from all I’ve heard of him, must have at least read something, after all! The very first things this Professor said dispelled any doubts I had. It’s impossible not to recognize him, my friend! But then you’re… you must again forgive me – I’m not mistaken, am I – you’re an ignorant man?”

“Indisputably,” agreed the unrecognizable Ivan.

“Right. I mean, even the face you described. different eyes, the brows! Forgive me, but perhaps you haven’t even heard the opera Faust?’’

For some reason Ivan got most terribly embarrassed, and with a burning face he began mumbling something about some trip to a sanatorium in Yalta.

“Right, right. it’s not surprising! But Berlioz, I repeat, amazes me. He’s not only a well-read man, but a very cunning one too. Although in his defence I ought to say that Woland can, of course, throw dust in the eyes even of someone still more cunning.”

“What?!” cried Ivan in his turn.

“Quiet!”

Ivan swung his palm and slapped it against his forehead and began to croak:

“I see, I see. He had the letter ‘W’ on his visiting card. Dearie, dearie me, there’s a thing!” he was silent for a time in his confusion, peering at the moon that was floating beyond the grille, and then he began: “So therefore he really could have been with Pontius Pilate? He’d already been born then, hadn’t he? And they call me a madman!” added Ivan, pointing at the door in indignation.

A bitter line revealed itself by the guest’s lips.

“Let’s look the truth in the eye,” and the guest turned his face in the direction of the nocturnal heavenly body that was racing through a cloud. “Both you and I are madmen, why deny it! Do you see, he shook you, and you went off your head, because you’re clearly the suitable type for it. But what you say did indisputably happen in reality. And yet it’s so extraordinary that even Stravinsky, a psychiatrist of genius, did not, of course, believe you. Did he look at you?” Ivan nodded. “The man you spoke to was both with Pilate and at breakfast with Kant, and now he’s come to Moscow.”

“But I mean, he’ll get up to the devil knows what here! Mustn’t he be caught somehow?” Inside the new Ivan, the former Ivan did after all raise his head, not entirely confidently, but not yet finally done for.

“You’ve already tried, and that’s enough from you,” responded the guest ironically, “and I don’t advise others to try either. But that he will get up to things, you can rest assured of that. Oh dear, oh dear! I’m so annoyed that it was you who met him and not me! Even if I’m all burnt out and the coals are covered in ash, still I swear I’d give Praskovya Fyodorovna’s bunch of keys in return for that meeting, for I’ve got nothing else to give. I’m a beggar!”

“And what do you want him for?”

The guest was sad and twitchy for a long time, but finally spoke:

“You see, it’s such a strange thing, I’m stuck in here for the very same reason that you are, precisely because of Pontius Pilate.” At this point the guest looked around fearfully and said: “The thing is that a year ago I wrote a novel about Pilate.”

“You’re a writer?” asked the poet with interest.

The guest’s face darkened, and he shook his fist at Ivan, then said:

“I’m the Master.” He became stern and took from his dressing-gown pocket a thoroughly soiled black hat with the letter “M” embroidered on it in yellow silk. He put this hat on and showed himself to Ivan both in profile and full face to prove that he was the Master. “She made it for me with her own hands,” he added mysteriously.

“And what is your name?”

“I no longer have a name,” the strange guest replied in gloomy scorn. “I rejected it, as I did everything else in life generally. bet’ s forget about it.”

“Then at least tell me about the novel,” Ivan requested tactfully.

“As you wish. My life, it should be said, has turned out in a not entirely ordinary way,” began the guest.

… A historian by education, just two years before he had been working in one of Moscow’s museums, and as well as that had been doing translations.

“From what language?” asked Ivan with interest.

“I know five languages besides my own,” the guest replied, “English, French, German, Latin and Greek. Well, and I read a little Italian too.”

“How about that!” Ivan whispered enviously.

The historian had lived a solitary life, having no relatives anywhere and hardly any acquaintances in Moscow. And, just think, one day he had won a hundred thousand roubles.

“Imagine my astonishment,” the guest in the black hat whispered, “when I put my hand in the basket of dirty washing, and lo and behold: it has the same number on it as is in the newspaper! A bond,” he explained, “I was given it at the museum.”

Having won a hundred thousand, Ivan’s enigmatic guest had acted thus: had bought books, given up his room on Myasnitskaya…

“Ooh, what a damned hole” he growled.

And he had rented two rooms from the owner in the basement of a little private house in a garden square in a side street near the Arbat. He had given up his work at the museum and begun composing a novel about Pontius Pilate.

“Ah, that was a golden age!” the narrator whispered, his eyes shining. “A completely self-contained little apartment, and an entrance hall as well, and a sink with water in it,” he emphasized for some reason with especial pride, “and little windows just above the pathway leading from the gate. Opposite, four paces away, by the fence, there was lilac, a lime and a maple. Dear, dear, dear! In winter I’d very rarely see anybody’s black feet at the window or hear the crunch of the snow beneath them. And the fire burned eternally in my little stove! But suddenly the spring came, and through the murky window panes I saw the lilac bushes, at first bare, and later clothing themselves in greenery. And it was then, last spring, that something much more delightful happened than getting a hundred thousand roubles – and that, you must agree, is a huge sum of money!”

“That’s true,” acknowledged Ivan, who was listening attentively.

“I’d opened the little windows and was sitting in the second, absolutely tiny room,” the guest began measuring it out with his arms, “like this. a couch, and opposite… another couch, and between them a little table, and on it a splendid night light, and further towards the window. books, here a small desk, and in the first room. a huge room, fourteen square metres. books, more books and the stove. Oh, what an ambience I had! There was an extraordinary scent of lilac! And exhaustion was making me light-headed, and Pilate was racing to its end.”

“The white mantle, the red lining! I understand!” exclaimed Ivan.

“Exactly so! Pilate was racing to its end, to its end, and I already knew that the last words of the novel would be: ‘The fifth Procurator of Judaea, the horseman Pontius Pilate.’ Well, naturally, I’d go out for walks. A hundred thousand is a huge sum, and I had a splendid suit. Or I’d set off for dinner in some cheap restaurant. There was a wonderful restaurant on the Arbat, I don’t know if it still exists now.”

At this point the guest’s eyes opened wide, and he continued whispering, gazing at the moon:

“She was carrying some disgusting, alarming yellow flowers in her hands. The devil knows what they’re called, but for some reason they’re the first to appear in Moscow. And those flowers stood out very distinctly against her black spring coat. She was carrying yellow flowers! Not a good colour. She turned off Tverskaya into a side street, and at that point she turned around. Well, you know Tverskaya? There were thousands of people walking along Tverskaya, but I guarantee that she saw me alone, and looked not exactly anxiously, but rather somehow painfully. And I was struck not so much by her beauty, as by the extraordinary solitude that no one had seen in her eyes!

"Obeying that yellow sign, I turned into the side street as well and followed in her footsteps. We walked wordlessly down the winding, drab street, I down one side, and she down the other. And imagine, there wasn’t a soul in the street. I was in torment, because it seemed to me it was essential to talk to her, and I was worried that I wouldn’t utter a single word, and she’d go away, and I’d never see her again.

"And just imagine, suddenly it was she who spoke:

"‘Do you like my flowers?’

"I remember distinctly the way her voice sounded, quite low, but with breaks in it, and, however silly, there seemed to be an echo in the side street, and it reverberated off the dirty yellow wall. I quickly crossed over to her side and, going up to her, replied:

"‘No.’

"She looked at me in surprise, and suddenly, and completely unexpectedly, I realized it was precisely this woman I had loved all my life! There’s a thing, eh? You’ll say I’m mad, of course?”

"I’m not saying anything,” exclaimed Ivan, and added: "I beg of you, do carry on!”

And the guest continued:

"Yes, she looked at me in surprise, and then, after looking, asked this:

"‘Do you not like flowers generally?’

"In her voice, as it seemed to me, there was animosity. I walked alongside her, trying to keep in step, and, to my surprise, didn’t feel myself constrained at all.

"‘No, I like flowers, only not that kind,’ I said.

"‘What kind, then?’

"‘I like roses.’

“At that point I regretted what I had said, because she smiled guiltily and threw her flowers into the gutter. Somewhat bewildered, I picked them up nonetheless and handed them to her, but she grinned and pushed the flowers away, and I carried them in my hands.

“We walked like that in silence for some time until she took the flowers from my hands and threw them onto the roadway, then she passed her hand in its black, bell-mouthed glove through my arm, and we went on side by side.”

“Carry on,” said Ivan, “and please don’t leave anything out.”

“Carry on?” queried the guest. “Well, but you can guess for yourself how it carried on.” He suddenly wiped away an unexpected tear with his right sleeve and continued: “Love leapt out in front of us, as a murderer leaps out from under the ground in a side street, and it struck us both at once. Lightning strikes like that, a Finnish knife strikes like that! She, however, subsequently claimed that it wasn’t like that, that we had, of course, loved one another for ever such a long time without knowing, and never seeing one another, and that she had lived with another man. and I too, at that time… with that… what’s her name.”

“Who?” asked Bezdomny.

“With that… um… with that… um…” the guest replied, and started clicking his fingers.

“You were married?”

“Well yes, that’s why I’m clicking. To that. Varenka. Manechka. No, Varenka. a striped dress as well, the museum. Still, I don’t remember.

“And so she said she’d come out with yellow flowers in her hands that day so that I’d finally find her, and that if it hadn’t happened, she’d have poisoned herself, because her life was empty.

“Yes, we were instantly struck by love. I knew it that same day, just an hour later, when, without noticing the city, we found ourselves on the embankment by the Kremlin wall.

“We talked as though we’d parted the day before, as though we’d known one another for many years. We agreed to meet the next day in the same place, on the Moscow River, and we did. The May sun shone for us. And soon, soon, that woman became my secret wife.

“She came to me every day, and I’d begin waiting for her first thing in the morning. The waiting expressed itself in my moving objects around on the table. Within ten minutes I’d sit down by the window and start listening out for the ramshackle old gate to go bang. And how curious: until my meeting with her, very few people came into our yard – or to put it simply, nobody did – but now it seemed to me that the city was focused on it. The gate would go bang, my heart would go bang, and, imagine, on the level of my face, outside the window, without fail somebody’s dirty boots. A grinder. So who in our building needs a grinder? To grind what? What knives?

“She’d come through the gate just once, but before that I’d have felt my heart pounding no fewer than ten times, I’m not lying. And then, when it was her time, and the hand on the clock was showing midday, it never actually stopped its banging until, without any tapping at all, almost completely noiselessly, her shoes with black suede decorative bows, fastened with steel buckles, drew level with the window.

“Sometimes she’d play a trick and, pausing by the second window, she’d tap the toe of her shoe on the pane. That same second I’d be at the window, but the shoe would vanish, the black silk blocking out the light would vanish, and I’d go and open the door to her.

“Nobody knew of our liaison, I can vouch for that, though that’s never ever the way it is. Her husband didn’t know, acquaintances didn’t know. In the little old house, where that basement was mine, people did know, of course: they saw some woman visiting me, but they didn’t know her name.”

“And who is she?” asked Ivan, interested in the love story in the highest degree.

The guest made a gesture signifying that he would never tell that to anyone, and continued his story.

It became known to Ivan that the Master and the unknown woman had come to love one another so deeply that they had become completely inseparable. And Ivan could already clearly picture to himself the two rooms in the basement of the house, in which it was always twilight because of the lilac and the fence. The shabby red furniture, the bureau, on which a clock chimed every half-hour, and the books, books from the painted floor to the smoke-blackened ceiling, and the stove.

Ivan learnt that his guest and his secret wife had come to the conclusion as early as the first days of their liaison that it was fate itself that had brought them together on the corner of Tverskaya and the side street, and that they were made for each other for ever.

Ivan learnt from the guest’s narrative how the lovers used to spend the day. She would arrive and, first and foremost, put on an apron, and in the narrow entrance hall, which housed the sink that the poor sick man was for some reason proud of, she would light the paraffin stove on the wooden table and cook breakfast, and lay it on the oval table in the first room. When the May thunderstorms were under way and the water rolled noisily past the blurry windows into the gateway, threatening to flood the final refuge, the lovers heated up the stove and baked potatoes in it. The steam would billow from the potatoes, the black potato skin stained their fingers. Laughter was heard in the little basement, and after the rain the trees in the garden threw off their broken twigs and their white tassels.

When the thunderstorms ended and the stifling summer arrived, the long-awaited roses they both loved appeared in a vase. The one who called himself the Master worked feverishly on his novel, and the novel absorbed the unknown woman too.

“Truly, there were times I began to be jealous of her attachment to it,” the nocturnal guest who had come from the moonlit balcony whispered to Ivan.

Thrusting her slender fingers with their sharply pointed nails into her hair, she would endlessly read over what had been written, and after that would spend time making that hat. Sometimes she would squat by the lower shelves or stand on a chair to reach the top ones and wipe the hundreds of dusty spines with a cloth. She promised fame, she urged him on, and it was at this point she started calling him the Master. She impatiently awaited the final words that had already been promised about the fifth Procurator of Judaea, repeating individual phrases she liked in a loud, sing-song voice, and said that this novel was her life.

It was finished in August, was given to some obscure typist, who typed it up in five copies. And finally came the hour when it was necessary to abandon the secret refuge and emerge into life.

“And I emerged into life, holding it in my hands, and then my life ended,” the Master whispered, and hung his head, and it was for a long time that the sad black hat with the yellow letter “M” shook. He took his story further, but it became rather incoherent. Only one thing was it possible to understand: that some sort of catastrophe had then befallen Ivan’s guest.

“I found myself in the world of literature for the first time, but now, when everything’s already over and my ruin’s clear to see, I remember it with horror!” the Master whispered solemnly and raised his hand. “Yes, he really shocked me – oh, how he shocked me!”

“Who?” Ivan whispered scarcely audibly, fearful of interrupting the agitated narrator.

“The editor, that’s what I’m saying, the editor. Yes, so he read it. He looked at me as if my cheek had swollen up with an abscess, kind of squinted into the corner and even tittered in embarrassment. He needlessly crumpled the manuscript and grunted. The questions he asked me seemed mad to me. Without saying a thing about the essence of the novel, he asked me who I was and where I’d sprung from – had I been writing long, and why nothing had been heard of me before – and even posed, from my point of view, an utterly idiotic question: who was it that had given me the idea of composing a novel on such a strange subject?

“Finally I got sick of him, and I asked him straight out, would he be publishing the novel or wouldn’t he?

“At this point he began making a fuss, started mumbling something or other, and declared that he couldn’t decide that question himself, that the other members of the editorial board had to familiarize themselves with my work – namely, the critics Latunsky and Ariman and the writer Mstislav Lavrovich. He asked me to come back in two weeks’ time.

“I went back in two weeks’ time, and was seen by some girl whose eyes squinted in towards her nose from her constant lying.”

“That’s Lapshonnikova, the publishers’ secretary,” said Ivan with a grin, knowing well the world that his guest was describing so irately.

“Perhaps,” snapped the latter. “And so I got my novel back from her, already pretty soiled and tattered. Trying not to let her eyes meet mine, Lapshonnikova informed me that the publishers had supplies of material for two years ahead, and for that reason the question of publishing my novel, as she expressed herself, ‘didn’t arise’. What do I remember after that?” muttered the Master, rubbing his temples. “Yes, fallen red petals on the title page, and also my girl’s eyes. Yes, I remember those eyes.”

The story of Ivan’s guest was becoming more and more muddled, more and more full of omissions. He said something about slanting rain and despair in the basement refuge, of how he had gone somewhere else. He cried out in a whisper that he did not blame her in the least, the one who had pressed him to fight on – oh no, he did not blame her!

“I remember, I remember that damned insert in the newspaper,” muttered the guest, drawing a newspaper page in the air with one finger of each hand, and Ivan guessed from the subsequent muddled phrases that some other editor had printed a big extract from the novel of the one who called himself the Master.

Later on, as Ivan heard, something sudden and strange occurred. One day, the hero opened up a newspaper and saw an article in it by the critic Ariman, which was called ‘An Enemy Sortie’, where Ariman warned all and sundry that he, that is, our hero, had made an attempt to sneak into print an apologia for Jesus Christ.

“Ah, I remember, I remember!” exclaimed Ivan. “But I’ve forgotten what your name is!”

“I repeat, let’s leave my name aside, it no longer exists,” replied the guest. “And that s not the point. A day later in another newspaper another article came to light, signed by Mstislav Lavrovich, where its author proposed striking, and striking hard, against Pilatism and the icon-dauber who had taken it into his head to sneak it (that damned word again!) into print.

“Dumbfounded by this unheard-of word, ‘Pilatism’, I opened up a third newspaper. Here there were two articles: one by Latunsky, and the other signed with the initials ‘M. Z.’. I can assure you that the works of Ariman and Lavrovich could have been considered a joke compared with what Latunsky had written. It’s enough to tell you that Latunsky’s article was called ‘A Militant Old Believer’. I got so carried away with reading the articles about me that I didn’t notice her appearing in front of me (I’d forgotten to close the door) with a wet umbrella in her hands and with newspapers that were wet as well. Her eyes were emitting fire, her hands were trembling and cold. First of all she rushed to kiss me; then, in a hoarse voice and banging her hand on the table, she said she was going to poison Latunsky.”

Ivan gave an embarrassed sort of grunt, but said nothing.

“The joyless days of autumn arrived,” the guest continued, “the monstrous failure with the novel seemed to have taken a part of my soul out of me. In essence, there was nothing else for me to do, and I lived from one meeting with her to the next. And it was at this time that something happened to me. The devil knows what, but Stravinsky probably worked it out long ago. Namely, I was overcome with melancholy and various presentiments appeared. The articles, note, didn’t cease. I laughed at the first of them. But the more of them appeared, the more my attitude to them changed. The second stage was the stage of surprise. Something uncommonly false and uncertain could be sensed in literally every line of those articles, despite their menacing and certain tone. I constantly had the impression, and I couldn’t free myself of it, that the authors of those articles weren’t saying what they wanted to say, and that was precisely what aroused their fury. And then, imagine, a third stage began – fear. No, not fear of those articles, you should understand, but fear regarding other things that had nothing whatsoever to do with them or with the novel. So, for example, I began to be afraid of the dark. In short, the stage of mental illness began. It seemed to me, particularly as I was falling asleep, that the tentacles of some highly flexible, cold octopus were stealing directly, straight towards my heart. And I had to sleep with the light on.

“My beloved changed greatly (of course, I didn’t tell her about the octopus, but she could see there was something bad happening to me): she grew thin and pale, stopped laughing and kept on asking me to forgive her for advising me to print the extract. She said I should drop everything and go away to the south, to the Black Sea, spending all the money that remained of the hundred thousand on the trip.

“She was very insistent, and so as not to quarrel (something told me I wouldn’t have to go away to the Black Sea), I promised her I’d do it in a few days’ time. But she said she’d get me the ticket herself. Then I took out all my money – around ten thousand roubles, that is – and handed it over to her.

“‘Why so much?’ she asked in surprise.

“I said something about being afraid of thieves, and asked her to take care of the money until my departure. She took it, put it away in her handbag, started kissing me and saying it would be easier for her to die than leave me alone in such a state, but that she was expected, she was submitting to necessity, she would come the next day. She begged me not to be afraid of anything.

“It was at dusk, in mid-October. And she left. I lay down on the couch and fell asleep without lighting the lamp. I was woken up by the sensation that the octopus was there. Fumbling in the dark, I just about managed to light the lamp. My pocket watch showed two o’clock in the morning. I’d lain down falling ill, and woken up sick. It suddenly seemed to me that the autumn darkness would knock out the window panes, pour into the room, and I’d choke in it, as though in ink. I got up like a man no longer in control of himself. I cried out, and the idea came to me of running to somebody, if only to my landlord upstairs. I struggled with myself like a madman. I had the strength to get as far as the stove and stir up the firewood inside it. When it began to crackle and the door began rattling, I seemed to feel a little better. I rushed into the hall and lit the light there, found a bottle of white wine, uncorked it and started drinking the wine out of the bottle. This dulled the fear somewhat, at least to the extent that I didn’t run to the landlord: I returned to the stove. I opened the door so that the heat began scorching my face and hands, and whispered:

“‘Sense that I’ve had a calamity… Come, come, come!..’

“But no one came. The fire was roaring in the stove, the rain was lashing at the windows. Then came the final thing. I took out of the desk drawer the heavy copies of the novel and the draft notebooks and started to burn them. It’s terribly hard to do, because paper covered in writing burns unwillingly. Breaking my nails, I ripped the notebooks apart, put them in upright between the logs and ruffled the leaves with the poker. Ash would get the better of me at times and quench the flame, but I struggled with it, and while resisting stubbornly, the novel was nonetheless perishing. Familiar words flashed before me; a yellow colour rose inexorably up the pages from bottom to top, but even there the words stood out all the same. They disappeared only when the paper was blackening, and I would finish them off furiously with the poker.

“At this time someone began quietly scratching at the window. My heart leapt, and, loading the last notebook into the fire, I rushed to open up. Brick steps led from the basement to the door to the yard. Stumbling, I ran up to it and quietly asked:

“‘Who’s there?’

“And a voice, her voice, answered me:

“‘It’s me.’

“Without knowing how, I managed the chain and the key. No sooner had she stepped inside than she fell against me, all wet, with wet cheeks and bedraggled hair, shivering. The only word I could utter was:

“'You… you?’ and my voice broke, and we ran down the steps. She freed herself of her overcoat in the hall, and we quickly went into the first room. She gave a quiet cry, and with her bare hands threw out of the stove onto the floor the last of what remained there, a bundle that had started burning from the bottom up. Smoke immediately filled the room. I stamped the fire out with my feet, while she fell onto the couch and burst into uncontained and convulsive sobbing.

“When she’d quietened down, I said:

“'I’d come to hate that novel, and I’m afraid. I’m ill. I’m frightened.’

“She got up and spoke:

“'God, you’re so ill. Why is it, why? But I’ll save you, I’ll save you. Whatever is it?’

“I could see her eyes, puffed up from the smoke and from crying, could feel her cold hands stroking my forehead.

“'I’ll cure you, I will,’ she muttered, boring into my shoulders, 'you’ll rewrite it. Why oh why didn’t I keep one copy myself!’

“'She bared her teeth in rage and said something else indistinct. Then, with lips compressed, she set about collecting and smoothing out the scorched sheets. It was some chapter from the middle of the novel, I don’t remember which. She put the sheets carefully together, wrapped them in paper and tied them with a ribbon. Her every action showed she was full of resolution and had regained her self-control. She demanded some wine and, after having a drink, began speaking more calmly.

“‘This is how you have to pay for lying,’ she said, ‘and I don’t want to lie any more. I’d even stay here with you now, but I don’t want to do it this way. I don’t want it to remain in his memory for ever that I ran away from him in the night. He never did me any harm… He was called out suddenly – there’s a fire at his factory. But he’ll soon be back. I’ll have things out with him tomorrow morning, I’ll say I love someone else, and I’ll return to you for ever. Answer me, perhaps you don’t want that?’

“‘My poor, poor girl,’ I said to her, ‘I won’t allow you to do it. Things won’t be going well for me, and I don’t want you to perish along with me.’

“‘That reason alone?’ she asked, and brought her eyes up close to mine.

“‘That alone.’

“She became terribly animated, leant up against me, winding her arms around my neck, and said:

“‘I’m going to perish along with you. In the morning I’ll be here with you.’

“And so the last thing I remember in my life is a strip of light from my hallway, and in that strip of light an unwound strand of hair, her beret and her eyes full of resolution. I remember too a black silhouette on the outer doorstep and a white bundle.

“‘I’d see you on your way, but I no longer have the strength to come back alone, I’m afraid.’

“‘Don’t be afraid. Be patient for a few hours. Tomorrow morning I’ll be here with you.’

“And those were her last words in my life. Shhh!” the sick man suddenly cut himself short and raised a finger. “It’s a restless moonlit night tonight.”

He hid on the balcony. Ivan heard wheels driving down the corridor, and somebody uttered a weak sob or cry.

When everything had gone quiet, the guest returned and announced that room 120 had gained a resident too. Someone had been brought in, and he kept on asking for his head to be returned. Both men paused in silent alarm, but, calming themselves, they returned to the interrupted story. The guest was about to open his mouth, but the night was indeed a restless one. Voices were still audible in the corridor, and the guest began speaking into Ivan’s ear so quietly that what he said became known to the poet alone, with the exception of the first phrase:

“A quarter of an hour after she left me, there was a knock on my window…”

The sick man was evidently greatly agitated by what he whispered into Ivan’s ear. Spasms kept on passing over his face. Fear and fury swam and raged in his eyes. The narrator pointed his hand somewhere in the direction of the moon, which was already long gone from the balcony. Only when various sounds from without stopped carrying in to them did the guest move away from Ivan and begin speaking a little louder:

“Yes, and so, in mid-January, at night, in the same overcoat, but with the buttons torn off, I was huddled against the coldin my little yard. Behind me were snowdrifts which hid the lilac bushes, while in front of me, low down, were my little windows, feebly lit and with the curtains closed. I fell down by the first of them and listened closely – a gramophone was playing in my rooms. That’s all I could hear, but I couldn’t see anything. I stood there for a little, then went out of the gate into the lane. There was a blizzard blowing in it. A dog that got caught up under my feet gave me a fright, and I ran away from it, over to the other side. The cold and the fear that had become my constant companion were working me into a frenzy. There was nowhere for me to go, and it would have been simplest of all, of course, to throw myself under a tram in the street into which my lane emerged. From afar I could see those ice-covered crates, filled with light, and hear their loathsome grating on the frost. But, my dear neighbour, the whole thing was that fear had a hold on every cell of my body. And I was afraid of the tram in exactly the same way as I was of the dog. No, there’s no illness in this building worse than mine, I can assure you.”

“But you could have let her know,” said Ivan, sympathizing with the poor sick man, “and besides, she has your money, doesn’t she? She has kept it, of course, hasn’t she?”

“Be in no doubt about that: of course she’s kept it. But you evidently don’t understand me. Or rather, I’ve lost the capacity I once had for describing something. I don’t feel regret for it, though, as it’ll be of no further use to me. In front of her” – the guest looked reverentially into the darkness of the night – “would have been a letter from the madhouse. How can you send letters from such an address? A mental patient? You’re joking, my friend! Make her unhappy? No, I’m not capable of that.”

Ivan could not object to this, but the taciturn Ivan felt sympathy for his guest, felt pity for him. And, in the torment of his memories, the latter nodded his head in its black hat and spoke thus:

“The poor woman. Still, I’m hopeful she’s forgotten me.”

“But you may recover…” said Ivan timidly.

“I’m incurable,” replied the guest calmly. “When Stravinsky says he’ll return me to life, I don’t believe him. He’s humane, and simply wants to comfort me. Still, I don’t deny I’m much better now. Yes, now, where was it I stopped? The frost, those flying trams. I knew this clinic had already opened, and I set off for it on foot across the entire city. Madness! Out of town I’d probably have frozen to death, but I was saved by chance. Something had broken down in a truck, and I approached the driver; this was about four kilometres outside the city gates, and, to my surprise, he took pity on me. The vehicle was on its way here. And he drove me. I escaped with frostbitten toes on my left foot. But that was cured. And so I’ve been here more than three months. And do you know, I find that it’s really not at all bad here. You don’t have to make great plans for yourself, dear neighbour, truly! Me, for example, I wanted to travel the entire globe. Oh well, it turns out that’s not meant to be. I see only an insignificant part of that globe. I don’t think it’s the very best there is upon it, but, I repeat, it’s not so very bad. Now summer’s on its way to us, and ivy will entwine the balcony, so Praskovya Fyodorovna promises. The keys have broadened my possibilities. There’ll be the moon at night. Ah, it’s gone! It’s getting cooler. The night’s slipping past midnight. Time for me to go.”

“Tell me what happened to Yeshua and Pilate next,” asked Ivan, “I beg you, I want to know.”

“Oh no, no!” replied the guest, twitching painfully, “I can’t remember my novel without a shudder. And your acquaintance from Patriarch’s would have done it better than me. Thank you for the chat. Goodbye.”

And before Ivan could collect himself, the grille closed with a quiet clang, and the guest disappeared.