"Ivan!” whispered Berlioz, embarrassed.
But not only did the proposal to send Kant to Solovki not shock the foreigner, it even sent him into raptures[42].
"Precisely, precisely,” he cried, and a twinkle appeared in his green left eye, which was turned towards Berlioz, "that’s the very place for him! I said to him then over breakfast, you know: ‘As you please, Professor, but you’ve come up with something incoherent! It may indeed be clever, but it’s dreadfully unintelligible. They’re going to make fun of[43] you.’”
Berlioz opened his eyes wide. "Over breakfast… to Kant?… What nonsense is this he’s talking?” he thought.
"But,” the foreigner continued, with no embarrassment at Berlioz’s astonishment and turning to the poet, "sending him to Solovki is impossible for the reason that he’s already been in parts considerably more distant than Solovki for over a hundred years, and there’s no possible way of extracting him from there, I can assure you!”
“That’s a pity!” responded the quarrelsome poet.
“I think it’s a pity too,” confirmed the stranger, with a twinkle in his eye[44], and continued: “But this is the question that’s troubling me: if there’s no God, then who, one wonders, is directing human life and all order on earth in general?”
“Man himself is directing it,” Bezdomny hastened to reply angrily to this, to be honest, not very clear question.
“I’m sorry,” responded the stranger mildly. “In order to be directing things, it is necessary, for all that, to have a definite plan for a certain, at least reasonably respectable, period of time. Permit me to ask you then, how can man be directing things, if he not only lacks the capacity to draw up any sort of plan for even a laughably short period of time – well, let’s say, for a thousand years or so – but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And indeed,” here the stranger turned to Berlioz, “imagine that you, for example, start directing things, managing both other people and yourself – generally, so to speak, getting a taste for it – and suddenly you have… heh… heh… a lung sarcoma." The foreigner smiled sweetly, as if the idea of a lung sarcoma gave him pleasure – “yes, a sarcoma,” narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word, “and there’s an end to your directing! No one’s fate, apart from your own, interests you any more. Your family begin lying to you. Sensing something wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to charlatans, and sometimes to fortune-tellers too. Like the first and the second, so the third too is completely pointless: you realize it yourself. And it all ends tragically: the man who just recently supposed he was directing something turns out suddenly to be lying motionless in a wooden box, and those around him, realizing there’s no more use whatsoever in the man lying there, burn him up in a stove. But it could be even worse: a man will have just decided to take a trip to Kislovodsk,” here the foreigner screwed his eyes up at Berlioz, “a trifling matter[45], it would have seemed, but he can’t accomplish even that, since for some unknown reason he’ll suddenly go and slip and fall under a tram! Surely you won’t say it was he that directed himself that way? Isn’t it more correct to think that someone else completely dealt with him directly?” Here the stranger laughed a strange little laugh.
Berlioz had listened with great attention to the unpleasant story of the sarcoma and the tram, and some alarming ideas had started to torment him. “He isn’t a foreigner… he isn’t a foreigner…” he thought, “he’s an extremely strange type. but permit me, who on earth is he?…”
“You want to smoke, I see?” the stranger unexpectedly addressed Bezdomny. “What kind do you prefer?”
“You have various kinds, do you?” the poet, who was out of cigarettes, asked gloomily.
“Which do you prefer?” the stranger repeated.
“Well, Our Brand” Bezdomny replied bad-temperedly.[46]
The stranger immediately took a cigarette case out of his pocket and offered it to Bezdomny.
“Our Brand.”
Both the editor and the poet were shocked not so much by the fact that it was specifically Our Brand that were in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was of huge proportions, of pure gold, and, as it was being opened, a diamond triangle on its lid flashed blue and white fire.
At this point the writers had differing thoughts. Berlioz: “No, a foreigner!” and Bezdomny: “Well, the devil take it, eh!..”
The poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, while the non-smoking Berlioz refused.
“I shall have to counter him thus,” decided Berlioz. “Yes, man is mortal, and nobody is arguing against that. But the point is that…”
However, he had not had time to voice these words before the foreigner began:
“Yes, man is mortal, but that would still be just a minor problem. The bad thing is that he’s sometimes suddenly mortal, and that’s the whole point! And he can’t possibly say what he’s going to be doing the same evening.”
“An absurd sort of formulation of the question,” considered Berlioz, and retorted:
“Well, there really is some exaggeration here. This evening is known to me more or less exactly. It goes without saying that, if on Bronnaya a brick should fall on my head.”
“Without rhyme or reason[47], a brick,” the stranger interrupted edifyingly, “will never fall on anybody’s head. And in particular, I can assure you, a brick doesn’t threaten you, not under any circumstances. You’re going to die a different death.”
“Perhaps you know what one precisely?” enquired Berlioz with completely natural irony, getting drawn
[48]
“Willingly,” responded the stranger. He sized Berlioz up, as though intending to make him a suit, muttered under his breath something like: “One, two. Mercury’s in the second house. the Moon’s gone. six – misfortune. the evening – seven…” and announced loudly and joyfully: “You’re going to have your head cut off!”
Bezdomny goggled with wild, angry eyes at the free-and-easy[49] stranger, while Berlioz asked with a crooked grin:
“By whom, precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?”
“No,” replied his interlocutor, “by a Russian woman in the Communist League of Youth.”
“Hm…” mumbled Berlioz, irritated by the stranger’s little joke. “Well, excuse me, but that s hardly likely.”
“I beg you to excuse me too,” replied the foreigner, “but it’s so. Yes, I’d like to ask you what you’re going to be doing this evening, if it’s not a secret?”
“There’s no secret. In a moment I’m going to pop into my apartment on Sadovaya, and then at ten o’clock in the evening a meeting will be taking place at MASSOLIT, and I’m going to chair it.”
“No, that can’t possibly be,” objected the foreigner firmly.
“And why’s that?”
“Because,” the foreigner replied, and looked with narrowed eyes into the sky, where, with a presentiment of the cool of the evening, black birds were flying in noiseless lines, “Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil – and not only bought it, but even spilt it too. So the meeting won’t take place.”
At this point, quite understandably, silence fell beneath the lime trees.
“Forgive me,” began Berlioz after a pause, casting glances at the foreigner who was talking such rubbish, “what has sunflower oil got to do with it… and who’s this Annushka?”
“This is what sunflower oil has got to do with it,” began Bezdomny suddenly, evidently having decided to declare war on their uninvited interlocutor. “Have you, Citizen, ever happened to be in a clinic for the mentally ill?”
“Ivan!” exclaimed Mikhail Alexandrovich quietly.
But the foreigner was not in the least offended, and gave an extremely cheerful laugh.
“I have, I have, and more than once!” he exclaimed, laughing, but without taking his unlaughing eye off the poet. “Where haven’t I been! It’s just a pity I didn’t find the time to ask the professor what schizophrenia was. So do find it out from him for yourself, Ivan Nikolayevich!”
“How do you know my name?”
“Come, come, Ivan Nikolayevich, who doesn’t know you?” Here the foreigner pulled the previous day’s issue of The Literary Gazette from his pocket, and Ivan Nikolayevich saw his own image right on the front page, and beneath it his very own verse. But the proof of his fame and popularity, that just the day before had gladdened the poet, on this occasion did not gladden him in the least.
“Excuse me,” he said, and his face darkened, “can you wait for just a moment? I want to have a quick word with my comrade.”
“Oh, with pleasure!” exclaimed the stranger. “It’s so nice here under the lime trees, and, happily, I’m not hurrying off anywhere.”
“You know what, Misha,” began the poet in a whisper, pulling Berlioz aside[50], “he’s no foreign tourist, but a spy. He’s a Russian émigré who’s made his way back over here. Ask for his papers, otherwise he’ll be off…”
“Do you think so?” Berlioz whispered anxiously, while thinking to himself: “He’s right, of course…”
“Believe you me” – the poet’s voice became hoarse in his ear – “he’s pretending to be a bit of an idiot so as to pump us about[51] something. You hear the way he speaks Russian” – the poet was casting sidelong glances as he talked, looking to see that the stranger did not make a run for it – “come on, we’ll detain him, or else he’ll be off.”
And the poet drew Berlioz back towards the bench by the arm.
The stranger was not sitting, but standing beside it, holding in his hands some sort of booklet with a dark-grey binding, a thick envelope made of good-quality paper and a visiting card.
“Excuse me for forgetting in the heat of our argument to introduce myself to you. Here’s my card, my passport and my invitation to come to Moscow for a consultation,” said the stranger weightily, giving both men of letters a piercing look.
They became embarrassed. “The devil, he heard it all…” thought Berlioz, and indicated with a polite gesture that there was no need for papers to be shown. While the foreigner was thrusting them at the editor, the poet managed to make out on the card, printed in foreign letters, the word “Professor” and the initial letter of the surname – “W”.
“Pleased to meet you,” the editor was meanwhile mumbling in embarrassment, and the foreigner put the papers away into his pocket.
Relations thus restored, all three sat down once more on the bench.
“You’ve been invited here in the capacity of a consultant, Professor?” asked Berlioz.
“Yes, as a consultant.”
“Are you German?” enquired Bezdomny.
“Me?” the Professor queried, and suddenly became pensive. “Yes, if you like, I’m German…” he said.
“Your Russian’s brilliant,” remarked Bezdomny.
“Oh, I’m a polyglot in general and know a very large number of languages,” replied the Professor.
“And what do you specialize in?” enquired Berlioz.
“I’m a specialist in black magic.”
“Well, there you are!” Mikhail Alexandrovich had a sudden thought. “And.” – he faltered – “and you were invited here to use that specialization?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s what I was invited for,” confirmed the Professor, and elucidated: “Here in the State Library they found some original manuscripts of a tenth-century practitioner of black magic, Gerbert of Aurillac.[52][53] And so I’m required to decipher them. I’m the only specialist in the world.”
“Aha! You’re a historian?” asked Berlioz with respect and great relief.
“I am a historian,” the scholar confirmed, and added without reference to anything in particular: “There’s going to be an interesting bit of history at Patriarch’s Ponds this evening!”
And again both the editor and the poet were extremely surprised, but the Professor beckoned both of them close to him and, when they had leant towards him, he whispered:
“Bear it in mind that Jesus did exist.”
“You see, Professor,” responded Berlioz with a forced smile, “we respect your great knowledge, but on that question we ourselves adhere to a different point of view.”
“But you don’t need any points of view,” replied the strange Professor. “Simply he existed, and that s all there is to it.”
“But some sort of proof is required,” began Berlioz.
“No proofs are required,” replied the Professor, and he began to speak in a low voice, his accent for some reason disappearing: “Everything’s quite simple: in a white cloak with a blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan…”[54]
2. Pontius Pilate
In a white cloak with a blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, into the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great[55] emerged the Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate.[56]
More than anything else on earth the Procurator hated the smell of attar of roses, and everything now betokened a bad day ahead, for that smell had been haunting the Procurator since dawn. It seemed to the Procurator that the smell of roses was being emitted by the cypresses and palms in the garden, and that mingling with the smell of his escort’s leather accoutrements and sweat was that accursed waft of roses. From the wings at the rear of the palace that quartered the Twelfth Lightning Legion’s First Cohort, which had come to Yershalaim[57] with the Procurator, a puff of smoke carried across the upper court of the garden into the colonnade, and mingling with this rather acrid smoke, which testified to the fact that the cooks in the centuries had started preparing dinner, was still that same heavy odour of roses.
"O gods, gods, why do you punish me?. No, there’s no doubt, this is it, it again, the invincible, terrible sickness… hemicrania, when half my head is aching. there are no remedies for it, no salvation whatsoever. I’ll try keeping my head still.”
On the mosaic floor by the fountain an armchair had already been prepared, and the Procurator sat down in it without looking at anyone and reached a hand out to one side. Into that hand his secretary deferentially placed a piece of parchment. Unable to refrain from a grimace of pain, the Procurator took a cursory sidelong look through what was written, returned the parchment to the secretary and said with difficulty:
“The man under investigation is from Galilee, is he? Was the case sent to the Tetrarch?”
“Yes, Procurator,” replied the secretary.
“And he did what?”
"He refused to give a decision on the case[58] and sent the Sanhedrin’s death sentence for your ratification,” explained the secretary.
The procurator pulled at his cheek and said quietly:
“Bring the accused here.”
And immediately two legionaries led a man of about twenty-seven from the garden court and onto the balcony under the columns, and stood him in front of the Procurator’s armchair. This man was dressed in an old and ragged light-blue chiton. His head was partly covered by a white cloth with a band around the forehead, and his hands were bound behind his back. Under his left eye the man had a large bruise, and in the corner of his mouth there was the dried blood of a cut. The new arrival looked at the Procurator with uneasy curiosity.
The latter was silent for a while, then asked quietly in Aramaic:
“So it was you inciting the people to demolish the Temple of Yershalaim?”
While speaking, the Procurator sat like stone, and only his lips moved a tiny bit as he pronounced the words. The Procurator was like stone because he was afraid of shaking his head, which was on fire with hellish pain[59].
The man with his hands bound edged forward a little and began to speak:
“Good man! Believe me…”
But the Procurator, immobile as before and without raising his voice in the least, interrupted him right away:
“Is it me you’re calling a good man? You’re mistaken. Everyone in Yershalaim whispers that I’m a savage monster, and it’s absolutely true.” And in the same monotone he added: “Centurion Rat-Catcher to me.”