‘If you can get out on to the balcony, you can escape. Or is it high up?’ Ivan was interested.
‘No,’ the guest replied firmly, ‘I cannot escape from here, not because it’s high up, but because I have nowhere to escape to.’ And he added, after a pause: ‘So, here we sit.’
‘Here we sit,’ Ivan replied, peering into the man’s brown and very restless eyes.
‘Yes ...’ here the guest suddenly became alarmed, ‘but you’re not violent, I hope? Because, you know, I cannot stand noise, turmoil, force, or other things like that. Especially hateful to me are people’s cries, whether cries of rage, suffering, or anything else. Set me at ease, tell me, you’re not violent?’
‘Yesterday in a restaurant I socked one type in the mug,’ the transformed poet courageously confessed.
‘Your grounds?’ the guest asked sternly.
‘No grounds, I must confess,’ Ivan answered, embarrassed.
‘Outrageous,’ the guest denounced Ivan and added: ‘And besides, what a way to express yourself: “socked in the mug” ... It is not known precisely whether a man has a mug or a face. And, after all, it may well be a face. So, you know, using fists ... No, you should give that up, and for good.’
Having thus reprimanded Ivan, the guest inquired:
‘Your profession?’
‘Poet,’ Ivan confessed, reluctantly for some reason.
The visitor became upset.
‘Ah, just my luck!’ he exclaimed, but at once reconsidered, apologized, and asked: ‘And what is your name?’
‘Homeless.’
‘Oh-oh ...’ the guest said, wincing.
‘What, you mean you dislike my poetry?’ Ivan asked with curiosity.
‘I dislike it terribly.’
‘And what have you read.’
‘I’ve never read any of your poetry!’ the visitor exclaimed nervously.
‘Then how can you say that?’
‘Well, what of it?’ the guest replied. ‘As if I haven’t read others. Or else ... maybe there’s some miracle? Very well, I’m ready to take it on faith. Is your poetry good? You tell me yourself.’
‘Monstrous!’ Ivan suddenly spoke boldly and frankly.
‘Don’t write any more!’ the visitor asked beseechingly.
‘I promise and I swear!’ Ivan said solemnly.
The oath was sealed with a handshake, and here soft footsteps and voices were heard in the corridor.
‘Shh!’ the guest whispered and, jumping out to the balcony, closed the grille behind him.
Praskovya Fyodorovna peeked in, asked Ivan how he was feeling and whether he wished to sleep in the dark or with a light. Ivan asked her to leave the light on, and Praskovya Fyodorovna withdrew, wishing the patient a good night. And when everything was quiet, the guest came back again.
He informed Ivan in a whisper that there was a new arrival in room 119 — some fat man with a purple physiognomy, who kept muttering something about currency in the ventilation and swearing that unclean powers were living in their place on Sadovaya.
‘He curses Pushkin up and down and keeps shouting: “Kurolesov, encore, encore!”’ the guest said, twitching nervously. Having calmed himself, he sat down, said: ‘Anyway, God help him,’ and continued his conversation with Ivan: ‘So, how did you wind up here?’
‘On account of Pontius Pilate,’ Ivan replied, casting a glum look at the floor.
‘What?!’ the guest cried, forgetting all caution, and clapped his hand over his own mouth. ‘A staggering coincidence! Tell me about it, I beg you, I beg you!’
Feeling trust in the unknown man for some reason, Ivan began, falteringly and timorously at first, then more boldly, to tell about the previous day’s story at the Patriarch’s Ponds. Yes, it was a grateful listener that Ivan Nikolaevich acquired in the person of the mysterious stealer of keys! The guest did not take Ivan for a madman, he showed great interest in what he was being told, and, as the story developed, finally became ecstatic. Time and again he interrupted Ivan with exclamations:
‘Well, well, go on, go on, I beg you! Only, in the name of all that’s holy, don’t leave anything out!’
Ivan left nothing out in any case, it was easier for him to tell it that way, and he gradually reached the moment when Pontius Pilate, in a white mantle with blood-red lining, came out to the balcony.
Then the visitor put his hands together prayerfully and whispered:
‘Oh, how I guessed! How I guessed it all!’
The listener accompanied the description of Berlioz’s terrible death with an enigmatic remark, while his eyes flashed with spite:
‘I only regret that it wasn’t the critic Latunsky or the writer Mstislav Lavrovich instead of this Berlioz!’, and he cried out frenziedly but soundlessly: ‘Go on!’
The cat handing money to the woman conductor amused the guest exceedingly, and he choked with quiet laughter watching as Ivan, excited by the success of his narration, quietly hopped on bent legs, portraying the cat holding the coin up next to his whiskers.
‘And so,’ Ivan concluded, growing sad and melancholy after telling about the events at Griboedov’s, ‘I wound up here.’
The guest sympathetically placed a hand on the poor poet’s shoulder and spoke thus:
‘Unlucky poet! But you yourself, dear heart, are to blame for it all. You oughtn’t to have behaved so casually and even impertinently with him. So you’ve paid for it. And you must still say thank you that you got off comparatively cheaply.’
‘But who is he, finally?’ Ivan asked, shaking his fists in agitation.
The guest peered at Ivan and answered with a question:
‘You’re not going to get upset? We’re all unreliable here ... There won’t be any calling for the doctor, injections, or other fuss?’
‘No, no!’ Ivan exclaimed. ‘Tell me, who is he?’
‘Very well,’ the visitor replied, and he said weightily and distinctly: ‘Yesterday at the Patriarch’s Ponds you met Satan.’
Ivan did not get upset, as he had promised, but even so he was greatly astounded.
‘That can’t be! He doesn’t exist!’
‘Good heavens! Anyone else might say that, but not you. You were apparently one of his first victims. You’re sitting, as you yourself understand, in a psychiatric clinic, yet you keep saying he doesn’t exist. Really, it’s strange!’
Thrown off, Ivan fell silent.
‘As soon as you started describing him,’ the guest went on, ‘I began to realize who it was that you had the pleasure of talking with yesterday. And, really, I’m surprised at Berlioz! Now you, of course, are a virginal person,’ here the guest apologized again, ‘but that one, from what I’ve heard about him, had after all read at least something! The very first things this professor said dispelled all my doubts. One can’t fail to recognize him, my friend! Though you ... again I must apologize, but I’m not mistaken, you are an ignorant man?’
‘Indisputably,’ the unrecognizable Ivan agreed.
‘Well, so ... even the face, as you described it, the different eyes, the eyebrows! ... Forgive me, however, perhaps you’ve never even heard the opera Faust?’
Ivan became terribly embarrassed for some reason and, his face aflame, began mumbling something about some trip to a sanatorium ... to Yalta ...
‘Well, so, so ... hardly surprising! But Berlioz, I repeat, astounds me ... He’s not only a well-read man but also a very shrewd one. Though I must say in his defence that Woland is, of course, capable of pulling the wool over the eyes of an even shrewder man.’
‘What?!’ Ivan cried out in his turn.
‘Hush!’
Ivan slapped himself roundly on the forehead with his palm and rasped:
‘I see, I see. He had the letter “W” on his visiting card. Ai-yai-yai, what a thing!’ He lapsed into a bewildered silence for some time, peering at the moon floating outside the grille, and then spoke: ‘So that means he might actually have been at Pontius Pilate’s? He was already born then?
A bitter wrinkle appeared on the guest’s lips.
‘Let’s look the truth in the eye.’ And the guest turned his face towards the nocturnal luminary racing through a cloud. ‘You and I are both madmen, there’s no denying that! You see, he shocked you - and you came unhinged, since you evidently had the ground prepared for it. But what you describe undoubtedly took place in reality. But it’s so extraordinary that even Stravinsky, a psychiatrist of genius, did not, of course, believe you. Did he examine you?’ (Ivan nodded.) ‘Your interlocutor was at Pilate’s, and had breakfast with Kant, and now he’s visiting Moscow.’
‘But he’ll be up to devil knows what here! Oughtn’t we to catch him somehow?’ the former, not yet definitively quashed Ivan still raised his head, though without much confidence, in the new Ivan.
‘You’ve already tried, and that will do for you,’ the guest replied ironically. ‘I don’t advise others to try either. And as for being up to something, rest assured, he will be! Ah, ah! But how annoying that it was you who met him and not I. Though it’s all burned up, and the coals have gone to ashes, still, I swear, for that meeting I’d give Praskovya Fyodorovna’s bunch of keys, for I have nothing else to give. I’m destitute.’
‘But what do you need him for?’
The guest paused ruefully for a long time and twitched, but finally spoke:
‘You see, it’s such a strange story, I’m sitting here for the same reason you are - namely, on account of Pontius Pilate.’ Here the guest looked around fearfully and said: ‘The thing is that a year ago I wrote a novel about Pilate.’
‘You’re a writer?’ the poet asked with interest.
The guest’s face darkened and he threatened Ivan with his fist, then said:
‘I am a master.’ He grew stem and took from the pocket of his dressing-gown a completely greasy black cap with the letter ‘M’ embroidered on it in yellow silk. He put this cap on and showed himself to Ivan both in profile and full face, to prove that he was a master. ’She sewed it for me with her own hands,‘ he added mysteriously.
‘And what is your name?’
‘I no longer have a name,’ the strange guest answered with gloomy disdain. ‘I renounced it, as I generally did everything in life. Let’s forget it.’
‘Then at least tell me about the novel,’ Ivan asked delicately.
‘If you please, sir. My life, it must be said, has taken a not very ordinary course,’ the guest began.
... A historian by education, he had worked until two years ago at one of the Moscow museums, and, besides that, had also done translations.
‘From what languages?’ Ivan interrupted curiously.
‘I know five languages besides my own,’ replied the guest, ‘English, French, German, Latin and Greek. Well, I can also read Italian a little.’
‘Oh, my!’ Ivan whispered enviously.
... The historian had lived solitarily, had no family anywhere and almost no acquaintances in Moscow. And, just think, one day he won a hundred thousand roubles.
‘Imagine my astonishment,’ the guest in the black cap whispered, ‘when I put my hand in the basket of dirty laundry and, lo and behold, it had the same number as in the newspaper. A state bond,’[86] he explained, ‘they gave it to me at the museum.’
... Having won a hundred thousand roubles, Ivan’s mysterious guest acted thus: bought books, gave up his room on Myasnitskaya ...
‘Ohh, that accursed hole! ...’ he growled.
... and rented from a builder, in a lane near the Arbat, two rooms in the basement of a little house in the garden. He left his work at the museum and began writing a novel about Pontius Pilate.
‘Ah, that was a golden age!’ the narrator whispered, his eyes shining. ‘A completely private little apartment, plus a front hall with a sink in it,’ he underscored for some reason with special pride, ‘little windows just level with the paved walk leading from the gate. Opposite, only four steps away, near the fence, lilacs, a linden and a maple. Ah, ah, ah! In winter it was very seldom that I saw someone’s black feet through my window and heard the snow crunching under them. And in my stove a fire was eternally blazing! But suddenly spring came and through the dim glass I saw lilac bushes, naked at first, then dressing themselves up in green. And it was then, last spring, that something happened far more delightful than getting a hundred thousand roubles. And that, you must agree, is a huge sum of money!’
That’s true,‘ acknowledged the attentively listening Ivan.
‘I opened my little windows and sat in the second, quite minuscule room.’ The guest began measuring with his arms: ‘Here’s the sofa, and another sofa opposite, and a little table between them, with a beautiful night lamp on it, and books nearer the window, and here a small writing table, and in the first room - a huge room, one hundred and fifty square feet! — books, books and the stove. Ah, what furnishings I had! The extraordinary smell of the lilacs! And my head was getting light with fatigue, and Pilate was flying to the end ...’
‘White mantle, red lining! I understand!’ Ivan exclaimed.
‘Precisely so! Pilate was flying to the end, to the end, and I already knew that the last words of the novel would be: “... the fifth procurator of Judea, the equestrian Pontius Pilate”. Well, naturally, I used to go out for a walk. A hundred thousand is a huge sum, and I had an excellent suit. Or I’d go and have dinner in some cheap restaurant. There was a wonderful restaurant on the Arbat, I don’t know whether it exists now.’ Here the guest’s eyes opened wide, and he went on whispering, gazing at the moon: ‘She was carrying repulsive, alarming yellow flowers in her hand. Devil knows what they’re called, but for some reason they’re the first to appear in Moscow. And these flowers stood out clearly against her black spring coat. She was carrying yellow flowers! Not a nice colour. She turned down a lane from Tverskaya and then looked back. Well, you know Tverskaya! Thousands of people were walking along Tverskaya, but I can assure you that she saw me alone, and looked not really alarmed, but even as if in pain. And I was struck not so much by her beauty as by an extraordinary loneliness in her eyes, such as no one had ever seen before! Obeying this yellow sign, I also turned down the lane and followed her. We walked along the crooked, boring lane silently, I on one side, she on the other. And, imagine, there was not a soul in the lane. I was suffering, because it seemed to me that it was necessary to speak to her, and I worried that I wouldn’t utter a single word, and she would leave, and I’d never see her again. And, imagine, suddenly she began to speak:
‘“Do you like my flowers?”
‘I remember clearly the sound of her voice; rather low, slightly husky, and, stupid as it is, it seemed that the echo resounded in the lane and bounced off the dirty yellow wall. I quickly crossed to her side and, coming up to her, answered:
‘“No!”
‘She looked at me in surprise, and I suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, understood that all my life I had loved precisely this woman! Quite a thing, eh? Of course, you’ll say I’m mad?’
‘I won’t say anything,’ Ivan exclaimed, and added: ‘I beg you, go on!’
And the guest continued.
‘Yes, she looked at me in surprise, and then, having looked, asked thus:
‘“You generally don’t like flowers?”
‘It seemed to me there was hostility in her voice. I was walking beside her, trying to keep in step, and, to my surprise, did not feel the least constraint.
‘“No, I like flowers, but not this kind,” I said.
‘“Which, then?”
‘“I like roses.”
‘Then I regretted having said it, because she smiled guiltily and threw the flowers into the gutter. Slightly at a loss, I nevertheless picked them up and gave them to her, but she, with a smile, pushed the flowers away, and I carried them in my hand.
‘So we walked silently for some time, until she took the flowers from my hand and threw them to the pavement, then put her own hand in a black glove with a bell-shaped cuff under my arm, and we walked on side by side.’
‘Go on,’ said Ivan, ‘and please don’t leave anything out!’
‘Go on?’ repeated the visitor. ‘Why, you can guess for yourself how it went on.’ He suddenly wiped an unexpected tear with his right sleeve and continued: ‘Love leaped out in front of us like a murderer in an alley leaping out of nowhere, and struck us both at once. As lightning strikes, as a Finnish knife strikes! She, by the way, insisted afterwards that it wasn’t so, that we had, of course, loved each other for a long, long time, without knowing each other, never having seen each other, and that she was living with a different man ... as I was, too, then ... with that, what’s her...’
‘With whom?’ asked Homeless.
‘With that ... well ... with ...’replied the guest, snapping his fingers.
‘You were married?’
‘Why, yes, that’s why I’m snapping ... With that ... Varenka ... Manechka ... no, Varenka ... striped dress, the museum ... Anyhow, I don’t remember.
‘Well, so she said she went out that day with yellow flowers in her hand so that I would find her at last, and that if it hadn’t happened, she would have poisoned herself, because her life was empty.
‘Yes, love struck us instantly. I knew it that same day, an hour later, when, without having noticed the city, we found ourselves by the Kremlin wall on the embankment.
‘We talked as if we had parted only the day before, as if we had known each other for many years. We arranged to meet the next day at the same place on the Moscow River, and we did. The May sun shone down on us. And soon, very soon, this woman became my secret wife.
‘She used to come to me every afternoon, but I would begin waiting for her in the morning. This waiting expressed itself in the moving around of objects on the table. Ten minutes before, I would sit down by the little window and begin to listen for the banging of the decrepit gate. And how curious: before my meeting with her, few people came to our yard — more simply, no one came — but now it seemed to me that the whole city came flocking there.
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