I couldn’t very well walk around Moscow naked! I put it on because I was hurrying to Griboedov’s restaurant.”
The doctor glanced questioningly at Riukhin, who muttered glumly: “The name of the restaurant.”
“Aha,” said the doctor, “and why were you in such a hurry? Some business meeting?”
“I’m trying to catch the consultant,” Ivan Nikolaevich said and looked around anxiously.
“What consultant?”
“Do you know Berlioz?” Ivan asked significantly.
The ... composer?”
Ivan got upset.
“What composer? Ah, yes ... Ah, no. The composer has the same name as Misha Berlioz.”
Riukhin had no wish to say anything, but was forced to explain: The secretary of Massolit, Berlioz, was run over by a tram-car tonight at the Patriarch’s Ponds.”
“Don’t blab about what you don’t know!” Ivan got angry with Riukhin. “I was there, not you! He got him under the tram-car on purpose!”
“Pushed him?”
“’Pushed him’, nothing!” Ivan exclaimed, angered by the general obtuseness. “His kind don’t need to push! He can perform such stunts – hold on to your hat! He knew beforehand that Berlioz would get under the tram-car!”
“And did anyone besides you see this consultant?”
That’s the trouble, it was just Berlioz and I.”
“So. And what measures did you take to catch this murderer?” Here the doctor turned and sent a glance towards a woman in a white coat, who was sitting at a table to one side. She took out a sheet of paper and began filling in the blank spaces in its columns.
“Here’s what measures: I took a little candle from the kitchen...”
That one?” asked the doctor, pointing to the broken candle lying on the table in front of the woman, next to the icon.
That very one, and ...”
“And why the icon?”
“Ah, yes, the icon ...” Ivan blushed. “It was the icon that frightened them most of all.” He again jabbed his finger in the direction ofRiukhin. “But the thing is that he, the consultant, he ... let’s speak directly ... is mixed up with the unclean powers ... and you won’t catch him so easily.”
The orderlies for some reason snapped to attention and fastened their eyes on Ivan.
Yes, sirs,” Ivan went on, “mixed up with them! An absolute fact. He spoke personally with Pontius Pilate. And there’s no need to stare at me like that. I’m telling the truth! He saw everything — the balcony and the palm trees. In short, he was at Pontius Pilate’s, I can vouch for it.”
“Come, come ...”
“Well, so I pinned the icon on my chest and ran ...”
Here the clock suddenly struck twice.
“Oh-oh!” Ivan exclaimed and got up from the couch. “It’s two o’clock, and I’m wasting time with you! Excuse me, where’s the telephone?”
“Let him use the telephone,” the doctor told the orderlies.
Ivan grabbed the receiver, and the woman meanwhile quietly asked Riukhin: “Is he married?”
“Single,” Riukhin answered fearfully.
“Member of a trade union?”
“Yes.”
“Police?” Ivan shouted into the receiver. “Police? Comrade officer-on-duty, give orders at once for five motor cycles with machine-guns to be sent out to catch the foreign consultant. What? Come and pick me up, I’ll go with you ... It’s the poet Homeless speaking from the madhouse ...
What’s your address?” Homeless asked the doctor in a whisper, covering the receiver with his hand, and then again shouting into it: “Are you listening?
Hello! ... Outrageous!” Ivan suddenly screamed and hurled the receiver against the wall. Then he turned to the doctor, offered him his hand, said “Goodbye” drily, and made as if to leave.
“For pity’s sake, where do you intend to go?” the doctor said, peering into Ivan’s eyes. “In the dead of night, in your underwear ... You’re not feeling well, stay with us.”
“Let me pass,” Ivan said to the orderlies, who closed ranks at the door. “Will you let me pass or not?” the poet shouted in a terrible voice.
Riukhin trembled, but the woman pushed a button on the table and a shiny little box with a sealed ampoule popped out on to its glass surface.
“Ah, so?!” Ivan said, turning around with a wild and hunted look.
“Well, then ... Goodbye!” And he rushed head first into the window-blind.
The crash was rather forceful, but the glass behind the blind gave no crack, and in an instant Ivan Nikolaevich was struggling in the hands of the orderlies. He gasped, tried to bite, shouted: “So that’s the sort of windows you’ve got here! Let me go! Let me go!...”
A syringe flashed in the doctor’s hand, with a single movement the woman slit the threadbare sleeve of the shirt and seized the arm with unwomanly strength. There was a smell of ether, Ivan went limp in the hands of the four people, the deft doctor took advantage of this moment and stuck the needle into Ivan’s arm. They held Ivan for another few seconds and then lowered him on to the couch.
“Bandits!” Ivan shouted and jumped up from the couch, but was installed on it again. The moment they let go of him, he again jumped up, but sat back down by himself. He paused, gazing around wildly, then unexpectedly yawned, then smiled maliciously.
“Locked me up after all,” he said, yawned again, unexpectedly lay down, put his head on the pillow, his fist under his head like a child, and muttered now in a sleepy voice, without malice: ‘very well, then ... you’ll pay for it yourselves ... I’ve warned you, you can do as you like ... I’m now interested most of all in Pontius Pilate ... Pilate ...”, and he closed his eyes.
“A bath, a private room, number 117, and a nurse to watch him,” the doctor ordered as he put his glasses on. Here Riukhin again gave a start: the white door opened noiselessly, behind it a corridor could be seen, lit by blue night-lights. Out of the corridor rolled a stretcher on rubber wheels, to which the quieted Ivan was transferred, and then he rolled off down the corridor and the door closed behind him.
“Doctor,” the shaken Riukhin asked in a whisper, “it means he’s really ill?”
“Oh, yes,” replied the doctor.
“But what’s wrong with him, then?” Riukhin asked timidly.
The tired doctor glanced at Riukhin and answered listlessly: “Locomotor and speech excitation ... delirious interpretations ... A complex case, it seems. Schizophrenia, I suppose. Plus this alcoholism ...”
Riukhin understood nothing from the doctor’s words, except that things were evidently not so great with Ivan Nikolaevich. He sighed and asked: “But what’s all this talk of his about some consultant?”
“He must have seen somebody who struck his disturbed imagination. Or maybe a hallucination ...”
A few minutes later the truck was carrying Riukhin off to Moscow. Day was breaking, and the light of the street lights still burning along the highway was now unnecessary and unpleasant. The driver was vexed at having wasted the night, drove the truck as fast as he could, and skidded on the turns.
Now the woods dropped off, stayed somewhere behind, and the river went somewhere to the side, and an omnium gatherum came spilling to meet the truck: fences with sentry boxes and stacks of wood, tall posts and some sort of poles, with spools strung on the poles, heaps of rubble, the earth scored by canals — in short, you sensed that she was there, Moscow, right there, around the turn, and about to heave herself upon you and engulf you.
Riukhin was jolted and tossed about; the sort of stump he had placed himself on kept trying to slide out from under him. The restaurant napkins, thrown in by the policeman and Pantelei, who had left earlier by bus, moved all around the flatbed. Riukhin tried to collect them, but then, for some reason hissing spitefully: ‘devil take them! What am I doing fussing like a fool? ...”, he spumed them aside with his foot and stopped looking at them.
The rider’s state of mind was terrible. It was becomin
g clear that his visit to the house of sorrow had left the deepest mark on him. Riukhin tried to understand what was tormenting him. The corridor with blue lights, which had stuck itself to his memory? The thought that there is no greater misfortune in the world than the loss of reason? Yes, yes, of course, that, too. But that – that’s only a general thought. There’s something else. What is it? An insult, that’s what. Yes, yes, insulting words hurled right in his face by Homeless. And the trouble is not that they were insulting, but that there was truth in them.
The poet no longer looked around, but, staring into the dirty, shaking floor, began muttering something, whining, gnawing at himself.
Yes, poetry ... He was thirty-two years old! And, indeed, what then? So then he would go on writing his several poems a year. Into old age? Yes, into old age. What would these poems bring him? Glory? “What nonsense! Don’t deceive yourself, at least. Glory will never come to someone who writes bad poems. What makes them bad? The truth, he was telling the truth!” Riukhin addressed himself mercilessly. “I don’t believe in anything I write! ...”
Poisoned by this burst of neurasthenia, the poet swayed, the floor under him stopped shaking. Riukhin raised his head and saw that he had long been in Moscow, and, what’s more, that it was dawn over Moscow, that the cloud was underlit with gold, that his truck had stopped, caught in a column of other vehicles at the turn on to the boulevard, and that very close to him on a pedestal stood a metal man,[71] his head inclined slightly, gazing at the boulevard with indifference.
Some strange thoughts flooded the head of the ailing poet. “There’s an example of real luck...” Here Riukhin rose to his full height on the flatbed of the truck and raised his arm, for some reason attacking the cast-iron man who was not bothering anyone. “Whatever step he made in his life, whatever happened to him, it all turned to his benefit, it all led to his glory! But what did he do? I can’t conceive ... Is there anything special in the words: "The snowstorm covers ..."? I don’t understand! ...
Luck, sheer luck!” Riukhin concluded with venom, and felt the truck moving under him. “He shot him, that white guard shot him, smashed his hip, and assured his immortality...”
The column began to move. In no more than two minutes, the completely ill and even aged poet was entering the veranda of Griboedov’s. It was now empty. In a corner some company was finishing its drinks, and in the middle the familiar master of ceremonies was bustling about, wearing a skullcap, with a glass of Abrau wine in his hand.
Riukhin, laden with napkins, was met affably by Archibald Archi-baldovich and at once relieved of the cursed rags. Had Riukhin not become so worn out in the clinic and on the truck, he would certainly have derived pleasure from telling how everything had gone in the hospital and embellishing the story with invented details. But just then he was far from such things, and, little observant though Riukhin was, now, after the torture on the truck, he peered keenly at the pirate for the first time and realized that, though the man asked about Homeless and even exclaimed “Ai-yai-yai!”, he was essentially quite indifferent to Homeless’s fate and did not feel a bit sorry for him. “And bravo! Right you are!” Riukhin thought with cynical, self-annihilating malice and, breaking off the story about the schizophrenia, begged: “Archibald Archibaldovich, a drop of vodka ...” The pirate made a compassionate face and whispered: “I understand ... this very minute ...” and beckoned to a waiter. A quarter of an hour later, Riukhin sat in complete solitude, hunched over his bream, drinking glass after glass, understanding and recognizing that it was no longer possible to set anything right in his life, that it was only possible to forget.
The poet had wasted his night while others were feasting and now understood that it was impossible to get it back. One needed only to raise one’s head from the lamp to the sky to understand that the night was irretrievably lost. Waiters were hurriedly tearing the tablecloths from the tables. The cats slinking around the veranda had a morning look. Day irresistibly heaved itself upon the poet.
Chapter 7. A Naughty Apartment
If Styopa Likhodeev had been told the next morning: ‘styopa! You’ll be shot if you don’t get up this minute!” — Styopa would have replied in a languid, barely audible voice: ‘shoot me, do what you like with me, I won’t get up.”
Not only not get up, it seemed to him that he could not open his eyes, because if he were to do so, there would be a flash of lightning, and his head would at once be blown to pieces. A heavy bell was booming in that head, brown spots rimmed with fiery green floated between his eyeballs and his closed eyelids, and to crown it all he was nauseous, this nausea, as it seemed to him, being connected with the sounds of some importunate gramophone.
Styopa tried to recall something, but only one thing would get recalled — that yesterday, apparently, and in some unknown place, he had stood with a napkin in his hand and tried to kiss some lady, promising her that the next day, and exactly at noon, he would come to visit her. The lady had declined, saying: “No, no, I won’t be home!”, but Styopa had stubbornly insisted: “And I’ll just up and come anyway!”
Who the lady was, and what time it was now, what day, of what month, Styopa decidedly did not know, and, worst of all, he could not figure out where he was. He attempted to learn this last at least, and to that end unstuck the stuck-together lids of his left eye. Something gleamed dully in the semi-darkness. Styopa finally recognized the pier-glass and realized that he was lying on his back in his own bed – that is, the jeweller’s wife’s former bed – in the bedroom. Here he felt such a throbbing in his head that he closed his eyes and moaned.
Let us explain: Styopa Likhodeev, director of the Variety Theatre, had come to his senses that morning at home, in the very apartment which he shared with the late Berlioz, in a big, six-storeyed, U-shaped building on Sadovaya Street.
It must be said that this apartment – no.50 – had long had, if not a bad, at least a strange reputation. Two years ago it had still belonged to the widow of the jeweller de Fougeray. Anna Frantsevna de Fougeray, a respectable and very practical fifty-year-old woman, let out three of the five rooms to lodgers: one whose last name was apparently Belomut, and another with a lost last name.
And then two years ago inexplicable events began to occur in this apartment: people began to disappear[72] from this apartment without a trace.
Once, on a day off, a policeman came to the apartment, called the second lodger (the one whose last name got lost) out to the front hall, and said he was invited to come to the police station for a minute to put his signature to something. The lodger told Anfisa, Anna Frantsevna’s long-time and devoted housekeeper, to say, in case he received any telephone calls, that he would be back in ten minutes, and left together with the proper, white-gloved policeman. He not only did not come back in ten minutes, but never came back at all. The most surprising thing was that the policeman evidently vanished along with him.
The pious, or, to speak more frankly, superstitious Anfisa declared outright to the very upset Anna Frantsevna that it was sorcery and that she knew perfectly well who had stolen both the lodger and the policeman, only she did not wish to talk about it towards night-time.
Well, but with sorcery, as everyone knows, once it starts, there’s no stopping it. The second lodger is remembered to have disappeared on a Monday, and that Wednesday Belomut seemed to drop from sight, though, true, under different circumstances. In the morning a car came, as usual, to take him to work, and it did take him to work, but it did not bring anyone back or come again itself.
Madame Belomut’s grief and horror defied description. But, alas, neither the one nor the other continued for long. That same night, on returning with Anfisa from her dacha, which Anna Frantsevna had hurried off to for some reason, she did not find the wife of citizen Belomut in the apartment. And not only that: the doors of the two rooms occupied by the Belomut couple turned out to be sealed.
Two days passed somehow. On the third day, Anna Frantsevna, who had suffered all the while from inso
mnia, again left hurriedly for her dacha . .
. Needless to say, she never came back!
Left alone, Anfisa, having wept her fill, went to sleep past one o’clock in the morning. What happened to her after that is not known, but lodgers in other apartments told of hearing some sort of knocking all night in no.50 and of seeing electric light burning in the windows till morning.
In the morning it turned out that there was also no Anfisa!
For a long time all sorts of legends were repeated in the house about these disappearances and about the accursed apartment, such as, for instance, “that this dry and pious little Anfisa had supposedly carried on her dried-up breast, in a suede bag, twenty-five big diamonds belonging to Anna Frantsevna. That in the woodshed of that very dacha to which Anna Frantsevna had gone so hurriedly, there supposedly turned up, of themselves, some inestimable treasures in the form of those same diamonds, plus some gold coins of tsarist minting ... And so on, in the same vein. Well, what we don’t know, we can’t vouch for.
However it may have been, the apartment stood empty and sealed for only a week. Then the late Berlioz moved in with his wife, and this same Styopa, also with his wife. It was perfectly natural that, as soon as they got into the malignant apartment, devil knows what started happening with them as well! Namely, within the space of a month both wives vanished. But these two not without a trace. Of Berlioz’s wife it was told that she had supposedly been seen in Kharkov with some ballet-master, while Styopa’s wife allegedly turned up on Bozhedomka Street, where wagging tongues said the director of the Variety, using his innumerable acquaintances, had contrived to get her a room, but on the one condition that she never show her face on Sadovaya...
And so, Styopa moaned. He wanted to call the housekeeper Grunya and ask her for aspirin, but was still able to realize that it was foolish, and that Grunya, of course, had no aspirin. He tried to call Berlioz for help, groaned twice: “Misha ... Misha ...”, but, as you will understand, received no reply. The apartment was perfectly silent.