PART I
…So who are you, after all? — I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally performs good.
Goethe. Faust
Chapter 1. Never Talk to Strangers
Once, in springtime, at an unprecedentedly hot sunset, two citizens appeared in Moscow, by the Patriarch’s Ponds. The first of them, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, stout, bald, carrying his respectable fedora in his hand, and on his cleanly shaven face were perched supernaturally large glasses in black horn frames. The second—a broad-shouldered, reddish, tousle-haired young man in a checkered cap pushed to the back of his head—was wearing a cowboy shirt, crumpled white trousers, and black slippers.
The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, chairman of the board of one of Moscow’s largest literary associations, known by the acronym MASSOLIT, and editor of a thick arts journal; his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolaevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the pseudonym Bezdomny (Homeless).
Having reached the shade of the lightly greening linden trees, the writers first rushed to the brightly painted booth bearing the sign “Beer and Water.”
Yes, one should note the first oddity of this terrible May evening. Not only by the booth, but in the entire alley parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street, there was not a single person. At that hour, when it seemed there was no strength left to breathe, when the sun, having scorched Moscow, was plunging into some dry haze beyond the Sadovoye Ring, no one came under the linden trees, no one sat on the benches, the alley was deserted.
“Give me some Narzan,” Berlioz asked.
“There is no Narzan,” the woman in the booth replied, sounding offended for some reason.
“Do you have beer?” Bezdomny inquired hoarsely.
“Beer will be delivered toward evening,” the woman replied.
“What is there?” Berlioz asked.
“Apricot soda, but it’s warm,” the woman said.
“Well, give it, give it, give it!…”
The apricot soda produced an abundant yellow foam, and the air smelled like a barbershop. After drinking, the writers immediately started to hiccup, paid, and sat down on a bench facing the pond and with their backs to Bronnaya Street.
Here occurred the second oddity, concerning Berlioz alone. He suddenly stopped hiccupping; his heart thumped and, for a moment, seemed to drop somewhere, then returned, but with a dull needle lodged in it. Furthermore, Berlioz was seized by an unfounded, but so strong a fear, that he immediately wanted to flee the Patriarch’s Ponds without looking back. Berlioz anxiously glanced around, not understanding what had frightened him. He turned pale, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, and thought: “What’s wrong with me? This has never happened… My heart is acting up… I’m overtired. Perhaps it’s time to drop everything and go to Kislovodsk…”
And then the sultry air thickened before him, and out of this air materialized a transparent citizen of a very strange appearance. A jockey cap on his small head, a checkered, short, and likewise airy jacket… The citizen was seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, impossibly thin, and his face, I beg you to note, was mocking.
Berlioz’s life was such that he was not accustomed to unusual phenomena. Even paler, he stared wide-eyed and thought in confusion: “This can’t be!”
But alas, it was, and the tall, visible-through citizen swayed before him, left and right, without touching the ground.
Terror so seized Berlioz that he closed his eyes. And when he opened them, he saw that it was over, the mirage had dissolved, the checkered figure had vanished, and the dull needle had simultaneously popped out of his heart.
“The devil take it!” exclaimed the editor, “You know, Ivan, I nearly had a heat stroke just now! Even had a sort of hallucination,”—he tried to smile, but anxiety still flickered in his eyes, and his hands trembled.
However, he gradually calmed down, fanned himself with his handkerchief, and, stating quite cheerfully, “Well then…” resumed the conversation that had been interrupted by drinking the apricot soda.
This conversation, as was learned later, was about Jesus Christ. The editor had commissioned the poet to write a long anti-religious poem for the upcoming issue of the journal. Ivan Nikolaevich had composed this poem, and very quickly, but unfortunately, it did not satisfy the editor in the least. Bezdomny had depicted the main character of his poem, that is, Jesus, in very dark colors, yet in the editor’s opinion, the entire poem needed to be rewritten. And so now the editor was giving the poet a kind of lecture about Jesus, the goal being to emphasize the poet’s basic mistake. It is hard to say what misled Ivan Nikolaevich—the expressive power of his talent or his complete unfamiliarity with the subject he intended to write about—but the Jesus he depicted turned out to be absolutely lifelike, although not a sympathetic character. Berlioz, however, wanted to prove to the poet that the main point was not what Jesus was like, whether bad or good, but that Jesus, as a person, never existed in the world at all, and that all stories about him were mere fabrications, the most common myth.
It must be noted that the editor was a well-read man and skillfully cited ancient historians in his speech, such as the famous Philo of Alexandria, and the brilliantly educated Josephus Flavius, none of whom ever mentioned the existence of Jesus. Displaying solid erudition, Mikhail Alexandrovich informed the poet, among other things, that the passage in the 15th book, in the 44th chapter, of Tacitus’s famous Annals, which speaks of Jesus’ execution, is nothing more than a later, counterfeit insertion.
The poet, to whom everything the editor reported was news, listened attentively to Mikhail Alexandrovich, fixing his lively green eyes upon him, and only occasionally hiccupped, whispering curses at the apricot soda.
“There is not a single Eastern religion,” Berlioz said, “in which, as a rule, a virgin doesn’t give birth to a god. And Christians, inventing nothing new, similarly created their Jesus, who in reality never existed. This is the main point you need to emphasize…”
Berlioz’s high tenor echoed in the deserted alley, and as Mikhail Alexandrovich delved into the thickets that only a highly educated person could enter without risking his neck—the poet learned more and more interesting and useful things about the Egyptian Osiris, the benevolent god and son of Heaven and Earth, and about the Phoenician god Tammūz, and about Marduk, and even about the less well-known fearsome god Huitzilopochtli, who was once highly revered by the Aztecs in Mexico.
And it was precisely at the moment when Mikhail Alexandrovich was telling the poet how the Aztecs moulded a figure of Huitzilopochtli out of dough that the first human figure appeared in the alley.
Subsequently, when, frankly speaking, it was already too late, various agencies submitted their reports describing this man. Their comparison cannot fail to cause astonishment. For instance, the first report stated that the man was short, had gold teeth, and limped on his right leg. The second—that the man was immensely tall, had platinum crowns, and limped on his left leg. The third laconically stated that the man had no distinguishing features.
One must admit that none of these reports is useful.
First of all: the person described did not limp on any leg, and was neither short nor immense, but simply tall. As for his teeth, he had platinum crowns on the left side and gold on the right. He was wearing an expensive grey suit and foreign shoes matching the color of the suit. He wore a grey beret tilted rakishly over one ear, and carried under his arm a cane with a black knob shaped like a poodle’s head. By appearance, he was over forty. His mouth was somehow crooked. Clean-shaven. A brunette. His right eye was black, his left, for some reason, green. His eyebrows were black, but one was higher than the other. In short—a foreigner.
Passing the bench where the editor and the poet were sitting, the foreigner glanced at them, stopped, and suddenly sat down on the adjacent bench, two steps away from the friends.
“German,” Berlioz thought.
“Englishman,” Bezdomny thought, “Look, he’s not even hot in gloves.”
The foreigner surveyed the tall houses that squared the pond, and it was noticeable that he was seeing this place for the first time and that it interested him.
He fixed his gaze on the upper floors, dazzlingly reflecting the fractured and forever-departing sun from Mikhail Alexandrovich, then lowered it to where the windows were beginning to darken with the approach of evening, smiled condescendingly at something, squinted, placed his hands on the cane’s knob, and rested his chin on his hands.
“You, Ivan,” Berlioz was saying, “very well and satirically depicted, for instance, the birth of Jesus, the son of God, but the crux of the matter is that a number of sons of God were born even before Jesus, like, say, the Phrygian Attis, and to put it simply, none of them were born, and none of them existed, including Jesus, and it is essential that you, instead of describing the birth and, say, the arrival of the Magi, describe the absurd rumors about this birth… Otherwise, in your narrative, it turns out that he really was born!…”
Here Bezdomny attempted to stop his tormenting hiccups by holding his breath, which only made him hiccup more painfully and loudly, and at that very moment Berlioz broke off his speech because the foreigner suddenly rose and headed toward the writers.
They looked at him in surprise.
“Please excuse me,” the man who approached began, speaking with a foreign accent but without mangling his words, “for taking the liberty without an introduction… but the subject of your learned discussion is so interesting that…”
He politely took off his beret, and the friends had no choice but to half-rise and bow.
“No, French, more likely…” Berlioz thought.
“Pole?…” Bezdomny thought.
It must be added that the foreigner made a repulsive impression on the poet from the very first words, while Berlioz rather liked him, or rather… how to put it… he was interested in him.
“May I sit down?” the foreigner politely asked, and the friends instinctively moved apart; the foreigner deftly sat between them and immediately joined the conversation.
“If I heard correctly, you claimed that Jesus did not exist in the world?” the foreigner asked, turning his left green eye toward Berlioz.
“No, you did not mishear,” Berlioz answered courteously, “That is exactly what I said.”
“Oh, how interesting!” the foreigner exclaimed.
“What the hell does he want?” Bezdomny thought and frowned.
“And did you agree with your companion?” the stranger inquired, turning to the right toward Bezdomny.
“One hundred percent!” the latter confirmed, fond of flowery and figurative expressions.
“Astonishing!” exclaimed the uninvited companion and, glancing furtively for some reason and lowering his deep voice, said: “Forgive my persistence, but I understand that, besides everything else, you also do not believe in God?”—he made frightened eyes and added: “I swear, I won’t tell anyone.”
“Yes, we do not believe in God,” Berlioz replied, slightly smiling at the tourist’s fright. “But one can speak about this quite freely.”
The foreigner leaned back against the bench and asked, even squealing with curiosity:
“You are atheists?!”
“Yes, we are atheists,” Berlioz answered, smiling, while Bezdomny thought, getting annoyed: “What a clinging fool, this foreign goose!”
“Oh, how charming!” cried the amazing foreigner and spun his head, looking first at one writer, then the other.
“In our country, atheism surprises no one,” Berlioz said with diplomatic politeness, “the majority of our population has consciously and long ceased to believe in fairy tales about God.”
Here the foreigner did a strange thing: he stood up and shook the astonished editor’s hand, pronouncing the words:
“Allow me to thank you from the bottom of my heart!”
“What are you thanking him for?” Bezdomny asked, blinking.
“For a very important piece of information, which is extremely interesting to me as a traveler,” the foreign eccentric explained, raising his finger meaningfully.
The important information seemed indeed to have made a strong impression on the traveler, because he anxiously scanned the houses, as if fearing to see an atheist in every window.
“No, he’s not English…” Berlioz thought, while Bezdomny thought: “Where did he learn to speak Russian so well, that’s what’s interesting!”—and frowned again.
“But, allow me to ask you,” the foreign guest inquired after anxious deliberation, “how do you account for the proofs of God’s existence, of which, as is known, there are exactly five?”
“Alas!” Berlioz replied with regret, “not one of those proofs is worth anything, and humanity long ago consigned them to the archives. You must agree that in the realm of reason there can be no proof of God’s existence.”
“Bravo!” exclaimed the foreigner, “Bravo! You have fully repeated the thought of the restless old Immanuel on this matter. But here’s a curious thing: he completely destroyed all five proofs, and then, as if mocking himself, constructed his own sixth proof!”
“Kant’s proof,” the educated editor countered with a subtle smile, “is also unconvincing. And it’s no wonder that Schiller said that Kant’s arguments on this question can only satisfy slaves, and Strauss simply laughed at this proof.”
Berlioz was speaking, while at the same time thinking: “But still, who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?”
“Someone ought to send that Kant to Solovki for three years for such proofs!” Ivan Nikolaevich burst out completely unexpectedly.
“Ivan!” Berlioz whispered, embarrassed.
But the suggestion to send Kant to Solovki not only did not shock the foreigner, but even delighted him.
“Exactly, exactly,” he cried, and his left green eye, turned towards Berlioz, sparkled, “that’s exactly where he belongs! I told him so myself at breakfast: ‘Professor, with all due respect, you’ve invented something clumsy! It may be clever, but it’s terribly incomprehensible. They’ll make fun of you.'”
Berlioz gaped. “At breakfast… with Kant?… What is he rambling about?” he thought.
“But,” the foreigner continued, undeterred by Berlioz’s astonishment and turning to the poet, “it’s impossible to send him to Solovki for the reason that he has been residing in places significantly more remote than Solovki for over a hundred years, and it is absolutely impossible to extract him from there, I assure you!”
“A pity!” retorted the provocative poet.
“And I agree!” the stranger confirmed, his eye glittering, and continued: “But here is the question that troubles me: if there is no God, then, one asks, who governs human life and the general order on earth?”
“Man himself governs it,” Bezdomny rushed to answer angrily to this, admittedly, not very clear question.
“Pardon me,” the stranger replied softly, “in order to govern, one must, after all, have a precise plan for some, even slightly decent period. Allow me to ask you, how can man govern if he is not only deprived of the possibility of making any plan for even a ridiculously short period, say, a thousand years, but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And indeed,”—here the stranger turned to Berlioz—”imagine that you, for instance, begin to govern, manage both others and yourself, in general, so to speak, to get into the swing of things, and suddenly you get… ahem… ahem… sarcoma of the lung…”
—here the foreigner smiled sweetly, as if the thought of lung sarcoma pleased him—”Yes, sarcoma,” he repeated the sonorous word, squinting like a cat, “and then your governing is over! No one’s fate, except your own, interests you anymore. Your family begins to lie to you; sensing trouble, you rush to learned doctors, then to charlatans, and sometimes to fortune-tellers. The first, second, and third are all completely meaningless, as you yourself understand. And all this ends tragically: the one who only recently imagined that he was controlling something suddenly finds himself lying motionless in a wooden box, and those around him, realizing that there is no more use for the one lying there, burn him in a furnace. And sometimes it’s even worse: just as a man prepares to travel to Kislovodsk,”—here the foreigner narrowed his eyes at Berlioz—”a trifling matter, it would seem, but even this he cannot accomplish, because for some unknown reason he suddenly slips and falls under a tram! Would you really say that he managed that himself? Isn’t it more correct to assume that someone entirely different managed him?”—and here the stranger gave a strange laugh.
Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about sarcoma and the tram, and some anxious thoughts began to plague him. “He is not a foreigner! He is not a foreigner!” he thought, “He is a most strange subject… But wait, who is he?”
“You want to smoke, I see?” the stranger unexpectedly addressed Bezdomny, “Which brand do you prefer?”
“Do you have different kinds, then?” the poet asked gloomily, having run out of cigarettes.
“Which do you prefer?” the stranger repeated.
“Well, ‘Nasha Marka’ (Our Brand),” Bezdomny replied spitefully.
The stranger immediately pulled a cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to Bezdomny:
“‘Nasha Marka’.”
What astonished both the editor and the poet was not so much that “‘Nasha Marka'” was in the case, but the case itself. It was enormous, made of crimson gold, and when it opened, a diamond triangle flashed with blue and white fire on its lid.
Here the writers had different thoughts. Berlioz: “No, he is a foreigner!”, and Bezdomny: “Well, what the devil! Huh?”
The poet and the case owner lit up; the non-smoking Berlioz declined.
“I must counter him like this,” Berlioz decided, “Yes, man is mortal, no one disputes that. But the point is that…”
However, he did not manage to speak these words before the foreigner spoke:
“Yes, man is mortal, but that would only be half the trouble. The bad thing is that he is sometimes suddenly mortal; that’s the trick! And generally, he cannot say what he will be doing this very evening.”
“What a ridiculous way to pose the question…” Berlioz mused and countered:
“Well, there is some exaggeration here. I know my plans for this evening more or less accurately. It goes without saying that if a brick falls on my head on Bronnaya Street…”
“A brick, without rhyme or reason,” the stranger interrupted impressively, “never falls on anyone’s head. Specifically, I assure you, it poses absolutely no threat to you. You will die a different death.”
“Perhaps you know exactly which one?” Berlioz inquired with perfectly natural irony, finding himself drawn into what was truly a ridiculous conversation, “and will you tell me?”
“Gladly,” the stranger responded. He measured Berlioz with a look, as if preparing to tailor a suit for him, mumbled something like, “One, two… Mercury in the second house… the moon has gone… six—misfortune… evening—seven…” and announced loudly and joyfully: “Your head will be cut off!”
Bezdomny stared wildly and angrily at the brash stranger, while Berlioz asked with a wry smile:
“And who exactly will do it? Enemies? Interventionists?”
“No,” the companion replied, “A Russian woman, a Komsomol member.”
“Hmm…” Berlioz muttered, irritated by the stranger’s joke, “well, that, excuse me, is improbable.”
“I beg your pardon too,” the foreigner replied, “but it is so. Yes, I would like to ask you what you will be doing this evening, if it’s not a secret?”
“It’s no secret. I’ll stop by my place on Sadovaya now, and then at ten o’clock there will be a meeting at MASSOLIT, and I will be chairing it.”
“No, that cannot be,” the foreigner firmly contradicted.
“And why not?”
“Because,” the foreigner replied, squinting at the sky, where black birds silently traced paths, sensing the evening cool, “Because Anushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and not only bought it, but even spilled it. So the meeting will not take place.”
Here, quite understandably, silence fell under the linden trees.
“Excuse me,” Berlioz said after a pause, looking at the nonsense-spouting foreigner, “what does sunflower oil have to do with anything… and who is this Anushka?”
“Sunflower oil has this to do with it,” Bezdomny suddenly interjected, obviously having decided to declare war on the uninvited companion, “have you ever visited an asylum for the mentally ill, Citizen?”
“Ivan!…” Mikhail Alexandrovich quietly exclaimed.
But the foreigner was not at all offended and laughed very cheerfully.
“I have, I have, and more than once!” he cried, laughing, but keeping his unsmiling eye fixed on the poet. “Where haven’t I been! I only regret that I didn’t get around to asking the professor what schizophrenia is. So you’ll have to find that out yourself, Ivan Nikolaevich!”
“How do you know my name?”
“My dear Ivan Nikolaevich, who doesn’t know you?”—here the foreigner pulled out yesterday’s issue of the Literary Gazette from his pocket, and Ivan Nikolaevich saw his own likeness on the first page, and his own poems beneath it. But the proof of fame and popularity that had delighted the poet yesterday did not please him this time in the least.
“I apologize,” he said, and his face darkened, “can you wait a minute? I want to say a couple of words to my comrade.”
“Oh, with pleasure!” the stranger exclaimed, “It’s so nice here under the linden trees, and besides, I’m not in a hurry.”
“Listen, Misha,” the poet whispered, dragging Berlioz aside, “He’s no tourist, he’s a spy. He’s a Russian émigré who’s moved back here. Ask him for his documents, or he’ll slip away…”
“You think so?” Berlioz whispered anxiously, while thinking: “He’s right!”
“You can trust me,” the poet hissed in his ear, “he’s pretending to be a fool to pump us for information. You hear how well he speaks Russian,”—the poet was speaking and glancing back, making sure the stranger didn’t escape—”let’s go, let’s detain him, or he’ll leave…”
And the poet pulled Berlioz by the arm toward the bench.
The stranger was not sitting, but standing next to it, holding in his hands a small book in a dark grey binding, a thick envelope of good paper, and a calling card.
“Excuse me for forgetting to introduce myself to you in the heat of our debate. Here is my card, passport, and invitation to come to Moscow for consultation,” the stranger pronounced weightily, looking keenly at both writers.
They were embarrassed. “Damn, he heard everything,” Berlioz thought and indicated with a polite gesture that the presentation of documents was unnecessary. While the foreigner was handing them to the editor, the poet managed to glimpse the word “Professor” printed in foreign letters on the card, and the initial letter of the surname—a double “W”.
“Very pleased,” the editor was meanwhile mumbling in confusion, and the foreigner put the documents back in his pocket.
Relations were thus restored, and all three sat down on the bench again.
“You’ve been invited here as a consultant, Professor?” Berlioz asked.
“Yes, a consultant.”
“Are you German?” Bezdomny inquired.
“Me?” The Professor asked back and suddenly became thoughtful. “Yes, perhaps German…” he said.
“You speak Russian awfully well,” Bezdomny noted.
“Oh, I am a polyglot generally, and I know a great many languages,” the Professor replied.
“And what is your specialization?” Berlioz inquired.
“I am a specialist in black magic.”
“Good heavens!” flashed through Mikhail Alexandrovich’s mind.
“And… and you were invited here for that specialization?” he stammered.
“Yes, for that I was invited,” the Professor confirmed and explained: “Authentic manuscripts of the black magician Gerbert of Aurillac, tenth century, have been discovered in the State Library here, and so I am required to decipher them. I am the only specialist in the world.”
“Ah! You are a historian?” Berlioz asked with great relief and respect.
“I am a historian,” the scholar confirmed and added out of nowhere: “There will be an interesting story on the Patriarch’s Ponds this evening!”
And again both the editor and the poet were extremely surprised, and the Professor beckoned both of them closer, and when they leaned toward him, he whispered:
“Keep in mind that Jesus did exist.”
“You see, Professor,” Berlioz replied with a forced smile, “we respect your great knowledge, but we ourselves hold a different point of view on this matter.”
“There is no need for any points of view!” the strange Professor replied, “He simply existed, and that’s all.”
“But some proof is required…” Berlioz began.
“And no proof is required,” the Professor replied and began to speak quietly, his accent having disappeared for some reason: “It’s simple: in a white cloak…”
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