lked on alongside her,
trying to walk  in step with her and to my amazement I felt completely  free
of shyness.
     '" No, I like flowers, only not these," I said.
     '" Which flowers do you like? "
     '" I love roses."
     'I immediately  regretted having said it, because she smiled  guiltily
and threw her flowers into the gutter.  Slightly embarrassed, I  picked them
up and gave them to her but  she pushed them away  with a smile and I had to
carry them.
     'We walked on in silence for a while until she pulled the flowers out
of my hand and threw them in the roadway, then slipped her black-gloved hand
into mine and we went on.'
     'Go on,' said Ivan, ' and please don't leave anything out! '
     'Well,' said the visitor, ' you can  guess what happened  after that.'
He wiped away a sudden tear with his right sleeve and went on. ' Love leaped
up out at  us like  a murderer  jumping  out of a dark  alley. It shocked us
both--the shock of a stroke of lightning, the  shock of a flick-knife. Later
she said that  this wasn't so, that we had of course been  in love for years
without  knowing  each  other  and never  meeting,  that she had merely been
living with another man and I had been living with . . . that girl, what was
her name . . .? '
     'With whom? ' asked Bezdomny.
     'With  .  .  . er, that girl  . .  . she was called . .  .' said  the
visitor, snapping his fingers in a vain effort to remember.
     'Were you married to her? ' ' Yes, of course I was, that's why it's so
embarrassing to forget  ... I think it was Varya ... or was it  Manya? . . .
no, Varya, that's it ... she wore a striped dress, worked at the museum. . .
. No good, can't  remember. So, she used  to  say,  she  had  gone  out that
morning carrying those yellow flowers for me to find her at last and that if
it hadn't happened she would  have committed  suicide because  her  life was
empty.
     'Yes, the shock  of love struck us both at once. I  knew it within the
hour when we  found ourselves, quite unawares, on the embankment  below  the
Kremlin  wall.  We  talked as though we had  only  parted the day before, as
though we had known each other  for years. We agreed to meet the next day at
the same place by the Moscow River and  we did. The  May sun shone on us and
soon that woman became my mistress.
     'She came to  me every day at noon. I began waiting for her from early
morning.  The  strain of waiting gave me hallucinations of seeing  things on
the  table.  After ten  minutes I would sit at my little window and start to
listen for  the creak of that ancient garden gate. It was curious  : until I
met her no one ever came into our little  yard. Now it seemed to me that the
whole town  was crowding in. The gate would  creak, my heart would bound and
outside the window a pair of muddy boots would  appear level with my head. A
knife-grinder. Who  in our house could possibly need  a  knife-grinder? What
was there for him to sharpen? Whose knives?
     'She only came through that gate once a day, but  my  heart would beat
faster from at least ten false alarms every morning. Then when her time came
and the hands were pointing to  noon, my heart went  on  thumping  until her
shoes  with their black patent-leather straps  and steel buckles drew level,
almost soundlessly, with my basement window.
     'Sometimes for fun  she would stop  at the  second window and  tap the
pane with her foot. In a second I would appear at that window but always her
shoe  and  her  black silk dress that blocked  the light had  vanished and I
would turn instead to the hall to let her in.
     'Nobody knew  about our  liaison, I can swear to that, although  as  a
rule  no  one  can keep such affairs a complete secret.  Her  husband didn't
know, our friends didn't know. The other tenants in that forgotten old house
knew, of course, because they could see that a woman called on me every day,
but they never knew her name.'
     'Who was she?' asked Ivan, deeply fascinated by this love story.
     The visitor made a sign which meant  that he would never reveal this to
anyone and went on with his narrative.
     The master and  his unknown mistress loved one another so strongly that
they became utterly inseparable. Ivan could clearly see  for himself the two
basement  rooms, where it was always twilight  from the  shade of  the lilac
bush and the fence : the shabby red furniture, the bureau,  the clock on top
of it which struck the half-hours and books, books from the painted floor to
the smoke-blackened ceiling, and the stove.
     Ivan  learned that from the very first days of their affair the man and
his mistress decided that fate had brought them together on  the  corner  of
the Tverskaya and that side-street and that they were made for each other to
eternity.
     Ivan  heard his visitor  describe how the lovers spent their  day.  Her
first action on arrival was to put  on an apron and  light an oil stove on a
wooden table in the  cramped  hall, with its tap and sink  that the wretched
patient  had recalled with such pride. There she cooked lunch  and served it
on an oval table in the  living-room. When the May storms blew and the water
slashed noisily  past  the  dim little  windows, threatening  to flood their
home, the lovers stoked up the  stove and baked potatoes in it. Steam poured
out of the potatoes as they cut them open, the charred skins blackened their
fingers. There was laughter in the basement, after the rain the trees in the
garden scattered broken branches and white blossom.
     When the  storms were past and the  heat of  summer  came, the vase was
filled with the long-awaited roses that they both loved so much. The man who
called himself  the master worked feverishly at his novel and the  book cast
its spell over the unknown woman.
     'At  times  I actually felt jealous  of  it,'  the moonlight  visitor
whispered to Ivan.
     Running   her  sharp,  pointed   fingernails  through  her  hair,   she
ceaselessly read and re-read the manuscript,  sewing that same black cap  as
she did so. Sometimes she would squat down by the lower bookshelves or stand
by the topmost ones and wipe the hundreds of dusty spines. Sensing fame, she
drove him on  and started to call him ' the master '. She waited impatiently
for the  promised final words  about the fifth Procurator of Judaea, reading
out in a loud sing-song  random  sentences that  pleased her and saying that
the novel was her life.
     It was finished in August and handed to a typist  who transcribed it in
five  copies. At last came the moment to  leave  the secret refuge and enter
the outside world.
     'When I emerged  into the world clutching my novel, my life came to an
end,' whispered the master. He hung his head and for a long while wagged the
black cap with  its embroidered yellow ' M '. He went on  with his story but
it  grew more disjointed and  Ivan could only gather that  his  visitor  had
suffered some disaster.
     'It was my first sortie into the literary world, but now that it's all
over and I am ruined for everyone to see, it fills  me with horror  to think
of it! '  whispered  the master solemnly,  raising his  hand. ' God,  what a
shock he gave me! '
     'Who?  '  murmured  Ivan,  scarcely  audibly,  afraid to disturb  the
master's inspiration.
     'The editor, of course, the editor!  Oh yes,  he read it. He looked at
me  as if I had  a swollen face,  avoided  my  eyes  and  even giggled  with
embarrassment.   He  had   smudged   and   creased   the  typescript   quite
unnecessarily. He asked me  questions which I thought  were insane.  He said
nothing about the substance of the novel but asked me who I  was and where I
came  from, had I  been  writing for long,  why had nothing been heard of me
before  and finally  asked what struck me  as the most  idiotic question  of
all--who had given me the idea of writing a novel on such a curious subject?
Eventually  I lost  patience with him  and asked him straight out whether he
was going to print my novel or not. This embarrassed him. He  began mumbling
something, then announced that he personally was not competent to decide and
that the other members  of the editorial board would have to study the book,
in  particular the  critics  Latunsky and  Ariman  and  the author  Mstislav
Lavrovich.  He  asked  me to come back a fortnight  later. I did so and  was
received by a  girl who had developed a permanent squint from having to tell
so many lies.'
     'That's  Lapshennikova,  the editor's  secretary,'  said Ivan with  a
smile, knowing the world that his visitor was describing with such rancour.
     'Maybe,' he cut  in.  ' Anyway, she gave  me  back my novel thoroughly
tattered  and covered in  grease-marks. Trying  not to look  at me, the girl
informed me  that the  editors  had  enough material for two years ahead and
therefore  the question  of  printing  my  novel  became,  as  she put it, "
redundant".  What  ^Ise do I remember?'  murmured  the  visitor, wiping  his
forehead. ' Oh yes, the red blobs spattered all over the title page and  the
eyes of my mistress. Yes, I remember those eyes.'
     The story grew more and more confused, full of more and more disjointed
remarks that trailed off unfinished. He  said something about slanting  rain
and despair in their basement home, about going somewhere else. He whispered
urgently that he would never, never blame  her, the  woman who had urged him
on into the struggle.
     After that, as  far  as Ivan could tell,  something strange  and sudden
happened.  One day  he  opened  a  newspaper and saw  an  article by Ariman,
entitled ' The Enemy Makes a Sortie,' where the critic warned all and sundry
that he, that  is to  say our hero had tried to drag into  print an apologia
for Jesus Christ.
     'I  remember that! '  cried Ivan. '  But I've forgotten what your name
was.'  '  I repeat,  let's leave my name  out  of it,  it no longer exists,'
replied  the visitor. ' It's not  important.  A  day or  two  later  another
article appeared in a different paper signed by Mstislav Lavrovich, in which
the writer suggested  striking  and  striking hard at all this pilatism  and
religiosity which I was trying to drag (that damned word again!) into print.
Stunned by  that unheard-of word "  pilatism " I opened the third newspaper.
In it were two articles, one by Latunsky, the other signed with the initials
"  N.E." Believe  me,  Ariman's and  Lavrovich's stuff was  a mere  joke  by
comparison with Latunsky's article. Suffice it to say that it was entitled "
A Militant Old  Believer ". I was  so absorbed in reading the  article about
myself that I did not notice her standing in front of me with a wet umbrella
and  a sodden copy  of the  same newspaper. Her eyes were flashing fire, her
hands cold  and trembling. First she  rushed to kiss me then she  said  in a
strangled voice, thumping the table, that she was going to murder Latunsky.'
     Embarrassed, Ivan gave a groan but said nothing. ' The  joyless  autumn
days came,' the visitor went on, ' the  appalling failure of my novel seemed
to have withered part of my soul. In fact I no longer had anything to do and
I only lived for my meetings with her. Then something began to happen to me.
God  knows  what it was; I  expect Stravinsky has unravelled  it long ago. I
began to  suffer  from  depression  and strange forebodings.  The  articles,
incidentally, did not stop. At first I simply laughed at them, then came the
second  stage : amazement. In literally  every line  of  those articles  one
could detect a sense of falsity, of unease, in spite of  their confident and
threatening tone. I couldn't help  feeling--and the conviction grew stronger
the more I read--that the people writing those articles were not saying what
they had really wanted to say and that this was the cause of their fury. And
then came the third stage--fear. Don't misunderstand me, I was not afraid of
the articles ; I was afraid of something else which had  nothing  to do with
them or with my  novel. I started, for instance, to be afraid of the dark. I
was reaching the stage of mental derangement. I felt, especially just before
going  to  sleep, that  some  very  cold, supple  octopus was fastening  its
tentacles round my heart. I had to sleep with the light on.
     'My  beloved had changed too. I told her nothing about the octopus, of
course, but she saw that something was wrong with me. She lost weight,  grew
paler, stopped laughing and  kept begging  me to have that excerpt from  the
novel printed. She said I should forget everything and go south to the Black
Sea, paying  for  the  journey  with what was  left  of the hundred thousand
roubles.
     'She  was very insistent, so to avoid arguing with her (something told
me that  I never would  go to the Black Sea)  I promised to arrange the trip
soon. However, she  announced that she would buy me the  ticket  herself.  I
took out all my money, which was about  ten thousand roubles, and gave it to
her.
     '" Why so much? " she said in surprise.
     'I said something about being afraid of burglars and asked her to keep
the money until my departure. She took it,  put it  in her handbag, began to
kiss  me and said that she  would rather die  than  leave  me  alone in this
condition, but  people were expecting her, she had to go but would come back
the next day. She begged me not to be afraid.
     'It was twilight, in mid-October. She went. I lay down on my divan and
fell asleep without putting on the light. I was awakened by the feeling that
the octopus was there. Fumbling in the dark I just  managed to switch on the
lamp. My watch showed two o'clock in the morning. When I had  gone to bed  I
had been  sickening; when I woke up I was an ill man. I had a sudden feeling
that the autumn  murk was about to burst the window-panes, run into the room
and I would  drown  in it as if it were ink. I had lost control of myself. I
screamed,  I  wanted to run somewhere,  if  only  to my  landlord  upstairs.
Wrestling  with myself as  one struggles with a  lunatic, I had  just enough
strength to crawl  to the stove and re-light  it. When I  heard  it begin to
crackle  and the fire-door started rattling in the draught,  I felt slightly
better. I rushed into the hall, switched  on the  light,  found  a bottle of
white wine and began gulping it down from the bottle. This  calmed my fright
a little, at least enough to stop me from running to my landlord. Instead, I
went back to  the stove. I opened  the  fire-door. The heat began to warm my
hands and face and I whispered :
     '" Something terrible has happened to me . . . Come, come, please come
. . .! "
     'But nobody came.  The fire roared in  the stove, rain whipped against
the windows.  Then I took  the heavy typescript copies  of the  novel and my
handwritten drafts out  of the desk drawer and started to burn them. It  was
terribly hard to do because  paper that has been written over in ink doesn't
burn easily. Breaking my fingernails I tore up the manuscript books, stuffed
them down between the  logs  and  stoked  the burning pages  with the poker.
Occasionally  there  was  so  much  ash that it  put  the flames  out, but I
struggled with it until finally the whole novel, resisting fiercely  to  the
end,  was  destroyed.  Familiar words flickered before me, the  yellow crept
inexorably up the  pages yet  I could still read the words through it.  They
only  vanished  when the  paper turned black  and  I  had given  it a savage
beating with the poker.
     'There  was a sound  of someone scratching gently at the  window.  My
heart leaped and  thrusting the last manuscript book into the  fire I rushed
up the brick steps from the basement to the door that opened on to the yard.
Panting, I reached the door and asked softly:
     '" Who's there? "
     'And a voice, her voice, answered :
     '" It's me . . ."
     'I don't remember how I managed the  chain and the key. As soon as she
was  indoors she fell into my  arms, all wet,  cheek wet,  hair  bedraggled,
shivering. I could only say :
     '"  Is  it  really  you? . .  ." then my voice  broke off and we  ran
downstairs into the flat.
     'She  took off her  coat  in  the hall and  we  went straight into the
living-room. Gasping, she pulled the last bundle of  paper out of  the stove
with  her bare hands. The  room at once filled with smoke. I stamped out the
flames  with  my  foot  and  she  collapsed  on the  divan  and  burst  into
convulsive, uncontrollable tears.
     'When she was calm again I said :
     '"  I  suddenly felt I hated  the novel and  I was afraid. I'm sick. I
feel terrible."
     'She sat up and said :
     '" God how ill you look. Why, why?  But I'm going  to save you. What's
the matter? "
     'I  could see her  eyes swollen from smoke and  weeping, felt her cool
hands smoothing my brow.
     '"  I  shall make you better," she  murmured, burying her head  in  my
shoulder.  " You're going to write it  again. Why, oh why  didn't I keep one
copy myself? "
     'She ground her teeth  with fury  and said something indistinct. Then
with clamped lips she started to collect and sort the burnt sheets of paper.
It was a chapter from somewhere  in the  middle of the book, I forget which.
She carefully piled up the sheets, wrapped them up into a parcel and tied it
with string. All her movements  showed that  she was  a determined woman who
was in absolute command of herself. She asked for a glass of wine and having
drunk it said calmly :
     '" This is how one pays for lying," she said, " and I don't want to go
on lying any more.  I would have stayed with you this evening,  but I didn't
want to do it like that. I don't want his last memory of me to be that I ran
out on him in the middle of the night. He has never  done me any harm ... He
was suddenly called out, there's a  fire at his  factory. But he'll  be back
soon. I'll tell him tomorrow  morning, tell him I love someone else and then
come back to you for ever. If you don't want me to do that, tell me."
     '" My poor, poor girl," I said to her.  " I won't allow you to do it.
It will be hell living with me and  I  don't want  you to  perish here as  I
shall perish."
     '" Is that  the only  reason?  "  she asked, putting her eyes close to
mine. ' " That's the only reason."
     'She grew terribly excited, hugged me, embraced my neck and said:
     '" Then I shall die with you. I shall be here tomorrow morning."
     'The last that I remember seeing of her was the patch of light from my
hall and in that patch of light a loose  curl of her hair, her beret and her
determined eyes,  her dark silhouette in the doorway and a parcel wrapped in
white paper.
     '" I'd see you  out, but I don't trust myself to come  back alone, I'm
afraid."
     '" Don't  be  afraid.  Just wait a  few  hours.  I'll be back  tomorrow
morning."
     'Those were the last words that I heard her say.
     'Sshh!  '  The patient  suddenly  interrupted  himself  and  raised Ms
finger. ' It's a restless moonlit  night.' He disappeared on to the balcony.
Ivan heard the sound of wheels along  the corridor, there was a faint  groan
or cry.
     When all  was  quiet again,  the visitor came back and  reported that a
patient had been put  into room No.  120, a man who kept asking for his head
back. Both men relapsed into anxious silence  for a  while, but soon resumed
their interrupted talk. The visitor had just opened his mouth but the night,
as he  had said, was a restless one : voices were heard in the  corridor and
the visitor began to whisper  into  Ivan's ear so  softly that only the poet
could hear what he was saying, with the exception of the first sentence :
     'A quarter  of an  hour after she had left me there came a knock at my
window . . .'
     The  man was obviously very excited by  what  he  was  whispering  into
Ivan's  ear.  Now and  again  a spasm would  cross his face. Fear  and anger
sparkled in  his  eyes. The narrator  pointed in the direction  of the moon,
which had  long ago disappeared from the balcony.  Only when all  the noises
outside had stopped did the visitor move away from Ivan and speak louder :
     'Yes, so there I stood, out in my little yard, one night in the middle
of January, wearing the same overcoat but without any buttons now  and I was
freezing with cold. Behind me the lilac bush was buried in snowdrifts, below
and in front of me were  my feebly lit  windows with  drawn blinds. I  knelt
down to the first of them and listened--a gramophone was playing in my room.
I could hear it but see nothing. After a slight pause I went out of the gate
and  into the street.  A snowstorm  was howling  along it. A  dog which  ran
between  my legs frightened  me,  and to get away from  it I crossed to  the
other side.  Cold and  fear, which had become my inseparable companions, had
driven me to desperation.  I had nowhere to  go and the simplest thing would
have been  to throw myself under a tram then and there where my  side street
joined the main  road. In the distance I could see the approaching tramcars,
looking  like  ice-encrusted lighted  boxes, and hear the fearful scrunch of
their wheels  along the frostbound tracks. But the joke, my dear friend, was
that  every cell of my body was in the grip of fear.  I was as afraid of the
tram as I  had been of the dog. I'm the most hopeless case in this building,
I assure you! '
     'But  you  could  have  let   her  know,  couldn't  you?'  said  Ivan
sympatherically. '  Besides, she had  all your money. I suppose she kept it,
did she? '
     'Don't  worry,  of  course  she  kept  it.  But  you obviously  don't
understand me. Or rather I have lost the powers of description  that  I once
had. I don't  feel very sorry for her, as she is  of no more  use to me. Why
should  I  write  to  her?  She  would  be faced,' said the  visitor  gazing
pensively at the night  sky, ' by a letter from the madhouse. Can one really
write to anyone from  an address like this?  ... I--a  mental  patient?  How
could I make her so unhappy? I ... I couldn't do it.'
     Ivan could only agree. The  poet's silence was eloquent of his sympathy
and  compassion for his visitor, who bowed his head in  pain at his memories
and said :
     'Poor woman ... I can only hope she has forgotten me . . .'
     'But you may recover,' said Ivan timidly.
     'I am incurable,'  said  the visitor calmly. ' Even though  Stravinsky
says that he will send me back to normal life,  I don't believe him. He's  a
humane man and he only wants to comfort me. I won't deny, though, that I'm a
great deal better now than  I was. Now, where was  I? Oh yes. The frost, the
moving tram-cars ...  I  knew that this  clinic had  just been opened  and I
crossed  the  whole town on foot  to  come  here. It  was  madness! I  would
probably  have frozen  to death but for a lucky chance.  A lorry had  broken
down on the  road and I approached the driver.  It was four  kilometres past
the city  limits and to my surprise he took pity  on me. He was driving here
and  he  took me  ... The toes of my left  foot were  frost-bitten, but they
cured them. I've been here four months now. And do you know, I think this is
not  at all a bad place. I shouldn't  bother to make any great plans for the
future if I  were you. I, for example, wanted to  travel all over the world.
Well, it  seems that  I was not fated to have my wish.  I shall only see  an
insignificant little corner of the globe. I don't think it's necessarily the
best bit, but I repeat, it's not so bad. Summer's on the way and the balcony
will be covered in ivy, so Praskovya Fyodorovna  tells me.  These keys  have
enlarged  my radius of action. There'll be a moon at night. Oh,  it has set!
It's freshening. Midnight is on the way. It's time for me to go.'
     'Tell me, what happened afterwards  with Yeshua  and Pilate? ' begged
Ivan. ' Please, I want to know.'
     'Oh no, I couldn't,' replied the visitor, wincing painfully. ' I can't
think about my novel without shuddering. Your  friend from Patriarch's Ponds
could have done it better than I can. Thanks for the talk. Goodbye.'
     Before Ivan had  time to notice it,  the grille had shut with  a gentle
click and the visitor was gone.



        14. Saved by Cock-Crow



     His nerves in  shreds, Rimsky did not stay  for the completion  of  the
police report on the incident but took refuge in his own office. He sat down
at the desk and  with bloodshot eyes stared at the magic rouble notes spread
out  in  front of  him.  The treasurer  felt his  reason slipping. A  steady
rumbling  could be heard  from outside  as the public  streamed out  of  the
theatre on to  the street. Suddenly Rimsky's acute hearing distinctly caught
the screech of a police whistle,  always a  sound of  ill-omen. When it  was
repeated and answered by another, more prolonged and authoritative, followed
by a clearly audible  bellow of laughter and a kind  of ululating noise, the
treasurer  realised at once that something scandalous  was  happening in the
street. However much he might like  to disown it, the noise was  bound to be
closely  connected with the terrible act put on that  evening  by  the black
magician and his assistants.
     The treasurer was right. As he glanced out of the window on to Sadovaya
Street he gave a grimace and hissed :
     'I knew it! '
     In  the bright  light of the street  lamps  he saw  below  him  on  the
pavement a woman wearing nothing but a pair of violet knickers, a hat and an
umbrella.  Round  the  painfully  embarrassed woman,  trying  desperately to
crouch down and run away, surged the crowd laughing in the way that had sent
shivers down  Rimsky's spine. Beside the woman was a man who was ripping off
his coat and getting his arm hopelessly tangled in the sleeve.
     Shouts and roars of laughter were  also coming from the side  entrance,
and  as he turned in that  direction  Grigory Danilovich  saw another woman,
this time  in pink  underwear. She was struggling across  the pavement in an
attempt to hide in the doorway, but the people coming out barred her way and
the wretched victim of her own rashness and vanity, cheated by the  sinister
Faggot, could do nothing but  hope to be  swallowed  up  by  the  ground.  A
policeman  ran towards  the  unfortunate  woman,  splitting the air with his
whistle. He was  closely followed  by some cheerful, cloth-capped young men,
the source of the ribald laughter and wolf-whistles.
     A  thin,  moustached horse-cab  driver drove  up  alongside  the  first
undressed woman and smiling all over his whiskered face, reined in his horse
with a flourish.
     Rimsky punched himself on the head, spat with fury and jumped back from
the window. He sat at his  desk for a while listening  to the  noise  in the
street. The sound of whistles from various  directions rose to  a climax and
then  began  to fade  out.  To  Rimsky's  astonishment  the  uproar subsided
unexpectedly soon.
     The time had come  to  act, to drink the bitter  cup of responsibility.
The telephones had been repaired during the last act and he now had  to ring
up, report  the  incident, ask  for  help,  blame it  all  on Likhodeyev and
exculpate himself.
     Twice Rimsky nervously picked up the  receiver and  twice  put it down.
Suddenly the  deathly  silence  of the  office was broken  by the  telephone
itself  ringing. He  jumped  and went  cold. ' My nerves  are in  a terrible
state,' he thought as he lifted the telephone. Immediately he staggered back
and  turned whiter than paper. A  soft, sensual woman's voice whispered into
the earpiece :
     'Don't ring up, Rimsky, or you'll regret it . . .'
     The  line  went dead.  Feeling gooseflesh spreading over  his skin, the
treasurer replaced the receiver  and glanced round to the window behind  his
back.  Through the sparse leaves of a sycamore  tree he saw  the moon flying
through  a translucent cloud. He seemed to be mesmerised by the  branches of
the tree and  the longer Rimsky stared at them the more strongly he felt the
grip of fear.
     Pulling  himself together  the  treasurer finally  turned away from the
moonlit  window and stood  up.  There was  now  no longer  any  question  of
telephoning and Rimsky could only think of one thing--how to get out  of the
theatre as quickly as possible.
     He listened : the building was silent. He realised that for  some  time
now he had been  the only person  left on the second floor  and a  childish,
uncontrollable fear overcame him at  the thought. He shuddered to think that
he  would  have  to walk  alone  through  the  empty  passages and  down the
staircase.  He feverishly grabbed the magic roubles from  his desk,  stuffed
them into his briefcase and coughed to summon up a little courage. His cough
sounded hoarse and weak.
     At  this  moment  he noticed what seemed to  be a  damp,  evil-smelling
substance oozing under  the door and into  his office. A tremor ran down the
treasurer's spine.  Suddenly a clock began to strike midnight and even  this
made him shudder. But his heart sank completely when he heard the sound of a
latch-key being  softly turned  in  the lock.  Clutching his  briefcase with
damp, cold hands Rimsky felt that if that scraping noise in the keyhole were
to last much longer his nerves would snap and he would scream.
     At last  the door gave  way and Varenukha slipped noiselessly  into the
office. Rimsky  collapsed into an armchair. Gasping for air,  he smiled what
was meant to be an ingratiating smile and whispered :
     'God, what a fright you gave me. . . .'
     Terrifying as  this sudden appearance  was, it had its hopeful side--it
cleared up at least one little mystery in this whole baffling affair.
     'Tell me, tell me,  quickly!  . . .' croaked Rimsky, clutching at his
one straw of certainty in a world gone mad. ' What does this all mean? "
     'I'm  sorry,'  mumbled Varenukha,  closing the door.  '  I thought you
would  have left  by now.' Without  taking  his cap  off  he  crossed to  an
armchair  and sat down beside the desk, facing  Rimsky. There was a trace of
something  odd  in Varenukha's reply, immediately  detected by Rimsky, whose
sensitivity was now on a par with the world's most delicate seismograph. For
one thing, why had Varenukha come to the treasurer's office if he thought he
wasn't there? He had his own office, after all. For another, no matter which
entrance Varenukha might have used to come into the theatre he must have met
one of the night watchmen, who had all been told that Grigory Danilovich was
working  late  in his office. Rimsky, however, did not dwell  long  on these
peculiarities--this was not the moment.
     'Why didn't  you  ring me? And what the  hell was all  that  pantomime
about Yalta? '
     'It was what I thought,' replied the  house manager, making a sucking
noise as though troubled by an aching  tooth. ' They found  him in a bar out
at Pushkino.'
     'Pushkino? But that's just outside Moscow! What  about those telegrams
from Yalta? '
     'Yalta--hell! He got the Pushkino telegraphist drunk and they started
playing  the fool, which included sending us those  telegrams marked " Yalta
".'
     'Aha,  aha  ... I see  now . . .' crooned  Rimsky,  his yellowish eyes
flashing. In his mind's eye he saw Stepa being  solemnly dismissed  from his
job. Freedom! At last Rimsky would be rid  of that idiot Likhodeyev! Perhaps
something even worse than the sack was in store for Stepan Bogdanovich . . .
'  Tell  me  all the  details!  ' cried  Rimsky,  banging  his desk  with  a
paper-weight.
     Varenukha began telling the story. As  soon as he  had  arrived  at the
place where the  treasurer had sent  him, he was  immediately  shown  in and
listened to with great attention. No one, of  course, believed for  a moment
that  Stepa  was  in  Yalta.  Everybody  at  once  agreed  with  Varenukha's
suggestion that Likhodeyev was  obviously  at the '  Yalta  '  restaurant in
Pushkino. '  Where is he now? ' Rimsky interrupted excitedly. ' Where do you
think?  ' replied  the  house manager with a twisted smile. ' In  the police
cells, of course, being sobered up! '
     'Ah! Thank God for that! '
     Varenukha  went  on with his story  and  the more  he  said the clearer
Rimsky saw the long chain of Likhodeyev's misdeeds,  each succeeding link in
it  worse than the last. What a price  he was going to pay  for one  drunken
afternoon at  Pushkino!  Dancing with  the telegraphist.  Chasing  terrified
women. Picking a fight with the barman at the '  Yalta'. Throwing  onions on
to the  floor. Breaking eight bottles of white wine. Smashing a cab-driver's
taximeter for refusing to take him.  Threatening to  arrest people who tried
to stop him. . . .
     Stepa was  well known in  the Moscow theatre  world  and everybody knew
that the man was a menace, but  this  story was just a shade too much,  even
for Stepa. . . . Rimsky's sharp  eyes bored into Varenukha's face across the
desk  and the longer the story went  on the  grimmer those eyes became.  The
more  Varenukha  embroidered  his  account with  picturesque  and  revolting
details, the  less Rimsky believed him.  When  Varenukha described how Stepa
was so far gone  that he tried to resist the men who had  been sent to bring
him back to Moscow,  Rimsky  was  quite  certain that  everything the  house
manager was telling him was a lie--a lie from beginning to end.
     Varenukha had never gone to Pushkino, and  Stepa  had never  been there
either. There was  no drunken telegraphist, no broken  glass in  the bar and
Stepa had not been hauled away with ropes-- none of it had ever happened.
     As soon  as Rimsky  felt sure that his  colleague was lying to  him,  a
feeling of terror crawled over his body, beginning with his feet and for the
second time he had the weird feeling that a kind of malarial damp was oozing
across  the  floor.  The  house  manager  was  sitting in a curious  hunched
attitude in the  armchair, trying  constantly to  stay in  the shadow of the
blue-shaded table lamp and ostensibly shading his eyes from the light with a
folded  newspaper. Without  taking his  eyes  off  Varenukha for  a  moment,
Rimsky's mind was working furiously to unravel this new  mystery. Why should
the  man be lying to him at  this late hour in the totally empty  and silent
building?  Slowly  a  consciousness of danger, of  an  unknown  but terrible
danger  took hold of Rimsky. Pretending not to notice Varenukha's  fidgeting
and  tricks  with the  newspaper,  the treasurer concentrated  on  his face,
scarcely  listening  to  what he was  saying. There was something  else that
Rimsky found even more sinister than  this slanderous and  completely  bogus
yarn about the goings-on in Pushkino, and that something was a change in the
house manager's appearance and manner.
     However hard Varenukha tried to pull down the peak of  his cap to shade
his face and however much he waved the  newspaper, Rimsky managed to discern
an enormous bruise that covered most of the right side of his face, starting
at his nose.  What  was more,  this normally ruddy-cheeked  man now  had  an
unhealthy chalky  pallor  and although  the night was hot, he was wearing an
old-fashioned  striped cravat tied round his neck. If one  added to this his
newly acquired and repulsive habit of sucking his teeth, a distinct lowering
and coarsening of  his tone of  voice  and the  furtive, shifty  look in his
eyes, it was safe to say that Ivan Savye-lich Varenukha was unrecognisable.
     Something even more insistent was worrying Rimsky, but he could not put
his finger on it however much he racked his brain or stared at Varenukha. He
was only  sure of one thing--that there was something peculiar and unnatural
in the man's posture in that familiar chair.
     'Well, finally they overpowered him and shoved him into a car,' boomed
Varenukha, peeping from under the newspaper and covering his bruise with his
hand.
     Rimsky suddenly stretched out his arm and with an apparently unthinking
gesture  of his palm pressed the button  of an electric  bell, drumming  his
fingers as he did so. His heart  sank. A loud ringing should have been heard
instantly  throughout the building --but nothing happened, and the bell-push
merely  sank  lifelessly  into the desktop. The  warning  system  was out of
order.
     Rimsky's  cunning move  did not escape Varenukha, who scowled and  said
with a clear flicker of hostility in his look :
     'Why did you ring? '
     'Oh, I just pressed it by mistake, without thinking,' mumbled Rimsky,
pulling back his hand and asked in a shaky voice :
     'What's that on your face? '
     'The car braked suddenly and I hit myself on the door-handle,' replied
Varenukha, averting his eyes.
     'He's  lying!' said Rimsky  to himself. Suddenly  his eyes gaped with
utter horror and he pressed himself against the back of his chair.
     On the floor behind Varenukha's chair lay two intersecting shadows, one
thicker and blacker than the  other.  The shadows  cast  by the  back of the
chair and its tapering legs were clearly visible, but above  the  shadow  of
the chairback there was no shadow or' Varenukha's head, just as there was no
shadow of his feet to be seen under the chairlegs.
     'He throws no shadow! ' cried Rimsky in a silent shriek of despair. He
shuddered helplessly.
     Following  Rimsky's horrified stare Varenukha  glanced furtively  round
behind the  chairback  and  realised that  he  had been found out. He got up
(Rimsky  did the same) and took  a  pace away from the  desk,  clutching his
briefcase.
     'You've  guessed, damn you! You always  were clever,' said  Varenukha
smiling evilly right into  Rimsky's face.  Then he  suddenly  leaped for the
door and quickly pushed  down the  latch-button on  the lock. The  treasurer
looked  round  in desperation, retreated towards the  window that gave on to
the garden  and in that moon-flooded window he saw the face of  a naked girl
pressed to the glass,  her  bare  arm reaching through the open top pane and
trying to open the lower casement.
     It seemed to Rimsky that the light of  the  desk-lamp was going out and
that the desk itself  was tilting. A wave  of icy cold washed over him,  but
luckily for him  he  fought it  off  and did not fall. The remnants  of  his
strength were only enough for him to whisper:
     'Help . . .'
     Varenukha, guarding the door, was  jumping  up  and  down beside it. He
hissed and sucked,  signalling to the girl in the  window  and  pointing his
crooked fingers towards Rimsky.
     The  girl increased her efforts,  pushed her auburn  head  through  the
little upper pane, stretched out  her arm as  far as she could and began  to
pluck at the lower catch  with her fingernails and shake the frame. Her arm,
coloured deathly green, started  to  stretch as if it  were  made of rubber.
Finally her green cadaverous  fingers caught  the knob  of the window-catch,
turned it and the casement opened. Rimsky gave a weak  cry,  pressed himself
to  the wall and held his briefcase in front of himself  like a  shield. His
last hour, he knew, had come.
     The window  swung wide  open, but instead of the freshness of the night
and the  scent of lime-blossom the  room was flooded with the stench  of the
grave. The walking  corpse stepped on to the window-sill. Rimsky clearly saw
patches of decay on her breast.
     At that moment the sudden, joyful  sound  of a cock crowing rang out in
the garden from the low building behind the shooting gallery where they kept
the  cage  birds  used on the Variety stage. With his full-throated cry  the
tame cock was announcing the approach of dawn over Moscow from the east.
     Wild fury distorted the girl's face as she swore hoarsely and Varenukha
by the door whimpered and collapsed to the floor.
     The cock crowed again, the girl gnashed  her teeth and  her auburn hair
stood on end. At the third crow she turned and flew out. Behind her,  flying
horizontally  through  the air  like  an oversized cupid,  Varenukha floated
slowly across the desk and out of the window.
     As white as snow,  without a  black hair  left on his head, the old man
who a short while  before had been Rimsky ran to  the door, freed the  latch
and rushed down the  dark corridor. At the top of  the  staircase,  groaning
with terror he fumbled  for the switch and lit the lights on the  staircase.
The shattered, trembling  old  man  fell down on  the stairs, imagining that
Varenukha was gently bearing down on him from above.
     At the bottom Rimsky saw die night-watchman, who had fallen asleep on a
chair in  the foyer  beside  the box  office.  Rimsky tiptoed past  him  and
slipped out of the main door. Once in the street he felt slightly better. He
came  to his senses enoug