LITMIR.BIZ

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him get to the telephone,” the doctor commanded the orderlies.

      Ivan grasped the receiver, and at the same time the woman quietly asked Ryukhin:

      “Is he married?”

      “Single,” replied Ryukhin fearfully.

      “A union member?”

      “Yes.”

      “Is that the police?” Ivan shouted into the receiver. “Is that the police? Comrade duty officer, make arrangements immediately for five motorcycles with machine guns to be sent out to capture a foreign consultant. What? Come and pick me up, I’ll go with you myself… It’s the poet Bezdomny speaking from the madhouse… What’s your address?” Bezdomny asked the doctor in a whisper, covering the receiver with his palm, and then he again shouted into the receiver: “Are you listening? Hello!. Disgraceful!” Ivan suddenly wailed, and he flung the receiver against the wall. Then he turned to the doctor, reached out his hand to him, said drily “Goodbye” and prepared to leave.

      “Pardon me, and where is it you mean to go?” began the doctor, peering into Ivan’s eyes. “In the middle of the night, in your underwear. You don’t feel well, stay here with us!”

      “Now let me pass,” said Ivan to the orderlies, who had closed ranks by the doors. “Will you let me go or not?” cried the poet in a terrible voice.

      Ryukhin started trembling, but the woman pressed a button in the desk, and a shiny little box and a sealed ampoule sprang out onto its glass surface.

      “So that’s the way it is?!” pronounced Ivan, looking around with a wild, trapped air. “Well, all right then! Farewell!” and he flung himself head first into the curtain over the window.

      There was quite a heavy crash, but the glass behind the curtain did not so much as crack, and a moment later Ivan Nikolayevich began struggling in the arms of the orderlies. He wheezed, tried to bite them, shouted:

      “So that’s the sort of glass you’ve got yourselves!.. Let me go!.. Let me go!”

      A syringe gleamed in the doctor’s hands; with a single yank the woman ripped the tattered sleeve of the tolstovka apart and seized hold of the arm with unfeminine strength. There was a sudden smell of ether – Ivan weakened in the arms of four people, and the dextrous doctor made use of that moment to sink the needle into Ivan’s arm. They held on to Ivan for a few more seconds and then lowered him onto the couch.

      “Bandits!” Ivan cried, and leapt up from the couch, but he was set upon again. As soon as he was released, he made to leap up again, but this time he sat back down by himself. He was silent for a while, looking around in a wild sort of way, then unexpectedly yawned, then smiled maliciously.

      “Locked me up[183] after all,” he said, then yawned once more, unexpectedly lay down, put his head on a cushion and his fist under his cheek, like a child, and began mumbling in a now sleepy voice, without malice: “Well, jolly good too. and you’ll pay for everything yourselves. I’ve warned you, now it’s up to you!. What I’m most interested in now is Pontius Pilate. Pilate.” – here he closed his eyes.

      “Bath, private room 117, and set a guard on him,” the doctor ordered, putting on his spectacles. At this point Ryukhin again gave a start: the white doors opened noiselessly, into sight beyond them came a corridor lit by blue night lights. A bed on rubber wheels rolled in from the corridor, and the now quiet Ivan was transferred onto it; he rode into the corridor, and the doors closed up behind him.

      “Doctor,” asked the shaken Ryukhin in a whisper, “he really is ill, then?”

      “Oh yes,” replied the doctor.

      “And what is it that’s wrong with him?” asked Ryukhin timidly.

      The tired doctor looked at Ryukhin and answered limply:

      “Motive and vocal excitement… delirious interpretations… evidently a complex case. Schizophrenia, one must assume. And add to that alcoholism.”

      Ryukhin understood nothing of the doctor’s words, except that Ivan Nikolayevich was clearly in quite a bad way; he sighed and asked:

      “And what was that he kept on saying about some consultant?”

      “He probably saw somebody his disturbed imagination found striking. Or perhaps he’s been hallucinating.”

      A few minutes later the truck was carrying Ryukhin away to Moscow. It was getting light, and the light of the street lamps that had not yet been extinguished on the highway was unnecessary now and unpleasant. The driver was angry about the night having been lost; he sped the vehicle on for all he was worth, and it skidded on the bends[184].

      And now the forest had fallen away, been left somewhere behind, and the river had gone off to the side somewhere, and all kinds of different things came hurrying along to meet the truck: fences of some kind with sentry boxes and palettes of firewood, great high poles and masts of some sort with threaded coils on the masts, piles of ballast, earth covered with the lines of channels – in short, there was the sense that here it was at any moment, Moscow, right here, around this bend, and in a minute it would be upon you and envelop you.

      Ryukhin was shaken and tossed about; the stump of some sort on which he was sitting was continually trying to slide out from under him. The restaurant’s towels, thrown in by the policeman and Pantelei, who had left earlier by trolleybus, shifted all over the truck. Ryukhin started to try and gather them together, but for some reason maliciously hissing: “Oh, they can go to the devil! Really, what am I fiddling around for like an idiot?” – he kicked them away and stopped looking at them.

      The mood of the man as he rode was terrible. It was becoming clear that the visit to the mental asylum had left the most painful mark upon him. Ryukhin tried to understand what was tormenting him. The corridor with the blue lights that had stuck in his mind? The thought that there was no worse misfortune in the world than the loss of one’s reason? Yes, yes, that too, of course. Yet that was just a general thought, after all. But there was something else. Whatever was it? The insult, that’s what. Yes, yes, the insulting words thrown right in his face by Bezdomny. And the trouble was not that they were insulting, but that there was truth in them.

      The poet no longer looked from side to side, but, staring at the dirty, shaking floor, began muttering something, whining, gnawing away at himself.

      Yes, the poetry… He was thirty-two. What, indeed, lay in the future? In the future too he would compose a few poems a year. Into old age? Yes, into old age. And what would those poems bring him? Fame? “What nonsense! Don’t deceive yourself, at least. Fame will never come to someone who composes bad poetry. Why is it bad? It was true, true, what he said!” Ryukhin addressed himself pitilessly. “I don’t believe in a thing of what I write!”

      Poisoned by the explosion of neurasthenia, the poet lurched, and the floor beneath him stopped shaking. Ryukhin raised his head and saw that he had already been in Moscow for a long time and, in addition, that the dawn was over Moscow, that the cloud was lit up from beneath with gold, that his truck was at a standstill, held up in a column of other vehicles at the turn onto a boulevard, and that ever so close to him stood a metal man on a pedestal,[185] his head slightly inclined, looking dispassionately at the boulevard.

      Some strange thoughts surged into the head of the sick poet. “There’s an example of real luck…” At this point Ryukhin stood up straight on the back of the truck and raised his hand, for some reason attacking the cast-iron man who was harming no one. “Whatever step he took in life, whatever happened to him, everything was to his advantage, everything worked towards his fame! But what did he do? I don’t get it. Is there something special about those words: ‘Stormy darkness’?[186] I don’t understand! He was lucky, lucky!” Ryukhin suddenly concluded venomously, and felt that the truck beneath him had stirred. “That White Guard[187] – he shot, he shot at him, smashed his hip to pieces

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