‘Well, well, go on, go on, I beg you! Only, in the name of all that’s holy, don’t leave anything out!’
Ivan left nothing out in any case, it was easier for him to tell it that way, and he gradually reached the moment when Pontius Pilate, in a white mantle with blood-red lining, came out to the balcony.
Then the visitor put his hands together prayerfully and whispered:
‘Oh, how I guessed! How I guessed it all!’
The listener accompanied the description of Berlioz’s terrible death with an enigmatic remark, while his eyes flashed with spite:
‘I only regret that it wasn’t the critic Latunsky or the writer Mstislav Lavrovich instead of this Berlioz!’, and he cried out frenziedly but soundlessly: ‘Go on!’
The cat handing money to the woman conductor amused the guest exceedingly, and he choked with quiet laughter watching as Ivan, excited by the success of his narration, quietly hopped on bent legs, portraying the cat holding the coin up next to his whiskers.
‘And so,’ Ivan concluded, growing sad and melancholy after telling about the events at Griboedov‘s, ’I wound up here.‘
The guest sympathetically placed a hand on the poor poet’s shoulder and spoke thus:
‘Unlucky poet! But you yourself, dear heart, are to blame for it all. You oughtn’t to have behaved so casually and even impertinently with him. So you’ve paid for it. And you must still say thank you that you got off comparatively cheaply.’
‘But who is he, finally?’ Ivan asked, shaking his fists in agitation.
The guest peered at Ivan and answered with a question:
‘You’re not going to get upset? We’re all unreliable here ... There won’t be any calling for the doctor, injections, or other fuss?’
‘No, no!’ Ivan exclaimed. Tell me, who is he?‘
‘Very well,’ the visitor replied, and he said weightily and distinctly: ‘Yesterday at the Patriarch’s Ponds you met Satan.’
Ivan did not get upset, as he had promised, but even so he was greatly astounded.
‘That can’t be! He doesn’t exist!’
‘Good heavens! Anyone else might say that, but not you. You were apparently one of his first victims. You’re sitting, as you yourself understand, in a psychiatric clinic, yet you keep saying he doesn’t exist. Really, it’s strange!’
Thrown off, Ivan fell silent.
‘As soon as you started describing him,’ the guest went on, ‘I began to realize who it was that you had the pleasure of talking with yesterday. And, really, I’m surprised at Berlioz! Now you, of course, are a virginal person,’ here the guest apologized again, ‘but that one, from what I’ve heard about him, had after all read at least something! The very first things this professor said dispelled all my doubts. One can’t fail to recognize him, my friend! Though you ... again I must apologize, but I’m not mistaken, you are an ignorant man?’
‘Indisputably,’ the unrecognizable Ivan agreed.
‘Well, so ... even the face, as you described it, the different eyes, the eyebrows! ... Forgive me, however, perhaps you’ve never even heard the opera
Ivan became terribly embarrassed for some reason and, his face aflame, began mumbling something about some trip to a sanatorium ... to Yalta ...
‘Well, so, so ... hardly surprising! But Berlioz, I repeat, astounds me ... He’s not only a well-read man but also a very shrewd one. Though I must say in his defence that Woland is, of course, capable of pulling the wool over the eyes of an even shrewder man.’
‘What?!’ Ivan cried out in his turn.
‘Hush!’
Ivan slapped himself roundly on the forehead with his palm and rasped:
‘I see, I see. He had the letter “W” on his visiting card. Ai-yai-yai, what a thing!’ He lapsed into a bewildered silence for some time, peering at the moon floating outside the grille, and then spoke: ‘So that means he might actually have been at Pontius Pilate’s? He was already born then? And they call me a madman!’ Ivan added indignantly, pointing to the door.
A bitter wrinkle appeared on the guest’s lips.
‘Let’s look the truth in the eye.’ And the guest turned his face towards the nocturnal luminary racing through a cloud. ‘You and I are both madmen, there’s no denying that! You see, he shocked you - and you came unhinged, since you evidently had the ground prepared for it. But what you describe undoubtedly took place in reality. But it’s so extraordinary that even Stravinsky, a psychiatrist of genius, did not, of course, believe you. Did he examine you?’ (Ivan nodded.) ‘Your interlocutor was at Pilate’s, and had breakfast with Kant, and now he’s visiting Moscow.‘
‘But he’ll be up to devil knows what here! Oughtn’t we to catch him somehow?’ the former, not yet definitively quashed Ivan still raised his head, though without much confidence, in the new Ivan.
