‘No, he’s not an Englishman ...’ thought Berlioz, and Homeless thought: ‘Where’d he pick up his Russian, that’s the interesting thing!’ and frowned again.
‘But, allow me to ask you,’ the foreign visitor spoke after some anxious reflection, ‘what, then, about the proofs of God’s existence, of which, as is known, there are exactly five?’
‘Alas!’ Berlioz said with regret. ‘Not one of these proofs is worth anything, and mankind shelved them long ago. You must agree that in the realm of reason there can be no proof of God’s existence.’
‘Bravo!’ cried the foreigner. ‘Bravo! You have perfectly repeated restless old Immanuel’s[20] thought in this regard. But here’s the hitch: he roundly demolished all five proofs, and then, as if mocking himself, constructed a sixth of his own.’
‘Kant’s proof,’ the learned editor objected with a subtle smile, ‘is equally unconvincing. Not for nothing did Schiller[21] say that the Kantian reasoning on this question can satisfy only slaves, and Strauss[22] simply laughed at this proof.’
Berlioz spoke, thinking all the while: ‘But, anyhow, who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?’
‘They ought to take this Kant and give him a three-year stretch in Solovki[23] for such proofs!’ Ivan Nikolaevich plumped quite unexpectedly.
‘Ivan!’ Berlioz whispered, embarrassed.
But the suggestion of sending Kant to Solovki not only did not shock the foreigner, but even sent him into raptures.
‘Precisely, precisely,’ he cried, and his green left eye, turned to Berlioz, flashed. ‘Just the place for him! Didn’t I tell him that time at breakfast: “As you will, Professor, but what you’ve thought up doesn’t hang together. It’s clever, maybe, but mighty unclear. You’ll be laughed at.”’
Berlioz goggled his eyes. ‘At breakfast ... to Kant? ... What is this drivel?’ he thought.
‘But,’ the outlander went on, unembarrassed by Berlioz’s amazement and addressing the poet, ‘sending him to Solovki is unfeasible, for the simple reason that he has been abiding for over a hundred years now in places considerably more remote than Solovki, and to extract him from there is in no way possible, I assure you.’
‘Too bad!’ the feisty poet responded.
‘Yes, too bad!’ the stranger agreed, his eye flashing, and went on: ‘But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?’
‘Man governs it himself,’ Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question.
‘Pardon me,’ the stranger responded gently, ‘but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period — well, say, a thousand years - but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?
‘And in fact,’ here the stranger turned to Berlioz, ‘imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ... hem ... hem ... lung cancer ...’ — here the foreigner smiled sweetly, as if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — ‘yes, cancer’ — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word — ’and so your governing is over!
‘You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven.
‘And sometimes it’s worse stilclass="underline" the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk’ — here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz - ’a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?‘ And here the unknown man burst into a strange little laugh.
Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about the cancer and the tram-car, and certain alarming thoughts began to torment him. ‘He’s not a foreigner ... he’s not a foreigner ...’ he thought, ‘he’s a most peculiar specimen ... but, excuse me, who is he then?...’
‘You’d like to smoke, I see?’ the stranger addressed Homeless unexpectedly. ‘Which kind do you prefer?’
‘What, have you got several?’ the poet, who had run out of cigarettes, asked glumly.
‘Which do you prefer?’ the stranger repeated.
‘Okay — Our Brand,’ Homeless replied spitefully.
The unknown man immediately took a cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to Homeless:
‘Our Brand ...’
Editor and poet were both struck, not so much by Our Brand precisely turning up in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was of huge size, made of pure gold, and, as it was opened, a diamond triangle flashed white and blue fire on its lid.
Here the writers thought differently. Berlioz: ‘No, a foreigner!’, and Homeless: ‘Well, devil take him, eh! ...’
The poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, but the non-smoker Berlioz declined.
‘I must counter him like this,’ Berlioz decided, ‘yes, man is mortal, no one disputes that. But the thing is ...’
However, before he managed to utter these words, the foreigner spoke:
‘Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal — there’s the trick! And generally he’s unable to say what he’s going to do this same evening.’
‘What an absurd way of putting the question ...’ Berlioz thought and objected:
‘Well, there’s some exaggeration here. About this same evening I do know more or less certainly. It goes without saying, if a brick should fall on my head on Bronnaya ...’
‘No brick,’ the stranger interrupted imposingly, ‘will ever fall on anyone’s head just out of the blue. In this particular case, I assure you, you are not in danger of that at all. You will die a different death.’
‘Maybe you know what kind precisely?’ Berlioz inquired with perfectly natural irony, getting drawn into an utterly absurd conversation. ‘And will tell me?’
‘Willingly,’ the unknown man responded. He looked Berlioz up and down as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something like: ‘One, two ... Mercury in the second house ... moon gone ... six — disaster ... evening — seven ...’ then announced loudly and joyfully: ‘Your head will be cut off!’
Homeless goggled his eyes wildly and spitefully at the insouciant stranger, and Berlioz asked, grinning crookedly:
‘By whom precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?’[24]
‘No,’ replied his interlocutor, ‘by a Russian woman, a Komsomol[25] girl.’
‘Hm ...’ Berlioz mumbled, vexed at the stranger’s little joke, ‘well, excuse me, but that’s not very likely.’
‘And I beg you to excuse me,’ the foreigner replied, ‘but it’s so. Ah, yes, I wanted to ask you, what are you going to do tonight, if it’s not a secret?’
‘It’s not a secret. Right now I’ll stop by my place on Sadovaya, and then at ten this evening there will be a meeting at Massolit, and I will chair it.’
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