Glukharev began to dance with the poetess Tamara Polumesyats, Kvant began to dance, Zhukopov the novelist began to dance with some film actress in a yellow dress. Dragoonsky and Cherdakchy were dancing, little Deniskin was dancing with the gigantic Navigator George, the beautiful architect Semyeikina-Gall was dancing in the tight grasp of a stranger in white canvas trousers. The regulars and invited guests were dancing, Muscovites and visitors, the writer Johann from Kronstadt, some Vitya Kuftik or other from Rostov, a director, apparently, with a purple rash completely covering his cheek, the most eminent representatives of the poetry subsection of MASSOLIT – that is, Pavianov, Bogokhulsky, Sladky, Shpichkin and Adelphina Buzdyak – were dancing, young men of unknown profession with crew cuts and padded shoulders were dancing, some very elderly man with a beard in which a little bit of spring onion had become lodged was dancing, and dancing with him was a sickly young girl, being eaten up by anaemia, in a crumpled little orange silk dress.

Bathed in sweat, waiters carried misted mugs of beer above their heads, shouting hoarsely and with hatred: “Sorry, Citizen!” Somewhere through a megaphone a voice commanded: “Karsky kebab, one! Venison, two! Imperial chitterlings!” The thin voice was no longer singing, but howling “Hallelujah!” The crashing of the golden cymbals in the jazz band at times drowned out the crashing of the crockery which the dishwashers slid down a sloping surface into the kitchen. In a word, hell.

And at midnight there was a vision in hell. Onto the veranda emerged a handsome black-eyed man in tails with a dagger of a beard who cast a regal gaze over his domains. It was said, it was said by mystics, that there was a time when the handsome man had not worn tails, but had been girdled with a broad leather belt, from which had protruded the butts of pistols, and his hair, black as a raven’s wing, had been tied with scarlet silk, and under his command a brig had sailed the Caribbean beneath a funereal black flag bearing a skull.

But no, no! The seductive mystics lie: there are no Caribbean Seas on earth, and desperate filibusters do not sail them, and a corvette does not give chase, and cannon smoke does not spread above the waves. There is nothing, and never was there anything either! There is, look, a sorry lime tree, there is a cast-iron railing and, beyond it, the boulevard… And the ice is melting in a bowl, and at the next table someone’s bloodshot, bull-like eyes can be seen, and it’s terrible, terrible. O gods, my gods, give me poison, poison!.

And suddenly at a table a word flew up: “Berlioz!” Suddenly the jazz band went to pieces and fell quiet, as though somebody had thumped it with their fist. “What, what, what, what?!” – “Berlioz!!!” And people started leaping up, started crying out.

Yes, a wave of grief surged up at the fearful news about Mikhail Alexandrovich. Someone was making a fuss, shouting that it was essential, at once, here and now, right on the spot, to compose some collective telegram and send it off immediately.

But what telegram, we’ll ask, and where to? And why should it be sent? Indeed, where to? And what good is any sort of telegram at all to the man whose flattened-out occiput^[166] is now squeezed in the prosector’s rubber hands, whose neck is now being pricked by the curved needles of the professor? He’s dead, and no telegram is any good to him. It’s all over, we won’t burden the telegraph office any more.

Yes, he’s dead, dead. But us, we’re alive, you know!^[167]

Yes, a wave of grief surged up, but it held, held and started to abate, and someone had already returned to his table, and – at first stealthily, but then quite openly – had drunk some vodka and had taken a bite to eat. Indeed, chicken cutlets de volaille^[168] weren’t to go to waste, were they? How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich? By staying hungry? But us, you know, we’re alive!

Naturally, the piano was locked, the jazz band dispersed, a number of journalists left for their offices to write obituaries. It became known that Zheldybin had arrived from the morgue. He settled himself in the dead man’s office upstairs, and straight away the rumour spread that it would be him replacing Berlioz. Zheldybin summoned all twelve members of the board from the restaurant, and, at a meeting begun immediately in Berlioz’s office, they got down to a discussion of the pressing questions of the decoration of Griboyedov’s columned hall, of the transportation of the body to that hall from the morgue, of opening it to visitors, and of other things connected with the regrettable event.

But the restaurant began living its usual nocturnal life, and would have lived it until closing time – that is, until four o’clock in the morning – had there not occurred something really completely out of the ordinary that startled the restaurant’s guests much more than the news of Berlioz’s death.

The first to become agitated were the cab drivers in attendance at the gates of the Griboyedov House. One of them was heard to shout out, half-rising on his box:

“Cor! Just look at that!”

Following which, from out of the blue, a little light flared up by the cast-iron railings and began approaching the veranda. Those sitting at the tables began half-rising and peering, and saw that proceeding towards the restaurant together with the little light was a white apparition. When it got right up to the trellis, it was as if everyone became ossified at the tables, with pieces of sterlet on their forks and their eyes popping out. The doorman, who had at that moment come out through the doors of the restaurant’s cloakroom into the yard for a smoke, stamped out his cigarette and made to move towards the apparition with the obvious aim of barring its access to the restaurant, but for some reason failed to do so and stopped, smiling rather foolishly.

And the apparition, passing through an opening in the trellis, stepped unimpeded onto the veranda. At that point everyone saw it was no apparition at all, but Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, the very well-known poet.

He was barefooted, in a ripped, off-white tolstovka, fastened onto the breast of which with a safety pin was a paper icon with a faded image of an unknown saint, and he was wearing striped white long johns. In his hand Ivan Nikolayevich was carrying a lighted wedding candle. Ivan Nikolayevich’s right cheek was covered in fresh scratches. It is difficult even to measure the depth of the silence that had come over the veranda. One of the waiters was seen to have beer flowing onto the floor from a mug that had tipped sideways.

The poet raised the candle above his head and said loudly:

“Hi, mates!” after which he glanced underneath the nearest table and exclaimed despondently: “No, he’s not here!”

Two voices were heard. A bass said pitilessly:

“A clear-cut case. Delirium tremens^[169].”

And the second, female and frightened, uttered the words:

“How on earth did the police let him walk the streets looking like that?”

Ivan Nikolayevich heard this and responded:

“Twice they tried to detain me, in Skatertny and here on Bronnaya, but I hopped over a fence and, see, scratched my cheek!” At this point Ivan Nikolayevich raised the candle and exclaimed: “Brothers in literature!” (His hoarsened voice strengthened and became fervent.) “Listen to me, everyone! He has appeared! You must catch him straight away, or else he will bring about indescribable calamities!”

“What? What? What did he say? Who’s appeared?” came a rush of voices from all sides.

“A consultant!” replied Ivan. “And this consultant has just killed Misha Berlioz at Patriarch’s.”

Here the people from the hall indoors poured onto the veranda. The crowd moved closer around Ivan’s light.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, be more precise,” a quiet and polite voice was heard right by Ivan Nikolayevich’s ear. “Say what it is you mean, ‘killed’? Who killed him?”

“A foreign consultant, a professor and spy,” responded Ivan, looking round.

“And what is his name?” came the quiet question in his ear.

“That’s just it, the name!” cried Ivan in anguish. “If only I knew the name! I didn’t see the name on the visiting card properly… I can only remember the first letter, W, the name begins with a W! Whatever is that name beginning with a W?” Ivan asked of himself, clutching his forehead with his hand, and suddenly began muttering: “W, w, w. Wa… Wo. Washner? Wagner? Weiner? Wegner? Winter?” The hair on Ivan’s head started shifting with the effort.

“Wulf?” some woman shouted out compassionately.

Ivan got angry.

“Idiot!” he shouted, his eyes searching for the woman. “What’s Wulf got to do with it? Wulf’s not to blame for anything! Wo, what. No! I won’t remember like this! But I’ll tell you what, Citizens, ring the police straight away so they send out five motorcycles with machine guns to catch the Professor. And don’t forget to say there are two others with him: some lanky one in checks. a cracked pince-nez. and a fat black cat! And in the mean time I’ll search Griboyedov. I sense he’s here!”

Ivan lapsed into agitation, pushed those surrounding him away, began waving the candle about, spilling the wax over himself, and looking under the tables. At this point the words: “Get a doctor!” were heard, and somebody’s kindly, fleshy face, cleanshaven and well fed, wearing horn-rimmed spectacles, appeared before Ivan.

“Comrade Bezdomny,” this face began in a gala voice, “calm down! You’re upset by the death of our beloved Mikhail Alexandrovich… no, simply Misha Berlioz. We all understand it perfectly. You need a rest. Some comrades will see you to bed now, and you’ll doze off^[170].”

“Do you understand,” Ivan interrupted, baring his teeth, “that the Professor must be caught? And you come pestering me with your stupid remarks! Cretin!”

“Comrade Bezdomny, pardon me,” the face replied, flushing, backing away, and already repenting getting mixed up in the matter^[171].

“No, someone else, maybe, but you I won’t pardon,” said Ivan Nikolayevich with quiet hatred.

A spasm distorted his face; he quickly moved the candle from his right hand to his left, swung his arm out wide and struck the sympathetic face on the ear.

At this point it occurred to people to throw themselves upon Ivan – and they did. The candle went out, and a pair of spectacles, flying off a face, were instantly trampled upon^[172]. Ivan emitted a terrifying war whoop – audible, to the excitement of all, even on the boulevard – and started to defend himself. The crockery falling from the tables began ringing, women began shouting.

While the waiters were tying the poet up with towels, a conversation was going on in the cloakroom between the commander of the brig and the doorman.

“Did you see he was in his underpants?” the pirate asked coldly.

“But after all, Archibald Archibaldovich,” replied the doorman in cowardly fashion, “how on earth can I not let them in if they’re members of MASSOLIT?”

“Did you see he was in his underpants?” repeated the pirate.

“For pity’s sake, Archibald Archibaldovich,” said the doorman, turning purple, “what ever can I do? I understand for myself there are ladies sitting on the veranda…”

“The ladies have nothing to do with it: it’s all one to the ladies,” replied the pirate, literally scorching the doorman with his eyes, “but it’s not all one to the police! A man in his underwear can proceed through the streets of Moscow only in one instance: if he’s going under police escort, and only to one place – the police station! And you, if you’re a doorman, ought to know that when you see such a man, you ought to begin whistling without a moment’s delay. Can you hear? Can you hear what’s happening on the veranda?”

At this point the doorman, beside himself, caught the sounds of some sort of rumbling, the crashing of crockery and women’s cries coming from the veranda.

“Well, and what am I to do with you for this?” the filibuster asked.

The skin on the doorman’s face assumed a typhoid hue, and his eyes were benumbed. He imagined that the black hair, now combed into a parting, had been covered in fiery silk. The dicky and tails^[173] had disappeared, and, tucked into a belt, the handle of a pistol had appeared. The doorman pictured himself hanged from the foretop yardarm. With his own eyes he saw his own tongue poking out and his lifeless head fallen onto his shoulder, and he even heard the splashing of the waves over the ship’s side. The doorman’s knees sagged. But here the filibuster took pity on him and extinguished his sharp gaze.

“Watch out, Nikolai! This is the last time. We don’t need such doormen in the restaurant at any price. Go and get a job as a watchman in a church.” Having said this, the commander gave precise, clear, rapid commands: “Pantelei from the pantry. Policeman. Charge sheet. Vehicle. Psychiatric hospital.” And added: “Whistle!”

A quarter of an hour later an extremely astonished audience, not only in the restaurant, but on the boulevard itself as well, and in the windows of the houses looking out onto the garden of the restaurant, saw Pantelei, the doorman, a policeman, a waiter and the poet Ryukhin carrying out of Griboyedov’s gates a young man swaddled like a doll^[174] who, in floods of tears, was spitting, attempting to hit specifically Ryukhin, and shouting for the entire boulevard to hear:

“Bastard!.. Bastard!”

The driver of a goods vehicle with an angry face was starting up his engine. Alongside, a cab driver was geeing up his horse, hitting it across the crupper with his lilac reins and shouting:

“Come and use the racehorse! I’ve taken people to the mental hospital before!”

All around the crowd was buzzing, discussing the unprecedented occurrence. In short, there was a vile, foul, seductive, swinish, scandalous scene, which ended only when the truck carried off from the gates of Griboyedov the unfortunate Ivan Nikolayevich, the policeman, Pantelei and Ryukhin.