Chapter 14
Glory to the Cock!
We haven’t visited Variety after the
black magic show. Let’s see what’s going on there.
Findirector Rimsky was unhappy with
the magician and his show. After the ‘exposure’ of Simpleyarov, he was no
longer able to control his nerves and comes back to his cabinet. Looking at the
currency notes which he collected from the hall he was lost in thoughts.
Suddenly he hears the shrill whistle
of police which never brings happiness.
He goes to the window facing
Sadovaya and peeps down….people were coming out of Variety, and some people
were surrounding a woman who was just in under garments…they were whistling, laughing,
taunting the poor woman whose fashionable dress from Fagot’s shop had suddenly
disappeared…another victim was also facing a similar ordeal a little away…and
enthusiastic Samaritans were too eager to escort her to her place!
Rimsky spat with repulsion and came
back to his seat and decided to ACT. He had to inform THEM about
Styopa’s disappearance followed by that of Varenukha; episode with currency
notes; the shocking incidence with George Bengalsky and the scandal that took
place with Simpleyarov.
But the moment he was about to lift
the receiver, the phone rang on its own and a lewd female voice warns him not
to ring anywhere.
Soon after this the key in the
key-hole started moving by itself, the door opened and entered Varenukha.
Well, you will read what all happened
there after: how Varenukha, who was not Varenukha but some devil in the guise
of Varenukha tried to kill Rimsky; how a naked woman tries to enter the
Findirector’s cabinet from window and how she along with fake Varenukha had to
leave the room at the cock’s third crow ….and Rimsky, who is looking like an 80
years old man, with all his hair white, rushes to the Railway station and
vanishes from Moscow. How magically Bulgakov describes it!
As soon as the findirector became firmly convinced
that the administrator was lying to him, fear crept over his body, starting from the legs, and
twice again the findirector fancied that a putrid malarial dankness was wafting across the floor.
Never for a moment taking his eyes off the administrator - who squirmed somehow strangely in his
armchair, trying not to get out of the blue shade of the desk lamp, and screening himself with a
newspaper in some remarkable fashion from the bothersome light - the findirector was thinking of
only one thing: what did it all mean? Why was he being lied to so brazenly, in the silent and
deserted building, by the administrator who was so late in coming back to him? And the awareness of
danger, an unknown but menacing danger, began to gnaw at Rimsky's soul. Pretending to ignore
Varenukha's dodges and tricks with the newspaper, the findirector studied his face, now
almost without listening to the yarn Varenukha was spinning. There was something that seemed still
more inexplicable than the calumny invented.
God knows why, about adventures in Pushkino, and that
something was the change in the administrator's appearance and manners.
No matter how the man pulled the duck-like visor of
his cap over his eyes, so as to throw a shadow on his face, no matter how he fidgeted with the
newspaper, the findirector managed to make out an enormous bruise on the right side of his
face just by the nose. Besides that, the normally full-blooded administrator was now pale with
a chalk-like, unhealthy pallor, and on this stifling night his neck was for some reason wrapped in
an old striped scarf. Add to that the repulsive manner the administrator had acquired during
the time of his absence of sucking and smacking, the sharp change in his voice, which had
become hollow and coarse, and the furtiveness and cowardliness in his eyes, and one could boldly say
that Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable.
Something else burningly troubled the findirector, but
he was unable to grasp precisely what it was, however much he strained his feverish mind,
however hard he peered at Varenukha. One thing he could affirm, that there was something
unprecedented, unnatural in this combination of the administrator and the familiar armchair.
"Well, we finally overpowered him, loaded him
into the car,' Varenukha boomed, peeking from behind the paper and covering the bruise with his
hand.
Rimsky suddenly reached out and, as if mechanically,
tapping his fingers on the table at the same time, pushed the electric-bell button with his
palm and went numb. The sharp signal ought to have been heard without fail in the empty building.
But no signal came, and the button sank lifelessly into the wood of the desk. The button was
dead, the bell broken.
The findirector's stratagem did not escape the notice
of Varenukha, who asked, twitching, with a clearly malicious fire flickering in his eyes:
"What are you ringing for?'
'Mechanically,' the findirector replied hollowly,
jerking his hand back, and asked in turn, in an unsteady voice: "What's that on your face?'
'The car skidded, I bumped against the door-handle,'
Varenukha said, looking away.
'He's lying!' the findirector exclaimed mentally. And
here his eyes suddenly grew round and utterly insane, and he stared at the back of the
armchair.
Behind the chair on the floor two shadows lay
criss-cross, one more dense and black, the other faint and grey. The shadow of the back of the chair
and of its tapering legs could be seen distinctly on the floor, but there was no shadow of Varenukha's
head above the back of the chair, or of the administrator's legs under its legs.
`He casts no shadow!' Rimsky cried out desperately in
his mind. He broke into shivers.
Varenukha, following Rimsky's insane gaze, looked
furtively behind him at the back of the chair, and realized that he had been found out.
He got up from the chair (the findirector did
likewise) and made one step back from the desk, clutching his briefcase in his hands.
'He's guessed, damn him! Always was clever,' Varenukha
said, grinning spitefully right in the findirector's face, and he sprang unexpectedly from
the chair to the door and quickly pushed down the catch on the lock. The findirector looked
desperately behind him, as he retreated to the window giving on to the garden, and in this window, flooded
with moonlight, saw the face of a naked girl pressed against the glass and her naked arm reaching
through the vent-pane and trying to open the lower latch. The upper one was already open.
It seemed to Rimsky that the light of the desk lamp
was going out and the desk was tilting. An icy wave engulfed Rimsky, but - fortunately for him -
he got control of himself and did not fall. He had enough strength left to whisper, but not cry out:
'Help...'
Varenukha, guarding the door, hopped up and down by
it, staying in air for a long time and swaying there. Waving his hooked fingers in Rimsky's
direction, he hissed and smacked, winking to the girl in the window.
She began to hurry, stuck her red-haired head through
the vent, reached her arm down as far as she could, her nails clawing at the lower latch and
shaking the frame. Her arm began to lengthen, rubber-like, and became covered with a
putrid green. Finally the dead woman's green fingers got hold of the latch knob, turned it, and the
frame began to open. Rimsky cried out weakly, leaned against the wall, and held his
briefcase in front of him like a shield. He realized that his end had come.
The frame swung wide open, but instead of the night's
freshness and the fragrance of the lindens, the smell of a cellar burst into the room.
The dead woman stepped on to the window-sill.
Rimsky clearly saw spots of decay on her breast.
And just then the joyful, unexpected crowing of a cock
came from the garden, from that low building beyond the shooting gallery where birds
participating in the program were kept. A loud, trained cock trumpeted, announcing that dawn was
rolling towards Moscow from the east.
Savage fury distorted the girl's face, she emitted a
hoarse oath, and at the door Varenukha shrieked and dropped from the air to the floor.
The cock-crow was repeated, the girl clacked her
teeth, and her red hair stood on end. With the third crowing of the cock, she turned and flew out
and after her, jumping up and stretching himself horizontally in the air, looking like a flying
cupid, Varenukha slowly floated over the desk and out the window.
Let’s have a look at Rimsky’s
character:
Rimsky was a very intelligent man;
his observations were always keen; he was very sensitive…Bulgakov even comments
that his sensitivity could compete even with the best seismograph of the
world…he was feeling the putrid darkness entering the room from below the door;
he could see the decaying breast of the naked woman; he could feel that she too
was enveloped in the same putrid, rotten smell; he could notice that sitting on
the chair Varenukha was not casting any shadow on the floor and he came to the
conclusion that it is some devil and not Varenukha, who has come at midnight
not only to inform about Styopa’s misadventures, but with some sinister design
in his mind!
I shall again reiterate that
Bulgakov has once again drawn the readers into a 3D film, where we don’t only
read: don’t only visualize but we participate in everything that’s taking place
in Rimsky’s cabinet.
We analyze like a detective, along
with Rimsky, why Varenukha came so late, stealthily, after presuming that
Rimsky had left the theatre? Why was he telling lies about Styopa Likhodeev;
why was he not coming out of the shadow of table lamp; why was he hiding his
face from Rimsky; how did he acquire the repulsive habit of sucking and
smacking; where was the wound on his cheek from?
We share the terrible mental turmoil
that Rimsky was going through; we share, we experience that his nerves are
about to break out of scare for his own life and we heave a sigh of relief when
the cock crows and the evil souls have to dissipate and disappear.
Bulgakov has mentioned repeatedly in
the novel that the LIGHT from the EAST was coming to Moscow…don’t we feel that
he had some specific ideas about the eastern wisdom?
In short, it is a marvelous, breathtaking chapter; you can’t leave the novel without reading it in one sitting!
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