فصل 14

XIV

Praise Be to the Rooster

HIS nerves couldn’t take it, as they say, and Rimsky ran off to his office without waiting for the police to finish their report of what had happened. He sat at his desk and stared with swollen eyes at the magic ten-ruble bills that lay before him. The financial director was at his wit’s end. A steady roar rose from the street as the public streamed out of the theater. The financial director’s overly sensitive ears suddenly heard the sharp trill of a police whistle, which is hardly ever a good omen. When that sound was repeated and then accompanied by another more imperious and prolonged one, only then to be joined by loud cackles of laughter and hoots, the financial director knew immediately that something scandalous and nasty had happened outside, and that, however much he wanted to brush it aside, it was intimately connected with the disgusting show put on by the black magician and his assistants. The quickwitted financial director was not mistaken.

No sooner had he looked out the window onto Sadovaya Street, than his face became distorted, and he said in a hiss rather than a whisper, “I knew it!” In the bright light of the high-intensity streetlamps, he saw on the sidewalk below a woman wearing nothing but a chemise and violet drawers. True, there was a hat on her head and an umbrella in her hands.

Milling around the woman, who was completely distraught and alternately crouching down or trying to run away, was an excited crowd, cackling in a way that sent shivers down the director’s spine. Hovering next to the woman was a man struggling to get out of his summer coat, who was so upset that he was unable to extricate his arm from the sleeve.

Cries and screams of laughter also came from another direction—from the motor entrance on the left, and when he turned to look, Grigory Danilovich saw another woman, this time in pink underwear. She jumped from the pavement to the sidewalk, in an effort to hide herself in the entranceway, but her way was barred by people streaming out of the theater. Victimized by her own frivolity and her mania for clothes, and deceived by Fagot and his vile company, the poor creature dreamed of only one thing: falling through the earth. A policeman was headed in her direction, drilling the air with his whistle, and behind the policeman came a pack of cheery young men wearing caps. They were the ones cackling and hooting.

A thin mustachioed cabbie drove up to the first naked woman and reined in his bony, broken-down nag with a flourish. The cabbie’s whiskered face was plastered with a grin.

Rimsky hit his head with his fist, spat, and moved away from the window.

He sat at the desk for a while, listening to the noise from the street. The whistling reached full pitch at various points and then started to subside. To Rimsky’s surprise, the scandal came to an unexpectedly speedy conclusion.

The time to act was approaching, he would have to drink the bitter cup of responsibility. The telephones had been repaired during the third part of the program, and he had to make calls, report what had happened, ask for help, lie himself out of any responsibility, blame everything on Likhodeyev, get himself off the hook, and so forth. Confound you, devil!

Twice the flustered director put his hand on the receiver and twice he picked it up. And suddenly the deadly silence of the office was shattered by the sound of the telephone itself, blasting in the financial director’s face. He shuddered and grew cold. “Boy, my nerves are really shot,” he thought and picked up the receiver, whereupon he recoiled and turned white as a sheet. A soft but at the same time insinuating and depraved female voice whispered into the phone, “Don’t make any calls, Rimsky, or you’ll be sorry …” The phone then went dead. Feeling his flesh crawl, the financial director put down the receiver and glanced for some reason at the window behind his back. Through the sparse and barely green branches of the maple tree outside the window he glimpsed the moon slipping behind a translucent cloud. Inexplicably transfixed by the branches, Rimsky stared at them, and the more he did, the more strongly he felt the grip of fear.

Making an effort to regain his composure, the financial director finally turned away from the moon-filled window and got up. To call anyone was now out of the question, and the financial director had only one thought on his mind—to get away from the theater as fast as possible.

He listened: the building was silent. Rimsky realized that he had been all alone on the second floor for some time, and the thought filled him with an uncontrollable childlike dread. When he thought of having to walk down the empty corridors and go down the staircase alone, he shuddered. He feverishly grabbed the hypnotist’s ten-ruble bills off the desk, stuffed them into his briefcase and coughed, in order to build up his courage. The cough came out sounding hoarse and feeble.

And here it seemed to him that a smell of damp decay had suddenly seeped under the office door. A shudder ran down the financial director’s spine. And a clock chimed suddenly and began to strike midnight. Even that made the financial director shudder. But his heart really sank when he heard a key turning softly in the lock. The financial director clutched his briefcase with cold damp hands and felt that he would not be able to contain himself and would burst out screaming if the scraping in the keyhole lasted one more minute.

Finally the door yielded to someone’s push, opened, and who stepped quietly into the office but Varenukha. Rimsky’s legs buckled beneath him and he plopped down into his chair. Sucking air into his lungs, he smiled a kind of ingratiating smile and said softly, “God, what a fright you gave me …” Indeed, that sudden appearance could have frightened anyone, and yet, at the same time, it came as a great joy: at least one small thread in this tangled business had unraveled.

“Well, get it out! Tell me! Well!” rasped Rimsky, pulling at the thread. “What’s the meaning of all this?!”

“Please, forgive me,” the man who had come in replied in a hollow voice, closing the door. “I thought you had already left.”

Without taking off his cap Varenukha went over to the armchair and sat down opposite Rimsky at the desk.

It must be said there was something slightly odd about Varenukha’s reply which was immediately picked up by the financial director, who was as sensitive to vibrations as any seismograph in the world. What was going on? Why had Varenukha come into the financial director’s office if he had assumed he wasn’t there? After all, he had his own office. That was for starters. And second, no matter which entrance Varenukha had used, he would have bumped into one of the night watchmen, all of whom had been told that Grigory Danilovich would be in his office for some time.

But the financial director did not dwell on this oddity for very long. He didn’t feel up to it.

“Why didn’t you call? What was all that nonsense about Yalta?”

“Well, it’s just as I said,” the manager answered, and he made a smacking sound with his lips as if he had a toothache. “They found him in a tavern in Pushkino.” “What do you mean Pushkino?! Isn’t that right near Moscow? And didn’t the telegrams come from Yalta?!”

“Yalta like hell! He got the Pushkino telegrapher drunk, they started fooling around and that meant, among other things, sending telegrams marked ‘Yalta.’” “I see, I see … Well, OK, OK …” said Rimsky, crooning rather than speaking. A yellowish light shone in his eyes. A festive vision of Styopa having to leave work in disgrace formed in his head. He’d be free! Free at least of that disaster known as Likhodeyev! And maybe Stepan Bogdanovich was in for more than just getting fired … “Give me the details,” said Rimsky, tapping the paperweight against the desk.

And Varenukha began to recount the details. As soon as he had arrived at the place where the financial director had sent him, he had been received right away and listened to with great attention. No one, of course, had ever seriously believed that Styopa was in Yalta. Everyone now agreed with Varenukha that Likhodeyev had obviously been at the Yalta restaurant in Pushkino.

“Where is he now?” asked the agitated financial director, interrupting the manager’s account.

“Well, where could he be?” replied the manager with a crooked smile. “Naturally, in a drunk tank!”

“Of course, of course! Where else!”

And Varenukha continued his story. And the more he talked, the more vivid an impression the financial director formed of Likhodeyev’s long chain of outrageous and disgraceful misdeeds. And each successive link in the chain was worse than the last. Take, for example, the drunken dance with the telegraph clerk on the lawn outside the Pushkino telegraph office to the strains of some idler’s accordion! The chase after some women who were screeching in terror! The attempt to start a fight with the bartender at the Yalta! Throwing green onions all over the floor of that same Yalta. Smashing eight bottles of dry white “AiDanil” wine. Breaking the meter of a cab when the driver refused to take him as a passenger. Threatening to arrest the citizens who were trying to end his spree … In short, holy terror!

Styopa was well known in Moscow theater circles, and everyone knew that he was hardly—a gift to humanity. But what the manager was saying about him now was too much, even for Styopa. Yes, too much. In fact, much too much … Rimsky’s piercing eyes bore into the manager’s face from across the desk, and the more the manager talked, the gloomier Rimsky looked. The manager embellished his story with various vile details, and the more vivid and piquant they became, the less Rimsky believed him. When Varenukha reported that Styopa had gone so far as to resist those who had come to take him back to Moscow, the financial director knew for sure that everything the manager was saying—the manager who had returned at midnight—everything was a lie! A lie from beginning to end.

Varenukha had not gone to Pushkino, nor had Styopa himself been in Pushkino. There was no drunken telegraph clerk, no broken glass in the bar, Styopa had not been tied up … none of it had happened.

Once the financial director became convinced that the manager was lying to him, fear crept over his body, starting with his feet, and for the second time it seemed to the financial director that a putrid malarial dampness had spread over the floor. Without ever taking his eyes off the manager—who was sitting in the armchair in an oddly contorted way, trying always to stay within the bluish shadow cast by the desk lamp and rather peculiarly shielding his eyes from the lamp light with a newspaper—the financial director thought of only one thing: what did it all mean? Why would the manager, who had returned too late to see him, be lying to him so blatantly in an empty and quiet building? And a sense of danger, unidentified but imminent, began to take hold of Rimsky’s heart. While pretending not to notice the manager’s maneuvers and his tricks with the newspaper, the financial director examined his face, hardly listening any more to the tale Varenukha was spinning. There was something that seemed even more inexplicable than the slanderous story of Styopa’s escapades in Pushkino, fabricated for no discernible reason whatsoever, and that something was the change in the manager’s appearance and manners.

Despite the manager’s efforts to keep his face in shadow by pulling the visor of his cap down over his eyes, and despite his maneuvers with the newspaper as well, the financial director did manage to observe a huge bruise that began at his nose and extended across his right cheek. In addition, the manager’s customarily ruddy complexion had taken on an unhealthy chalky pallor, and, despite the sultriness of the night, his neck was wrapped in an old striped muffler. If one added to this the manager’s new habit, evidently acquired during his absence, of making disgusting sucking and smacking sounds with his lips, the sharp change in his voice, which had become rough and hollow, and the furtive and cowardly look in his eyes, then one could say without hesitation that Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable.

Something even more disturbing gnawed at the financial director, but however much he strained his already inflamed brain, however much he stared at Varenukha, he couldn’t figure out what it was. He was sure of only one thing: there was something weird and unnatural about this combination of the manager and the familiar chair.

“Well, eventually he was subdued and shoved into a car,” droned on Varenukha, peering out from behind the newspaper and covering his bruise with his palm.

Rimsky suddenly stretched out his hand and started drumming his fingers on the table, while at the same time nonchalantly pressing his palm down on the buzzer of an electric bell. Then he froze. A loud alarm should have gone off in the empty building. But the alarm did not go off, and the buzzer sank lifelessly into the desktop. The buzzer was dead and the bell was broken.

The financial director’s maneuver did not escape Varenukha, who winced and asked with a malicious gleam in his eye, “Why did you press the alarm?” “Habit,” was the financial director’s hollow reply as he moved his hand away. Then he asked in a shaky voice, “What’s that on your face?” “The car braked, and I hit my face against the door handle,” answered Varenukha, turning his eyes away.

“He’s lying!” the financial director exclaimed to himself. Then his eyes widened and bulged crazily as he fixated on the back of Varenukha’s chair.

On the floor behind the chair there were two intersecting shadows, one blacker and denser, the other faint and gray. The armchair’s back and pointed legs cast a clear shadow on the floor, but there was no shadow from Varenukha’s head above the chair back, nor was there any shadow from his feet beneath its legs.

“He doesn’t cast a shadow!” cried Rimsky to himself in desperation. He started to tremble.

Varenukha glanced furtively behind the chair, following Rimsky’s crazed eyes, and realized that he had been found out.

He stood up (as did the financial director) and stepped away from the desk, his briefcase clutched in his hands.

“You guessed it, damn you! You always were smart,” said Varenukha, smirking maliciously in Rimsky’s face. Suddenly he sprang to the door and quickly lowered the bolt. The financial director looked around in desperation as he moved over to the window that looked out onto the garden. There in the moonlight he saw the face of a naked girl pressed against the glass, her bare arm stuck through the fortochka, trying to open the latch on the lower part of the window. The upper part was already open.

It seemed to Rimsky that the light in the desk lamp was going out and the desk was tilting sideways. An icy wave swept over Rimsky, but fortunately he found the strength to resist it and didn’t fall. He had enough strength left to whisper, but not shout, “Help …” As he guarded the door, Varenukha jumped up and down beside it, staying suspended in the air for a long time and swaying back and forth. Hissing and smacking his lips, he winked at the girl in the window and pointed at Rimsky.

The girl then doubled her efforts and struck her red head through the fortochka, stretching her hand out as far as it would go. She scratched at the lower window latch with her nails and shook the window frame. Her hand began to stretch as if it were made of elastic and became covered with a corpselike greenness. Finally the corpse’s green fingers grabbed hold of the tip of the window latch, turned it, and the casement began to open. Rimsky gave a faint cry, pressed against the wall, and held out his briefcase in front of him as if it were a shield. He knew his end had come.

The casement window swung wide open, but it was not fresh night air and the fragrance of the linden trees that wafted into the room, it was the smell of the grave. The dead girl stepped onto the windowsill, and Rimsky could clearly see patches of decay on her breast.

And at that moment the unexpected and joyous crowing of a rooster was heard coming from the garden, from the low building behind the shooting gallery where the performing birds were kept. The trained rooster was raucously trumpeting the news that dawn was advancing on Moscow from the east.

Savage fury distorted the girl’s face, and she rasped out a curse. Over by the door Varenukha let out a screech and fell down from the air onto the floor.

The rooster crowed again, the girl grated her teeth, and her red hair stood on end. At the third cockcrow she turned and flew out of the room. And right behind her came Varenukha, who jumped up in the air, assumed a horizontal position, like a flying Cupid, and floated slowly over the desk and out the window.

His head as white as snow, with not one black hair left, an old man, who not long before had been Rimsky, ran over to the door, undid the lock, opened the door, and started running down the dark corridor. Stricken with terror and moaning, he felt for the switch at the top of the staircase and turned on the light. Trembling and shaking, the old man fell on the stairs because it seemed to him that Varenukha was softly collapsing on him from above.

When he got to the bottom of the stairs, Rimsky saw the night watchman asleep on a chair by the box office in the lobby. He tiptoed past him and slipped out through the main door. Once he was outside he felt a little better. He was sufficiently in command of his senses to realize, when he clutched his head, that he had left his hat behind in the office.

Needless to say, he did not go back for it, but ran across the wide street, gasping for breath, to the movie theater on the opposite corner where nearby, a dim red light could be seen. A minute later he was at the taxi, before anyone else could intercept it.

“To the Leningrad Express, you’ll get a tip,” said the old man, breathing heavily and clutching his heart.

“I’m on my way to the garage,” said the driver with loathing and turned away.

Then Rimsky unfastened his briefcase, pulled out fifty rubles, and thrust them at the driver through the open window.

Minutes later the rattling car was rushing like a whirlwind along the Sadovaya Ring. The passenger was jounced about on the seat, and when he looked into the rearview mirror, he caught glimpses of the joyous look in the driver’s eyes and the crazed look in his own.

Rimsky jumped out of the car in front of the station and shouted at the first person he saw, who was wearing a white apron and a badge, “One first-class ticket, here’s thirty rubles,” whereupon he crumpled and pulled the ten-ruble notes out of his briefcase. “If there’s no first-class, then second, and if not that, then third.” The man with the badge turned to look at the clock and grabbed the rubles out of Rimsky’s hands.

Five minutes later the express train pulled out of the glass-domed station and vanished into the darkness. And along with it vanished Rimsky.