Citizen, ever happened to be in a clinic for the mentally ill?”
“Ivan!” exclaimed Mikhail Alexandrovich quietly.
But the foreigner was not in the least offended, and gave an extremely cheerful laugh.
“I have, I have, and more than once!” he exclaimed, laughing, but without taking his unlaughing eye off the poet. “Where haven’t I been! It’s just a pity I didn’t find the time to ask the professor what schizophrenia was. So do find it out from him for yourself, Ivan Nikolayevich!”
“How do you know my name?”
“Come, come, Ivan Nikolayevich, who doesn’t know you?” Here the foreigner pulled the previous day’s issue of The Literary Gazette from his pocket, and Ivan Nikolayevich saw his own image right on the front page, and beneath it his very own verse. But the proof of his fame and popularity, that just the day before had gladdened the poet, on this occasion did not gladden him in the least.
“Excuse me,” he said, and his face darkened, “can you wait for just a moment? I want to have a quick word with my comrade.”
“Oh, with pleasure!” exclaimed the stranger. “It’s so nice here under the lime trees, and, happily, I’m not hurrying off anywhere.”
“You know what, Misha,” began the poet in a whisper, pulling Berlioz aside[50], “he’s no foreign tourist, but a spy. He’s a Russian émigré who’s made his way back over here. Ask for his papers, otherwise he’ll be off…”
“Do you think so?” Berlioz whispered anxiously, while thinking to himself: “He’s right, of course…”
“Believe you me” – the poet’s voice became hoarse in his ear – “he’s pretending to be a bit of an idiot so as to pump us about[51] something. You hear the way he speaks Russian” – the poet was casting sidelong glances as he talked, looking to see that the stranger did not make a run for it – “come on, we’ll detain him, or else he’ll be off.”
And the poet drew Berlioz back towards the bench by the arm.
The stranger was not sitting, but standing beside it, holding in his hands some sort of booklet with a dark-grey binding, a thick envelope made of good-quality paper and a visiting card.
“Excuse me for forgetting in the heat of our argument to introduce myself to you. Here’s my card, my passport and my invitation to come to Moscow for a consultation,” said the stranger weightily, giving both men of letters a piercing look.
They became embarrassed. “The devil, he heard it all…” thought Berlioz, and indicated with a polite gesture that there was no need for papers to be shown. While the foreigner was thrusting them at the editor, the poet managed to make out on the card, printed in foreign letters, the word “Professor” and the initial letter of the surname – “W”.
“Pleased to meet you,” the editor was meanwhile mumbling in embarrassment, and the foreigner put the papers away into his pocket.
Relations thus restored, all three sat down once more on the bench.
“You’ve been invited here in the capacity of a consultant, Professor?” asked Berlioz.
“Yes, as a consultant.”
“Are you German?” enquired Bezdomny.
“Me?” the Professor queried, and suddenly became pensive. “Yes, if you like, I’m German…” he said.
“Your Russian’s brilliant,” remarked Bezdomny.
“Oh, I’m a polyglot in general and know a very large number of languages,” replied the Professor.
“And what do you specialize in?” enquired Berlioz.
“I’m a specialist in black magic.”
“Well, there you are!” Mikhail Alexandrovich had a sudden thought. “And.” – he faltered – “and you were invited here to use that specialization?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s what I was invited for,” confirmed the Professor, and elucidated: “Here in the State Library they found some original manuscripts of a tenth-century practitioner of black magic, Gerbert of Aurillac.[52][53] And so I’m required to decipher them. I’m the only specialist in the world.”
“Aha! You’re a historian?” asked Berlioz with respect and great relief.
“I am a historian,” the scholar confirmed, and added without reference to anything in particular: “There’s going to be an interesting bit of history at Patriarch’s Ponds this evening!”
And again both the editor and the poet were extremely surprised, but the Professor beckoned both of them close to him and, when they had leant towards him, he whispered:
“Bear it in mind that Jesus did exist.”
“You see, Professor,” responded Berlioz with a forced smile, “we respect your great knowledge, but on that question we ourselves adhere to a different point of view.”
“But you don’t need any points of view,” replied the strange Professor. “Simply he existed, and that s all there is to it.”
“But some sort of proof is required,” began Berlioz.
“No proofs are required,” replied the Professor, and he began to speak in a low voice, his accent for some reason disappearing: “Everything’s quite simple: in a white cloak with a blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan…”[54]
2. Pontius Pilate
In a white cloak with a blood-red lining, with the shuffling gait of a cavalryman, early in the morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nisan, into the covered colonnade between the two wings of the palace of Herod the Great[55] emerged the Procurator of Judaea, Pontius Pilate.[56]
More than anything else on earth the Procurator hated the smell of attar of roses, and everything now betokened a bad day ahead, for that smell had been haunting the Procurator since dawn. It seemed to the Procurator that the smell of roses was being emitted by the cypresses and palms in the garden, and that mingling with the smell of his escort’s leather accoutrements and sweat was that accursed waft of roses. From the wings at the rear of the palace that quartered the Twelfth Lightning Legion’s First Cohort, which had come to Yershalaim[57] with the Procurator, a puff of smoke carried across the upper court of the garden into the colonnade, and mingling with this rather acrid smoke, which testified to the fact that the cooks in the centuries had started preparing dinner, was still that same heavy odour of roses.
"O gods, gods, why do you punish me?. No, there’s no doubt, this is it, it again, the invincible, terrible sickness… hemicrania, when half my head is aching. there are no remedies for it, no salvation whatsoever. I’ll try keeping my head still.”
On the mosaic floor by the fountain an armchair had already been prepared, and the Procurator sat down in it without looking at anyone and reached a hand out to one side. Into that hand his secretary deferentially placed a piece of parchment. Unable to refrain from a grimace of pain, the Procurator took a cursory sidelong look through what was written, returned the parchment to the secretary and said with difficulty:
“The man under investigation is from Galilee, is he? Was the case sent to the Tetrarch?”
“Yes, Procurator,” replied the secretary.
“And he did what?”
"He refused to give a decision on the case[58] and sent the Sanhedrin’s death