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whispered Berlioz, embarrassed.

      But not only did the proposal to send Kant to Solovki not shock the foreigner, it even sent him into raptures[42].

      "Precisely, precisely,” he cried, and a twinkle appeared in his green left eye, which was turned towards Berlioz, "that’s the very place for him! I said to him then over breakfast, you know: ‘As you please, Professor, but you’ve come up with something incoherent! It may indeed be clever, but it’s dreadfully unintelligible. They’re going to make fun of[43] you.’”

      Berlioz opened his eyes wide. "Over breakfast… to Kant?… What nonsense is this he’s talking?” he thought.

      "But,” the foreigner continued, with no embarrassment at Berlioz’s astonishment and turning to the poet, "sending him to Solovki is impossible for the reason that he’s already been in parts considerably more distant than Solovki for over a hundred years, and there’s no possible way of extracting him from there, I can assure you!”

      “That’s a pity!” responded the quarrelsome poet.

      “I think it’s a pity too,” confirmed the stranger, with a twinkle in his eye[44], and continued: “But this is the question that’s troubling me: if there’s no God, then who, one wonders, is directing human life and all order on earth in general?”

      “Man himself is directing it,” Bezdomny hastened to reply angrily to this, to be honest, not very clear question.

      “I’m sorry,” responded the stranger mildly. “In order to be directing things, it is necessary, for all that, to have a definite plan for a certain, at least reasonably respectable, period of time. Permit me to ask you then, how can man be directing things, if he not only lacks the capacity to draw up any sort of plan for even a laughably short period of time – well, let’s say, for a thousand years or so – but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow? And indeed,” here the stranger turned to Berlioz, “imagine that you, for example, start directing things, managing both other people and yourself – generally, so to speak, getting a taste for it – and suddenly you have… heh… heh… a lung sarcoma." The foreigner smiled sweetly, as if the idea of a lung sarcoma gave him pleasure – “yes, a sarcoma,” narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word, “and there’s an end to your directing! No one’s fate, apart from your own, interests you any more. Your family begin lying to you. Sensing something wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to charlatans, and sometimes to fortune-tellers too. Like the first and the second, so the third too is completely pointless: you realize it yourself. And it all ends tragically: the man who just recently supposed he was directing something turns out suddenly to be lying motionless in a wooden box, and those around him, realizing there’s no more use whatsoever in the man lying there, burn him up in a stove. But it could be even worse: a man will have just decided to take a trip to Kislovodsk,” here the foreigner screwed his eyes up at Berlioz, “a trifling matter[45], it would have seemed, but he can’t accomplish even that, since for some unknown reason he’ll suddenly go and slip and fall under a tram! Surely you won’t say it was he that directed himself that way? Isn’t it more correct to think that someone else completely dealt with him directly?” Here the stranger laughed a strange little laugh.

      Berlioz had listened with great attention to the unpleasant story of the sarcoma and the tram, and some alarming ideas had started to torment him. “He isn’t a foreigner… he isn’t a foreigner…” he thought, “he’s an extremely strange type. but permit me, who on earth is he?…”

      “You want to smoke, I see?” the stranger unexpectedly addressed Bezdomny. “What kind do you prefer?”

      “You have various kinds, do you?” the poet, who was out of cigarettes, asked gloomily.

      “Which do you prefer?” the stranger repeated.

      “Well, Our Brand” Bezdomny replied bad-temperedly.[46]

      The stranger immediately took a cigarette case out of his pocket and offered it to Bezdomny.

      “Our Brand.”

      Both the editor and the poet were shocked not so much by the fact that it was specifically Our Brand that were in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was of huge proportions, of pure gold, and, as it was being opened, a diamond triangle on its lid flashed blue and white fire.

      At this point the writers had differing thoughts. Berlioz: “No, a foreigner!” and Bezdomny: “Well, the devil take it, eh!..”

      The poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, while the non-smoking Berlioz refused.

      “I shall have to counter him thus,” decided Berlioz. “Yes, man is mortal, and nobody is arguing against that. But the point is that…”

      However, he had not had time to voice these words before the foreigner began:

      “Yes, man is mortal, but that would still be just a minor problem. The bad thing is that he’s sometimes suddenly mortal, and that’s the whole point! And he can’t possibly say what he’s going to be doing the same evening.”

      “An absurd sort of formulation of the question,” considered Berlioz, and retorted:

      “Well, there really is some exaggeration here. This evening is known to me more or less exactly. It goes without saying that, if on Bronnaya a brick should fall on my head.”

      “Without rhyme or reason[47], a brick,” the stranger interrupted edifyingly, “will never fall on anybody’s head. And in particular, I can assure you, a brick doesn’t threaten you, not under any circumstances. You’re going to die a different death.”

      “Perhaps you know what one precisely?” enquired Berlioz with completely natural irony, getting drawn^[48] into a really absurd sort of conversation. “And you’ll tell me?”

      “Willingly,” responded the stranger. He sized Berlioz up, as though intending to make him a suit, muttered under his breath something like: “One, two. Mercury’s in the second house. the Moon’s gone. six – misfortune. the evening – seven…” and announced loudly and joyfully: “You’re going to have your head cut off!”

      Bezdomny goggled with wild, angry eyes at the free-and-easy[49] stranger, while Berlioz asked with a crooked grin:

      “By whom, precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?”

      “No,” replied his interlocutor, “by a Russian woman in the Communist League of Youth.”

      “Hm…” mumbled Berlioz, irritated by the stranger’s little joke. “Well, excuse me, but that s hardly likely.”

      “I beg you to excuse me too,” replied the foreigner, “but it’s so. Yes, I’d like to ask you what you’re going to be doing this evening, if it’s not a secret?”

      “There’s no secret. In a moment I’m going to pop into my apartment on Sadovaya, and then at ten o’clock in the evening a meeting will be taking place at MASSOLIT, and I’m going to chair it.”

      “No, that can’t possibly be,” objected the foreigner firmly.

      “And why’s that?”

      “Because,” the foreigner replied, and looked with narrowed eyes into the sky, where, with a presentiment of the cool of the evening, black birds were flying in noiseless lines, “Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil – and not only bought it, but even spilt it too. So the meeting won’t take place.”

      At this point, quite understandably, silence fell beneath the lime trees.

      “Forgive me,” began Berlioz after a pause, casting glances at the foreigner who

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