The Theme of Violence Against Human
Dignity Concludes.
Ask, and it shall be given
you...
Matthew 7:7.
At last Rimsky gets it that,
no matter how “bad” Stepa was, whatever Varenukha was now telling him was too
much to stretch the credulity of Rimsky, who was of course predisposed to
believe the worst about the man he so strongly disliked…
“Yes, far too
much, even much too much… The more lively and picturesque became the sordid
details, the less was the financial director inclined to believe the
storyteller. Until at last he came to the conclusion that everything was a lie.
A lie from the first word to the last. Nothing of that ever happened… And a
sense of danger, unknown but keen danger, presently pressed upon the financial
director’s soul…
Rimsky started
watching Varenukha, and although he was trying to avoid the light as much as he
could do, still Rimsky was able to discover a bruise on the right side near the
nose. Aside from this, the usually full-blooded administrator was now pale with a chalky sick paleness, and
for some reason wrapped around his neck was an old striped scarf. If we add to
all of this his newly acquired, since the time of his absence, disgusting habit
of sucking and lip-smacking, the sharp change in his voice, which had become
hollow and rough, a stealthy cowardly look in his eyes, one could safely say
that Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable.
What also strongly
bothered the financial director… he could not understand no matter how much he
would strain his inflamed brain, no matter how attentively he would examine
Varenukha with his eyes…there was something unnatural in this fitting together
of the administrator with the well-known armchair. There was a clearly visible
shadow of the armchair’s back and similarly clear shadows of the armchair’s
legs, but above the chair there was no shadow of Varenukha’s head, similarly as
there were no shadows of the administrator’s legs under the chair legs.
‘He does not make a shadow!’—desperately
cried out Rimsky in his mind. He started trembling all over… Varenukha
stealthily turned around, following Rimsky’s crazed stare behind the chair’s
back, and realized that he was discovered…”
Spotting the naked Gella with
spots of decay on her breast, Rimsky imagined that the light of the desk lamp
was being extinguished and that the desk itself was tilting… Rimsky was swamped
by an icy wave… With what was left of his strength he was able to whisper:
“Help…”
Watching “Varenukha hissing and smacking his lips, guarding the door
and winking to Gella who was trying to open the window via the transom… her arm
was elongating like made of rubber and was covered by corpse’s greenness… at
last the green fingers of the dead woman managed to unlock the window and the
window pane started opening. Rimsky cried out weakly…” He understood
that his death was coming. And then an unexpected deliverance came. “With a happy crow a rooster trumpeted, announcing that from
the East sunset was rolling toward Moscow.” Hoarsely cursing, Gella
rapped her teeth, “her red hair standing up, she flew
straight out. Varenukha screeched, jumped, and stretching himself horizontally,
flew out of the window…”
“Moaning from
fear, Rimsky started running… Gasping for breath, and breathing heavily, his
eyes crazed, Rimsky hired a taxicab and flew to catch the courier train
departing from the Leningrad Railway Station.”
The theme of rooster is very important to Bulgakov.
There will be a special chapter on
roosters later on. (There will be a chapter on birds in my present work, but there will be no rooster there. As
Bulgakov himself puts it, “a rooster is
not a nightingale.”)
No comments:
Post a Comment