‘In our country atheism does not surprise anyone,’ Berlioz said with diplomatic politeness. ‘The majority of our population consciously and long ago ceased believing in the fairy tales about God.’
Here the foreigner pulled the following stunt: he got up and shook the amazed editor’s hand, accompanying it with these words:
‘Allow me to thank you with all my heart!’
‘What are you thanking him for?’ Homeless inquired, blinking.
‘For some very important information, which is of great interest to me as a traveller,’ the outlandish fellow explained, raising his finger significantly.
The important information apparently had indeed produced a strong impression on the traveller, because he passed his frightened glance over the buildings, as if afraid of seeing an atheist in every window.
‘No, he’s not an Englishman ...’ thought Berlioz, and Homeless thought: ‘Where’d he pick up his Russian, that’s the interesting thing!’ and frowned again.
‘But, allow me to ask you,’ the foreign visitor spoke after some anxious reflection, ‘what, then, about the proofs of God’s existence, of which, as is known, there are exactly five?’
‘Alas!’ Berlioz said with regret. ‘Not one of these proofs is worth anything, and mankind shelved them long ago. You must agree that in the realm of reason there can be no proof of God’s existence.’
Bravo!‘ cried the foreigner. ’Bravo! You have perfectly repeated restless old Immanuel‘s19 thought in this regard. But here’s the hitch: he roundly demolished all five proofs, and then, as if mocking himself, constructed a sixth of his own.’
‘Kant’s proof,’ the learned editor objected with a subtle smile, ‘is equally unconvincing. Not for nothing did Schiller20 say that the Kantian reasoning on this question can satisfy only slaves, and Strauss21 simply laughed at this proof.’
Berlioz spoke, thinking all the while: ‘But, anyhow, who is he? And why does he speak Russian so well?’
They ought to take this Kant and give him a three-year stretch in Solovki22 for such proofs!‘ Ivan Nikolaevich plumped quite unexpectedly.
‘Ivan!’ Berlioz whispered, embarrassed.
But the suggestion of sending Kant to Solovki not only did not shock the foreigner, but even sent him into raptures.
‘Precisely, precisely,’ he cried, and his green left eye, turned to Berlioz, flashed. ‘Just the place for him! Didn’t I tell him that time at breakfast: “As you will, Professor, but what you’ve thought up doesn’t hang together. It’s clever, maybe, but mighty unclear. You’ll be laughed at.”’
Berlioz goggled his eyes. ‘At breakfast ... to Kant? ... What is this drivel?’ he thought.
‘But,’ the outlander went on, unembarrassed by Berlioz’s amazement and addressing the poet, ‘sending him to Solovki is unfeasible, for the simple reason that he has been abiding for over a hundred years now in places considerably more remote than Solovki, and to extract him from there is in no way possible, I assure you.’
Too bad!‘ the feisty poet responded.
‘Yes, too bad!’ the stranger agreed, his eye flashing, and went on: ‘But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then, one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of things on earth?’
‘Man governs it himself,’ Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this admittedly none-too-clear question.
‘Pardon me,’ the stranger responded gently, ‘but in order to govern, one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for at least some ridiculously short period — well, say, a thousand years - but cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?
‘And in fact,’ here the stranger turned to Berlioz, ‘imagine that you, for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself, generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ... hem ... hem ... lung cancer ...’ — here the foreigner smiled sweetly, as if the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure — ‘yes, cancer’ — narrowing his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word — ’and so your governing is over!
‘You are no longer interested in anyone’s fate but your own. Your family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well. Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven.
‘And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk’ — here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz - ’a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?‘ And here the unknown man burst into a strange little laugh.
Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about the cancer and the tram-car, and certain alarming thoughts began to torment him. ‘He’s not a foreigner ... he’s not a foreigner ...’ he thought, ‘he’s a most peculiar specimen ... but, excuse me, who is he then?...’
‘You’d like to smoke, I see?’ the stranger addressed Homeless unexpectedly. ‘Which kind do you prefer?’
‘What, have you got several?’ the poet, who had run out of cigarettes, asked glumly.
‘Which do you prefer?’ the stranger repeated.
‘Okay — Our Brand,’ Homeless replied spitefully.
The unknown man immediately took a cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to Homeless:
‘Our Brand ...’
