Entering the shade of the lime trees that were just becoming green, the writers first and foremost hurried towards a colourfully painted little booth with the inscription "Beer and Minerals”.
Yes, the first strange thing about that terrible May evening should be noted. Not just by the booth, but along the entire tree-lined avenue running parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street, not a single person was about. At that hour, when people no longer even seemed to have the strength to breathe, when the sun, having heated Moscow up to an unbearable degree, was toppling in a dry mist somewhere down beyond the Garden Ring Road, nobody had come along here under the lime trees, nobody had sat down on a bench: the avenue was empty.
“Narzan,[5] please,” requested Berlioz.
“There’s no Narzan,” replied the woman in the booth, and for some reason took umbrage[6].
“Is there beer?” enquired Bezdomny in a hoarse voice[7].
“They’ll be bringing beer towards evening,” the woman replied.
“What is there, then?” asked Berlioz.
“Apricot squash – only it’s warm,” said the woman.
“Well, come on, come on, come on!”
The apricot squash produced an abundant yellow foam, and there was a sudden smell of the hairdresser’s in the air. Having quenched their thirst[8], the writers immediately started hiccuping; they settled up, and seated themselves on a bench with their faces to the pond and their backs to Bronnaya.
At this point the second strange thing occurred, concerning Berlioz alone. He suddenly stopped hiccuping; his heart gave a thump[9] and disappeared somewhere for a moment, then returned, but with a blunt needle lodged in it. Moreover, Berlioz was seized by terror – groundless, but so powerful that he felt the urge to flee from Patriarch’s Ponds at once without a backward glance.
Berlioz glanced back in anguish, unable to understand what had frightened him. He turned pale, mopped his brow with his handkerchief and thought: “What is the matter with me? This has never happened before… my heart’s playing up… I’m overtired. Maybe it’s time to let everything go to the devil and be off to Kislovodsk…”
And then the sultry air thickened before him, and out of this air was woven a transparent citizen of very strange appearance. On his little head a jockey’s peaked cap, a little checked jacket – tight, and airy too. a citizen almost seven feet tall, but narrow in the shoulders, unbelievably thin, and a physiognomy, I beg you to note, that was mocking[10].
Berlioz’s life had been shaped in such a way that he was not used to extraordinary phenomena. Turning still paler, he opened his eyes wide and thought in confusion: “It can’t be!.”
But, alas, it could, and the lanky citizen you could see through swayed to both left and right in front of him without touching the ground.
At this point Berlioz was horror-stricken[11] to such a degree that he closed his eyes. And when he opened them, he saw that everything was over, the mirage had dissolved, the one in checks had vanished, and at the same time the blunt needle had dropped out of his heart.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” exclaimed the editor. “You know, Ivan, I almost had a seizure[12] just now because of the heat! There was even something like a hallucination…” He tried to grin, but alarm was still dancing in his eyes, and his hands were trembling. However, he gradually calmed down, fanned himself with his handkerchief and, saying quite brightly, “Well, and so.” he renewed the speech that had been interrupted by the drinking of the apricot squash.
This speech, as was learnt subsequently, was about Jesus Christ. The thing was, the editor had commissioned a long antireligious poem from the poet for the next issue of his journal. Ivan Nikolayevich had written this poem, in a very short time too, but unfortunately had not satisfied the editor with it at all. Bezdomny had outlined the main character of his poem – Jesus, that is – in very dark colours, yet nonetheless, in the editor’s opinion, the whole poem needed to be written all over again. And so now the editor was giving the poet something in the way of a lecture on Jesus, with the aim of underlining the poet s basic error.
It is hard to say what precisely had let Ivan Nikolayevich down[13] – whether it had been the graphic power of his talent, or his utter unfamiliarity with the question on which he was writing – but his Jesus had come out as just a living Jesus who had once existed: only, true, a Jesus furnished with all the negative features possible.
And Berlioz wanted to demonstrate to the poet that the main thing was not what Jesus was like, whether he was good or bad, but that this Jesus, as a person, had not existed in the world at all, and that all the stories about him were simply inventions, the most commonplace myth.
It must be noted that the editor was a well-read man, and pointed very skilfully in his speech to the ancient historians – for example, to the celebrated Philo of Alexandria[14][15] and to the brilliantly educated Flavius Josephus,[16][17] who had never said a word about the existence of Jesus. Displaying sound erudition[18], Mikhail Alexandrovich also informed the poet, incidentally, that the passage in book fifteen, chapter forty-four of the celebrated Annales of Tacitus,[19][20] where the execution of Jesus is spoken of, is nothing other than a later forged interpolation.
The poet, to whom everything being imparted by the editor was news, listened to Mikhail Alexandrovich attentively with his lively green eyes fixed upon him, and only hiccuping occasionally, cursing in a whisper the apricot squash.
“There isn’t a single eastern religion,” said Berlioz, “in which, as a rule, a chaste virgin doesn’t give birth to a god. And without inventing anything new, in exactly the same way, the Christians created their Jesus, who in reality never actually lived. And it’s on that the main emphasis needs to be put…”
Berlioz’s high tenor resounded in the deserted avenue, and the deeper Mikhail Alexandrovich clambered into the thickets[21] into which only a very educated man can clamber without the risk of coming a cropper, the more and more interesting and useful were the things the poet learnt about the Egyptian Osiris, the most merciful god and son of heaven and earth,[22][23] and about the Phoenician god Tammuz,[24][25] and about Marduk,[26][27] and even about the lesser-known stern god Huitzilopochtli,[28] who was at one time much revered by the Aztecs in Mexico.[29]
And it was at precisely the moment when Mikhail Alexandrovich was telling the poet about how the Aztecs used to make a figurine of Huitzilopochtli from dough that the first person appeared in the avenue.
Subsequently – when, frankly speaking, it was already too late