Chapter summary
Before the dream, under interrogation, Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy admits to having accepted the bundle from Korovyov, but swears it was in rubles and denies having touched foreign currency (see the foreign money). He blames Korovyov, whom he calls an unclean force, and begins to see the interpreter behind the wardrobe; the investigators go to Apartment 50, find no one, and Nikanor is taken at night to Stravinsky's clinic, where he receives an injection and falls asleep in room 119.
In the dream, he is taken to the stage of a theater where the audience, made up only of bearded men seated on the floor, is called by a cordial master of ceremonies to hand over the foreign money hidden at home. Nikanor sticks to his version from the interrogation: he has no foreign currency, and the dollars in the bathroom belong to the translator in checked clothing. The master of ceremonies replies ironically that someone can plant in another's house a child, an anonymous letter or a time bomb, but that no one would part with four hundred dollars, and the audience whistles and calls him a currency dealer. Then another spectator, Dunchil, who for a month and a half has refused to hand over the dollars, says he has none left, and his wife confirms that he has already handed everything over; the master of ceremonies then brings up Dunchil's mistress, who reveals that he kept eighteen thousand dollars and a necklace at her house. Another, Kanavkin, confesses to having a thousand dollars hidden in the cellar of his aunt's house and is applauded as a hero. Nikanor wakes shouting that he has nothing, and the alarm of the nightmare spreads to the neighboring rooms, among them the Master's and that of Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, who falls back asleep already dreaming of Golgotha.
Analysis
Nikanor dreams what he cannot say awake: he was arrested for dollars he never touched and is sedated in the clinic. The dream restages the interrogation as a spectacle in which the entire audience is called on to hand over. One spectator, Kanavkin, confesses to having hidden dollars and is applauded; another, Dunchil, says he has already handed over everything, until his mistress helps reveal where the dollars and the necklace were. Nikanor chooses to deny, the only resource left to him, and wakes shouting that he has nothing, which wakes the neighbors, Ivan among them.
I accepted the money! Yes, I accepted it, but it was our money, Soviet money!
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