Chapter summary
Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny stays on the bench, paralyzed with horror, after seeing Berlioz's head roll along the paving (see Berlioz's head). Hearing a woman shout that it was Annushka, from Sadovaya Street, who poured a liter of sunflower oil over the turnstile, Ivan connects that oil to the foreigner's prediction that there would be no meeting and to the one that a woman would cut off Berlioz's head, and recalls that the tram operator was a woman. He concludes that the consultant knew everything in advance and perhaps staged the scene. He runs back to the place where he left him and finds him there, now in the company of a man in checked clothing, who says he is a former choirmaster and wears a pince-nez with one lens missing and the other cracked. The foreigner pretends not to understand Russian, the choirmaster gets in Ivan's way and vanishes, and soon the two reappear fleeing with a huge black cat, which walks on its hind legs and tries to pay a tram fare with a ten-kopeck coin. Ivan pursues them through Moscow at a speed that makes no sense, loses sight of the foreigner and, without knowing why, deduces that he is in apartment 47 of building no. 13. He breaks into the apartment, comes upon a naked woman in the bath, who mistakes him for someone named Kiryukha and orders him out, and in the kitchen he takes a candle and a paper icon. Then he decides, also without knowing why, that the professor is in the Moskva River and dives in; when he climbs out of the water, he discovers that his clothes and his Massolit membership card have been stolen, and all he has left is striped long underwear, the candle, the icon and a box of matches. He resolves to go on foot, like that, to the Griboyedov House, the seat of Massolit, convinced that the professor will be there.
Analysis
Ivan goes after the three with the logic of someone pursuing a culprit: the narrator records that he thinks two things, that the consultant is not mad, and that perhaps he staged everything. The text does not explain why he takes the candle and the icon from the invaded apartment, nor why he supposes the man is in the river; it shows someone who acts before deciding, pushed by the horror of the scene.
There was no shadow of doubt that the mysterious consultant had known in advance of the entire scene of Berlioz's terrible death.
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