The Duel Between the Professor and the Poet

Chapter summary

At about half past eleven in the morning, Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny wakes in the clinic's white room, much calmer than the day before. A nurse prepares a bath for him and offers him clean clothes, and three people in white coats question him about his past and his family and examine him, without being astonished by the mention of Pontius Pilate. Ivan then decides to wait for the head of the place to ask for justice. Doctor Stravinsky arrives (see Stravinsky's clinic), followed by a retinue of doctors, and Ivan tries to convince him that in Patriarch's Ponds he met a foreigner who knew in advance of the death of Berlioz and who had met Pontius Pilate in person, accompanied by a man with broken glasses and by a huge cat that rides the tram. Stravinsky never contests the story head-on: he listens attentively, offers him his discharge if Ivan merely says that he is normal and, when Ivan says it firmly, goes through with him, action by action, everything he did the day before (the icon on his chest, the fall at the fence, the candle lit in the restaurant, the slap, the request for motorcycles with machine guns, the attempt to throw himself out of the window) and asks whether that is how one arrests a criminal. Faced with the chained logic, Ivan understands that if he leaves there in his underwear to speak to Pontius Pilate's police, he will return to the same room, and he agrees to stay. The doctor then proposes that he put on paper his suspicions against the foreigner, on condition that he think less about Pontius Pilate, and repeats, holding his hands, that he will be helped there.