Bulgakov's Feuilleton
Moscow, 1923
Moonshine Lake
At ten pm before Easter Sunday, our accursed hallway became quiet. In the blissful silence was born in me the burning thought that my dream had arrived and that the bimbo Pavlovna, who trades in cigarettes, had died. I decided this because from Pavlovna’s room did not carry the cries of her tortured son Shurik. I voluptuously smiled, sat in the torn armchair and unfurled Mark Twain's volume. Oh this blissful moment, this bright hour!
…Then, at 10:15 pm, in the corridor, a rooster thrice crowed. A rooster is nothing special. Indeed, a suckling pig lived in Pavlovna’s room for half a year. Generally, Moscow is not Berlin, for one thing, but in the second place, a man living one-and-a-half years in the corridor of № 50 you will not in any way astonish.
It wasn’t the fact of the unexpected appearance of a rooster that frightened me, but rather the circumstance that the rooster sang at ten pm. A rooster is not a nightingale that in the prewar times sang at dawn.
— Did these villains really get a rooster drunk? — I asked my unhappy wife, after pulling myself away from Twain.
But she did not have time to answer. Following upon the entrance flourish began an unbroken howling from the rooster. Then a man’s voice began to wail. And howl! It was an uninterrupted bass howl in C-sharp, soulful suffering and desperation, an agonal painful howl.
All the doors were thrown open, footsteps thundered. I dropped Twain and made for the corridor. In the corridor under the lamp, within a tight circle of amazed inhabitants of the famous corridor, stood a citizen unknown to me. His legs were spread wide as the letter W, he rocked, and without shutting his mouth, filled this most frenzied howl, which frightened me. In the corridor, I caught how the inarticulate long note gave way to an intoned recitative:
— Such a one, — hoarsely choked and howled the unknown citizen, being doused by large tears, — Christ is Risen! Very well you act! So you will belong to no one!!! A-a-a-a-a!!
And with these words he tore bundles of feathers from the tail of the rooster, which thrashed in his hands.
One glance was sufficient to ascertain that the rooster was completely sober. But on the face of the rooster was written inhuman suffering. Its eyes were popping out from the orbits, it clapped its wings and thrashed out from the tenacious hands of the unknown citizen. Pavlovna, Shurka, the chauffeur, Annushka, Annushka’s Misha, Duskin’s husband and both Duskins stood in a circle in perfect silence and motionless, as if nailed to the floor. On this occasion, I do not blame them. They even lost the gift of speech. They saw, as did I, the scene of the peeling of a live rooster for the first time.
