Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita -
93 >
pointed inside and asked him:
'What would you like to wear--a dressing gown or pyjamas? '
Although he was a prisoner in his new home, Ivan found it hard to
resist the woman's easy, friendly manner and he pointed to a pair of crimson
flannelette pyjamas.
After that Ivan Nikolayich was led along an empty, soundless corridor
into a room of vast dimensions. He had decided to treat everything in this
wonderfully equipped building with
sarcasm and he at once mentally christened this room ' the factory
kitchen'.
And with good reason. There were cupboards and glass-fronted cabinets
full of gleaming nickel-plated instruments. There were armchairs of
strangely complex design, lamps with shiny, bulbous shades, a mass of
phials, bunsen burners, electric cables and various totally mysterious
pieces of apparatus.
Three people came into the room to see Ivan, two women and one man, all
in white. They began by taking Ivan to a desk in the corner to interrogate
him.
Ivan considered the situation. He had a choice of three courses. The
first was extremely tempting--to hurl himself at these lamps and other
ingenious gadgets and smash them all to pieces as a way of expressing his
protest at being locked up for nothing. But today's Ivan was significantly
different from the Ivan of yesterday and he found the first course dubious ;
it would only make them more convinced that he was a dangerous lunatic, so
he abandoned it. There was a second--to begin at once telling them the story
about the professor and Pontius Pilate. However yesterday's experience had
shown him that people either refused to believe the story or completely
misunderstood it, so Ivan rejected that course too, deciding to adopt the
third: he would wrap himself in proud silence.
It proved impossible to keep it up, and willy-nilly he found himself