Their foreheads collided, clapping like billiard balls.
Mikhail Alexandrovich had tears in his eyes.
“So you’re not crazy?” asked Berlaga. “Then why are you playing the fool?”
“And you, why are you playing the fool?
Look at him!
Just give him his elephants or else!
Besides, my dear Berlaga, I have to tell you that if you want to make a good madman, the Viceroy is not a very convincing role, not at all.”
“My brother-in-law told me it was fine,” said Berlaga dejectedly.
“Take me, for example,” said Mikhail Alexandrovich, “a subtle act.
A dog man.
Schizophrenia complicated by bipolar disorder and on top of that, Berlaga, de-personalization.
Do you think it was easy to pull off?
I studied the literature.
Did you read Autistic Thinking by Professor Bleuler?”
“I’m afraid not,” answered Berlaga, sounding like a Viceroy who had just been stripped of the Order of the Garter and demoted to officer’s orderly.
“Gentlemen!” called out Mikhail Alexandrovich.
“He hasn’t read Bleuler!
Don’t be scared, come over here.
He’s no more a Viceroy than you are Caesar.”
The two remaining denizens of the small ward for disruptive patients came closer.
“You haven’t read Bleuler?” asked Julius Caesar with surprise. “But then what did you use to prepare?”
“He probably subscribed to the German magazine Jahrbuch fur Psychoanalytik und Psychopathologie,” suggested the mustachioed psychopath.
Berlaga felt like a complete fool.
Meanwhile, the experts continued spouting abstruse terminology relating to the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
Everybody agreed that Berlaga was in deep trouble, and that the head physician, Titanushkin, who was expected back from a business trip at any moment, would see through him in five minutes.
They failed to mention that they themselves were not looking forward to Titanushkin’s return.
“Maybe I should switch delusions?” asked Berlaga meekly.
“What if I become Emile Zola, or the Prophet Mohammed?”
“Too late, “ said Caesar. “Your case history already says that you’re the Viceroy. A madman cannot change his manias like socks.
For the rest of your life, you’ll be the stupid Viceroy.
We’ve been here for a week, and we know how it works.”
Within the next hour, Berlaga had learned the real case histories of his companions in great detail.
Mikhail Alexandrovich had entered the insane asylum for very simple, mundane reasons.
He was an important businessman who had inadvertently underpaid his income tax by forty-three thousand rubles.
This could mean an involuntary trip way up north, whereas business urgently required his presence in Chernomorsk.
Duvanov, the man who pretended he was a woman, was apparently a petty criminal with good reasons to fear arrest. But Gaius Julius Caesar, or, according to his papers, I. N. Starokhamsky, a former attorney-at-law, was a different matter entirely.
Gaius Julius Starokhamsky had entered the madhouse for lofty, ideological reasons.
“In Soviet Russia, the only place where a normal person can live is an insane asylum,” he said, draping himself in a blanket.
“Everything else is super-bedlam.
I cannot live with the Bolsheviks, no sir!
I’d rather live here, among common lunatics.
At least they aren’t building socialism.
Plus, here they feed you, while out there, in bedlam, you need to work.
And I have no intention of working for their socialism.
Finally, I have my personal freedom here.
Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech . . .”
Seeing an orderly who was passing by, Gaius Julius Starokhamsky started screaming:
“Long live the Constitutional Assembly!
Everyone to the Forum!
Et tu, Brute, sold out to the party apparatchiks!” He turned to Berlaga and added: “See?