'But here is a question that is troubling me: if there is no God, then,
one may ask, who governs human life and, in general, the whole order of
things on earth?'
'Man governs it himself,' Homeless angrily hastened to reply to this
admittedly none-too-clear question.
'Pardon me,' the stranger responded gently, 'but in order to govern,
one needs, after all, to have a precise plan for a certain, at least
somewhat decent, length of time. Allow me to ask you, then, how can man
govern, if he is not only deprived of the opportunity of making a plan for
at least some ridiculously short period - well, say, a thousand years - but
cannot even vouch for his own tomorrow?
'And in fact,' here the stranger turned to Berlioz, 'imagine that you,
for instance, start governing, giving orders to others and yourself,
generally, so to speak, acquire a taste for it, and suddenly you get ...hem
... hem ... lung cancer ...' -- here the foreigner smiled sweetly, and if
the thought of lung cancer gave him pleasure -- 'yes, cancer' -- narrowing
his eyes like a cat, he repeated the sonorous word -- 'and so your governing
is over!
'You are no longer interested in anyone's fate but your own. Your
family starts lying to you. Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to
learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well.
Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you
understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he
was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box,
and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good
for anything, burn him in an oven.
'And sometimes it's worse still: the man has just decided to go to
Kislovodsk' - here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz - 'a trifling matter,
it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows
why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who
governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was
governed by someone else entirely?' And here the unknown man burst into a
strange little laugh.