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bird's claw and began melting into air.
Two hours passed. Professor Kuzmin sat in his bedroom on the bed, with
leeches hanging from his temples, behind his ears, and on his neck. At
Kuzmin's feet, on a quilted silk blanket, sat the grey-moustached Professor
Bouret, looking at Kuzmin with condolence and comforting him, saying it was
all nonsense. Outside the window it was already night.
What other prodigies occurred in Moscow that night we do not know and
certainly will not try to find out - especially as it has come time for us
to go on to the second part of this truthful narrative. Follow me, reader!
Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful,
eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out!
Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!
No! The master was mistaken when with bitterness he told Ivanushka in
the hospital, at that hour when the night was falling past midnight, that
she had forgotten him. That could not be. She had, of course, not forgotten
him.
First of all let us reveal the secret which the master did not wish to
reveal to Ivanushka. His beloved's name was Margarita Nikolaevna [1].
Everything the master told the poor poet about her was the exact truth.
He described his beloved correctly. She was beautiful and intelligent. To
that one more thing must be added: it can be said with certainty that many
women would have given anything to exchange their lives for the life of
Margarita Nikolaevna. The childless thirty-year-old Margarita was the wife
of a very prominent specialist, who, moreover, had made a very important
discovery of state significance. Her husband was young, handsome, kind,
honest, and adored his wife. The two of them, Margarita and her husband,
occupied the entire top floor of a magnificent house in a garden on one of
the lanes near the Arbat. A charming place! Anyone can be convinced of it
who wishes to visit this garden. Let them inquire of me, and I will give
them the address, show them the way - the house stands untouched to this
day.
Margarita Nikolaevna was not in need of money. Margarita Nikolaevna
could buy whatever she liked. Among her husband's acquaintances there were
some interesting people. Margarita Nikolaevna had never touched a primus
stove. Margarita Nikolaevna knew nothing of the horrors of life in a
communal apartment. In short ... she was happy? Not for one minute! Never,
since the age of nineteen, when she had married and wound up in this house,
had she known any happiness. Gods, my gods! What, then, did this woman
need?! What did this woman need, in whose eyes there always burned some
enigmatic little fire? What did she need, this witch with a slight cast in
one eye, who had adorned herself with mimosa that time in the spring? I do
not know. I have no idea. Obviously she was telling the truth, she needed
him, the master, and not at all some Gothic mansion, not a private garden,
not money. She loved him, she was telling the truth.
Even I, the truthful narrator, though an outsider, feel my heart wrung
at the thought of what Margarita endured when she came to the master's
little house the next day (fortunately before she had time to talk with her
husband, who had not come back at the appointed time) and discovered that
the master was no longer there. She did everything to find out something
about him, and, of course, found out nothing. Then she went back to her
house and began living in her former place.
But as soon as the dirty snow disappeared from the sidewalks and
streets, as soon as the slightly rotten, disquieting spring breeze wafted
through the window, Margarita Nikolaevna began to grieve more than in
winter. She often wept in secret, a long and bitter weeping. She did not
know who it was she loved: a living man or a dead one? And the longer the
desperate days went on, the more often, especially at twilight, did the
thought come to her that she was bound to a dead man.
She had either to forget him or to die herself. It was impossible to
drag on with such a life. Impossible! Forget him, whatever the cost - forget
him! But he would not be forgotten, that was the trouble.
'Yes, yes, yes, the very same mistake!' Margarita said, sitting by the
stove and gazing into the fire lit in memory of the fire that had burned
while he was writing Pontius Pilate. `Why did I leave him that night? Why?
It was madness! I came back the next day, honestly, as I'd promised, but it
was too late. Yes, like the unfortunate Matthew Levi, I came back too late!'
All these words were, of course, absurd, because what, in fact, would
it have changed if she had stayed with the master that night? Would she have
saved him? 'Ridiculous! ...' we might exclaim, but we shall not do so before
a woman driven to despair.
On that same day when all sorts of absurd turmoil took place, provoked
by the appearance of the black magician in Moscow, on the Friday when
Berlioz's uncle was chased back to Kiev, when the bookkeeper was arrested
and a host of other quite stupid and incomprehensible things took place -
Margarita woke up at around noon in her bedroom with bay windows in the
tower of the house.
On awakening, Margarita did not weep, as she often did, because she
awoke with a presentiment that today something was finally going to happen.
Having felt this presentiment, she began to warm it and nurture it in
her soul, for fear it might abandon her.
'I believe!' Margarita whispered solemnly. 'I believe! Something will
happen! It cannot not happen, because for what, indeed, has lifelong torment
been sent to me? I admit that I lied and deceived and lived a secret life,
hidden from people, but all the same the punishment for it cannot be so
cruel... Something is bound to happen, because it cannot be that anything
will go on forever. And besides, my dream was prophetic, I'll swear it
was...'
So Margarita Nikolaevna whispered, looking at the crimson curtains as
they filled with sun, dressing anxiously, combing her short curled hair in
front of the triple mirror.
The dream that Margarita had dreamed that night was indeed unusual. The
thing was that during her winter sufferings she had never seen the master in
her dreams. He released her for the night, and she suffered only in the
daylight hours. But now she had dreamed of him.
The dream was of a place unknown to Margarita - hopeless, dismal, under
the sullen sky of early spring. In the dream there was this ragged,
fleeting, grey sky, and under it a noiseless flock of rooks. Some gnarled
little bridge, and under it a muddy spring runlet. Joyless, destitute,
half-naked trees. A lone aspen, and further on, among the trees, beyond some
vegetable patch, a little log structure - a separate kitchen, a bathhouse,
devil knows what it was! Everything around somehow lifeless and so dismal
that one just longed to hang oneself from that aspen by the bridge. Not a
puff of breeze, not a movement of the clouds, and not a living soul. What a
hellish place for a living man!
And then, imagine, the door of this log structure is thrown open, and
he appears. Rather far away, but clearly visible. He is in tatters, it is
impossible to make out what he is wearing. Unshaven, hair dishevelled. Sick,
anxious eyes. He beckons with his hand, calling her. Gasping in the lifeless
air, Margarita ran to him over the tussocks, and at that moment she woke up.
This dream means only one of two things,' Margarita Nikolaevna reasoned
with herself. 'If he's dead and beckoned to me, it means he has come for me,
and I will die soon. And that's very good - because then my suffering will
soon end. Or else he's alive, and then the dream can only mean one thing,
that he's reminding me of himself! He wants to say that we will see each
other again... Yes, we will see each other very soon!'
Still in the same agitated state, Margarita got dressed and began
impressing it upon herself that, essentially, everything was turning out
very luckily, and one must know how to catch such lucky moments and take
advantage of them. Her husband had gone on a business trip for a whole three
days. During those three days she was at her own disposal, and no one could
prevent her from thinking what she liked or dreaming what she liked. All
five rooms on the top floor of the house, all of this apartment which in
Moscow would be the envy of tens of thousands of people, was entirely at her
disposal.
However, being granted freedom for a whole three days, Margarita chose
from this entire luxurious apartment what was far from the best place. After
having tea, she went to a dark, windowless room where suitcases and all
sorts of old stuff were kept in two large wardrobes. Squatting down, she
opened the bottom drawer of the first of them, and took from under a pile of
silk scraps the only precious thing she had in life. Margarita held in her
hands an old brown leather album which contained a photographic portrait of
the master, a bank savings book with a deposit of ten thousand roubles in
his name, the petals of a dried rose pressed between sheets of tissue paper,
and part of a full-sized notebook covered with typescript and with a charred
bottom edge.
Going back to her bedroom with these riches, Margarita Nikolaevna set
the photograph up on the triple mirror and sat for about an hour holding the
fire-damaged book on her knees, leafing through it and rereading that which,
after the burning, had neither beginning nor end:
'... The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city
hated by the procurator. The hanging bridges connecting the temple with the
dread Antonia Tower [2] disappeared, the abyss descended from the sky and
flooded the winged gods over the hippodrome, the Has-monaean Palace [3] with
its loopholes, the bazaars, caravanserais, lanes, pools... Yershalaim - the
great city - vanished as if it had never existed in the world...'
Margarita wanted to read further, but further there was nothing except
an irregular, charred fringe.
Wiping her tears, Margarita Nikolaevna abandoned the notebook, rested
her elbows on the dressing table and, reflected in the mirror, sat for a
long time without taking her eyes from the photograph. Then the tears dried
up. Margarita neatly folded her possessions, and a few minutes later they
were again buried under silk rags, and the lock clicked shut in the dark
room.
Margarita Nikolaevna was putting her coat on in the front hall in order
to go for a walk. The beautiful Natasha, her housemaid, asked what to
prepare for the main course, and, receiving the reply that it made no
difference, got into conversation with her mistress for her own amusement,
and began telling her God knows what, something about how yesterday in the
theatre a conjurer began performing such tricks that everybody gasped, gave
away two flacons of foreign perfume and a pair of stockings free to
everybody, and then, when the sce came outside and -
bang - everybody turned out to be naked! Margarita Nikolaevna dropped on to
the chair in front of the hall mirror and burst out laughing.
'Natasha! You ought to be ashamed,' Margarita Nikolaevna said, 'you, a
literate, intelligent girl... they tell devil knows what lies in the queues,
and you go repeating them!'
Natasha flushed deeply and objected with great ardour that, no, they
weren't lying, and that she herself had personally seen today, in a grocer's
on the Arbat, one citizeness who came into the shop wearing shoes, but as
she was paying at the cash register, the shoes disappeared from her feet,
and she was left in just her stockings. Eyes popping out, and a hole in her
heel! And the shoes were magic ones from that same shis sant surprise for Natasha.
Margarita Nikolaevna went to the bedroom and came back holding a pair
of stockings and a flacon of eau-de-cologne. Telling Natasha that she, too,
wanted to perform a trick, Margarita Nikolaevna gave her both the stockings
and the bottle, and said her only request was that she not run around on
Tverskaya in nothing but stockings and that she not listen to Darya. Having
kissed each other, mistress and housemaid parted.
Leaning against the comfortable soft back of the trolley-bus seat,
Margarita Nikolaevna rode down the Arbat, now thinking her own thoughts, now
listening to the whispers of two citizens sitting in front of her.
They were exchanging whispers about some nonsense, looking around
warily from time to time to make sure no one was listening. The hefty, beefy
one with pert, piggish eyes, sitting by the window, was quietly telling his
small neighbour that the coffin had to be covered with a black cloth...
`It can't be!' the small one whispered, amazed. 'This is something
unheard-of! ... And what has Zheldybin done?'
Amidst the steady humming of the trolley-bus, words came from the
window:
`Criminal investigation ... scandal ... well, outright mysticism!
...' From these fragmentary scraps, Margarita Nikolaevna somehow put
together something coherent. The citizens were whispering about some dead
person (they did not name him) whose head had been stolen from the coffin
that morning... This was the reason why Zheldybin was now so worried. And
the two who were whispering on the trolley-bus also had some connection with
the robbed dead man.
`Will we have time to stop for flowers?' the small one worried. The
cremation is at two, you say?'
Margarita Nikolaevna finally got tired of listening to this mysterious
palaver about a head stolen from a coffin, and she was glad it was time for
her to get off.
A few minutes later Margarita Nikolaevna was sitting on one of the
benches under the Kremlin wall, settling herself in such a way that she
could see the Manege. [4]
Margarita squinted in the bright sunlight, remembered her last night's
dream, remembered how, exactly a year ago to the day and the hour, she had
sat next to him on this same bench. And in just the same way as then, her
black handbag lay beside her on the bench. He was not beside her this day,
but Margarita Nikolaevna mentally conversed with him all the same: 'If
you've been exiled, why don't you send me word of yourself? People do send
word. Have you stopped loving me? No, for some reason I don't believe that.
It means you were exiled and died... Release me, then, I beg you, give me
freedom to live, finally, to breathe the air! ...' Margarita Nikolaevna
answered for him herself:
'You are free ... am I holding you?' Then she objected to him: 'No,
what kind of answer is that? No, go from my memory, then I'll be free...'
People walked past Margarita Nikolaevna. Some man gave the well-dressed
woman a sidelong glance, attracted by her beauty and her solitude. He
coughed and sat down at the end of the same bench that Margarita Nikolaevna
was sitting on. Plucking up his courage, he began:
'Definitely nice weather today ...'
But Margarita gave him such a dark look that he got up and left.
"There, for example,' Margarita said mentally to him who possessed her.
'Why, in fact, did I chase that man away? I'm bored, and there's
nothing bad about this Lovelace, unless it's the stupid word "definitely"
... Why am I sitting alone under the wall like an owl? Why am I excluded
from life?'
She became thoroughly sad and downcast. But here suddenly the same
morning wave of expectation and excitement pushed at her chest. 'Yes, it
will happen!' The wave pushed her a second time, and now she realized that
it was a wave of sound. Through the noise of the city there came ever more
distinctly the approaching beat of a drum and the sounds of slightly off-key
trumpets.
The first to appear was a mounted policeman riding slowly past the
garden fence, with three more following on foot. Then a slowly rolling truck
with the musicians. After that, a new, open hearse moving slowly, a coffin
on it all covered with wreaths, and at the corners of the platform four
standing persons - three men and one woman.
Even from a distance, Margarita discerned that the faces of the people
standing on the hearse, accompanying the deceased on his last journey, were
somehow strangely bewildered. This was particularly noticeable with regard
to the citizeness who stood at the left rear corner of the hearse. This
citizeness's fat cheeks were as if pushed out still more from inside by some
piquant secret, her puffy little eyes glinted with an ambiguous fire. It
seemed that just a little longer and the citizeness, unable to help herself,
would wink at the deceased and say: `Have you ever seen the like? Outright
mysticism! ...' The same bewildered faces showed on those in the cortege,
who, numbering three hundred or near it, slowly walked behind the hearse.
Margarita followed the procession with her eyes, listening to the
dismal Turkish drum fading in the distance, producing one and the same
'boom, boom, boom', and thought: 'What a strange funeral ... and what
anguish from that "boom"! Ah, truly, I'd pawn my soul to the devil just to
find out whether he's alive or not ... It would be interesting to know who
they're burying.'
'Berlioz, Mikhail Alexandrovich,' a slightly nasal male voice came from
beside her, 'chairman of Massolit.'
The surprised Margarita Nikolaevna turned and saw a citizen on her
bench, who had apparently sat down there noiselessly while Margarita was
watching the procession and, it must be assumed, absent-mindedly asked her
last question aloud.
The procession meanwhile was slowing down, probably delayed by traffic
lights ahead.
`Yes,' the unknown citizen went on, 'they're in a surprising mood.
They're accompanying the deceased and thinking only about what happened to
his head.'
What head?' asked Margarita, studying her unexpected neighbour. This
neighbour turned out to be short of stature, a fiery redhead with a fang, in
a starched shirt, a good-quality striped suit, patent leather shoes, and
with a bowler hat on his head. His tie was brightly coloured. The surprising
thing was that from the pocket where men usually carry a handkerchief or a
fountain pen, this gentleman had a gnawed chicken bone sacking out.
'You see,' the redhead explained, `this morning in the hall of
Griboedov's, the deceased's head was filched from the coffin.'
`How can that be?' Margarita asked involuntarily, remembering at the
same time the whispering on the trolley-bus.
'Devil knows how!' the redhead replied casually. `I suppose, however,
that it wouldn't be a bad idea to ask Behemoth about it. It was an awfully
deft snatch! Such a scandal! ... And, above all, it's incomprehensible - who
needs this head and for what!'
Occupied though Margarita Nikolaevna was with her own thoughts, she was
struck all the same by the unknown citizen's strange twaddle.
`Excuse me!' she suddenly exclaimed. 'What Berlioz? The one that
today's newspapers...'
The same, the same...'
'So it means that those are writers following the coffin!' Margarita
asked, and suddenly bared her teeth.
'Well, naturally they are!'
'And do you know them by sight?'
'All of them to a man,' the redhead replied.
'Tell me,' Margarita began to say, and her voice became hollow, 'is the
critic Latunsky among them?'
`How could he not be?' the redhead replied. 'He's there at the end of
the fourth row.'
The blond one?' Margarita asked, narrowing her eyes.
'Ash-coloured ... See, he's raising his eyes to heaven.'
'Looking like a parson?'
"That's him!'
Margarita asked nothing more, peering at Latunsky.
`And I can see,' the redhead said, smiling, 'that you hate this
Latunsky!'
There are some others I hate,' Margarita answered through her teeth,
'but it's not interesting to talk about it.'
The procession moved on just then, with mostly empty automobiles
following the people on foot.
'Oh, well, of course there's nothing interesting in it, Margarita
Nikolaevna!'
Margarita was surprised.
'Do you know me?'
In place of an answer, the redhead took off his bowler hat and held it
out.
`A perfect bandit's mug!' thought Margarita, studying her street
interlocutor.
'Well, I don't know you,' Margarita said drily.
`Where could you know me from? But all the same I've been sent to you
on a little business.'
Margarita turned pale and recoiled.
You ought to have begun with that straight off,' she said, 'instead of
pouring out devil knows what about some severed head! You want to arrest
me?'
'Nothing of the kind!' the redhead exclaimed. 'What is it - you start a
conversation, and right away it's got to be an arrest! I simply have
business with you.'
'I don't understand, what business?'
The redhead looked around and said mysteriously:
'I've been sent to invite you for a visit this evening.'
'What are you raving about, what visit?'
'To a very distinguished foreigner,' the redhead said significantly,
narrowing one eye.
Margarita became very angry.
'A new breed has appeared - a street pander!' she said, getting up to
leave.
Thanks a lot for such errands!' the redhead exclaimed grudgingly, and
he muttered 'Fool!' to Margarita Nikolaevna's back.
'Scoundrel!' she replied, turning, and straight away heard the
redhead's voice behind her:
'The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city
hated by the procurator. The hanging bridges connecting the temple with the
dread Antonia Tower disappeared ... Yershalaim - the great city - vanished
as if it had never existed in the world... So you, too, can just vanish away
along with your burnt notebook and dried-up rose! Sit here on the bench
alone and entreat him to set you free, to let you breathe the air, to go
from your memory!'
Her face white, Margarita came back to the bench. The redhead was
looking at her, narrowing his eyes.
`I don't understand any of this,' Margarita began quietly. 'It's
possible to find out about the pages ... get in, snoop around ... You bribed
Natasha, right? But how could you find out my thoughts?' She scowled
painfully and added: 'Tell me, who are you? From which institution?'
`What a bore ...' the redhead muttered and then said aloud, 'I beg your
pardon, didn't I tell you that I'm not from any institution? Sit down,
please.'
Margarita obeyed unquestioningly, but even so, as she was sitting down,
she asked once more:
'Who are you?'
'Well, all right, my name is Azazello, but anyhow that tells you
nothing.'
'And you won't tell me how you found out about the pages and about my
thoughts?'
'No, I won't,' Azazello replied drily.
'But do you know anything about him?' Margarita whispered imploringly.
'Well, suppose I do.'
'I implore you, tell me only one thing ... is he alive? ... Don't
torment me!'
'Well, he's alive, he's alive,' Azazello responded reluctantly.
'Oh, God! ...'
'Please, no excitements and exclamations,' Azazello said, frowning.
`Forgive me, forgive me,' the now obedient Margarita murmured, 'of
course, I got angry with you. But, you must agree, when a woman is invited
in the street to pay a visit somewhere ... I have no prejudices, I assure
you,' Margarita smiled joylessly, 'but I never see any foreigners, I have no
wish to associate with them ... and, besides, my husband ... my drama is
that I'm living with someone I don't love ... but I consider it an unworthy
thing to spoil his life ... I've never seen anything but kindness from him
...'
Azazello heard out this incoherent speech with visible boredom and said
sternly:
'I beg you to be silent for a moment.'
Margarita obediently fell silent.
The foreigner to whom I'm inviting you is not dangerous at all. And not
a single soul will know of this visit. That I can guarantee you.'
'And what does he need me for?' Margarita asked insinuatingly.
'You'll find that out later.'
'I understand ... I must give myself to him,' Margarita said pensively.
To which Azazello grunted somehow haughtily and replied thus:
'Any woman in the world, I can assure you, would dream of just that,'
Azazello's mug twisted with a little laugh, 'but I must disappoint you,
it won't happen.'
'What kind of foreigner is that?!' Margarita exclaimed in bewilderment,
so loudly that people passing by turned to look at her. 'And what interest
do I have in going to him?'
Azazello leaned towards her and whispered meaningfully:
'Well, a very great interest ... you'd better use the opportunity...'
'What?' exclaimed Margarita, and her eyes grew round. 'If I understand
you rightly, you're hinting that I may find out about him there?'
Azazello silently nodded.
'I'll go!' Margarita exclaimed with force and seized Azazello by the
hand. 'I'll go wherever you like!'
Azazello, with a sigh of relief, leaned against the back of the bench,
covering up the name `Niura' carved on it in big letters, and saying
ironically:
'Difficult folk, these women!' he put his hands in his pockets and
stretched his legs way out. 'Why, for instance, was I sent on this business?
Behemoth should have gone, he's a charmer...'
Margarita said, with a crooked and bitter smile:
'Stop mystifying me and tormenting me with your riddles. I'm an unhappy
person, and you're taking advantage of it... I'm getting myself into some
strange story, but I swear, it's only because you lured me with words about
him! My head's spinning from all these puzzlements...'
'No dramas, no dramas,' Azazello returned, making faces, 'you must also
put yourself in my position. To give some administrator a pasting, or chuck
an uncle out of the house, or gun somebody down, or any other trifle of the
sort - that's right in my line. But talking with a woman in love, no thanks!
... It's half an hour now that I've been wangling you into it... So you'll
go?'
'I will,' Margarita Nikolaevna answered simply.
'Be so good as to accept this, then,' said Azazello, and, pulling a
round little golden box from his pocket, he offered it to Margarita with the
words: 'Hide it now, the passers-by are looking. It'll come in useful,
Margarita Nikolaevna, you've aged a lot from grief in the last half-year.'
Margarita flushed but said nothing, and Azazello went on: 'Tonight, at
exactly half past nine, be so good as to take off all your clothes and rub
your face and your whole body with this ointment. Then do whatever you like,
only don't go far from the telephone. At ten I'll call you and tell you all
you need to know. You won't have to worry about a thing, you'll be delivered
where you need to go and won't be put to any trouble. Understood?'
Margarita was silent for a moment, then replied:
'Understood. This thing is pure gold, you can tell by the weight. So,
then, I understand perfectly well that I'm being bribed and drawn into some
shady story for which I'm going to pay dearly...'
'What is all this?' Azazello almost hissed. 'You're at it again?'
'No, wait!'
'Give me back the cream!' Margarita clutched the box more tightly in
her hand and said:
'No, wait! ... I know what I'm getting into. But I'm getting into it on
account of him, because I have no more hope for anything in this world. But
I want to tell you that if you're going to ruin me, you'll be ashamed! Yes,
ashamed! I'm perishing on account of love!' - and striking herself on the
breast, Margarita glanced at the sun.
'Give it back!' Azazello cried angrily. 'Give it back and devil take
the whole thing. Let them send Behemoth!'
'Oh, no!' exclaimed Margarita, shocking the passers-by. `I agree to
everything, I agree to perform this comedy of rubbing in the ointment, agree
to go to the devil and beyond! I won't give it back!'
'Hah!' Azazello suddenly shouted and, goggling his eyes at the garden
fence, began pointing off somewhere with his finger.
Margarita turned to where Azazello was pointing, but found nothing
special there. Then she turned back to Azazello, wishing to get an
explanation of this absurd 'Hah!' but there was no one to give an
explanation: Margarita Nikolaevna's mysterious interlocutor had disappeared.
Margarita quickly thrust her hand into her handbag, where she had put
the box before this shouting, and made sure it was there. Then, without
reflecting on anything, Margarita hurriedly ran out of the Alexandrovsky
Garden.
The moon in the clear evening sky hung full, visible through the maple
branches. Lindens and acacias drew an intricate pattern of spots on the
ground in the garden. The triple bay window, open but covered by a curtain,
was lit with a furious electric light. In Margarita Nikolaevna's bedroom all
the lamps were burning, illuminating the total disorder in the room.
On the blanket on the bed lay shifts, stockings and underwear. Crumpled
underwear was also simply lying about on the floor next to a box of
cigarettes crushed in the excitement. Shoes stood on the night table next to
an unfinished cup of coffee and an ashtray in which a butt was smoking. A
black evening dress hung over the back of a chair. The room smelled of
perfume. Besides that, the smell of a red-hot iron was coming from
somewhere.
Margarita Nikolaevna sat in front of the pier-glass, with just a
bathrobe thrown over her naked body, and in black suede shoes. A gold
bracelet with a watch lay in front of Margarita Nikolaevna, beside the box
she had received from Azazello, and Margarita did not take her eyes from its
face.
At times it began to seem to her that the watch was broken and the
hands were not moving. But they were moving, though very slowly, as if
sucking, and at last the big hand fell on the twenty-ninth minute past nine.
Margarita's heart gave a terrible thump, so that she could not even
take hold of the box right away. Having mastered herself, Margarita opened
it and saw in the box a rich, yellowish cream. It seemed to her that it
smelted of swamp slime. With the tip of her finger, Margarita put a small
dab of the cream on her palm, the smell of swamp grass and forest grew
stronger, and then she began rubbing the cream into her forehead and cheeks
with her palm.
The cream spread easily and, as it seemed to Margarita, evaporated at
once. Having rubbed several times, Margarita glanced into the mirror and
dropped the box right on her watch crystal, which became covered with
cracks. Margarita closed her eyes, then glanced once again and burst into
stormy laughter.
Her eyebrows, plucked to a thread with tweezers, thickened and lay in
even black arches over her greening eyes. The thin vertical crease cutting
the bridge of her nose, which had appeared back then, in October, when the
master vanished, disappeared without a trace. So did the yellowish shadows
at her temples and the two barely noticeable little webs of wrinkles at the
outer corners of her eyes. The skin of her cheeks filled out with an even
pink colour, her forehead became white and clear, and the hairdresser's
waves in her hair came undone.
From the mirror a naturally curly, black-haired woman of about twenty
was looking at the thirty-year-old Margarita, baring her teeth and shaking
with laughter.
Having laughed her fill, Margarita jumped out of her bathrobe with a
single leap, dipped freely into the light, rich cream, and with vigorous
strokes began rubbing it into the skin of her body. It at once turned pink
and tingly. That instant, as if a needle had been snatched from her brain,
the ache she had felt in her temple all evening after the meeting in the
Alexandrovsky Garden subsided, her leg and arm muscles grew stronger, and
then Margarita's body became weightless.
She sprang up and hung in the air just above the rug, then was slowly
pulled down and descended.
'What a cream! What a cream!' cried Margarita, throwing herself into an
armchair.
The rubbings changed her not only externally. Now joy was boiling up in
her, in all of her, in every particle of her body, which felt to her like
bubbles prickling her body all over. Margarita felt herself free, free of
everything. Besides, she understood with perfect clarity that what was
happening was precisely what her presentiment had been telling her in the
morning, and that she was leaving her house and her former life forever.
But, even so, a thought split off from this former life about the need
of fulfilling just one last duty before the start of something new,
extraordinary, which was pulling her upwards into the air. And, naked as she
was, she ran from her bedroom, flying up in the air time and again, to her
husband's study, and, turning on the light, rushed to the desk. On a page
torn from a notebook, she pencilled a note quickly and in big letters,
without any corrections:
Forgive me and forget me as soon as possible. I am leaving you for
ever. Do not look for me, it is useless. I have become a witch from the
grief and calamities that have struck me. It's time for me to go. Farewell.
Margarita.
With a completely unburdened soul, Margarita came flying into the
bedroom, and after her ran Natasha, loaded down with things. At once all
these things - a wooden hanger with a dress, lace shawls, dark blue satin
shoes on shoe-trees and a belt - all of it spilled on the floor, and Natasha
clasped her freed hands.
'What, nice?' Margarita Nikolaevna cried loudly in a hoarse voice.
'How can it be?' Natasha whispered, backing away. 'How did you do it,
Margarita Nikolaevna.'
'It's the cream! The cream, the cream!' answered Margarita, pointing to
the glittering golden box and turning around in front of the mirror.
Natasha, forgetting the wrinkled dress lying on the floor, ran up to
the pier-glass and fixed her greedy, lit-up eyes on the remainder of the
cream. Her lips were whispering something. She again turned to Margarita and
said with a sort of awe:
'And, oh, the skin! The skin! Margarita Nikolaevna, your skin is
glowing!' But she came to her senses, ran to the dress, picked it up and
began shaking it out.
'Leave it! Leave it!' Margarita shouted to her. 'Devil take it! Leave
it all! Or, no, keep it as a souvenir. As a souvenir, I tell you. Take
everything in the room!'
As if half-witted, the motionless Natasha looked at Margarita for some
time, then hung on her neck, kissing her and crying out:
'Satin! Glowing! Satin! And the eyebrows, the eyebrows!'
`Take all these rags, take the perfume, drag it to your trunk, hide
it,' cried Margarita, 'but don't take any valuables, they'll accuse you of
stealing.'
Natasha grabbed and bundled up whatever came to her hand - dresses,
shoes, stockings, underwear - and ran out of the bedroom.
Just then from somewhere at the other end of the lane a thundering,
virtuoso waltz burst and flew out an open window, and the chugging of a car
driving up to the gate was heard.
`Azazello will call now!' exclaimed Margarita, listening to the waltz
spilling into the lane. 'He'll call! And the foreigner's not dangerous, yes,
I understand now that he's not dangerous!'
There was the noise of a car driving away from the front gate. The
garden gate banged, and steps were heard on the tiles of the path.
'It's Nikolai Ivanovich, I recognize his footsteps,' thought Margarita.
'I must do something funny and interesting in farewell.'
Margarita tore the curtain open and sat sideways on the window-sill,
her arms around her knees. Moonlight licked her from the right side.
Margarita raised her head towards the moon and made a pensive and
poetic face. The steps tapped twice more, and then suddenly - silence. After
admiring the moon a little longer, sighing for the sake of propriety,
Margarita turned her head to the garden and indeed saw Nikolai Ivanovich,
who lived on the bottom floor of the same house. Moonlight poured down
brightly on Nikolai Ivanovich. He was sitting on a bench, and there was
every indication that he had sunk on to it suddenly. The pince-nez on his
face was somehow askew, and he was clutching his briefcase in his hands.
'Ah, hello, Nikolai Ivanovich,' Margarita said in a melancholy voice.
'Good evening! Coming back from a meeting?'
Nikolai Ivanovich made no reply to that.
'And I,' Margarita went on, leaning further out into the garden, 'am
sitting alone, as you see, bored, looking at the moon and listening to the
waltz...'
Margarita passed her left hand over her temple, straightening a strand
of hair, then said crossly:
That is impolite, Nikolai Ivanovich! I'm still a woman after all! It's
boorish not to reply when someone is talking to you.'
Nikolai Ivanovich, visible in me moonlight to the last button on his
grey waistcoat, to the last hair of his blond, wedge-shaped beard, suddenly
smiled a wild smile, rose from the bench, and, apparently beside himself
with embarrassment, instead of taking off his hat, waved his briefcase to
the side and bent his knees as if about to break into a squatting dance.
'Ah, what a boring type you are, Nikolai Ivanovich!' Margarita went on.
'Generally, I'm so sick of you all that I can't even tell you, and I'm
so happy to be parting with you! Well, go to the devil's dam!'
Just then, behind Margarita's back in the bedroom, the telephone
exploded. Margarita tore from the window-sill and, forgetting Nikolai
Ivanovich, snatched the receiver.
'Azazello speaking,' came from the receiver. 'Dear, dear Azazello!'
cried Margarita.
`It's time. Take off,' Azazello spoke into the receiver, and it could
be heard in his tone that he liked Margarita's sincere and joyful impulse.
'When you fly over the gate, shout "Invisible!" Then fly over the city
a little, to get used to it, and after that head south, out of the city, and
straight for the river. You're expected!'
Margarita hung up, and here something in the next room hobbled woodenly
and started beating on the door. Margarita flung it open and a sweeping
broom, bristles up, flew dancing into the bedroom. It drummed on the floor
with its end, kicking and straining towards the window. Margarita squealed
with delight and jumped astride the broom. Only now did the thought flash in
the rider that amidst all this fracas she had forgotten to get dressed. She
galloped over to the bed and grabbed the first thing she found, some light
blue shift. Waving it like a banner, she flew out the window. And the waltz
over the garden struck up louder.
From the window Margarita slipped down and saw Nikolai Ivanovich on the
bench. He seemed to have frozen to it and listened completely dumbfounded to
the shouting and crashing coming from the lighted bedroom of the upstairs
tenants.
'Farewell, Nikolai Ivanovich!' cried Margarita, capering in front of
Nikolai Ivanovich.
He gasped and crawled along the bench, pawing it with his hands and
knocking down his briefcase.
'Farewell for ever! I'm flying away!' Margarita shouted above the
waltz. Here she realized that she did not need any shift, and with a
sinister guffaw threw it over Nikolai Ivanovich's head. The blinded Nikolai
Ivanovich crashed from the bench on to the bricks of the path.
Margarita turned to take a last look at the house where she had
suffered for so long, and saw in the blazing window Natasha's face distorted
with amazement.
'Farewell, Natasha!' Margarita cried and reared up on the broom.
'Invisible! Invisible!' she cried still louder, and, flying over the
front gates, between the maple branches, which lashed at her face, she flew
out into the lane. And after her flew the completely insane waltz.
Invisible and free! Invisible and free! ... After flying down her own
lane, Margarita got into another that crossed the first at right angles.
This patched up, darned, crooked and long lane, with the lopsided door
of a kerosene shop where they sold paraffin by the cup and liquid against
parasites in flacons, she cut across in an instant, and here she realized
that, even while completely free and invisible, she still had to be at least
somewhat reasonable in her pleasure. Having slowed down only by some
miracle, she just missed smashing herself to death against an old lopsided
street light at the corner. Dodging it, Margarita clutched the broom tighter
and flew more slowly, studying the electric wires and the street signs
hanging across the sidewalk.
The third lane led straight to the Arbat. Here Margarita became fully
accustomed to controlling the broom, realized that it obeyed the slightest
touch of her hands and legs, and that, flying over the city, she had to be
very attentive and not act up too much. Besides, in the lane it had already
become abundantly clear that passers-by did not see the lady flier. No one
threw his head back, shouted 'Look! Look!' or dashed aside, no one shrieked,
swooned or guffawed with wild laughter.
Margarita flew noiselessly, very slowly, and not high up, approximately
on second-floor level. But even with this slow flying, just at the entrance
to the dazzlingly lit Arbat she misjudged slightly and struck her shoulder
against some illuminated disc with an arrow on it. This angered Margarita.
She reined in the obedient broom, flew a little aside, and then, suddenly
hurling herself at the disc with the butt of the broom, smashed it to
smithereens. Bits of glass rained down with a crash, passers-by shied away,
a whistle came from somewhere, and Margarita, having accomplished this
unnecessary act, burst out laughing.
'On the Arbat I must be more careful,' thought Margarita, 'everything's
in such a snarl here, you can't figure it out.' She began dodging between
the wires. Beneath Margarita floated the roofs of buses, trams and cars, and
along the sidewalks, as it seemed to Margarita from above, floated rivers of
caps. From these rivers little streams branched off and flowed into the
flaming maws of night-time shops.
'Eh, what a mess!' Margarita thought angrily. 'You can't even turn
around here.'
She crossed the Arbat, rose higher, to fourth-floor level, and, past
the dazzlingly bright tubes on the theatre building at the corner, floated
into a narrow lane with tall buildings. All the windows in them were open,
and everywhere radio music came from the windows. Out of curiosity,
Margarita peeked into one of them. She saw a kitchen. Two primuses were
roaring on the range, and next to them stood two women with spoons in their
hands, squabbling.
'You should turn the toilet light off after you, that's what I'm
telling you, Pelageya Petrovna,' said the woman before whom there was a pot
with some sort of eatables steaming in it, 'or else we'll apply to have you
evicted.'
You're a good one yourself,' the other woman answered. `You're both
good ones,' Margarita said loudly, clambering over the window-sill into the
kitchen.
The two quarrelling women turned towards the voice and froze with their
dirty spoons in their hands. Margarita carefully reached out between them,
turned the knobs of both primuses, and extinguished them. The women gasped
and opened their mouths. But Margarita was already bored with the kitchen
and flew out into the lane.
Her attention was attracted by the magnificent hulk of an
eight-storeyed, obviously just-constructed building at the end of it.
Margarita dropped down and, alighting, saw that the facade of the
building was covered in black marble, that the doors were wide, that behind
their glass could be glimpsed a doorman's buttons and peaked cap with gold
braid, and that over the door there was a gold inscription: 'Dramlit House'.
Margarita squinted at the inscription, trying to figure out what the
word 'Dramlit' might mean. Taking her broom under her arm, Margarita walked
into the lobby, shoving the surprised doorman with the door, and saw on the
wall beside the elevator a huge black board and on it, written in white
letters, apartment numbers and tenants' names. The heading `House of
Dramatists and Literary Workers' above the list provoked a suppressed
predatory scream in Margarita. Rising in the air, she greedily began to read
the last names: Khustov, Dvubratsky, Quant, Beskudnikov, Latunsky...
Two hours passed. Professor Kuzmin sat in his bedroom on the bed, with
leeches hanging from his temples, behind his ears, and on his neck. At
Kuzmin's feet, on a quilted silk blanket, sat the grey-moustached Professor
Bouret, looking at Kuzmin with condolence and comforting him, saying it was
all nonsense. Outside the window it was already night.
What other prodigies occurred in Moscow that night we do not know and
certainly will not try to find out - especially as it has come time for us
to go on to the second part of this truthful narrative. Follow me, reader!
Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful,
eternal love in this world! May the liar's vile tongue be cut out!
Follow me, my reader, and me alone, and I will show you such a love!
No! The master was mistaken when with bitterness he told Ivanushka in
the hospital, at that hour when the night was falling past midnight, that
she had forgotten him. That could not be. She had, of course, not forgotten
him.
First of all let us reveal the secret which the master did not wish to
reveal to Ivanushka. His beloved's name was Margarita Nikolaevna [1].
Everything the master told the poor poet about her was the exact truth.
He described his beloved correctly. She was beautiful and intelligent. To
that one more thing must be added: it can be said with certainty that many
women would have given anything to exchange their lives for the life of
Margarita Nikolaevna. The childless thirty-year-old Margarita was the wife
of a very prominent specialist, who, moreover, had made a very important
discovery of state significance. Her husband was young, handsome, kind,
honest, and adored his wife. The two of them, Margarita and her husband,
occupied the entire top floor of a magnificent house in a garden on one of
the lanes near the Arbat. A charming place! Anyone can be convinced of it
who wishes to visit this garden. Let them inquire of me, and I will give
them the address, show them the way - the house stands untouched to this
day.
Margarita Nikolaevna was not in need of money. Margarita Nikolaevna
could buy whatever she liked. Among her husband's acquaintances there were
some interesting people. Margarita Nikolaevna had never touched a primus
stove. Margarita Nikolaevna knew nothing of the horrors of life in a
communal apartment. In short ... she was happy? Not for one minute! Never,
since the age of nineteen, when she had married and wound up in this house,
had she known any happiness. Gods, my gods! What, then, did this woman
need?! What did this woman need, in whose eyes there always burned some
enigmatic little fire? What did she need, this witch with a slight cast in
one eye, who had adorned herself with mimosa that time in the spring? I do
not know. I have no idea. Obviously she was telling the truth, she needed
him, the master, and not at all some Gothic mansion, not a private garden,
not money. She loved him, she was telling the truth.
Even I, the truthful narrator, though an outsider, feel my heart wrung
at the thought of what Margarita endured when she came to the master's
little house the next day (fortunately before she had time to talk with her
husband, who had not come back at the appointed time) and discovered that
the master was no longer there. She did everything to find out something
about him, and, of course, found out nothing. Then she went back to her
house and began living in her former place.
But as soon as the dirty snow disappeared from the sidewalks and
streets, as soon as the slightly rotten, disquieting spring breeze wafted
through the window, Margarita Nikolaevna began to grieve more than in
winter. She often wept in secret, a long and bitter weeping. She did not
know who it was she loved: a living man or a dead one? And the longer the
desperate days went on, the more often, especially at twilight, did the
thought come to her that she was bound to a dead man.
She had either to forget him or to die herself. It was impossible to
drag on with such a life. Impossible! Forget him, whatever the cost - forget
him! But he would not be forgotten, that was the trouble.
'Yes, yes, yes, the very same mistake!' Margarita said, sitting by the
stove and gazing into the fire lit in memory of the fire that had burned
while he was writing Pontius Pilate. `Why did I leave him that night? Why?
It was madness! I came back the next day, honestly, as I'd promised, but it
was too late. Yes, like the unfortunate Matthew Levi, I came back too late!'
All these words were, of course, absurd, because what, in fact, would
it have changed if she had stayed with the master that night? Would she have
saved him? 'Ridiculous! ...' we might exclaim, but we shall not do so before
a woman driven to despair.
On that same day when all sorts of absurd turmoil took place, provoked
by the appearance of the black magician in Moscow, on the Friday when
Berlioz's uncle was chased back to Kiev, when the bookkeeper was arrested
and a host of other quite stupid and incomprehensible things took place -
Margarita woke up at around noon in her bedroom with bay windows in the
tower of the house.
On awakening, Margarita did not weep, as she often did, because she
awoke with a presentiment that today something was finally going to happen.
Having felt this presentiment, she began to warm it and nurture it in
her soul, for fear it might abandon her.
'I believe!' Margarita whispered solemnly. 'I believe! Something will
happen! It cannot not happen, because for what, indeed, has lifelong torment
been sent to me? I admit that I lied and deceived and lived a secret life,
hidden from people, but all the same the punishment for it cannot be so
cruel... Something is bound to happen, because it cannot be that anything
will go on forever. And besides, my dream was prophetic, I'll swear it
was...'
So Margarita Nikolaevna whispered, looking at the crimson curtains as
they filled with sun, dressing anxiously, combing her short curled hair in
front of the triple mirror.
The dream that Margarita had dreamed that night was indeed unusual. The
thing was that during her winter sufferings she had never seen the master in
her dreams. He released her for the night, and she suffered only in the
daylight hours. But now she had dreamed of him.
The dream was of a place unknown to Margarita - hopeless, dismal, under
the sullen sky of early spring. In the dream there was this ragged,
fleeting, grey sky, and under it a noiseless flock of rooks. Some gnarled
little bridge, and under it a muddy spring runlet. Joyless, destitute,
half-naked trees. A lone aspen, and further on, among the trees, beyond some
vegetable patch, a little log structure - a separate kitchen, a bathhouse,
devil knows what it was! Everything around somehow lifeless and so dismal
that one just longed to hang oneself from that aspen by the bridge. Not a
puff of breeze, not a movement of the clouds, and not a living soul. What a
hellish place for a living man!
And then, imagine, the door of this log structure is thrown open, and
he appears. Rather far away, but clearly visible. He is in tatters, it is
impossible to make out what he is wearing. Unshaven, hair dishevelled. Sick,
anxious eyes. He beckons with his hand, calling her. Gasping in the lifeless
air, Margarita ran to him over the tussocks, and at that moment she woke up.
This dream means only one of two things,' Margarita Nikolaevna reasoned
with herself. 'If he's dead and beckoned to me, it means he has come for me,
and I will die soon. And that's very good - because then my suffering will
soon end. Or else he's alive, and then the dream can only mean one thing,
that he's reminding me of himself! He wants to say that we will see each
other again... Yes, we will see each other very soon!'
Still in the same agitated state, Margarita got dressed and began
impressing it upon herself that, essentially, everything was turning out
very luckily, and one must know how to catch such lucky moments and take
advantage of them. Her husband had gone on a business trip for a whole three
days. During those three days she was at her own disposal, and no one could
prevent her from thinking what she liked or dreaming what she liked. All
five rooms on the top floor of the house, all of this apartment which in
Moscow would be the envy of tens of thousands of people, was entirely at her
disposal.
However, being granted freedom for a whole three days, Margarita chose
from this entire luxurious apartment what was far from the best place. After
having tea, she went to a dark, windowless room where suitcases and all
sorts of old stuff were kept in two large wardrobes. Squatting down, she
opened the bottom drawer of the first of them, and took from under a pile of
silk scraps the only precious thing she had in life. Margarita held in her
hands an old brown leather album which contained a photographic portrait of
the master, a bank savings book with a deposit of ten thousand roubles in
his name, the petals of a dried rose pressed between sheets of tissue paper,
and part of a full-sized notebook covered with typescript and with a charred
bottom edge.
Going back to her bedroom with these riches, Margarita Nikolaevna set
the photograph up on the triple mirror and sat for about an hour holding the
fire-damaged book on her knees, leafing through it and rereading that which,
after the burning, had neither beginning nor end:
'... The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city
hated by the procurator. The hanging bridges connecting the temple with the
dread Antonia Tower [2] disappeared, the abyss descended from the sky and
flooded the winged gods over the hippodrome, the Has-monaean Palace [3] with
its loopholes, the bazaars, caravanserais, lanes, pools... Yershalaim - the
great city - vanished as if it had never existed in the world...'
Margarita wanted to read further, but further there was nothing except
an irregular, charred fringe.
Wiping her tears, Margarita Nikolaevna abandoned the notebook, rested
her elbows on the dressing table and, reflected in the mirror, sat for a
long time without taking her eyes from the photograph. Then the tears dried
up. Margarita neatly folded her possessions, and a few minutes later they
were again buried under silk rags, and the lock clicked shut in the dark
room.
Margarita Nikolaevna was putting her coat on in the front hall in order
to go for a walk. The beautiful Natasha, her housemaid, asked what to
prepare for the main course, and, receiving the reply that it made no
difference, got into conversation with her mistress for her own amusement,
and began telling her God knows what, something about how yesterday in the
theatre a conjurer began performing such tricks that everybody gasped, gave
away two flacons of foreign perfume and a pair of stockings free to
everybody, and then, when the sce came outside and -
bang - everybody turned out to be naked! Margarita Nikolaevna dropped on to
the chair in front of the hall mirror and burst out laughing.
'Natasha! You ought to be ashamed,' Margarita Nikolaevna said, 'you, a
literate, intelligent girl... they tell devil knows what lies in the queues,
and you go repeating them!'
Natasha flushed deeply and objected with great ardour that, no, they
weren't lying, and that she herself had personally seen today, in a grocer's
on the Arbat, one citizeness who came into the shop wearing shoes, but as
she was paying at the cash register, the shoes disappeared from her feet,
and she was left in just her stockings. Eyes popping out, and a hole in her
heel! And the shoes were magic ones from that same shis sant surprise for Natasha.
Margarita Nikolaevna went to the bedroom and came back holding a pair
of stockings and a flacon of eau-de-cologne. Telling Natasha that she, too,
wanted to perform a trick, Margarita Nikolaevna gave her both the stockings
and the bottle, and said her only request was that she not run around on
Tverskaya in nothing but stockings and that she not listen to Darya. Having
kissed each other, mistress and housemaid parted.
Leaning against the comfortable soft back of the trolley-bus seat,
Margarita Nikolaevna rode down the Arbat, now thinking her own thoughts, now
listening to the whispers of two citizens sitting in front of her.
They were exchanging whispers about some nonsense, looking around
warily from time to time to make sure no one was listening. The hefty, beefy
one with pert, piggish eyes, sitting by the window, was quietly telling his
small neighbour that the coffin had to be covered with a black cloth...
`It can't be!' the small one whispered, amazed. 'This is something
unheard-of! ... And what has Zheldybin done?'
Amidst the steady humming of the trolley-bus, words came from the
window:
`Criminal investigation ... scandal ... well, outright mysticism!
...' From these fragmentary scraps, Margarita Nikolaevna somehow put
together something coherent. The citizens were whispering about some dead
person (they did not name him) whose head had been stolen from the coffin
that morning... This was the reason why Zheldybin was now so worried. And
the two who were whispering on the trolley-bus also had some connection with
the robbed dead man.
`Will we have time to stop for flowers?' the small one worried. The
cremation is at two, you say?'
Margarita Nikolaevna finally got tired of listening to this mysterious
palaver about a head stolen from a coffin, and she was glad it was time for
her to get off.
A few minutes later Margarita Nikolaevna was sitting on one of the
benches under the Kremlin wall, settling herself in such a way that she
could see the Manege. [4]
Margarita squinted in the bright sunlight, remembered her last night's
dream, remembered how, exactly a year ago to the day and the hour, she had
sat next to him on this same bench. And in just the same way as then, her
black handbag lay beside her on the bench. He was not beside her this day,
but Margarita Nikolaevna mentally conversed with him all the same: 'If
you've been exiled, why don't you send me word of yourself? People do send
word. Have you stopped loving me? No, for some reason I don't believe that.
It means you were exiled and died... Release me, then, I beg you, give me
freedom to live, finally, to breathe the air! ...' Margarita Nikolaevna
answered for him herself:
'You are free ... am I holding you?' Then she objected to him: 'No,
what kind of answer is that? No, go from my memory, then I'll be free...'
People walked past Margarita Nikolaevna. Some man gave the well-dressed
woman a sidelong glance, attracted by her beauty and her solitude. He
coughed and sat down at the end of the same bench that Margarita Nikolaevna
was sitting on. Plucking up his courage, he began:
'Definitely nice weather today ...'
But Margarita gave him such a dark look that he got up and left.
"There, for example,' Margarita said mentally to him who possessed her.
'Why, in fact, did I chase that man away? I'm bored, and there's
nothing bad about this Lovelace, unless it's the stupid word "definitely"
... Why am I sitting alone under the wall like an owl? Why am I excluded
from life?'
She became thoroughly sad and downcast. But here suddenly the same
morning wave of expectation and excitement pushed at her chest. 'Yes, it
will happen!' The wave pushed her a second time, and now she realized that
it was a wave of sound. Through the noise of the city there came ever more
distinctly the approaching beat of a drum and the sounds of slightly off-key
trumpets.
The first to appear was a mounted policeman riding slowly past the
garden fence, with three more following on foot. Then a slowly rolling truck
with the musicians. After that, a new, open hearse moving slowly, a coffin
on it all covered with wreaths, and at the corners of the platform four
standing persons - three men and one woman.
Even from a distance, Margarita discerned that the faces of the people
standing on the hearse, accompanying the deceased on his last journey, were
somehow strangely bewildered. This was particularly noticeable with regard
to the citizeness who stood at the left rear corner of the hearse. This
citizeness's fat cheeks were as if pushed out still more from inside by some
piquant secret, her puffy little eyes glinted with an ambiguous fire. It
seemed that just a little longer and the citizeness, unable to help herself,
would wink at the deceased and say: `Have you ever seen the like? Outright
mysticism! ...' The same bewildered faces showed on those in the cortege,
who, numbering three hundred or near it, slowly walked behind the hearse.
Margarita followed the procession with her eyes, listening to the
dismal Turkish drum fading in the distance, producing one and the same
'boom, boom, boom', and thought: 'What a strange funeral ... and what
anguish from that "boom"! Ah, truly, I'd pawn my soul to the devil just to
find out whether he's alive or not ... It would be interesting to know who
they're burying.'
'Berlioz, Mikhail Alexandrovich,' a slightly nasal male voice came from
beside her, 'chairman of Massolit.'
The surprised Margarita Nikolaevna turned and saw a citizen on her
bench, who had apparently sat down there noiselessly while Margarita was
watching the procession and, it must be assumed, absent-mindedly asked her
last question aloud.
The procession meanwhile was slowing down, probably delayed by traffic
lights ahead.
`Yes,' the unknown citizen went on, 'they're in a surprising mood.
They're accompanying the deceased and thinking only about what happened to
his head.'
What head?' asked Margarita, studying her unexpected neighbour. This
neighbour turned out to be short of stature, a fiery redhead with a fang, in
a starched shirt, a good-quality striped suit, patent leather shoes, and
with a bowler hat on his head. His tie was brightly coloured. The surprising
thing was that from the pocket where men usually carry a handkerchief or a
fountain pen, this gentleman had a gnawed chicken bone sacking out.
'You see,' the redhead explained, `this morning in the hall of
Griboedov's, the deceased's head was filched from the coffin.'
`How can that be?' Margarita asked involuntarily, remembering at the
same time the whispering on the trolley-bus.
'Devil knows how!' the redhead replied casually. `I suppose, however,
that it wouldn't be a bad idea to ask Behemoth about it. It was an awfully
deft snatch! Such a scandal! ... And, above all, it's incomprehensible - who
needs this head and for what!'
Occupied though Margarita Nikolaevna was with her own thoughts, she was
struck all the same by the unknown citizen's strange twaddle.
`Excuse me!' she suddenly exclaimed. 'What Berlioz? The one that
today's newspapers...'
The same, the same...'
'So it means that those are writers following the coffin!' Margarita
asked, and suddenly bared her teeth.
'Well, naturally they are!'
'And do you know them by sight?'
'All of them to a man,' the redhead replied.
'Tell me,' Margarita began to say, and her voice became hollow, 'is the
critic Latunsky among them?'
`How could he not be?' the redhead replied. 'He's there at the end of
the fourth row.'
The blond one?' Margarita asked, narrowing her eyes.
'Ash-coloured ... See, he's raising his eyes to heaven.'
'Looking like a parson?'
"That's him!'
Margarita asked nothing more, peering at Latunsky.
`And I can see,' the redhead said, smiling, 'that you hate this
Latunsky!'
There are some others I hate,' Margarita answered through her teeth,
'but it's not interesting to talk about it.'
The procession moved on just then, with mostly empty automobiles
following the people on foot.
'Oh, well, of course there's nothing interesting in it, Margarita
Nikolaevna!'
Margarita was surprised.
'Do you know me?'
In place of an answer, the redhead took off his bowler hat and held it
out.
`A perfect bandit's mug!' thought Margarita, studying her street
interlocutor.
'Well, I don't know you,' Margarita said drily.
`Where could you know me from? But all the same I've been sent to you
on a little business.'
Margarita turned pale and recoiled.
You ought to have begun with that straight off,' she said, 'instead of
pouring out devil knows what about some severed head! You want to arrest
me?'
'Nothing of the kind!' the redhead exclaimed. 'What is it - you start a
conversation, and right away it's got to be an arrest! I simply have
business with you.'
'I don't understand, what business?'
The redhead looked around and said mysteriously:
'I've been sent to invite you for a visit this evening.'
'What are you raving about, what visit?'
'To a very distinguished foreigner,' the redhead said significantly,
narrowing one eye.
Margarita became very angry.
'A new breed has appeared - a street pander!' she said, getting up to
leave.
Thanks a lot for such errands!' the redhead exclaimed grudgingly, and
he muttered 'Fool!' to Margarita Nikolaevna's back.
'Scoundrel!' she replied, turning, and straight away heard the
redhead's voice behind her:
'The darkness that came from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city
hated by the procurator. The hanging bridges connecting the temple with the
dread Antonia Tower disappeared ... Yershalaim - the great city - vanished
as if it had never existed in the world... So you, too, can just vanish away
along with your burnt notebook and dried-up rose! Sit here on the bench
alone and entreat him to set you free, to let you breathe the air, to go
from your memory!'
Her face white, Margarita came back to the bench. The redhead was
looking at her, narrowing his eyes.
`I don't understand any of this,' Margarita began quietly. 'It's
possible to find out about the pages ... get in, snoop around ... You bribed
Natasha, right? But how could you find out my thoughts?' She scowled
painfully and added: 'Tell me, who are you? From which institution?'
`What a bore ...' the redhead muttered and then said aloud, 'I beg your
pardon, didn't I tell you that I'm not from any institution? Sit down,
please.'
Margarita obeyed unquestioningly, but even so, as she was sitting down,
she asked once more:
'Who are you?'
'Well, all right, my name is Azazello, but anyhow that tells you
nothing.'
'And you won't tell me how you found out about the pages and about my
thoughts?'
'No, I won't,' Azazello replied drily.
'But do you know anything about him?' Margarita whispered imploringly.
'Well, suppose I do.'
'I implore you, tell me only one thing ... is he alive? ... Don't
torment me!'
'Well, he's alive, he's alive,' Azazello responded reluctantly.
'Oh, God! ...'
'Please, no excitements and exclamations,' Azazello said, frowning.
`Forgive me, forgive me,' the now obedient Margarita murmured, 'of
course, I got angry with you. But, you must agree, when a woman is invited
in the street to pay a visit somewhere ... I have no prejudices, I assure
you,' Margarita smiled joylessly, 'but I never see any foreigners, I have no
wish to associate with them ... and, besides, my husband ... my drama is
that I'm living with someone I don't love ... but I consider it an unworthy
thing to spoil his life ... I've never seen anything but kindness from him
...'
Azazello heard out this incoherent speech with visible boredom and said
sternly:
'I beg you to be silent for a moment.'
Margarita obediently fell silent.
The foreigner to whom I'm inviting you is not dangerous at all. And not
a single soul will know of this visit. That I can guarantee you.'
'And what does he need me for?' Margarita asked insinuatingly.
'You'll find that out later.'
'I understand ... I must give myself to him,' Margarita said pensively.
To which Azazello grunted somehow haughtily and replied thus:
'Any woman in the world, I can assure you, would dream of just that,'
Azazello's mug twisted with a little laugh, 'but I must disappoint you,
it won't happen.'
'What kind of foreigner is that?!' Margarita exclaimed in bewilderment,
so loudly that people passing by turned to look at her. 'And what interest
do I have in going to him?'
Azazello leaned towards her and whispered meaningfully:
'Well, a very great interest ... you'd better use the opportunity...'
'What?' exclaimed Margarita, and her eyes grew round. 'If I understand
you rightly, you're hinting that I may find out about him there?'
Azazello silently nodded.
'I'll go!' Margarita exclaimed with force and seized Azazello by the
hand. 'I'll go wherever you like!'
Azazello, with a sigh of relief, leaned against the back of the bench,
covering up the name `Niura' carved on it in big letters, and saying
ironically:
'Difficult folk, these women!' he put his hands in his pockets and
stretched his legs way out. 'Why, for instance, was I sent on this business?
Behemoth should have gone, he's a charmer...'
Margarita said, with a crooked and bitter smile:
'Stop mystifying me and tormenting me with your riddles. I'm an unhappy
person, and you're taking advantage of it... I'm getting myself into some
strange story, but I swear, it's only because you lured me with words about
him! My head's spinning from all these puzzlements...'
'No dramas, no dramas,' Azazello returned, making faces, 'you must also
put yourself in my position. To give some administrator a pasting, or chuck
an uncle out of the house, or gun somebody down, or any other trifle of the
sort - that's right in my line. But talking with a woman in love, no thanks!
... It's half an hour now that I've been wangling you into it... So you'll
go?'
'I will,' Margarita Nikolaevna answered simply.
'Be so good as to accept this, then,' said Azazello, and, pulling a
round little golden box from his pocket, he offered it to Margarita with the
words: 'Hide it now, the passers-by are looking. It'll come in useful,
Margarita Nikolaevna, you've aged a lot from grief in the last half-year.'
Margarita flushed but said nothing, and Azazello went on: 'Tonight, at
exactly half past nine, be so good as to take off all your clothes and rub
your face and your whole body with this ointment. Then do whatever you like,
only don't go far from the telephone. At ten I'll call you and tell you all
you need to know. You won't have to worry about a thing, you'll be delivered
where you need to go and won't be put to any trouble. Understood?'
Margarita was silent for a moment, then replied:
'Understood. This thing is pure gold, you can tell by the weight. So,
then, I understand perfectly well that I'm being bribed and drawn into some
shady story for which I'm going to pay dearly...'
'What is all this?' Azazello almost hissed. 'You're at it again?'
'No, wait!'
'Give me back the cream!' Margarita clutched the box more tightly in
her hand and said:
'No, wait! ... I know what I'm getting into. But I'm getting into it on
account of him, because I have no more hope for anything in this world. But
I want to tell you that if you're going to ruin me, you'll be ashamed! Yes,
ashamed! I'm perishing on account of love!' - and striking herself on the
breast, Margarita glanced at the sun.
'Give it back!' Azazello cried angrily. 'Give it back and devil take
the whole thing. Let them send Behemoth!'
'Oh, no!' exclaimed Margarita, shocking the passers-by. `I agree to
everything, I agree to perform this comedy of rubbing in the ointment, agree
to go to the devil and beyond! I won't give it back!'
'Hah!' Azazello suddenly shouted and, goggling his eyes at the garden
fence, began pointing off somewhere with his finger.
Margarita turned to where Azazello was pointing, but found nothing
special there. Then she turned back to Azazello, wishing to get an
explanation of this absurd 'Hah!' but there was no one to give an
explanation: Margarita Nikolaevna's mysterious interlocutor had disappeared.
Margarita quickly thrust her hand into her handbag, where she had put
the box before this shouting, and made sure it was there. Then, without
reflecting on anything, Margarita hurriedly ran out of the Alexandrovsky
Garden.
The moon in the clear evening sky hung full, visible through the maple
branches. Lindens and acacias drew an intricate pattern of spots on the
ground in the garden. The triple bay window, open but covered by a curtain,
was lit with a furious electric light. In Margarita Nikolaevna's bedroom all
the lamps were burning, illuminating the total disorder in the room.
On the blanket on the bed lay shifts, stockings and underwear. Crumpled
underwear was also simply lying about on the floor next to a box of
cigarettes crushed in the excitement. Shoes stood on the night table next to
an unfinished cup of coffee and an ashtray in which a butt was smoking. A
black evening dress hung over the back of a chair. The room smelled of
perfume. Besides that, the smell of a red-hot iron was coming from
somewhere.
Margarita Nikolaevna sat in front of the pier-glass, with just a
bathrobe thrown over her naked body, and in black suede shoes. A gold
bracelet with a watch lay in front of Margarita Nikolaevna, beside the box
she had received from Azazello, and Margarita did not take her eyes from its
face.
At times it began to seem to her that the watch was broken and the
hands were not moving. But they were moving, though very slowly, as if
sucking, and at last the big hand fell on the twenty-ninth minute past nine.
Margarita's heart gave a terrible thump, so that she could not even
take hold of the box right away. Having mastered herself, Margarita opened
it and saw in the box a rich, yellowish cream. It seemed to her that it
smelted of swamp slime. With the tip of her finger, Margarita put a small
dab of the cream on her palm, the smell of swamp grass and forest grew
stronger, and then she began rubbing the cream into her forehead and cheeks
with her palm.
The cream spread easily and, as it seemed to Margarita, evaporated at
once. Having rubbed several times, Margarita glanced into the mirror and
dropped the box right on her watch crystal, which became covered with
cracks. Margarita closed her eyes, then glanced once again and burst into
stormy laughter.
Her eyebrows, plucked to a thread with tweezers, thickened and lay in
even black arches over her greening eyes. The thin vertical crease cutting
the bridge of her nose, which had appeared back then, in October, when the
master vanished, disappeared without a trace. So did the yellowish shadows
at her temples and the two barely noticeable little webs of wrinkles at the
outer corners of her eyes. The skin of her cheeks filled out with an even
pink colour, her forehead became white and clear, and the hairdresser's
waves in her hair came undone.
From the mirror a naturally curly, black-haired woman of about twenty
was looking at the thirty-year-old Margarita, baring her teeth and shaking
with laughter.
Having laughed her fill, Margarita jumped out of her bathrobe with a
single leap, dipped freely into the light, rich cream, and with vigorous
strokes began rubbing it into the skin of her body. It at once turned pink
and tingly. That instant, as if a needle had been snatched from her brain,
the ache she had felt in her temple all evening after the meeting in the
Alexandrovsky Garden subsided, her leg and arm muscles grew stronger, and
then Margarita's body became weightless.
She sprang up and hung in the air just above the rug, then was slowly
pulled down and descended.
'What a cream! What a cream!' cried Margarita, throwing herself into an
armchair.
The rubbings changed her not only externally. Now joy was boiling up in
her, in all of her, in every particle of her body, which felt to her like
bubbles prickling her body all over. Margarita felt herself free, free of
everything. Besides, she understood with perfect clarity that what was
happening was precisely what her presentiment had been telling her in the
morning, and that she was leaving her house and her former life forever.
But, even so, a thought split off from this former life about the need
of fulfilling just one last duty before the start of something new,
extraordinary, which was pulling her upwards into the air. And, naked as she
was, she ran from her bedroom, flying up in the air time and again, to her
husband's study, and, turning on the light, rushed to the desk. On a page
torn from a notebook, she pencilled a note quickly and in big letters,
without any corrections:
Forgive me and forget me as soon as possible. I am leaving you for
ever. Do not look for me, it is useless. I have become a witch from the
grief and calamities that have struck me. It's time for me to go. Farewell.
Margarita.
With a completely unburdened soul, Margarita came flying into the
bedroom, and after her ran Natasha, loaded down with things. At once all
these things - a wooden hanger with a dress, lace shawls, dark blue satin
shoes on shoe-trees and a belt - all of it spilled on the floor, and Natasha
clasped her freed hands.
'What, nice?' Margarita Nikolaevna cried loudly in a hoarse voice.
'How can it be?' Natasha whispered, backing away. 'How did you do it,
Margarita Nikolaevna.'
'It's the cream! The cream, the cream!' answered Margarita, pointing to
the glittering golden box and turning around in front of the mirror.
Natasha, forgetting the wrinkled dress lying on the floor, ran up to
the pier-glass and fixed her greedy, lit-up eyes on the remainder of the
cream. Her lips were whispering something. She again turned to Margarita and
said with a sort of awe:
'And, oh, the skin! The skin! Margarita Nikolaevna, your skin is
glowing!' But she came to her senses, ran to the dress, picked it up and
began shaking it out.
'Leave it! Leave it!' Margarita shouted to her. 'Devil take it! Leave
it all! Or, no, keep it as a souvenir. As a souvenir, I tell you. Take
everything in the room!'
As if half-witted, the motionless Natasha looked at Margarita for some
time, then hung on her neck, kissing her and crying out:
'Satin! Glowing! Satin! And the eyebrows, the eyebrows!'
`Take all these rags, take the perfume, drag it to your trunk, hide
it,' cried Margarita, 'but don't take any valuables, they'll accuse you of
stealing.'
Natasha grabbed and bundled up whatever came to her hand - dresses,
shoes, stockings, underwear - and ran out of the bedroom.
Just then from somewhere at the other end of the lane a thundering,
virtuoso waltz burst and flew out an open window, and the chugging of a car
driving up to the gate was heard.
`Azazello will call now!' exclaimed Margarita, listening to the waltz
spilling into the lane. 'He'll call! And the foreigner's not dangerous, yes,
I understand now that he's not dangerous!'
There was the noise of a car driving away from the front gate. The
garden gate banged, and steps were heard on the tiles of the path.
'It's Nikolai Ivanovich, I recognize his footsteps,' thought Margarita.
'I must do something funny and interesting in farewell.'
Margarita tore the curtain open and sat sideways on the window-sill,
her arms around her knees. Moonlight licked her from the right side.
Margarita raised her head towards the moon and made a pensive and
poetic face. The steps tapped twice more, and then suddenly - silence. After
admiring the moon a little longer, sighing for the sake of propriety,
Margarita turned her head to the garden and indeed saw Nikolai Ivanovich,
who lived on the bottom floor of the same house. Moonlight poured down
brightly on Nikolai Ivanovich. He was sitting on a bench, and there was
every indication that he had sunk on to it suddenly. The pince-nez on his
face was somehow askew, and he was clutching his briefcase in his hands.
'Ah, hello, Nikolai Ivanovich,' Margarita said in a melancholy voice.
'Good evening! Coming back from a meeting?'
Nikolai Ivanovich made no reply to that.
'And I,' Margarita went on, leaning further out into the garden, 'am
sitting alone, as you see, bored, looking at the moon and listening to the
waltz...'
Margarita passed her left hand over her temple, straightening a strand
of hair, then said crossly:
That is impolite, Nikolai Ivanovich! I'm still a woman after all! It's
boorish not to reply when someone is talking to you.'
Nikolai Ivanovich, visible in me moonlight to the last button on his
grey waistcoat, to the last hair of his blond, wedge-shaped beard, suddenly
smiled a wild smile, rose from the bench, and, apparently beside himself
with embarrassment, instead of taking off his hat, waved his briefcase to
the side and bent his knees as if about to break into a squatting dance.
'Ah, what a boring type you are, Nikolai Ivanovich!' Margarita went on.
'Generally, I'm so sick of you all that I can't even tell you, and I'm
so happy to be parting with you! Well, go to the devil's dam!'
Just then, behind Margarita's back in the bedroom, the telephone
exploded. Margarita tore from the window-sill and, forgetting Nikolai
Ivanovich, snatched the receiver.
'Azazello speaking,' came from the receiver. 'Dear, dear Azazello!'
cried Margarita.
`It's time. Take off,' Azazello spoke into the receiver, and it could
be heard in his tone that he liked Margarita's sincere and joyful impulse.
'When you fly over the gate, shout "Invisible!" Then fly over the city
a little, to get used to it, and after that head south, out of the city, and
straight for the river. You're expected!'
Margarita hung up, and here something in the next room hobbled woodenly
and started beating on the door. Margarita flung it open and a sweeping
broom, bristles up, flew dancing into the bedroom. It drummed on the floor
with its end, kicking and straining towards the window. Margarita squealed
with delight and jumped astride the broom. Only now did the thought flash in
the rider that amidst all this fracas she had forgotten to get dressed. She
galloped over to the bed and grabbed the first thing she found, some light
blue shift. Waving it like a banner, she flew out the window. And the waltz
over the garden struck up louder.
From the window Margarita slipped down and saw Nikolai Ivanovich on the
bench. He seemed to have frozen to it and listened completely dumbfounded to
the shouting and crashing coming from the lighted bedroom of the upstairs
tenants.
'Farewell, Nikolai Ivanovich!' cried Margarita, capering in front of
Nikolai Ivanovich.
He gasped and crawled along the bench, pawing it with his hands and
knocking down his briefcase.
'Farewell for ever! I'm flying away!' Margarita shouted above the
waltz. Here she realized that she did not need any shift, and with a
sinister guffaw threw it over Nikolai Ivanovich's head. The blinded Nikolai
Ivanovich crashed from the bench on to the bricks of the path.
Margarita turned to take a last look at the house where she had
suffered for so long, and saw in the blazing window Natasha's face distorted
with amazement.
'Farewell, Natasha!' Margarita cried and reared up on the broom.
'Invisible! Invisible!' she cried still louder, and, flying over the
front gates, between the maple branches, which lashed at her face, she flew
out into the lane. And after her flew the completely insane waltz.
Invisible and free! Invisible and free! ... After flying down her own
lane, Margarita got into another that crossed the first at right angles.
This patched up, darned, crooked and long lane, with the lopsided door
of a kerosene shop where they sold paraffin by the cup and liquid against
parasites in flacons, she cut across in an instant, and here she realized
that, even while completely free and invisible, she still had to be at least
somewhat reasonable in her pleasure. Having slowed down only by some
miracle, she just missed smashing herself to death against an old lopsided
street light at the corner. Dodging it, Margarita clutched the broom tighter
and flew more slowly, studying the electric wires and the street signs
hanging across the sidewalk.
The third lane led straight to the Arbat. Here Margarita became fully
accustomed to controlling the broom, realized that it obeyed the slightest
touch of her hands and legs, and that, flying over the city, she had to be
very attentive and not act up too much. Besides, in the lane it had already
become abundantly clear that passers-by did not see the lady flier. No one
threw his head back, shouted 'Look! Look!' or dashed aside, no one shrieked,
swooned or guffawed with wild laughter.
Margarita flew noiselessly, very slowly, and not high up, approximately
on second-floor level. But even with this slow flying, just at the entrance
to the dazzlingly lit Arbat she misjudged slightly and struck her shoulder
against some illuminated disc with an arrow on it. This angered Margarita.
She reined in the obedient broom, flew a little aside, and then, suddenly
hurling herself at the disc with the butt of the broom, smashed it to
smithereens. Bits of glass rained down with a crash, passers-by shied away,
a whistle came from somewhere, and Margarita, having accomplished this
unnecessary act, burst out laughing.
'On the Arbat I must be more careful,' thought Margarita, 'everything's
in such a snarl here, you can't figure it out.' She began dodging between
the wires. Beneath Margarita floated the roofs of buses, trams and cars, and
along the sidewalks, as it seemed to Margarita from above, floated rivers of
caps. From these rivers little streams branched off and flowed into the
flaming maws of night-time shops.
'Eh, what a mess!' Margarita thought angrily. 'You can't even turn
around here.'
She crossed the Arbat, rose higher, to fourth-floor level, and, past
the dazzlingly bright tubes on the theatre building at the corner, floated
into a narrow lane with tall buildings. All the windows in them were open,
and everywhere radio music came from the windows. Out of curiosity,
Margarita peeked into one of them. She saw a kitchen. Two primuses were
roaring on the range, and next to them stood two women with spoons in their
hands, squabbling.
'You should turn the toilet light off after you, that's what I'm
telling you, Pelageya Petrovna,' said the woman before whom there was a pot
with some sort of eatables steaming in it, 'or else we'll apply to have you
evicted.'
You're a good one yourself,' the other woman answered. `You're both
good ones,' Margarita said loudly, clambering over the window-sill into the
kitchen.
The two quarrelling women turned towards the voice and froze with their
dirty spoons in their hands. Margarita carefully reached out between them,
turned the knobs of both primuses, and extinguished them. The women gasped
and opened their mouths. But Margarita was already bored with the kitchen
and flew out into the lane.
Her attention was attracted by the magnificent hulk of an
eight-storeyed, obviously just-constructed building at the end of it.
Margarita dropped down and, alighting, saw that the facade of the
building was covered in black marble, that the doors were wide, that behind
their glass could be glimpsed a doorman's buttons and peaked cap with gold
braid, and that over the door there was a gold inscription: 'Dramlit House'.
Margarita squinted at the inscription, trying to figure out what the
word 'Dramlit' might mean. Taking her broom under her arm, Margarita walked
into the lobby, shoving the surprised doorman with the door, and saw on the
wall beside the elevator a huge black board and on it, written in white
letters, apartment numbers and tenants' names. The heading `House of
Dramatists and Literary Workers' above the list provoked a suppressed
predatory scream in Margarita. Rising in the air, she greedily began to read
the last names: Khustov, Dvubratsky, Quant, Beskudnikov, Latunsky...