Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita

roubles!

     ' What the hell? ' thought the miserable Stepa. His head began to spin.

Was this one of his  lapses of memory? Well, of  course, now that the actual

contract had been produced any  further signs of  disbelief  would merely be

rude.  Stepa  excused  himself for a moment  and ran to the telephone in the

hall,. On the way he shouted towards the kitchen :

     ' Grunya! '

     There was no  reply. He glanced at the  door of Berlioz's study,  which

opened off the hall, and stopped, as they  say, dumbfounded. There,  tied to

the door-handle, hung an enormous wax seal.

     '  My God!  ' said a voice  in  Stepa's head.  ' If that isn't the last

straw! ' It would be difficult  to  describe Stepa's mental confusion. First

this  diabolical  character  with his black  beret, the iced vodka and  that

incredible contract. . . . And then, if you  please, a seal on the door! Who

could ever imagine Berlioz getting into  any sort of  trouble? No  one.  Yet

there it was--a seal. H'm.

     Stepa was at once assailed by a number of uncomfortable little thoughts

about an  article  which he had  recently talked Mikhail  Alexandrovich into

printing  in  his  magazine.  Frankly the  article  had been  awful--stupid,

politically dubious and badly paid. Hard on the heels of his recollection of

the article came a memory  of  a slightly  equivocal conversation which  had

taken place,  as  far as he  could  remember,  on 24th  April  here  in  the

dining-room when Stepa and Berlioz  had  been  having  supper  together.  Of

course their talk  had not really  been dubious (Stepa would not have joined

in any such conversation) but it had  been on a  rather unnecessary subject.

They could easily have avoided  having it altogether. Before the  appearance

of this  seal  the  conversation would undoubtedly  have been dismissed  as

utterly trivial, but since the seal . . .

     ' Oh, Berlioz, Berlioz,' buzzed the  voice in  Stepa's head.  '  Surely

he'll never mention it!'

     But there was  no time for regrets. Stepa dialled the office of Rimsky,

the  Variety Theatre's treasurer. Stepa was in a  delicate position: for one

thing, the foreigner  might be offended at Stepa ringing up to check  on him

after he had been shown the contract and for another,  the treasurer  was an

extremely  difficult man to deal with. After all he couldn't just say to him

: ' Look  here,  did J  sign  a contract  yesterday for thirty-five thousand

roubles with a professor of black magic? ' It simply wouldn't do!

     ' Yes? ' came Rimsky's harsh, unpleasant voice in the earphone.

     ' Hello, Grigory Danilovich,' said Stepa gently. ' Likhodeyev speaking.

It's  about  this ...  er ...  this  fellow .  . . this artiste, in my flat,

called, er, Woland  . . .  I  just wanted to ask  you about this evening--is

everything O.K.? '

     ' Oh, the black  magician? ' replied Rimsky. ' The posters will be here

any minute now.'

     ' Uhuh . . .' said Stepa weakly. ' O.K., so long . . .'

     ' Will you be coming over soon? ' asked Rimsky.

     ' In half  an  hour,'  answered  Stepa and  replacing  the  receiver he

clasped his feverish head. God, how embarrassing! What an appalling thing to

forget!

     As it  would  be rude to  stay  in  the  hall  for  much longer,  Stepa

concocted  a  plan. He had  to use every  possible  means of  concealing his

incredible forgetfulness and begin by cunningly  persuading the foreigner to

tell him exactly what he proposed to do in his act at the Variety.

     With this Stepan turned away from the telephone and in the hall mirror,

which  the  lazy  Grunya  had  not  dusted  for  years,  he  clearly  saw  a

weird-looking man, as  thin as a bean-pole and wearing a pince-nez. Then the

apparition vanished. Stepa peered anxiously down the hallway and immediately

had another shock  as a huge  black  cat  appeared  in  the mirror  and also

vanished.

     Stepa's heart gave a jump and he staggered back.

     ' What in  God's name . . .? ' he thought. ' Am I going out of my mind?

Where  are these  reflections coming from? ' He gave another  look round the

hall and shouted in alarm :

     ' Grunya! What's this cat doing,  sneaking in here? Where does it  come

from? And who's this other character? '

     '  Don't  worry,  Stepan  Bogdanovich,'  came   a   voice,  though  not

Grunya's--it was the visitor speaking  from  the bedroom. ' The cat is mine.

Don't be nervous.  And Grunya's not  here--I  sent her away to her family in

Voronezh. She complained that you had cheated her out of her leave.'

     These words were  so unexpected and so absurd that Stepa decided he had

not heard them. In utter bewilderment he bounded back  into the bedroom  and

froze on the threshold.  His  hair  rose and a  mild sweat broke out on  his

forehead.

     The visitor was no longer alone in the bedroom. The second armchair was

now occupied by the creature who had materialised in the hall. He was now to

be seen  quite  plainly--feathery  moustache,  one  lens  of  his  pince-nez

glittering, the  other missing. But  worst of all wa:s the third invader : a

black cat of revolting proportions sprawled in a nonchalant attitude on  the

pouffe, a glass of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had just speared

a pickled mushroom, in the other.

     Stepa  felt  the light in  the bedroom,  already  weak enough, begin to

fade. ' This must be  what it's like to go mad .  . .' he thought, clutching

the doorpost.

     '  You  seem  slightly astonished,  my dear Stepan  Bogdanovich,'  said

Woland. Stepai's teeth were  chattering. ' But I assure you there is nothing

to be surprised at. These are my assistants.'

     Here  the  cat drank  its  vodka  and Stepa's  hand  dropped  from  the

doorpost.

     ' And my assistants need a  place  to stay,' went on  Woland, '  so  it

seems  that  there is  one too many  of us in this flat.  That one, I rather

think, is you.'

     ' Yes, that's them! ' said the tall man in a goatish voice, speaking of

Stepa in  the plural. ' They've been  behaving disgustingly  lately. Getting

drunk,  carrying on with women, trading on  their position  and not  doing a

stroke of work--not that they could do  anything even  if they tried because

they're  completely  incompetent.  Pulling  the  wool over  the boss's eyes,

that's what they've been doing! '

     ' Drives  around in a free car! ' said the cat slanderously, chewing  a

mushroom.

     Then occurred the  fourth and last phenomenon at which  Stepa collapsed

entirely,  his weakened hand scraping down the doorpost as he  slid  to  the

floor.

     Straight  from the  full-length mirror  stepped a short  but  unusually

broad-she uldered man with a  bowler hat on his head. A fang protruding from

his  mouth  disfigured an  already  hideous physiognomy that was topped with

fiery red hair.

     ' I cannot,' put  in the new arrival, '  understand how he ever came to

be manager'--his voice grew  more and more nasal-- ' he's as much  a manager

as I am a bishop.'

     ' You  don't  look much  like  a bishop,  Azazello,' remarked the  cat,

piling sausages on his plate.

     '  That's what I  mean,' snarled the man with red hair  and turning  to

Woland he added  in  a voice of respect:  ' Will  you permit us, messire, to

kick him out of Moscow? '

     ' Shoo!! ' suddenly hissed the cat, its hair standing on end.

     The bedroom  began to spin round Stepa, he hit his head on the doorpost

and as he lost consciousness he thought, ' I'm dying . . .'

     But he did not die. Opening  his eyes slightly he found himself sitting

on something made of stone. There was a roaring sound nearby. When he opened

his eyes fully he realised that the roaring was the sea; that the waves were

breaking at his feet, that he was in fact sitting on the very end of a stone

pier,  a shining blue sky above  him and behind him a white town climbing up

the mountainside.

     Not knowing quite what to do  in a case like this, Stepa raised himself

on to his shaking legs and walked down the pier to the shore.

     On the pier stood a man, smoking and spitting into the  sea. He  glared

at Stepa and stopped spitting.

     Stepa then did an odd  thing--he  kneeled down in  front of the unknown

smoker and said :

     ' Tell me, please, where am I? '

     ' Well, I'm damned! ' said the unsympathetic smoker.

     '  I'm not drunk,' said Stepa hoarsely.  ' Something's happened  to me,

I'm ill. . . . Where am I? What town is this? '

     ' Yalta, of course. . . .'

     Stepa  gave a gentle sigh, collapsed and fainted  as he struck his head

on the warm stonework of the pier.

 

 

 

 

        8. A. Duel between Professor and Poet

 

 

 

     At  about   half  past eleven  that  morning,  just  as   Stepa   lost

consciousness in  Yalta, Ivan Nikolayich Bezdomny regained it, waking from a

deep and  prolonged sleep. For a while he tried to think why  he was in this

strange  room  with  its white walls,  its  odd little bedside table made of

shiny metal and its white  shutters,  through  which the sun  appeared to be

shining.

     Ivan  shook his  head  to  convince himself that it was not  aching and

remembered that he was in a hospital. This in turn reminded him of Berlioz's

death, but today Ivan no longer found  this  very disturbing. After his long

sleep  Ivan Nikolayich  felt  calmer and able to think more  clearly.  After

lying for a while motionless in his spotlessly clean and  comfortably sprung

bed, Ivan noticed  a bell-push  beside  him.  Out  of a habit  of  fingering

anything in sight, Ivan pressed it. He expected a bell to ring  or a  person

to appear, but something quite different happened.

     At the foot of Ivan's bed a frosted-glass cylinder lit up with the word

'DRINK'. After a short  spell in that position, the cylinder  began  turning

until it stopped at another word:

     ' NANNY '. Ivan found this clever machine slightly confusing. ' NANNY '

was replaced by ' CALL THE DOCTOR '.

     ' H'm . . .' said Ivan, at a loss to know what the machine expected him

to do. Luck came to his rescue. Ivan pressed the button at the  word ' NURSE

'.  In reply the machine gave a faint tinkle, stopped and went out. Into the

room came a kind-looking woman in a clean white overall and said to Ivan :

     ' Good morning!'

     Ivan  did  not  reply,  as he  felt the  greeting out of  place  in the

circumstances. They  had,  after all,  dumped  a  perfectly healthy  man  in

hospital  and were making it worse  by pretending it was necessary! With the

same kind  look  the woman  pressed a  button and raised the blind. Sunlight

poured into the room  through a light, wide-mesh grille that extended to the

floor. Beyond the grille was a balcony, beyond that the bank of a meandering

river and on the far side a cheerful pine forest.

     ' Bath  time! ' said  the woman invitingly and  pushed  aside a folding

partition to reveal a magnificently equipped bathroom.

     Although  Ivan had  made up his mind not to talk to the  woman, when he

saw a broad stream of water thundering into the  bath from a glittering  tap

he could not help saying sarcastically :

     ' Look at that! Just like in the Metropole! '

     ' Oh, no,'  replied the  woman  proudly.  '  Much  better.  There's  no

equipment like this  anywhere, even abroad. Professors and doctors come here

specially to inspect our clinic. We have foreign tourists here every day.'

     At the  words ' foreign tourist' Ivan at once remembered the mysterious

professor of the day before. He scowled and said :

     ' Foreign tourists  . . . why  do you  all think they're so  wonderful?

There  are some pretty odd  specimens among them,  I can tell you. I met one

yesterday--he was a charmer! '

     He was  just  going  to  start  telling her about Pontius  Pilate,  but

changed his  mind. The  woman would never  understand and  it was useless to

expect any help from her.

     Washed  and  clean,  Ivan  Nikolayich  was  immediately  provided  with

everything a man needs after a bath--a freshly ironed shirt, underpants  and

socks. That was only a beginning : opening the door of a wardrobe, the woman

pointed inside and asked him:

     ' What would you like to wear--a dressing gown or pyjamas? '

     Although  he  was a  prisoner in his new home,  Ivan found it  hard  to

resist the woman's easy, friendly manner and he pointed to a pair of crimson

flannelette pyjamas.

     After that Ivan Nikolayich  was led along an empty,  soundless corridor

into a  room of vast dimensions. He had decided  to treat everything in this

wonderfully equipped building with

     sarcasm and  he at  once  mentally  christened this room '  the factory

kitchen'.

     And with good reason.  There were  cupboards and glass-fronted cabinets

full  of  gleaming   nickel-plated  instruments.  There  were  armchairs  of

strangely complex  design,  lamps  with  shiny, bulbous  shades,  a  mass of

phials,  bunsen  burners, electric  cables and  various  totally  mysterious

pieces of apparatus.

     Three people came into the room to see Ivan, two women and one man, all

in  white. They began by taking Ivan to a desk  in the corner to interrogate

him.

     Ivan  considered the situation. He  had a choice of  three courses. The

first  was  extremely  tempting--to hurl himself  at these  lamps  and other

ingenious gadgets and smash them  all to  pieces as a  way of expressing his

protest at being locked up for nothing. But today's  Ivan  was significantly

different from the Ivan of yesterday and he found the first course dubious ;

it  would  only make them more convinced that he was a dangerous lunatic, so

he abandoned it. There was a second--to begin at once telling them the story

about the professor and  Pontius  Pilate. However yesterday's experience had

shown  him  that  people either  refused to believe the  story or completely

misunderstood it, so Ivan  rejected that course too,  deciding to  adopt the

third: he would wrap himself in proud silence.

     It  proved  impossible to keep it up, and willy-nilly he  found himself

answering,  albeit curtly and  sulkily, a  whole series  of questions.  They

carefully  extracted from Ivan  everything about his  past life,  down to an

attack of scarlet fever  fifteen years before. Having filled a whole page on

Ivan they turned it  over and  one of the women in white started questioning

him about his  relatives. It was a  lengthy  performance--who had died, when

and  why,  did they  drink, had they suffered  from venereal  disease and so

forth. Finally they asked him  to describe what had happened on the previous

day at Patriarch's Ponds, but they did not pay  much attention to it and the

story about Pontius Pilate left them cold.

     The woman then handed Ivan  over to the man, who  took a different line

with him, this time in silence. He  took  Ivan's temperature, felt his pulse

and looked into his eyes while he  shone a lamp  into them. The other  woman

came to  the  man's  assistance and  they hit Ivan on  the  back  with  some

instrument, though not painfully, traced some signs on the skin of his chest

with  the handle of a  little hammer, hit  him on the knees with more little

hammers, making Ivan's legs jerk, pricked his finger and drew blood from it,

pricked his elbow joint, wrapped rubber bracelets round his arm . . .

     Ivan could  only smile bitterly to himself and ponder on  the absurdity

of it all. He  had  wanted to warn them  all  of the danger threatening them

from  the mysterious  professor,  and had tried to catch him, yet all he had

achieved  was to land up  in this  weird laboratory  just to talk a  lot  of

rubbish about his uncle Fyodor who had died of drink in Vologda.

     At last they let  Ivan  go. He was  led  back to his room where he  was

given a cup  of coffee, two soft-boiled eggs and a slice of white  bread and

butter. When  he  had eaten his breakfast, Ivan made up his mind to wait for

someone  in charge of the clinic to arrive, to  make him listen and to plead

for justice.

     The man came soon after Ivan's  breakfast.  The door  into  Ivan's room

suddenly opened and in swept a crowd of people  in white  overalls. In front

strode a man of about  forty-five, with a  clean-shaven, actorish face, kind

but extremely piercing eyes and a courteous manner. The whole retinue showed

him  signs  of  attention and respect, which  gave  his  entrance  a certain

solemnity. ' Like Pontius Pilate! ' thought Ivan.

     Yes, he  was undoubtedly the man  in  charge. He  sat  down on a stool.

Everybody else remained standing.

     ' How do you do. My name is doctor Stravinsky,' he said as he sat down,

looking amiably at Ivan.

     '  Here you are, Alexander Nikolayich,'  said a neatly bearded man  and

handed the chief Ivan's filled-in questionnaire.

     ' They've got it all sewn up,'  thought Ivan.  The man in charge  ran a

practised eye over the sheet of paper,  muttered' Mm'hh' and exchanged a few

words  with  his colleagues in  a strange  language.  '  And he speaks Latin

too--like Pilate ',  mused Ivan sadly. Suddenly a word made him shudder.  It

was the word  '  schizophrenia ', which the sinister stranger had spoken  at

Patriarch's Ponds.  Now  professor Stravinsky  was  saying it. '  So he knew

about this, too! ' thought Ivan uneasily.

     The chief had adopted the  rule of agreeing with  everybody  and  being

pleased with whatever other  people might say,  expressing  it by the word '

Splendid . . .'

     ' Splendid! '  said  Stravinsky, handing back the  sheet  of paper.  He

turned to Ivan.

     ' Are you a poet? '

     '  Yes, I am,' replied Ivan glumly and for the  first  time he suddenly

felt an inexplicable revulsion to poetry. Remembering some of his own poems,

they struck him as vaguely unpleasant.

     Frowning, he returned Stravinsky's question by asking:

     ' Are you a professor? '

     To this Stravinsky, with engaging courtesy, inclined his head.

     ' Are you in charge here? ' Ivan went on.

     To this, too, Stravinsky nodded.

     ' I must talk to you,' said Ivan Nikolayich in a significant tone.

     ' That's why I'm here,' answered Stravinsky.

     ' Well  this is the  situation,' Ivan began,  sensing that his hour had

come. ' They say I'm mad and nobody wants to listen to me!'

     ' Oh no, we will listen very carefully  to everything you have to say,'

said  Stravinsky seriously and reassuringly, ' and on  no  account shall  we

allow anyone to say you're mad.'

     ' All right, then, listen: yesterday evening at Patriarch's Ponds I met

a mysterious person,  who  may or may not have been  a  foreigner, who  knew

about Berlioz's death before it happened, and had met Pontius Pilate.'

     The retinue listened to Ivan, silent and unmoving.

     ' Pilate? Is that the Pilate who  lived  at  the time of Jesus Christ?'

enquired Stravinsky, peering at Ivan. ' Yes.'

     ' Aha,' said Stravinsky. ' And this Berlioz is the one who died falling

under a tram? '

     ' Yes. I was there yesterday evening when the tram killed him, and this

mysterious character was there too .'

     '  Pontius  Pilate's friend?  '  asked Stravinsky,  obviously a  man of

exceptional intelligence.

     ' Exactly,' said  Ivan, studying  Stravinsky.  '  He told us, before it

happened,  that  Anna had spilt the sunflower-seed oil ... and that  was the

very  spot  where Berlioz slipped!  How d'you  like that?!' Ivan  concluded,

expecting his story to produce a big effect.

     But it produced none. Stravinsky simply asked :

     ' And who is this Anna? '

     Slightly disconcerted by the question, Ivan frowned.

     ' Anna doesn't matter,' he  said irritably. '  God knows  who  she  is.

Simply some  stupid girl from Sadovaya  Street. What's important,  don't you

see, is that he knew  about the sunflower-seed oil beforehand. Do you follow

me? '

     ' Perfectly,' replied Stravinsky seriously. Patting the  poet's knee he

added : ' Relax and go on.'

     '  All right,' said Ivan,  trying  to  fall  into Stravinsky's tone and

knowing from bitter experience that only calm would help him. ' So obviously

this terrible  man (he's  lying,  by  the way--he's no  professor)  has some

unusual power .  . . For instance, if  you chase him you can't catch up with

him . . . and there's a couple of others with him, just as peculiar in their

way: a tall  fellow with broken spectacles  and an enormous cat who rides on

the  tram  by  himself. What's  more,'  went on Ivan  with  great  heat  and

conviction, ' he was on the balcony with Pontius Pilate, there's no doubt of

it. What about that, eh? He must be arrested immediately or he'll  do untold