nd them.  True, there may  be exceptions.  Among  persons
sitting down  with me  at  the banqueting table, there have been on occasion
some extraordinary scoundrels! ... And so, let me hear your business.'
     'Yesterday you were so good as to do some conjuring tricks ...'
     'I?' the magician  exclaimed in amazement. 'Good gracious, it's somehow
even unbecoming to me!'
     'I'm sorry,' said  the barman, taken aback. 'I mean the sance of black
magic...'
     'Ah, yes, yes, yes!  My dear, I'll  reveal a secret to you.  I'm not an
artiste at all, I  simply  wanted to see the  Muscovites en masse, and  that
could be done most conveniently in a theatre. And so my  retinue,' he nodded
in the direction of the cat, 'arranged for this sance, and I merely sat and
looked at the Muscovites. Now, don't go changing  countenance,  but tell me,
what is it in connection with this sance that has brought you to me?'
     'If you please, you see, among other things there were banknotes flying
down from  the ceiling...'  The  barman lowered his voice and looked  around
abashedly.  'So they snatched them all up. And then a young man comes  to my
bar and gives me a ten-rouble bill, I give him eight-fifty in change... Then
another one ...'
     'Also a young man?'
     'No, an  older  one. Then a third, and a fourth ... I keep giving  them
change. And today  I went to check the cash box, and there, instead of money
- cut-up paper. They hit the buffet for a hundred and nine roubles.'
     'Ai-yai-yai!' the  artiste exclaimed. 'But can they have  thought those
were real bills? I can't admit the idea that they did it knowingly.'
     The  barman  took a somehow hunched and  anguished look around him, but
said nothing.
     'Can they be crooks?' the magician asked worriedly of his visitor. 'Can
there be crooks among the Muscovites?'
     The barman  smiled so bitterly in  response that all  doubts fell away:
yes, there were crooks among the Muscovites.
     'That is mean!' Woland was indignant. 'You're  a poor man ... You are a
poor man?'
     The barman drew his head down between his shoulders, making  it evident
that he was a poor man.
     'How much have you got in savings?'
     The question  was  asked in  a  sympathetic  tone,  but  even so such a
question could not but be acknowledged as indelicate. The barman faltered.
     Two  hundred and forty-nine thousand roubles in  five savings banks,' a
cracked  voice responded  from  the  neighbouring  room,  `and  two  hundred
ten-rouble gold pieces at home under the floor.'
     The barman became as if welded to his tabouret.
     'Well, of course, that's not  a great sum,' Woland said condescendingly
to his visitor, 'though, as a matter of fact, you have no need of it anyway.
When are you going to die?'
     Here the barman became indignant.
     'Nobody knows that and it's nobody's concern,' he replied.
     'Sure  nobody knows,' the same trashy voice  came  from  the study. The
binomial  theorem, you might think!  He's going to die in  nine months, next
February,  of  liver  cancer,  in  the  clinic  of the  First  Moscow  State
University, in ward number four.'
     The barman's face turned yellow.
     'Nine   months...'  Woland   calculated  pensively.  Two  hundred   and
forty-nine thousand... rounding it off that comes to twenty-seven thousand a
month... Not  a lot,  but  enough  for  a  modest  life ...  Plus those gold
pieces... '
     `He  won't get  to realize the gold  pieces,' the  same voice mixed in,
turning  the barman's heart to ice. 'On  Andrei  Fokich's  demise, the house
will immediately be torn down, and the gold will be sent to the State Bank.'
     'And I wouldn't advise you to go to the clinic,' the artiste went on.
     'What's the sense of dying in a ward  to the groans and wheezes of  the
hopelessly ill?  Isn't  it better  to give  a  banquet on  the  twenty-seven
thousand, then  take poison and move on to the other world to the sounds  of
strings, surrounded by drunken beauties and dashing friends?'
     The barman sat  motionless and grew very old. Dark rings surrounded his
eyes, his cheeks sagged, and his lower jaw hung down.
     'However, we've started day-dreaming,' exclaimed the host. To business!
     Show me your cut-up paper.'
     The  barman, agitated, pulled a package  from his pocket, unwrapped it,
and was dumbfounded: the piece of paper contained ten-rouble bills.
     'My dear, you really are unwell,' Woland said, shrugging his shoulders.
     The barman, grinning wildly, got up from the tabouret.
     'A-and...' he said, stammering, 'and if they ... again ... that is...'
     `Hm...' the artiste  pondered, 'well,  then  come to  us  again. You're
always welcome. I'm glad of our acquaintance ...'
     Straight  away Koroviev  came  bounding  from  the study,  clutched the
barman's  hand, and began  shaking  it, begging Andrei Fokich  to  give  his
regards to everybody, everybody. Not thinking  very well, the barman started
for the front hall.
     'Hella, see him out!' Koroviev shouted.
     Again that naked redhead in the front hall! The barman squeezed through
the door, squeaked 'Goodbye!',  and went off like a  drunk  man. Having gone
down a  little  way, he  stopped,  sat on a  step, took out  the packet  and
checked - the ten-rouble bills were in place.
     Here  a  woman  with a  green bag  came out of  the  apartment  on that
landing. Seeing a man sitting on a step and staring dully at some money, she
smiled and said pensively:
     'What a  house we've got... Here's this one drunk in the morning... And
the window on the stairway is broken again!'
     Peering more attentively at the barman, she added:
     'And you, dozen, are simply rolling in money! ... Give some to me, eh?'
     `Let  me  alone,  for  Christ's sake!' the  barman got  frightened  and
quickly hid the money.
     The woman laughed.
     To the hairy devil with you,  skinflint! I was joking...' And she  went
downstairs.
     The barman slowly got up, raised his hand to  straighten  his  hat, and
realized that it was not  on his head. He was terribly reluctant to go back,
but he was  sorry about the hat. After some hesitation, he nevertheless went
back and rang.
     'What else do you want?' the accursed Hella asked him.
     'I forgot my hat...' the barman whispered, pointing to his bald head.
     Hella turned around. The barman  spat mentally and dosed his eyes. When
he opened them, Hella was holding out his hat to him and a sword with a dark
hilt.
     'Not mine ...' the barman whispered, pushing the sword away and quickly
putting on his hat.
     'You came without a sword?' Hella was surprised.
     The barman growled something and quickly went  downstairs. His head for
some reason felt uncomfortable  and too warm in the hat. He took it off and,
jumping from fear,  cried out softly: in his hands was a velvet beret with a
dishevelled cock's feather. The barman  crossed himself. At the same moment,
the beret miaowed,  turned into a black kitten  and, springing  back  on  to
Andrei Fokich's head, sank  all its claws into  his bald spot. Letting out a
cry  of  despair, the barman  dashed downstairs, and the kitten fell off and
spurted back up the stairway.
     Bursting outside, the barman trotted to the gates and left the devilish
no.502-bis for ever.
     What  happened to him afterwards is known  perfectly well.  Running out
the gateway, the barman looked around wildly, as if searching for something.
A  minute later he was on the other side of the street in a pharmacy. He had
no sooner uttered the words:
     'Tell me, please ...' when the woman behind the counter exclaimed:
     'Citizen, your head is cut all over!'
     Some five minutes later the barman was bandaged  with gauze,  knew that
the  best specialists  in  liver diseases  were considered  to be professors
Bernadsky and Kuzmin, asked who was closer, lit up with joy on learning that
Kuzmin lived literally across the courtyard in a small white house, and some
two minutes later was in that house.
     The premises were antiquated but very, very cosy. The barman remembered
that the first one he happened to meet was an old nurse who wanted  to  take
his hat,  but as he turned out to have no hat, the nurse went off somewhere,
munching with an empty mouth.
     Instead of her, there turned up near  the  mirror and under what seemed
some sort  of arch, a middle-aged woman  who said straight away that  it was
possible to make an appointment  only for  the nineteenth, not  before.  The
barman at once grasped what would save him. Peering with fading eyes through
the arch, where  three persons  were waiting in what was obviously some sort
of anteroom, he whispered:
     'Mortally ill...'
     The  woman  looked  in  perplexity  at  the  barman's  bandaged   head,
hesitated, and said:
     'Well, then ...' and allowed the barman through the archway.
     At that same moment the opposite door opened, there was the  flash of a
gold pince-nez. The woman in the white coat said:
     'Citizens, this patient will go out of turn.'
     And  before  the  barman could  look  around him, he  was  in Professor
Kuzmin's  office.  There  was nothing terrible, solemn or  medical  in  this
oblong room.
     "What's wrong with  you?' Professor Kuzmin asked in  a pleasant  voice,
and glanced with some alarm at the bandaged head.
     `I've just  learned  from reliable hands,' the barman  replied, casting
wild glances at some group photograph under glass, 'that I'm going to die of
liver cancer in February of this corning year. I beg you to stop it.'
     Professor  Kuzmin,  as  he sat there,  threw  himself against  the high
Gothic leather back of his chair.
     `Excuse me, I don't understand you... you've, what, been to the doctor?
Why is your head bandaged?'
     `Some  doctor!  ...  You  should've seen  this  doctor...'  the  barman
replied,  and his  teeth  suddenly  began  to chatter.  'And don't  pay  any
attention to the head,  it has no  connection ...  Spit on the  head, it has
nothing to do with it... Liver cancer, I beg you to stop it! ...'
     'Pardon me, but who told you?!'
     'Believe him!' the barman ardently entreated. 'He knows!'
     `I  don't  understand  a thing!'  the  professor  said,  shrugging  his
shoulders and pushing his chair  back  from the desk. 'How  can he know when
you're going to die? The more so as he's not a doctor!'
     'In ward four of the clinic of the First MSU,' replied the barman.
     Here  the  professor  looked at  his patient, at his head, at his  damp
trousers, and thought: 'Just what I needed, a madman...' He asked:
     'Do you drink vodka?'
     'Never touch it,' the barman answered.
     A  moment  later he  was undressed, lying on  the cold oilcloth of  the
couch,  and the professor was kneading  his stomach. Here, it must  be said,
the barman cheered up considerably. The  professor  categorically maintained
that presently, at least for the given moment, the barman had no symptoms of
cancer, but since it was so ... since he was afraid and had  been frightened
by some charlatan, he must perform all the tests ...
     The professor was  scribbling away on some sheets  of paper, explaining
where  to go, what to bring. Besides  that, he gave him a note for Professor
Bouret, a  neurologist, telling  the barman that his nerves were in complete
disorder.
     'How much  do I owe you. Professor?' the  barman  asked in a tender and
trembling voice, pulling out a fat wallet.
     'As much as you like,' the professor said curtly and drily.
     The barman took out thirty roubles and  placed  them on the  table, and
then,  with an  unexpected softness, as  if operating with a  cat's  paw, he
placed on top of the bills a clinking stack wrapped in newspaper.
     'And what is this?' Kuzmin asked, twirling his moustache.
     'Don't scorn it, citizen Professor,' the barman whispered. 'I beg you -
stop the cancer!'
     Take away your gold this minute,' said the professor, proud of himself.
     'You'd  better  look  after  your  nerves.  Tomorrow  have  your  urine
analysed, don't drink a lot of tea, and don't put any salt in your food.'
     'Not even in soup?' the barman asked.
     'Not in anything,' ordered Kuzmin.
     'Ahh! ...' the barman exclaimed wistfully, gazing at the professor with
tenderness, gathering up his gold pieces and backing towards the door.
     That evening the professor had few patients, and as twilight approached
the  last one left. Taking off his  white coat, the professor glanced at the
spot where the barman had left his money and saw no banknotes there but only
three labels from bottles of Abrau-Durso wine.
     `Devil knows what's  going on!'  Kuzmin muttered, trailing  the flap of
his coat on the  floor and feeling the labels. 'It turns out he's not only a
schizophrenic but also a  crook!  But I  can't understand what  he needed me
for!  Could it  be the prescription for the urine  analysis? Oh-oh! ... He's
stolen my overcoat!'  And the professor rushed  for the front  hall, one arm
still in the sleeve of  his white coat. 'Xenia Nikitishna!' he cried shrilly
through the door to the  front hall. 'Look  and  see  if all  the  coats are
there!'
     The  coats all turned  out to be there. But instead, when the professor
went back to his  desk, having peeled off his white coat at last, he stopped
as if rooted to the parquet beside his  desk, his eyes riveted to it. In the
place where  the labels had been there  sat an orphaned  black kitten with a
sorry little muzzle, miaowing over a saucer of milk.
     'Wh-what's  this, may  I ask?! Now this is...' And Kuzmin felt the nape
of his neck go cold.
     At the professor's quiet and pitiful cry, Xenia Nikitishna came running
and at once reassured him  completely, saying that it was, of course, one of
the patients who had abandoned the kitten, as happens  not  infrequently  to
professors.
     They probably have a poor life,' Xenia Nikitishna explained, "well, and
we, of course...'
     They started  thinking  and  guessing  who  might  have  abandoned  it.
Suspicion fell on a little old lady with a stomach ulcer.
     `It's  she, of  course,' Xenia Nikitishna said. 'She thinks:  "I'll die
anyway, and it's a pity for the kitten.'"
     'But excuse me!' cried Kuzmin. 'What about the milk? ... Did she  bring
that, too? And the saucer, eh?'
     `She brought it  in  a  little  bottle, and poured it  into  the saucer
here,' Xenia Nikitishna explained.
     'In any case, take both the  kitten  and the saucer away,' said Kuzmin,
and he accompanied Xenia Nikitishna to the door himself.  When he came back,
the situation had altered.
     As he was hanging his coat on a nail, the professor heard  guffawing in
the courtyard. He glanced out and, naturally,  was  struck dumb.  A lady was
running  across the yard to  the  opposite wing in  nothing but a shift. The
professor even knew her name - Marya Alexandrovna. The guffawing came from a
young boy.
     'What's this?' Kuzmin said contemptuously.
     Just  then,  behind the  wall,  in the professor's  daughter's room,  a
gramophone began to play the foxtrot  'Hallelujah,' and at the same moment a
sparrow's chirping came from behind the professor's  back. He turned  around
and saw a large sparrow hopping on his desk.
     'Hm ... keep calm!' the  professor thought. 'It flew in  as I left  the
window. Everything's  in  order!' the professor told  himself, feeling  that
everything was in complete disorder, and  that, of  course, owing chiefly to
the sparrow. Taking a closer look at him, the professor  became convinced at
once that this was no  ordinary sparrow. The obnoxious little sparrow dipped
on its left leg, obviously clowning, dragging it, working  it in syncopation
- in short, it was dancing the foxtrot to the sounds of the gramophone, like
a  drunkard in a bar, saucy  as  could be, casting  impudent glances at  the
professor.
     Kuzmin's  hand fell  on the telephone, and he decided  to  call his old
schoolmate Bouret, to ask what such little sparrows might mean at the age of
sixty, especially when one's head suddenly starts spinning?
     The sparrow meanwhile sat on the presentation inkstand, shat in it (I'm
not joking!), then flew  up, hung in the air,  and, swinging  a steely beak,
pecked at the glass covering the photograph portraying the entire university
graduating class of '94, broke the glass to smithereens, and  only then flew
out the window.
     The  professor dialled  again,  and instead of calling Bouret, called a
leech bureau,  [5] said he was Professor Kuzmin, and asked them to send some
leeches to his house at once. Hanging up the receiver, the  professor turned
to his desk  again  and  straight away let out a scream. At this  desk sat a
woman in  a nurse's  headscarf,  holding a handbag with  the  word 'Leeches'
written  on  it. The professor screamed as he looked  at her mouth: it was a
man's mouth, crooked, stretching from  ear  to ear, with  a single fang. The
nurse's eyes were dead.
     'This bit  of cash I'll just pocket,' the nurse said in a  male  basso,
`no  point in letting it lie  about  here.' She  raked up the  labels with a
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!




         * BOOK TWO * 




        CHAPTER 19. Margarita


     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 sance ended, the audience 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 sance.
     'And she left like that?'
     `And she  left like that!' Natasha  cried, blushing still more from not
being  believed.  `And  yesterday, Margarita Nikolaevna, the police arrested
around a hundred people in the evening. Women from this sance were  running
down Tverskaya in nothing but their bloomers.'
     'Well,  of  course,  it's  Darya  who  told  you  that,' said Margarita
Nikolaevna. 'I noticed long ago that she's a terrible liar.'
     The funny conversation ended with a pleasant 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