The Master and Margarita (34 page)

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,[107] 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[108] Nikolaevna.

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 for ever. 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 all this 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.