The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

  ‘If you, scum, allow yourself to interfere in the conversation again ...’

  Behemoth squeaked in a not very ball-like fashion and rasped:

  ‘Queen ... the ear will get swollen ... why spoil the ball with a swollen ear? ... I was speaking legally, from the legal point of view ... I say no more, I say no more. Consider me not a cat but a post, only let go of my ear!’

  Margarita released his ear, and the importunate, gloomy eyes were before her.

  ‘I am happy, Queen-hostess, to be invited to the great ball of the full moon!’

  ‘And I am glad to see you,’ Margarita answered her, ‘very glad. Do you like champagne?’

  ‘What are you doing, Queen?!’ Koroviev cried desperately but soundlessly in Margarita’s ear. ‘There’ll be a traffic jam!’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ the woman said imploringly, and suddenly began repeating mechanically: ‘Frieda,[124] Frieda, Frieda! My name is Frieda, Queen!’

  ‘Get drunk tonight, Frieda, and don’t think about anything,’ said Margarita.

  Frieda reached out both arms to Margarita, but Koroviev and Behemoth very adroitly took her under the arms and she blended into the crowd.

  Now people were coming in a solid wall from below, as if storming the landing where Margarita stood. Naked women’s bodies came up between tailcoated men. Their swarthy, white, coffee-bean-coloured, and altogether black bodies floated towards Margarita. In their hair - red, black, chestnut, light as flax - precious stones glittered and danced, spraying sparkles into the flood of light. And as if someone had sprinkled the storming column of men with droplets of light, diamond studs sprayed light from their chests. Every second now Margarita felt lips touch her knee, every second she held out her hand to be kissed, her face was contracted into a fixed mask of greeting.

  ‘I’m delighted,’ Koroviev sang monotonously, ‘we’re delighted ... the queen is delighted ...’

  ‘The queen is delighted ...’ Azazello echoed nasally behind her back.

  ‘I’m delighted!’ the cat kept exclaiming.

  ‘The marquise..,’[125] muttered Koroviev, ‘poisoned her father, two brothers and two sisters for the inheritance ... The queen is delighted! ... Madame Minkin ...[126] Ah, what a beauty! A bit nervous. Why burn the maid’s face with the curling-irons? Of course, in such conditions one gets stabbed ... The queen is delighted! ... Queen, one second of attention! The emperor Rudolf[127] — sorcerer and alchemist ... Another alchemist - got hanged ... Ah, here she is! Ah, what a wonderful brothel she ran in Strasbourg! ... We’re delighted! ... A Moscow dressmaker,[128] we all love her for her inexhaustible fantasy ... She kept a shop and invented a terribly funny trick: drilled two round holes in the wall ...’

  ‘And the ladies didn’t know?’ asked Margarita.

  ‘Every one of them knew, Queen,’ answered Koroviev. ‘Delighted! ... This twenty-year-old boy was distinguished from childhood by strange qualities, a dreamer and an eccentric. A girl fell in love with him, and he went and sold her to a brothel...’

  A river came streaming from below, and there was no end to this river in sight. Its source - the enormous fireplace - continued to feed it. Thus one hour passed and a second commenced. Here Margarita began to notice that her chain had become heavier than before. Something strange also happened with her arm. Now, before raising it, Margarita had to wince. Koroviev’s interesting observations ceased to amuse Margarita. Slant-eyed Mongolian faces, white faces and black became undifferentiated to her, they merged at times, and the air between them would for some reason begin to tremble and flow. A sharp pain, as if from a needle, suddenly pierced Margarita’s right arm, and, clenching her teeth, she rested her elbow on the post. Some rustling, as if from wings against the walls, was now coming from the ballroom, and it was clear that unprecedented hordes of guests were dancing there, and it seemed to Margarita that even the massive marble, mosaic and crystal floors of this prodigious room were pulsing rhythmically.

  Neither Gaius Caesar Caligula[129] nor Messalina[130] interested Margarita any longer, nor did any of the kings, dukes, cavaliers, suicides, poisoners, gallowsbirds, procuresses, prison guards and sharpers, executioners, informers, traitors, madmen, sleuths, seducers. All their names became jumbled in her head, the faces stuck together into one huge pancake, and only a single face lodged itself painfully in her memory — the face, framed in a truly fiery beard, of Maliuta Skuratov.[131] Margarita’s legs kept giving way, she was afraid of bursting into tears at any moment. The worst suffering was caused by her right knee, which was being kissed. It became swollen, the skin turned blue, even though Natasha’s hand appeared by this knee several times with a sponge, wiping it with something fragrant. At the end of the third hour, Margarita glanced down with completely desperate eyes and gave a joyful start — the stream of guests was thinning out.

  ‘Balls always assemble according to the same laws, Queen,’ whispered Koroviev. ‘Presently the wave will begin to subside. I swear we’re enduring the final minutes. Here’s the group of revellers from Brocken, they always come last. Yes, here they are. Two drunken vampires ... that’s all? Ah, no, here’s one more ... no, two!’[130]

  The last two guests were coming up the stairs!

  ‘It’s some new one,’ Koroviev was saying, squinting through his lens. ‘Ah, yes, yes. Azazello visited him once and, over the cognac, whispered some advice to him on how to get rid of a certain man whose exposures he was extremely afraid of. And so he told an acquaintance who was dependent on him to spray the walls of the office with poison...’

  ‘What’s his name?’ asked Margarita.

  ‘Ah, really, I myself don’t know yet,’ Koroviev replied, ‘well have to ask Azazello.’

  ‘And who is with him?’

  ‘Why, that same efficient subordinate of his. Delighted!’ cried Koroviev to the last two.

  The stairway was empty. They waited a little longer as a precaution. But no one else came from the fireplace.

  A second later, without knowing how it happened, Margarita found herself in the same room with the pool, and there, bursting into tears at once from the pain in her arm and leg, she collapsed right on the floor. But Hella and Natasha, comforting her, again drew her under the bloody shower, again massaged her body, and Margarita revived.

  ‘There’s more, there’s more, Queen Margot,’ whispered Koroviev, appearing beside her. ‘You must fly around the rooms, so that the honourable guests don’t feel they’ve been abandoned.’

  And once more Margarita flew out of the room with the pool. On the stage behind the tulips, where the waltz king’s orchestra had been playing, there now raged an ape jazz band. A huge gorilla with shaggy side-whiskers, a trumpet in his hand, capering heavily, was doing the conducting. Orang-utans sat in a row blowing on shiny trumpets. Perched on their shoulders were merry chimpanzees with concertinas. Two hamadryads with manes like lions played grand pianos, but these grand pianos were not heard amidst the thundering, squeaking and booming of saxophones, fiddles and drums in the paws of gibbons, mandrills and marmosets. On the mirror floor a countless number of couples, as if merged, amazing in the deftness and cleanness of their movements, all turning in the same direction, swept on like a wall threatening to clear away everything in its path. Live satin butterflies bobbed above the heads of the dancing hordes, flowers poured down from the ceiling. In the capitals of the columns, each time the electricity went off, myriads of fireflies lit up, and marsh-lights floated in the air.

  Then Margarita found herself in a room with a pool of monstrous size bordered by a colonnade. A giant black Neptune spouted a wide pink stream from his maw. A stupefying smell of champagne rose from the pool. Here unconstrained merriment held sway. Ladies, laughing, gave their handbags to their cavaliers or the negroes who rushed about with towels in their hands, and with a cry dived swallow-like into the pool. Foamy columns shot up. The crystal bottom of the pool shone with light from below that broke through the density of the wine, and in it the silvery swimming bodies coul
d be seen. The ladies got out of the pool completely drunk. Loud laughter resounded under the columns, booming like the jazz band.

  All that was remembered from this turmoil was the completely drunken face of a woman with senseless and, even in their senselessness, imploring eyes, and only one name — Frieda — was recalled.

  Margarita’s head began to spin from the smell of the wine, and she was about to leave when the cat arranged a number in the pool that detained her. Behemoth performed some magic by Neptune’s maw, and at once the billowing mass of champagne, hissing and gurgling, left the pool, and Neptune began spewing out a stream neither glittering nor foaming but of a dark-yellow colour. The ladies - shrieking and screaming ‘Cognac!’ - rushed from the pool-side and hid behind the columns. In a few seconds the pool was filled, and the cat, turning three times in the air, dropped into the heaving cognac. He crawled out, spluttering, his bow-tie limp, the gilding on his whiskers gone, along with the opera glasses. Only one woman dared to follow Behemoth’s example - that same frolicsome dressmaker, with her cavalier, an unknown young mulatto. The two threw themselves into the cognac, but here Koroviev took Margarita under the arm and they left the bathers.

  It seemed to Margarita that she flew somewhere, where she saw mountains of oysters in huge stone basins. Then she flew over a glass floor with infernal furnaces burning under it and devilish white cooks darting among them. Then somewhere, already ceasing to comprehend anything, she saw dark cellars where some sort of lamps burned, where girls served meat sizzling on red-hot coals, where her health was drunk from big mugs. Then she saw polar bears playing concertinas and dancing the Kamarinsky[133] on a platform. A salamander-conjurer[134] who did not burn in the fireplace ... And for the second time her strength began to ebb.

  ‘One last appearance,’ Koroviev whispered to her anxiously, ‘and then we’re free!’

  Accompanied by Koroviev, she again found herself in the ballroom, but now there was no dancing in it, and the guests in a numberless throng pressed back between the columns, leaving the middle of the room open. Margarita did not remember who helped her to get up on the dais that appeared in the middle of this open space in the room. When she was up on it, to her own amazement, she heard a clock strike midnight somewhere, though by her reckoning it was long past. At the last stroke of the clock, which came from no one knew where, silence fell on the crowd of guests.

  Then Margarita saw Woland again. He walked in surrounded by Abaddon, Azazello and several others who resembled Abaddon - dark-haired and young. Now Margarita saw that opposite her dais another had been prepared for Woland. But he did not make use of it. What struck Margarita was that Woland came out for this last great appearance at the ball looking just the same as he had looked in the bedroom. The same dirty, patched shirt[135] hung on his shoulders, his feet were in worn-out bedroom slippers. Woland had a sword, but he used this bare sword as a cane, leaning on it.

  Limping, Woland stopped at his dais, and immediately Azazello was before him with a platter in his hands, and on this platter Margarita saw a man’s severed head with the front teeth knocked out. Total silence continued to reign, broken only once by the far-off sound, inexplicable under the circumstances, of a doorbell, coming as if from the front hall.

  ‘Mikhail Alexandrovich,’ Woland addressed the head in a low voice, and then the slain man’s eyelids rose, and on the dead face Margarita saw, with a shudder, living eyes filled with thought and suffering.

  ‘Everything came to pass, did it not?’ Woland went on, looking into the head’s eyes. ‘The head was cut off by a woman, the meeting did not take place, and I am living in your apartment. That is a fact. And fact is the most stubborn thing in the world. But we are now interested in what follows, and not in this already accomplished fact. You have always been an ardent preacher of the theory that, on the cutting off of his head, life ceases in a man, he turns to ashes and goes into non-being. I have the pleasure of informing you, in the presence of my guests, though they serve as proof of quite a different theory, that your theory is both solid and clever. However, one theory is as good as another. There is also one which holds that it will be given to each according to his faith.[136] Let it come true! You go into non-being, and from the cup into which you are to be transformed, I will joyfully drink to being!’

  Woland raised his sword. Straight away the flesh of the head turned dark and shrivelled, then fell off in pieces, the eyes disappeared, and soon Margarita saw on the platter a yellowish skull with emerald eyes, pearl teeth and a golden foot. The lid opened on a hinge.

  ‘Right this second, Messire,’ said Koroviev, noticing Woland’s questioning look, ‘hell appear before you. In this sepulchral silence I can hear the creaking of his patent leather shoes and the clink of the goblet he has just set down on the table, having drunk champagne for the last time in his life. Here he is.’

  A solitary new guest was entering the room, heading towards Woland. Outwardly he did not differ in any way from the numerous other male guests, except for one thing: this guest was literally reeling with agitation, which could be seen even from afar. Flushed spots burned on his cheeks, and his eyes darted about in total alarm. The guest was dumbstruck, and that was perfectly natural: he was astounded by everything, and above all, of course, by Woland’s attire.

  However, the guest was met with the utmost kindness.

  ‘Ah, my dearest Baron Meigel,’ Woland, smiling affably, addressed the guest, whose eyes were popping out of his head. ‘I’m happy to commend to you,’ Woland turned to the other guests, ‘the most esteemed Baron Meigel, an employee of the Spectacles Commission, in charge of acquainting foreigners with places of interest in the capital.’

  Here Margarita froze, because she recognized this Meigel. She had come across him several times in Moscow theatres and restaurants. ‘Excuse me ...’ thought Margarita, ‘but that means - what - that he’s also dead? ...’ But the matter straight away clarified itself.

  ‘The dear baron,’ Woland went on, smiling joyfully, ‘was so charming that, having learned of my arrival in Moscow, he rang me up at once, offering his services along the line of his expertise, that is, acquainting people with places of interest. It goes without saying that I was happy to invite him here.’

  Just then Margarita saw Azazello hand the platter with the skull to Koroviev.

  ‘Ah, yes, incidentally, Baron,’ Woland said, suddenly lowering his voice intimately, ‘rumours have spread about your extreme curiosity. They say that, combined with your no less developed talkativeness, it was beginning to attract general attention. What’s more, wicked tongues have already dropped the word - a stool-pigeon and a spy. And, what’s still more, it is hinted that this will bring you to a sorry end in no more than a month. And so, in order to deliver you from this painful anticipation, we have decided to come to your aid, taking advantage of the fact that you invited yourself here precisely with the purpose of eavesdropping and spying out whatever you can.’

  The baron turned paler than Abaddon, who was exceptionally pale by nature, and then something strange took place. Abaddon stood in front of the baron and took off his glasses for a second. At the same moment something flashed fire in Azazello’s hand, something clapped softly, the baron began to fall backwards, crimson blood spurted from his chest and poured down his starched shirt and waistcoat. Koroviev put the cup to the spurt and handed the full cup to Woland. The baron’s lifeless body was by that time already on the floor.

  ‘I drink your health, ladies and gentlemen,’ Woland said quietly and, raising the cup, touched it to his lips.

  Then a metamorphosis occurred. The patched shirt and worn slippers disappeared. Woland was in some sort of black chlamys with a steel sword on his hip. He quickly approached Margarita, offered her the cup, and said imperiously:

  ‘Drink!’

  Margarita became dizzy, she swayed, but the cup was already at her lips, and voices, she could not make out whose, whispered in both her ears:

  ‘Don’t be afraid,
Queen ... Don’t be afraid, Queen, the blood has long since gone into the earth. And where it was spilled, grapevines are already growing.’

  Margarita, without opening her eyes, took a gulp, and a sweet current ran through her veins, a ringing began in her ears. It seemed to her that cocks were crowing deafeningly, that somewhere a march was being played. The crowds of guests began to lose their shape: tailcoaters and women fell to dust. Decay enveloped the room before Margarita’s eyes, a sepulchral smell flowed over it. The columns fell apart, the fires went out, everything shrank, there were no more fountains, no camellias, no tulips. And there was simply this: the modest living room of the jeweller’s widow, and a strip of light falling from a slightly opened door. And Margarita went through this slightly opened door.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Extraction of the Master

  In Woland’s bedroom everything turned out to be as it had been before the ball. Woland was sitting on the bed in his nightshirt, only Hella was no longer rubbing his leg, but was setting out supper on the table on which they had been playing chess. Koroviev and Azazello, having removed their tailcoats, were sitting at the table, and next to them, of course, was the cat, who refused to part with his bow-tie, though it had turned into an utterly filthy rag. Margarita, swaying, came up to the table and leaned on it. Then Woland beckoned her to him like the other time and indicated that she should sit down beside him.

  ‘Well, did they wear you out very much?’ asked Woland.

  ‘Oh, no, Messire,’ Margarita answered, but barely audibly.

  ‘Nobless obleege,’ the cat observed and poured some transparent liquid into a goblet for Margarita.

  ‘Is that vodka?’ Margarita asked weakly.

  The cat jumped up on his chair in resentment.

  ‘Good heavens, Queen,’ he croaked, ‘would I allow myself to pour vodka for a lady? It’s pure alcohol!’

  Margarita smiled and made an attempt to push the glass away.