The professor read none of this; he stared ahead, glassy-eyed, and smoked. Besides him, there were only two other people at the institute—Pankrat and the housekeeper, Maria Stepanovna, who every now and then would break into tears. The old woman had not slept for three nights, spending them in the professor’s office, where he adamantly refused to leave his only remaining, now extinguished chamber. Now Maria Stepanovna was huddled on the oilcloth couch in a shadow in the corner, and she was keeping silent in sorrowful meditation, watching the kettle with some tea for the professor coming to a boil on the tripod over the gas burner. The institute was silent, and everything happened abruptly.
From the sidewalk there was suddenly such an outburst of rancorous shouts that Maria Stepanovna started and cried out. Flashlights flickered in the street, and Pankrat’s voice was heard in the vestibule. The professor was hardly aware of this noise. He raised his head for a second and muttered “Ooh … they’re going crazy … What can I do now’?” And he again fell into his stupor. But it was rudely broken. The iron doors of the institute on Herzen Street began a terrible clangor, and all of the walls began to shake. Then the solid mirrored wall in the adjoining office crashed. The glass in the professor’s office began to tinkle and fly to pieces, and a gray brick bounced through the window smashing the glass table. The frogs scuttled around in their terraria and set up a cry. Maria Stepanovna ran around shrieking, rushed to the professor, seized him by the hands, and shouted, “Run, Vladimir Ipatich, run!”
The professor rose from his revolving stool, straightened himself up, and curled his index finger into a little hook, his eyes recovering for an instant the old sharp glitter reminiscent of the old, inspired Persikov. “I’m not going anywhere,” he pronounced. “This is simply stupidity. They are rushing around like lunatics … And if all Moscow has gone insane, then where can l go? And please stop screaming. What do I have to do with this. Pankrat!” he called, pressing a button.
He probably wanted Pankrat to stop all the commotion, something which generally he had never liked. But Pankrat could no longer do anything. The banging had ended with the institute doors flying open and a distant popping of shots; and then the whole stone institute shook with the thunder of running feet, shouts, and crashing windows. Maria Stepanovna clutched at Persikov’s sleeve and began to drag him back; but he pushed her away, drew himself up to his full height, and just as he was, in his white lab coat, he walked out into the corridor. “Well?” he asked. The doors swung open, and the first thing to appear in them was the back of a military uniform with a red chevron and a star on the left sleeve. He was retreating from the door, through which a furious mob was surging forward, and he was firing his revolver. Then he started to run past Persikov, shouting to him, “Save yourself, professor! I can’t do anything else!”
His words were answered by a shriek from Maria Stepanovna. The officer shot past Persikov, who was standing there like a white statue, and vanished in the darkness of the winding corridors at the opposite end.
People flew through the door, howling.
“Beat him! kill him!”
“Public enemy!”
“You let the snakes loose!”
Distorted faces and ripped clothing jumped through the corridors, and someone fired a shot. Sticks flashed. Persikov stepped back a little, barring the door to his office, where Maria Stepanovna was kneeling on the floor in terror; and he spread out his arms, as one crucified … he did not want to let the mob in, and he yelled irascibly, “This is utter lunacy … You are absolute wild animals. What do you want?” And he bellowed, “Get out of here!” and completed his speech with a shrill, familiar cry, “Pankrat, throw them out!”
But Pankrat could no longer throw anyone out. Pankrat, trampled and torn, his skull crushed, lay motionless in the vestibule, while more and more crowds tore past him, paying no attention to the fire of the police in the street.
A short man with crooked, apelike legs, wearing a torn jacket and a torn shirt twisted to one side, dashed out ahead of the others, leaped toward Persikov, and with a terrible blow from his stick he split open Persikov’s skull. Persikov tottered and began to collapse sideways. His last words were, “Pankrat … Pankrat …”
Maria Stepanovna, who was guilty of nothing, was killed and torn to pieces in the office; the chamber in which the ray had gone out was smashed to bits, the terraria were smashed to bits, and the crazed frogs were flailed with sticks and trampled underfoot. The glass tables were dashed to pieces, the reflectors were dashed to pieces, and an hour later the institute was a mass of flames. Corpses were strewn around, cordoned off by a line of troops armed with electric pistols; and fire engines, pumping water from the hydrants, were pouring streams through all the windows, from which long, roaring tongues of flame were bursting.
XII. A FROSTY Deus ex Machina
On the night of August 19 to 20 an unprecedented frost fell on the country, unlike anything any of its oldest inhabitants had ever seen. It came and lasted two days and two nights, bringing the thermometer down to eleven degrees below zero. Frenzied Moscow locked all doors, all windows. Only toward the end of the third day did the populace realize that the frost had saved the capital, and the boundless expanses which it governed, and on which the terrible catastrophe of 1928 had fallen. The cavalry at Mozhaisk had lost three-quarters of its complement and was near prostration, and the gas squadrons had not been able to stop the onslaught of the vile reptiles, which were moving toward Moscow in a semicircle from the West, Southwest, and South.
The frost killed them. Two days and two nights at eleven below zero had proved too much for the abominable herds, and when the frost lifted after the 20th of August, leaving nothing but dampness and wetness, leaving the air dank, leaving all the greenery blasted by the unexpected cold, there was no longer anything left to fight. The calamity was over. Woods, fields, and infinite bogs were still piled high with multicolored eggs, often covered with the strange, unearthly, unique pattern that Feit—who had vanished without a trace—had once mistaken for mud, but now these eggs were quite harmless. They were dead, the embryos within lifeless.
For a long time the infinite expanses of land were still putrescent with numberless corpses of crocodiles and snakes which had been called to life by the mysterious ray born under the eyes of genius on Herzen Street—but they were no longer dangerous; the fragile creatures of the putrescent, hot, tropical bogs had perished in two days, leaving a terrible stench, disintegration, and decay throughout the territory of three provinces.
There were long epidemics; there were widespread diseases for a long time, caused by the corpses of snakes and men; and for a long time the army combed the land, no longer equipped with gases, but with sapper gear, kerosene tanks and hoses, clearing the earth. It cleared the earth, and everything was over toward the spring of 1929.
And in the spring of 1929 Moscow again began to dance, glitter, and flash lights; and again, as before, the mechanical carriages rolled through the traffic, and the lunar sickle hung as if on a fine thread over the helmet of the Cathedral of Christ; and on the site of the two-storey institute that had burned down in August 1928, a new zoological palace rose, and Assistant Professor Ivanov directed it, but Persikov was no longer there. Never again did the persuasively hooked index finger rise before anyone’s eyes, and never again was the squeaking, croaking voice heard by anyone. The ray and the catastrophe of 1928 were long talked and written about by the whole world, but then the name of Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov was shrouded in mist and sank into darkness, as did the red ray he had discovered on that April night. The ray itself was never again captured, although the elegant gentleman and now full professor, Peter Stepanovich Ivanov, had occasionally made attempts. The raging mob had smashed the first chamber on the night of Persikov’s murder. Three chambers were burned up in the Nikolsky sovkhoz, the “Red Ray,” during the first battle of an air squadron with the reptiles, and no one succeeded in reconstructing them. No matter how simple the combin
ation of lenses and mirrored clusters of light had been, the combination was never achieved again, in spite of Ivanov’s efforts. Evidently this required something special, besides knowledge, something which was possessed by only one man in the world—the late Professor Vladimir Ipatievich Persikov.
(Moscow, October 1924)
Translated by Carl R. Proffer; ed. by A.L. and M.K.
From The Master and Margarita
AZAZELLO’S CRÈME (From Chapter 20)
The moon hung, full, in the clear evening sky, visible through the branches of a maple. Lime-trees and acacias patterned the ground in the garden with intricate blotches. The streetlamp’s three-sided aperture, open but masked by a blind, gave off a maniacal electric glow. In Margarita Nikolaevna’s boudoir all the lights were on and they illuminated the complete disorder of the room. <… >
Margarita Nikolaevna sat before her vanity with nothing more than a bathrobe thrown over her naked body, wearing black suede slippers. The gold bracelet-watch lay before her, together with the little box she had received from Azazello, and Margarita did not shift her gaze from the face.
At times it seemed to her that the watch must be broken and the hands not in motion. But they were moving, if very slowly, as if they were sticking, and at long last the big hand reached twenty-nine minutes into the tenth hour. Margarita’s heart was pounding terribly, so that she wasn’t even able to reach for the box. Getting hold of herself, Margarita opened it and saw inside a greasy yellowish cream. It seemed to smell of swamp mud. With the tip of her finger Margarita smeared a small dollop of the cream on her palm, whereupon the smell of the swamp and the forest grew stronger, and then with her palm began to massage the cream into her forehead and cheeks.
The cream was easy to work in, and, it seemed to Margarita was already evaporating. After several applications Margarita glanced in the mirror and dropped the box straight onto the watch crystal, so it was instantly covered with cracks. Margarita closed her eyes, glanced into the mirror a second time, and burst into wild laughter.
Her brows, which had been tweezed to a thread, had thickened and stretched in even black arches over eyes that had suddenly turned green. The delicate vertical wrinkle across the bridge of her nose, which had appeared in October when the Master disappeared, had faded without a trace. Gone as well were the yellowish shadows at the her temples and the two barely perceptible webs at the outer corners of her eyes. The skin on her cheeks was infused with an even rosy tint, her brow had become white and smooth, and her salon coiffure had come undone.
From the mirror the thirty-year-old Margarita was regarded by a woman of twenty, with dark naturally curly hair, who was shaking with laughter.
When she had her laugh Margarita took one bound that left the robe behind, dipped deep into light greasy cream and with strong strokes began to rub it over her body. Her body immediately became rose pink and warm. Then in an instant, as if someone had withdrawn a needle from her brain, the pain in her temple, which had ached all evening after her encounter in the Alexander Gardens, went away. The muscles in her arms and legs grew stronger, and then Margarita’s body lost all its weight.
She leapt upwards and hovered in the air over the carpet, then she was slowly pulled downwards and alit.
“Hurrah for the crème, the crème!”—Margarita cried, flinging herself into an armchair.
The anointing had changed not only her external appearance. Within her now everywhere, in each tiny part, joy was seething, joy which she perceived as tiny bubbles prickling over her entire body. Margarita felt herself to be free, free of everything. Moreover she understood with all possible clarity that precisely what her morning presentiment had spoken of had happened, and that she was leaving the apartment and her past life forever. < … >
Her mind completely relieved, Margarita flew back to the bedroom and on her heels came Natasha with her arms full of things. And at once all these things, the wooden hangers with their dresses, the lace scarves, the dark-blue silk sandals with their straps and laces—all this fell to the floor, and Natasha threw up her freed hands.
“Well? How do I look?” Margarita Nikolaevna shrilled loudly.
“How can it be?” whispered Natasha, stumbling back. “How are you doing that, Margarita Nikolaevna?”
“It’s the crème! Yes, the crème, the crème!” Margarita replied, pointing to the shiny gold box and twirling before the mirror.
Natasha, forgetting the crumpled dress on the floor, ran to the vanity and with greedy sparkling eyes stared at the remains of the ointment. Her lips whispered something. She turned back to Margarita and murmured, with a sort of reverence:
“And your skin? Your skin! Margarita Nikolaevna, your skin is glowing!” But then she remembered herself, ran to the dress, picked it up and began to shake it out.
“Let it be! Stop it!”—Margarita cried—“The hell with it. Throw it all out. Better yet, keep it to remember me by. I’m telling you, to remember me by. Take everything in the room!”
As if dazed, a motionless Natasha gazed at Margarita, then threw her arms around her, kissing her and crying:
“Like satin! It glows! Satin! And your eyebrows!”
Take all these rags, take the perfume, and haul it off to your trunk, hide it,” cried Margarita, “but don’t take the jewelry or they’ll say you stole it!”
Whatever came to hand Natasha gathered up into a bundle, dresses, shoes, stockings and lingerie, and ran out of the bedroom.
Through the open window at that moment, from somewhere across the way a thunderous virtuoso waltz rang out, and one could hear the puffing of a car approaching the gates. < … > The car roared past. The gate banged open and footsteps were heard on the stones of the walkway.
“That’s Nikolai Ivanovich, I know his walk,” thought Margarita. “I must do something amusing and interesting as a farewell.” < … >
Just then behind Margarita in the bedroom the phone rang. Margarita tore herself away from the windowsill and, forgetting Nikolai Ivanovich, seized the receiver.
“Azazello here,” came through the receiver.
“Dear, dear Azazello!” cried Margarita.
“It’s time. Fly away,” said Azazello, and by his tone it was clear that he was pleased by Margarita’s sincere, joyful outburst. “When you fly over the gates shout out—‘Invisible.’ First fly around a little above the city, to get used to it, then go south, away from town, and head straight for the river. They’re waiting for you!”
Margarita hung up and just then, in the next room something began to thump woodenly and beat against the door. Margarita threw it open and a broom, bristles up, dancing, flew into the room. Its handle kept up a tattoo on the floorboards, it kicked and strained towards the window. Margarita shrieked in ecstasy and leapt astride it. Only then did the rider consider that in all the tumult she had forgotten to get dressed. She galloped over to the bed and seized the first thing that came to hand, some sort of light blue chemise. Waving it like a battle-flag she flew through the window. And above the garden the waltz rang out more strongly.
Margarita slid down from the windowsill and saw Nikolai Ivanovich sitting on the garden bench. He gaze was fixed on her as he listened in complete stupefaction to the cries and the din coming from the bedroom of the upstairs tenants.
“Farewell, Nikolai Ivanovich!” shouted Margarita, doing a little dance in front of him.
He moaned and moved closer, groping his way down the bench and letting his briefcase fall to the ground.
“Farewell forever! I’m flying away!” cried Margarita, drowning out the waltz. Whereupon she understood that the blouse she was holding was completely useless to her, and, laughing maliciously, she dropped it over Nikolai Ivanovich’s head. Blinded, Nikolai Ivanovich tumbled from the bench onto the brick walkway.
Margarita turned to look once more at the apartment where she had been unhappy for so long, and in the glowing window she saw the face of Natasha, distorted by amazement.
“Good-bye, Nat
asha!” cried Margarita and shook the broom. “Invisible, Invisible!” still louder she shouted and through the branches of the maple that lashed at her face, over the gates, she flew out above the street. And in her wake flew a waltz gone mad.
THE FLIGHT (From Chapter 21)
Invisible and free! Invisible and free!—Flying the length of her own street brought Margarita to a second street, which intersected the first at a right angle. This patched, darned, crooked and long street with its fuel shop with the crooked door, where they sold kerosene by the pitcher and insecticide by the bottle, she flew over in an instant and immediately grasped that, completely free and invisible as she was, all the same she must be a bit more circumspect in her delight. It was only by some sort of miracle that she was able to brake and did not dash herself to pieces on the old crooked lamp post at the corner. Swerving away from it, Margarita grasped the broom more firmly and flew on at a slower speed, watching out for electrical wires and for signs hung out over the sidewalk. < … >
The street beneath her rolled and fell away. In its place beneath Margarita’s feet was only an assemblage of roofs, dissected at the corners by glowing pathways. All of this unexpectedly veered to one side, and the chain of lights blurred and brightened.
Margarita made another bound, and then the whole roof assemblage fell through the earth and in its place there appeared below her a lake of trembling electric lights, and that lake made an abrupt vertical ascent and reappeared above her head, while the moon shone below her feet. Understanding that she had turned upside down, Margarita righted herself and glancing back, saw that there was no more lake, just a rosy glow on the horizon. That too disappeared in a second and Margarita saw she was alone with the moon sailing above her and to her left. Her hair had long since arranged itself in a shock, and the moonlight, whistling by, bathed her body. Judging by the fact that beneath her the two rows of scattered lights had merged into two uninterrupted lines, and by the speed of their retreat, Margarita guessed that she was flying at a monstrous speed, and was surprised she wasn’t out of breath.
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