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