Mikhail and Margarita

by Julie Lekstrom Himes

Pyotr had risen through the hierarchy, past other capable men for a reason. His methods had been gathered into textbooks. The remembered cadence of his voice could rob sleep from both guard and victim years later. “My friend”—the words seemed to tag one; the victim upon hearing them felt their menace as a spotlight. “My friend” who was not. “My friend” who would come to learn the meaning of atrocity. Words that were a preamble to indecencies that would be enacted.

  “Have you a wife? A girlfriend.” Pyotr said it as if he’d answered his own question.

  Ilya had read these textbooks; Pyotr looked not for the truth but the reaction to the falsehood.

  “I am committed to my work,” said Ilya.

  “Family? A sister.”

  Ilya’s lips felt dry.

  “A brother,” he answered.

  “You are close?”

  Ilya chose a random word.

  “Very.”

  Pyotr smiled as though the prisoner had capitulated. “Family is so important to keeping one grounded.”

  Ilya stood. Pyotr’s gaze followed him. A disinterested Stalin looked away. Ilya touched the door.

  “You may go,” said Pyotr, a pointed command. Its belatedness mattered not at all.

  “I’m glad I was able to play some small role in this evening’s success,” said Ilya with a bow.

  “Of course you are,” said Pyotr.

  She was somewhere in that complex. Somewhere beyond his reach.

  Ilya wouldn’t recall leaving Pyotr’s office. He wouldn’t remember the maze of passages he took as he fled. Or if he’d closed Pyotr’s door behind him. But if he hadn’t, if the interrogator-turned-Director had listened to the anxious cascade of footsteps in his retreat, he’d have understood as well as if Ilya had barked forth his confession.

  He loved her. Dear God—he loved her.

  CHAPTER 22

  Margarita was processed then taken to a large room of grey painted cinderblock, occupied by a dozen or so women. It was early morning. Those who were awake looked at her, pale ovals turning toward the light from the hallway. They looked away again as though what they saw was simply a reflection of themselves. She brought no answers to their particular concerns. The door shut loudly behind her. The sound of its locking mechanism lingered. One of the guards who had escorted her laughed in response to something another guard had said.

  She sat down on a bunk board. There was a woman on the other end.

  “You’re bleeding,” said the woman.

  Margarita touched her ear. It was sticky. “It’s stopped,” she said.

  “You were beaten,” said the woman. She sounded alarmed. Margarita sensed others around them turn with curiosity. She felt them withdraw as if she among them was the true criminal, the one they should fear.

  Margarita lay down, first toward the wall; however, this pressed the injured ear against the wood, so she rolled over and faced outward. She heard snoring; and perhaps also weeping, though it was faint and could have been the breathiness of dreaming. Strangely, the grey, boxlike room seemed more real to her than the other world. As if the former could be easily dismissed, and in her dreamlike meditations she thought that the world had been turned inside out: all that had been external: the buildings, streets, landscape, sky, was now squeezed down inside her, perhaps as a memory or as a miniaturized version of creation for her to keep as a souvenir. And those things internal, her secrets and fears, were real and manifest in the shadowy space, available for all to touch and comment upon.

  When she opened her eyes the lights had been turned on. The clock on the wall indicated it was close to eight. It was covered by a metal cage.

  She sat up. The room tipped for a moment.

  On the edge of her sleeve was something—a piece of goose down from one of their pillows. She touched it, then held it between her fingers; it was so light she couldn’t feel it. She remembered the snow of it falling in the dim room—she needed to keep it—she hadn’t a pocket—where? She closed her hand around it. She opened it to ensure it was there, then closed it again.

  A woman sat down beside her. Different from the woman earlier. Margarita guessed they were of similar age. She seemed of lesser means with a roughness that came of less education. Margarita had the sense she’d been waiting for her to awaken. She touched Margarita’s hair where it was matted to the blood by her ear.

  “Does it hurt?” she asked. She didn’t ask who’d done this to her.

  Margarita lied and said no.

  “Look at them,” said the woman, indicating the others who sat in groups of twos and threes. “You’d think they were at some kind of newcomers’ tea party.”

  Others were chatting in lowered tones. Exchanging information about their families and children, their jobs and their circumstances. Two had just discovered they had been neighbors as children; they spoke warmly of the grocer that had once lived on their block. Their voices rose for a moment over the memory of the man’s son who’d been a few years older than them; a memory once dull that was now precious in their current situation. They clasped hands briefly in what they shared.

  “They act like bosom friends,” said the woman with scorn.

  “You’ve been here before?” said Margarita.

  The woman seemed not to hear. “Like this is all some silly mistake,” she said. “Like they’ll get to go home.”

  Some of the others stared at them. Margarita felt their fear, and, more particularly, their dread of her. She touched her ear. She was what they feared they might be.

  There were footsteps. All faces turned to the door. It opened but no one entered. A man’s voice rang through the cell.

  “Margarita Nikoveyena Sergeyev.”

  Margarita stood and felt at once dizzy and slightly nauseous. She didn’t want to leave; who could say where they might take her. Hands from behind shoved her forward.

  The woman who’d engaged her in conversation now pushed her. She hissed. “Go!”

  Margarita started toward the door. Its opening seemed to dip. She grabbed at its frame to steady herself. The other woman rose and spoke out.

  “I’m not supposed to be here,” she said. “There’s been a mistake. Check your records. I’m not supposed to be here.”

  Margarita passed through and fell against the chest of the guard. He grabbed her arm to right her. No response had been given to the other woman. Her voice was lost in the shutting of the door.

  They descended stairs then sloping passages. Walls were in places rough-hewn as though of a medieval dungeon. Her questions wrapped themselves in the pounding of her head and her growing nausea. Lights came and went overhead. She stumbled again and they hauled her upright. She wanted to tell them to take her back. She’d feel better tomorrow if they gave her more time. She’d speak nicely with the other women, share stories, express sympathy. She thought she had said that, but she heard her own voice, ragged and begging, utter different thoughts.

  “Just tell me,” she said. Just say what was coming; tell her what she needed to fear.

  They didn’t answer.

  CHAPTER 23

  Molière opened despite Margarita not being there to see it. This was the case with many things in those first weeks. Streetcars kept to their schedules. Newspapers continued to print. The world had changed—yet passersby appeared to give no notice to it. They bent their hats against the weather, they walked back and forth from work as before. The world had changed—yet it seemed to maintain some stubborn indifference to this, and if Bulgakov mistrusted it; if he resented it in fact, it was for this disregard.

  The play’s reviews were generally positive. Stanislawski was pleased, and, perhaps more so, he was relieved. He arranged interviews for Bulgakov with major literary magazines and with Pravda. When Bulgakov missed his appointment for this, not once, but twice, Stanislawski first called, then came to his apartment to harangue him
in person. This was important, the director told him. Actually, it was more than important—Bulgakov needed to earn the privilege of keeping Molière on the stage. He told him he would reschedule the interview once more—and that there would be others to follow. Now was the time to become a true literary figure. After everything he’d invested, that they both had invested. Bulgakov said he’d do better in order to get him to leave and Stanislawski slammed the door behind him.

  Bulgakov cleaned up the mess from the night she was taken. He’d acquired a new kind of pragmatism with this. Rather than repair a tear, he turned the cushion over. Shattered picture glass was swept and prints were rehung on the wall without its protection. As if his anticipation of the agents’ return and further mischief was protection against it. Her blouses and skirts he hung in the wardrobe. Sweaters and slacks he returned to their drawers. Her boots near the door where they waited for her. Their belief in her release seemed alternately reassuring and absurdly naïve.

  The novel itself remained on the table where they’d left it. One early morning when sleep gave no reprieve, he returned to his chair and laid his hand on the first page. It was as impenetrable as a grave. He put it back in the drawer of the wardrobe then lay down again. Still he sensed it as though that part of the room had settled under its weight.

  He debated what to do about the curtains and one night he rehung them. They were rumpled from having sat in piles for too long. Most of the pins she’d used still lay on the sills; some had been scattered and, with the hanging of the final panel, he found himself on the floor, on his knees searching the seams between the floor’s planks for the last remaining ones. What looked like a pin was a grain in the wood, a stray thread, a strand of hair. He would go to pick it up and his fingers grasped air. The world had done this to him. Ilya had done it. Then one small part of his brain went past this to think absurdly, selfishly, childishly, perhaps she’d had some hand in it. How could he blame himself and go on? Did he know how hard it was to lay one’s hands on pins? He pressed his forehead against the wood. How could he have known?

  Bulgakov posted letters to Stalin nearly every day. There was never any indication that they were read. He went to Lubyanka looking for Ilya but was turned away. He stood in long queues with the families of other prisoners. He thought they all looked the same—pale, shell-shocked. They spoke not at all to each other, as though this would acknowledge some terrible commonality. As though it would unduly test their faith that their particular case—their husband, their wife, their child—was different from the rest. They waited for the opportunity to plead with a guard whose lips were hidden behind a small metal slit in a wall. Ten-second conversations that were unvaried. The guard would review several lists for the given name. A rattle of paper might be heard but not always. Sometimes there was the odor of onions and animal fat.

  Bulgakov wished he could talk to Nadya. He wondered how she had managed those weeks waiting for some bit of information, yet dreading it too. What would she have thought of this turn of events? Once again, her husband and his lover were aligned in ways that excluded her. Would she feel vindicated or would this be a different kind of loss? Or had all feelings been wrung dry?

  “Margarita Nikoveyena Sergeyev.” The sound of it fled quickly and made for Bulgakov a renewed loneliness.

  The voice paused. “I have no information available.”

  How was that possible? “Every week I hear the same thing—do you know if she is even in there?” said Bulgakov.

  There was another pause, and for a moment Bulgakov wondered whether if by deviating from the typical dialogue, he’d actually broken some internal mechanism. The voice returned.

  “Is she out there with you?” it said.

  “Of course not.”

  “Then she is here.”

  A woman behind him pressed against his coat. “You’ve had your turn,” she said. “Give it to another.” Bulgakov didn’t move.

  “And if you were to have new information, what might that be?” said Bulgakov.

  Another pause, then Bulgakov sensed a kind of sympathy to the words. “That she is no longer here, either.”

  Bulgakov stood at the tram stop outside of Lubyanka, watching those who converged upon that spot waiting for their own particular route. He wasn’t certain whom he was looking for. There were office workers—men and women, older women, perhaps mothers in their own right, and younger, attractive ones. There were guards in uniform. Many read newspapers. Some smoked and kept watch down the avenue. Some stared into space. Several trams stopped and filled with passengers. Bulgakov continued to wait. The afternoon shadows began to lengthen. A women with a perambulator appeared. The baby was crying and the woman bobbed the handles, cooing into its cover, trying to soothe it. A youngish guard standing nearby glanced toward the child. Bulgakov could guess that from his angle he had some view of the carriage’s interior. Bulgakov surmised he was of lower rank given the few stripes across his sleeve. Perhaps the guard was only bored. Perhaps he was reminded of some younger brother or sister, some past time. He smiled slightly, and then, and Bulgakov’s heart rose with this, the guard’s expression shifted. There was a moment of understanding—the day was chilled, the wind stung, the afternoon had been long already and one could simply be hungry. Or bored and with only a child’s sensibility there would be no anticipation of what would certainly be relief once Mother could get it home. Yet unlike others nearby who either ignored or were irritated by the noise, unlike even the Mother who seemed to think jostling the buggy might provide some comfort, the guard seemed to understand the world of these things; he seemed to feel them all at once. It was there—one instant that said, Yes. I can imagine what you are feeling right now.

  The tram arrived and the guard climbed in. Bulgakov followed.

  His interview with Pravda, rescheduled now for the third time, was that evening. The tram was headed in a different direction.

  CHAPTER 24

  A clock hung on the wall inside her cell. For sixteen minutes each day, sunlight passed through a single, high window and painted a rhombus of light on the cement floor. For those sixteen minutes, she sat in the light, feeling the coolness seep through the fabric of her skirt. For those minutes the rest of the cell seemed darker.

  Each day she followed the guards down two flights of stairs to a room that was painted white on the top and blue-grey on the bottom. Here her interrogators waited. There were three of them. She did not know their names. She called them Matthew, Mark and John. Matthew was handsome and in some ways her favorite. He wasn’t interested in learning of her anti-Bolshevik sentiments, if indeed she had any. He had imagination.

  Their first session, he held her hand at the beginning as if they’d been formally introduced. He seemed to linger over it, admiring its structure, and for a moment she was self-conscious of his attention. He then let go.

  “Take off your underwear,” he told her.

  “What? No!”

  There was an explosion of light, then pain. She fell to her hands and knees. No one in the room said anything or moved to help her. She touched the inside of her cheek with her tongue where it’d been torn by her own teeth. She got up, for a moment unsteady, then lifted her skirt, slid her underwear down to her ankles, and stepped out of them. She held them in her hands, her arms crossed over her torso. Tears came and rolled down her cheeks. Matthew nodded to one of the men behind her and her arms were lifted and extended over her head. Loops of rope were tied around her wrists and then to a hook that hung from the ceiling. The hook was raised until she was standing on her toes.

  “Oh! Oh! Please! I can’t—please!” Her voice sounded muffled, her arms pressed against her ears. She wanted to cross her legs but couldn’t maintain her footing. Matthew didn’t respond. He walked around her slowly, slipping from her sight. She quieted, listening, breathing in short airy gasps. After a few moments he reappeared. He sat on a stool in front of her. He now car
ried a policeman’s baton. He stroked the hem of her skirt with it.

  “I’ll bet you can do lots of things,” he said. “I thought we’d start slowly, being your first time.” He pushed the tip of the baton between her knees. “You were Mandelstam’s whore. Tell me about him.”

  She couldn’t speak or think, only wisps of air came from her. He pushed the baton upward a little.

  “We don’t have to start slowly, whore.”

  “I—I don’t know—I mean, what do you want to know?”

  He removed the baton and sat back.

  “What was it like—your first time with him?”

  She struggled to find words. He looked bored, then he wagged the baton in her face.

  “I think you can do better.”

  She started again; her vocabulary became more eloquent as she went on. He brightened at first, then seemed to grow agitated as he listened. She stopped, uncertain that she might be upsetting him. He growled at her to go on.

  “Tell me what it felt like the first time you put that bastard’s cock in your mouth.”

  Her voice seemed to come from a hole behind her head. She went on, feeding him words, words she never used, and his breathing deepened and he started to grimace. He stopped her again and had her repeat herself. Finally, he sprung from the stool and struck her with the bat across her cheek. The walls flickered with pinpoints of light. She had satisfied him.

  Each day he questioned her then beat her; afterwards he’d sit awhile until the red of his cheeks faded, until his breathing steadied, until the trembling of his hands subsided. Then Mark would have his turn. Mark was interested in other things.

  It was Mark she could imagine as her lover. Shorter and more compact than the sprawling and emotional Matthew, he maintained a stillness in his features during their exchanges. It was only when he would step away, remove his wire-framed glasses, and wipe them carefully with his handkerchief that the silent and muscular John would step forward with a short leather-sheathed bat. Then she knew she’d touched him in some way. She heard her voice exclaim in short beats as John laid into her; each slap against her thighs and buttocks followed by a bright burst in her brain. Eventually he would tire and the cadence would slow and her exclamations would crescendo into round moans. When the beating was finished Mark would fold and return the white cloth to his pocket, slip the glasses back behind his ears, and raise his eyes to her again. He was patient with her; he forgave her these interruptions. She imagined him dressing in the morning, thinking of her as he took each button through its hole, as he looked in his mirror.