The Master and Margarita

by Mikhail Bulgakov

  ‘Understood, Procurator,’ Aphranius replied and began retreating and bowing, while the procurator clapped his hands and shouted:

  ‘To me, here! A lamp to the colonnade!’

  Aphranius was going out to the garden when lights began to flash in the hands of servants behind Pilate’s back. Three lamps appeared on the table before the procurator, and the moonlit night at once retreated to the garden, as if Aphranius had led it away with him. In place of Aphranius, an unknown man, small and skinny, stepped on to the balcony beside the gigantic centurion. The latter, catching the procurator’s eye, withdrew to the garden at once and there disappeared.

  The procurator studied the newcomer with greedy and slightly frightened eyes. So one looks at a man of whom one has heard a great deal, of whom one has been thinking, and who finally appears.

  The newcomer, a man of about forty, was black-haired, ragged, covered with caked mud, and looked wolf-like from under his knitted brows. In short, he was very unsightly, and rather resembled a city beggar, of whom there were many hanging about on the porches of the temple or in the bazaars of the noisy and dirty Lower City.

  The silence continued for a long time, and was broken by the strange behaviour of the man brought to Pilate. His countenance changed, he swayed, and if he had not grasped the edge of the table with his dirty hand, he would have fallen.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Pilate asked him.

  ‘Nothing,’ answered Matthew Levi, and he made a movement as if he were swallowing something. His skinny, bare, grey neck swelled out and then slackened again.

  ‘What’s wrong, answer me,’ Pilate repeated.

  ‘I’m tired,’ Levi answered and looked sullenly at the floor.

  ‘Sit down,’ said Pilate, pointing to the armchair.

  Levi looked at the procurator mistrustfully, moved towards the armchair, gave a timorous sidelong glance at the gilded armrests, and sat down not in the chair but beside it on the floor.

  ‘Explain to me, why did you not sit in the chair?’ asked Pilate.

  ‘I’m dirty, I’d soil it,’ said Levi, looking at the ground.

  ‘You’ll presently be given something to eat.’

  ‘I don’t want to eat,’ answered Levi.

  ‘Why lie?’ Pilate asked quietly. ‘You haven’t eaten for the whole day, and maybe even longer. Very well, don’t eat. I’ve summoned you so that you could show me the knife you had with you.’

  ‘The soldiers took it from me when they brought me here,’ Levi replied and added sullenly: ‘You must give it back to me, I have to return it to its owner, I stole it.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘To cut the ropes,’ answered Levi.

  ‘Mark!’ cried the procurator, and the centurion stepped in under the columns. ‘Give me his knife.’

  The centurion took a dirty bread knife from one of the two cases on his belt, handed it to the procurator, and withdrew.

  ‘Who did you take the knife from?’

  ‘From the bakery by the Hebron gate, just as you enter the city, on the left.’

  Pilate looked at the broad blade, for some reason tried the sharpness of the edge with his finger, and said:

  ‘Concerning the knife you needn’t worry, the knife will be returned to the shop. But now I want a second thing — show me the charta you carry with you, on which Yeshua’s words are written down.’

  Levi looked at Pilate with hatred and smiled such an inimical smile that his face became completely ugly.

  ‘You want to take away the last thing?’ he asked.

  ‘I didn’t say “give me”,’ answered Pilate, ‘I said “show me”.’

  Levi fumbled in his bosom and produced a parchment scroll. Pilate took it, unrolled it, spread it out between the lights, and, squinting, began to study the barely legible ink marks. It was difficult to understand these crabbed lines, and Pilate kept wincing and leaning right to the parchment, running his finger over the lines. He did manage to make out that the writing represented an incoherent chain of certain utterances, certain dates, household records, and poetic fragments. Some of it Pilate could read: ‘... there is no death ... yesterday we ate sweet spring baccuroth ...’[154]

  Grimacing with the effort, Pilate squinted as he read: ‘... we shall see the pure river of the water of life[155] ... mankind shall look at the sun through transparent crystal ...’ Here Pilate gave a start. In the last lines of the parchment he made out the words: ‘... greater vice ... cowardice...’

  Pilate rolled up the parchment and with an abrupt movement handed it to Levi.

  ‘Take it,’ he said and, after a pause, added: ‘You’re a bookish man, I see, and there’s no need for you to go around alone, in beggar’s clothing, without shelter. I have a big library in Caesarea, I am very rich and want to take you to work for me. You will sort out and look after the papyri, you will be fed and clothed.’

  Levi stood up and replied:

  ‘No, I don’t want to.’

  ‘Why?’ the procurator asked, his face darkening. ‘Am I disagreeable to you? ... Are you afraid of me?’

  The same bad smile distorted Levi’s face, and he said:

  ‘No, because you’ll be afraid of me. It won’t be very easy for you to look me in the face now that you’ve killed him.’

  ‘Quiet,’ replied Pilate. ‘Take some money.’

  Levi shook his head negatively, and the procurator went on:

  ‘I know you consider yourself a disciple of Yeshua, but I can tell you that you learned nothing of what he taught you. For if you had, you would certainly take something from me. Bear in mind that before he died he said he did not blame anyone.’ Pilate raised a finger significantly, Pilate’s face was twitching. ‘And he himself would surely have taken something. You are cruel, and he was not cruel. Where will you go?’

  Levi suddenly came up to the table, leaned both hands on it, and, gazing at the procurator with burning eyes, whispered to him:

  ‘Know, Hegemon, that I am going to kill a man in Yershalaim. I wanted to tell you that, so you’d know there will be more blood.’

  ‘I, too, know there will be more of it,’ replied Pilate, ‘you haven’t surprised me with your words. You want, of course, to kill me?’

  ‘You I won’t manage to kill,’ replied Levi, baring his teeth and smiling, ‘I’m not such a foolish man as to count on that. But I’ll kill Judas of Kiriath, I’ll devote the rest of my life to it.’

  Here pleasure showed in the procurator’s eyes, and beckoning Matthew Levi to come closer, he said:

  ‘You won’t manage to do it, don’t trouble yourself. Judas has already been killed this night.’

  Levi sprang away from the table, looking wildly around, and cried out:

  ‘Who did it?’

  ‘Don’t be jealous,’ Pilate answered, his teeth bared, and rubbed his hands, ‘I’m afraid he had other admirers besides you.’

  ‘Who did it?’ Levi repeated in a whisper.

  Pilate answered him:

  ‘I did it.’

  Levi opened his mouth and stared at the procurator, who said quietly:

  ‘It is, of course, not much to have done, but all the same I did it.’ And he added: ‘Well, and now will you take something?’

  Levi considered, relented, and finally said:

  ‘Have them give me a piece of clean parchment.’

  An hour went by. Levi was not in the palace. Now the silence of the dawn was broken only by the quiet noise of the sentries’ footsteps in the garden. The moon was quickly losing its colour, one could see at the other edge of the sky the whitish dot of the morning star. The lamps had gone out long, long ago. The procurator lay on the couch. Putting his hand under his cheek, he slept and breathed soundlessly. Beside him slept Banga.

  Thus was the dawn of the fifteenth day of Nisan met by the fifth procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate.

  CHAPTER 27

  The End of Apartment No. 50

  When Margarita came to the last words of t
he chapter — ‘... Thus was the dawn of the fifteenth day of Nisan met by the fifth procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate’ — it was morning.

  Sparrows could be heard in the branches of the willows and lindens in the little garden, conducting a merry, excited morning conversation.

  Margarita got up from the armchair, stretched, and only then felt how broken her body was and how much she wanted to sleep. It is interesting to note that Margarita’s soul was in perfect order. Her thoughts were not scattered, she was quite unshaken by having spent the night supernaturally. She was not troubled by memories of having been at Satan’s ball, or that by some miracle the master had been returned to her, that the novel had risen from the ashes, that everything was back in place in the basement in the lane, from which the snitcher Aloisy Mogarych had been expelled. In short, acquaintance with Woland had caused her no psychic damage. Everything was as if it ought to have been so.

  She went to the next room, convinced herself that the master was soundly and peacefully asleep, turned off the unnecessary table lamp, and stretched out by the opposite wall on a little couch covered with an old, torn sheet. A minute later she was asleep, and that morning she had no dreams. The basement rooms were silent, the builder’s whole little house was silent, and it was quiet in the solitary lane.

  But just then, that is, at dawn on Saturday, an entire floor of a certain Moscow institution was not asleep, and its windows, looking out on a big asphalt-paved square which special machines, driving around slowly and droning, were cleaning with brushes, shone with their full brightness, cutting through the light of the rising sun.

  The whole floor was occupied with the investigation of the Woland case, and the lights had burned all night in dozens of offices.

  Essentially speaking, the matter had already become clear on the previous day, Friday, when the Variety had had to be closed, owing to the disappearance of its administration and all sorts of outrages which had taken place during the notorious seance of black magic the day before. But the thing was that more and more new material kept arriving all the time and incessantly on the sleepless floor.

  Now the investigators of this strange case, which smacked of obvious devilry, with an admixture of some hypnotic tricks and distinct criminality, had to shape into one lump all the many-sided and tangled events that had taken place in various parts of Moscow.

  The first to visit the sleepless, electrically lit-up floor was Arkady Apollonovich Sempleyarov, chairman of the Acoustics Commission.

  After dinner on Friday, in his apartment located in a house by the Kamenny Bridge, the telephone rang and a male voice asked for Arkady Apollonovich. Arkady Apollonovich’s wife, who picked up the phone, replied sullenly that Arkady Apollonovich was unwell, had retired for the night, and could not come to the phone. However, Arkady Apollonovich came to the phone all the same. To the question of where Arkady Apollonovich was being called from, the voice in the telephone had said very briefly where it was from.

  ‘This second ... at once ... this minute ...’ babbled the ordinarily very haughty wife of the chairman of the Acoustics Commission, and she flew to the bedroom like an arrow to rouse Arkady Apollonovich from his bed, where he lay experiencing the torments of hell at the recollection of yesterday’s seance and the night’s scandal, followed by the expulsion of his Saratov niece from the apartment.

  Not in a second, true, yet not in a minute either, but in a quarter of a minute, Arkady Apollonovich, with one slipper on his left foot, in nothing but his underwear, was already at the phone, babbling into it:

  ‘Yes, it’s me ... I’m listening, I’m listening ...’

  His wife, forgetting for these moments all the loathsome crimes against fidelity in which the unfortunate Arkady Apollonovich had been exposed, kept sticking herself out the door to the corridor with a frightened face, poking a slipper at the air and whispering:

  ‘Put the slipper on, the slipper ... you’ll catch cold ...’ At which Arkady Apollonovich, waving his wife away with his bare foot and making savage eyes at her, muttered into the telephone:

  ‘Yes, yes, yes, surely ... I understand ... I’ll leave at once ...’

  Arkady Apollonovich spent the whole evening on that same floor where the investigation was being conducted.

  It was a difficult conversation, a most unpleasant conversation, for he had to tell with complete sincerity not only about this obnoxious seance and the fight in the box, but along with that — as was indeed necessary - also about Militsa Andreevna Pokobatko from Yelokhovskaya Street, and about the Saratov niece, and about much else, the telling of which caused Arkady Apollonovich inexpressible torments.

  Needless to say, the testimony of Arkady Apollonovich, an intelligent and cultivated man, who had been a witness to the outrageous seance, a sensible and qualified witness, who gave an excellent description of the mysterious masked magician himself and of his two scoundrelly assistants, a witness who remembered perfectly well that the magician’s name was indeed Woland, advanced the investigation considerably. And the juxtaposition of Arkady Apollonovich’s testimony with the testimony of others — among whom were some ladies who had suffered after the seance (the one in violet underwear who had shocked Rimsky and, alas, many others), and the messenger Karpov, who had been sent to apartment no. 50 on Sadovaya Street — at once essentially established the place where the culprit in all these adventures was to be sought.

  Apartment no. 50 was visited, and not just once, and not only was it looked over with extreme thoroughness, but the walls were also tapped and the fireplace flues checked, in search of hiding places. However, none of these measures yielded any results, and no one was discovered in the apartment during any of these visits, though it was perfectly clear that there was someone in the apartment, despite the fact that all persons who in one way or another were supposed to be in charge of foreign artistes coming to Moscow decidedly and categorically insisted that there was not and could not be any black magician Woland in Moscow.

  He had decidedly not registered anywhere on arrival, had not shown anyone his passport or other papers, contracts, or agreements, and no one had heard anything about him! Kitaitsev, head of the programme department of the Spectacles Commission, swore to God that the vanished Styopa Likhodeev had never sent him any performance programme of any Woland for approval and had never telephoned him about the arrival of such a Woland. So that he, Kitaitsev, utterly failed to see and understand how Styopa could have allowed such a seance in the Variety. And when told that Arkady Apollonovich had seen this magician at the seance with his own eyes, Kitaitsev only spread his arms and raised his eyes to heaven. And from Kitaitsev’s eyes alone one could see and say confidently that he was as pure as crystal.

  That same Prokhor Petrovich, chairman of the main Spectacles Commission ...

  Incidentally, he returned to his suit immediately after the police came into his office, to the ecstatic joy of Anna Richardovna and the great perplexity of the needlessly troubled police.

  Also, incidentally, having returned to his place, into his grey striped suit, Prokhor Petrovich fully approved of all the resolutions the suit had written during his short-term absence.

  ... So, then, this same Prokhor Petrovich knew decidedly nothing about any Woland.

  Whether you will or no, something preposterous was coming out: thousands of spectators, the whole staff of the Variety, and finally Sempleyarov, Arkady Apollonovich, a most educated man, had seen this magician, as well as his thrice-cursed assistants, and yet it was absolutely impossible to find him anywhere. What was it, may I ask, had he fallen through the ground right after his disgusting seance, or, as some affirm, had he not come to Moscow at all? But if the first is allowed, then undoubtedly, in falling through, he had taken along the entire top administration of the Variety, and if the second, then would it not mean that the administration of the luckless theatre itself, after first committing some vileness (only recall the broken window in the study and the behaviour of Ace of Diamonds!), had disapp
eared from Moscow without a trace?

  We must do justice to the one who headed the investigation. The vanished Rimsky was found with amazing speed. One had only to put together the behaviour of Ace of Diamonds at the cab stand by the movie theatre with certain given times, such as when the seance ended, and precisely when Rimsky could have disappeared, and then immediately send a telegram to Leningrad. An hour later (towards evening on Friday) came the reply that Rimsky had been discovered in number four-twelve on the fourth floor of the Hotel Astoria, next to the room in which the repertory manager of one of the Moscow theatres, then on tour in Leningrad, was staying — that same room which, as is known, had gilded grey-blue furniture and a wonderful bathroom.[156]

  Discovered hiding in the wardrobe of number four-twelve of the Astoria, Rimsky was questioned right there in Leningrad. After which a telegram came to Moscow reporting that findirector Rimsky was in an unanswerable state, that he could not or did not wish to give sensible replies to questions and begged only to be hidden in a bulletproof room and provided with an armed guard.

  A telegram from Moscow ordered that Rimsky be delivered to Moscow under guard, as a result of which Rimsky departed Friday evening, under said guard, on the evening train.

  Towards evening on that same Friday, Likhodeev’s trail was also found. Telegrams of inquiry about Likhodeev were sent to all cities, and from Yalta came the reply that Likhodeev had been in Yalta but had left on a plane for Moscow.

  The only one whose trail they failed to pick up was Varenukha. The famous theatre administrator known to decidedly all of Moscow had vanished into thin air.

  In the meantime, there was some bother with things happening in other parts of Moscow, outside the Variety Theatre. It was necessary to explain the extraordinary case of the staff all singing ‘Glorious Sea’ (incidentally, Professor Stravinsky managed to put them right within two hours, by means of some subcutaneous injections), of persons presenting other persons or institutions with devil knows what in the guise of money, and also of persons who had suffered from such presentations.