Mikhail Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita / Мастер и Маргарита. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“Ah, the black magician?” Rimsky responded in the receiver.

“The playbills will be here at any moment.”

“Aha,” said Styopa in a weak voice, “see you, then…”

“Will you be here soon?” asked Rimsky.

“In half an hour,” Styopa replied and, hanging up, squeezed his hot head in his hands. Oh, what a nasty business this was developing into! Whatever was the matter with his memory, Citizens? Eh?

However, it was awkward to linger in the hall any longer, and Styopa drew up a plan on the spot: use all possible means to conceal his unbelievable forgetfulness, and now, first and foremost, slyly enquire of the foreigner what he was actually intending to do in his show at the Variety, the theatre entrusted to Styopa.

At this point Styopa turned away from the telephone, and in the mirror located in the hall, which the lazy Grunya had not wiped for a long time, he distinctly saw a strange sort of character – lanky as a lath and wearing a pincenez (ah, if only Ivan Nikolayevich had been there! He would have recognized this character straight away!) But his reflection was there, and then immediately vanished. In alarm, Styopa looked a little deeper into the hall, and he was rocked for a second time, for there in the mirror the most strapping black cat passed by, then vanished too.

Styopa’s heart missed a beat; he reeled.

“What on earth is going on?” he thought. “I’m not losing my mind, am I? Where are these reflections coming from?” He looked into the hall and cried out in fright:

“Grunya! What’s this cat we’ve got wandering around [209] to wander around – шляться ? Where’s it from? And someone else too?!”

“Don’t worry, Stepan Bogdanovich,” answered a voice, only not Grunya’s, but the guest’s from the bedroom. “The cat is mine. Don’t fret. And Grunya’s not here, I sent her off to Voronezh. She was complaining that you’d not given her any leave for a long time now.”

These words were so unexpected and absurd that Styopa decided he had misheard. In utter confusion he trotted to the bedroom and froze on the threshold. His hair stirred, and on his forehead there appeared a sprinkling of tiny drops of sweat.

The guest was no longer alone in the bedroom, but in company. In the second armchair sat that same fellow who had been seen dimly in the hall. Now he was clearly visible: a feathery moustache, one lens of the pince-nez gleaming and the other lens missing. But there proved to be even worse things in the bedroom: on the jeweller’s wife’s pouffe there lounged in a free-and-easy pose a third figure – namely, a black cat of awesome dimensions with a shot glass of vodka in one paw and a fork, on which he had managed to spear a pickled mushroom, in the other.

The light, weak in the bedroom as it was, began to fade completely in Styopa’s eyes. “So it turns out that this is how you go mad!” he thought, and grabbed hold of the doorpost.

“I see you’re a little surprised, dearest Stepan Bogdanovich?” enquired Woland of Styopa, whose teeth were chattering. “And yet there’s nothing to be surprised about. This is my retinue.”

At this point the cat drank the vodka, and Styopa’s hand slipped down the doorpost.

“And the retinue needs room,” continued Woland, “so there’s one too many of us here in the apartment. And it seems to me that the one too many… is specifically you!”

“Them, them!” the lanky one in checks began bleating like a goat, talking about Styopa in the plural. “Generally they’ve been acting like dreadful pigs of late. Drinking heavily, using their position to form liaisons with women, doing damn all – well, they can’t actually do anything, because they don’t understand a thing about what they’re charged to do. Pulling the wool over their superiors’ eyes [210] to pull the wool over one's eyes – втирать очки !”

“He misuses an official car!” the cat snitched on him, chewing a mushroom.

And at this point there was a fourth and final appearance in the apartment, while Styopa, who had by now slipped down completely onto the floor, was scratching at the doorpost with a weakened hand.

Straight from the mirror of the cheval glass there emerged a small but unusually broad-shouldered man with a bowler hat on his head and, sticking out of his mouth, a fang, which disfigured a physiognomy that was already of unprecedented loathsomeness. And with fiery red hair besides.

“I,” this newcomer entered into the conversation, “don’t understand at all how he came to be a director” – the red-headed man’s voice became more and more nasal – “he’s as much a director as I’m an archbishop!”

“You’re nothing like an archbishop, Azazello,” remarked the cat, putting some sausages on his plate.

“That’s what I’m saying,” said the red-headed man nasally and, turning to Woland, he added deferentially: “Will you allow us, Messire, [211] Messire: “Sir” (French). (Комментарий И. Беспалова) [212] Messire – (фр.) Сэр, мессир to damn well chuck him out of Moscow [213] to damn well chuck somebody out of – выкинуть ко всем чертям ?”

“Shoo!” the cat suddenly roared, with his fur standing on end.

And then the bedroom began spinning around Styopa, and he struck his head on the doorpost, and, as he lost consciousness, he thought: “I’m dying…”

But he did not die. Opening his eyes a little, he saw himself sitting on something made of stone. There was something making a noise all around him. When he opened his eyes up properly, he realized it was the sea making the noise and – even more than that – the waves were rising and falling right at his feet; in short, he was sitting at the very end of a mole; above him was the glittering blue sky and, behind, a white town in the mountains.

Not knowing how people behave in such situations, Styopa rose on shaky legs and set off down the mole towards the shore.

On the mole stood some man or other, smoking and spitting into the sea. He looked at Styopa wild-eyed, and stopped spitting.

Then Styopa came out with the following trick: he knelt down before the unknown smoker and uttered:

“Tell me, I beg you, what town is this?”

“Well, really!” said the heartless smoker.

“I’m not drunk,” replied Styopa hoarsely, “something’s happened to me. I’m ill. Where am I? What town is it?”

“Well, it’s Yalta.”

Styopa sighed quietly, toppled onto his side and struck his head on the warm stone of the mole. Consciousness left him.

Just at the time when consciousness left Styopa in Yalta – that is, at about eleven thirty in the morning – it returned to Ivan Nikolayevich Bezdomny, who woke after a deep and prolonged sleep. It took him some time to grasp how it was he had ended up in an unknown room with white walls, with an astonishing bedside table made of some sort of bright metal and with a white blind, behind which he could sense the sun.

Ivan gave his head a shake, satisfied himself it did not ache, and remembered he was in a clinic. This thought pulled along with it the memory of Berlioz’s death, but today it did not elicit any great shock in Ivan. After a good night’s sleep, Ivan Nikolayevich had become a little calmer and begun thinking more clearly. Having lain motionless for some time in the cleanest of soft and comfortable sprung beds, Ivan saw a call button next to him. Out of a habit of touching objects needlessly, he pressed it. He expected some sort of ringing to follow the pressing of the button, or someone to arrive, but what happened was something else entirely.