The Master and Margarita

Streaming with sweat, waiters carried sweating mugs of beer over their heads, shouting hoarsely and with hatred: ‘Excuse me, citizen!’ Somewhere through a megaphone a voice commanded: ‘One Karsky shashlik! Two Zubrovkas! Home-style tripe!’ The high voice no longer sang, but howled ‘Hallelujah!’ The clashing of golden cymbals in the band sometimes even drowned out the clashing of dishes which the dishwashers sent down a sloping chute to the kitchen. In short - hell.

And at midnight there came an apparition in hell. A handsome dark-eyed man with a dagger-like beard, in a tailcoat, stepped on to the veranda and cast a regal glance over his domain. They used to say, the mystics used to say, that there was a time when the handsome man wore not a tailcoat but a wide leather belt with pistol butts sticking from it, and his raven hair was tied with scarlet silk, and under his command a brig sailed the Caribbean under a black death flag with a skull and crossbones.

But no, no! The seductive mystics are lying, there are no Caribbean Seas in the world, no desperate freebooters sail them, no corvette chases after them, no cannon smoke drifts across the waves. There is nothing, and there was nothing! There is that sickly linden over there, there is the cast-iron fence, and the boulevard beyond it ... And the ice is melting in the bowl, and at the next table you see someone’s bloodshot, bovine eyes, and you’re afraid, afraid ... Oh, gods, my gods, poison, bring me poison! ...

And suddenly a word fluttered up from some table: Berlioz!!‘ The jazz broke up and fell silent, as if someone had hit it with a fist. ’What, what, what, what?!!‘ ’Berlioz!!!‘ And they began jumping up, exclaiming ...

Yes, a wave of grief billowed up at the terrible news about Mikhail Alexandrovich. Someone fussed about, crying that it was necessary at once, straight away, without leaving the spot, to compose some collective telegram and send it off immediately.

But what telegram, may we ask, and where? And why send it? And where, indeed? And what possible need for any telegram does someone have whose flattened pate is now clutched in the dissector’s rubber hands, whose neck the professor is now piercing with curved needles? He’s dead, and has no need of any telegrams. It’s all over, let’s not burden the telegraph wires any more.

Yes, he’s dead, dead ... But, as for us, we’re alive!

Yes, a wave of grief billowed up, held out for a while, but then began to subside, and somebody went back to his table and — sneakily at first, then openly — drank a little vodka and ate a bite. And, really, can one let chicken cutlets de volaille perish? How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich? By going hungry? But, after all, we’re alive!

Naturally, the grand piano was locked, the jazz band dispersed, several journalists left for their offices to write obituaries. It became known that Zheldybin had come from the morgue. He had installed himself in the deceased’s office upstairs, and the rumour spread at once that it was he who would replace Berlioz. Zheldybin summoned from the restaurant all twelve members of the board, and at the urgently convened meeting in Berlioz’s office they started a discussion of the pressing questions of decorating the hall with columns at Griboedov‘s, of transporting the body from the morgue to that hall, of opening it to the public, and all else connected with the sad event.

And the restaurant began to live its usual nocturnal life and would have gone on living it until closing time, that is, until four o‘clock in the morning, had it not been for an occurrence which was completely out of the ordinary and which struck the restaurant’s clientele much more than the news of Berlioz’s death.

The first to take alarm were the coachmen⁵ waiting at the gates of the Griboedov house. One of them, rising on his box, was heard to cry out:

‘Hoo-ee! Just look at that!’

After which, from God knows where, a little light flashed by the cast-iron fence and began to approach the veranda. Those sitting at the tables began to get up and peer at it, and saw that along with the little light a white ghost was marching towards the restaurant. When it came right up to the trellis, everybody sat as if frozen at their tables, chunks of sterlet on their forks, eyes popping. The doorman, who at that moment had stepped out of the restaurant coat room to have a smoke in the yard, stamped out his cigarette and made for the ghost with the obvious intention of barring its way into the restaurant, but for some reason did not do so, and stopped, smiling stupidly.

And the ghost, passing through an opening in the trellis, stepped unhindered on to the veranda. Here everyone saw that it was no ghost at all, but Ivan Nikolaevich Homeless, the much-renowned poet.