The Master and Margarita

The Master and Margarita '... who are you, then?' 'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.'

Goethe, Faust

Never Talk with Strangers

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds.

One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plump, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size.

The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.

The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, [2] editor of a fat literary journal and chairman of the board of one of the major Moscow literary associations, called Massolit [3] for short, and his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the pseudonym of Homeless. [4]

Once in the shade of the barely greening lindens, the writers dashed first thing to a brightly painted stand with the sign: `Beer and Soft Drinks.'

Ah, yes, note must be made of the first oddity of this dreadful May evening.

There was not a single person to be seen, not only by the stand, but also along the whole walk parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street.

At that hour when it seemed no longer possible to breathe, when the sun, having scorched Moscow, was collapsing in a dry haze somewhere beyond Sadovoye Ring, no one came under the lindens, no one sat on a bench, the walk was empty.

'Give us seltzer,' Berlioz asked.

'There is no seltzer,' the woman in the stand said, and for some reason became offended.

'Is there beer?' Homeless inquired in a rasping voice.

`Beer'll be delivered towards evening,' the woman replied.

'Then what is there?' asked Berlioz.

'Apricot soda, only warm,' said the woman.

'Well, let's have it, let's have it! ...'

The soda produced an abundance of yellow foam, and the air began to smell of a barber-shop.

Having finished drinking, the writers immediately started to hiccup, paid, and sat down on a bench face to the pond and back to Bronnaya.

Here the second oddity occurred, touching Berlioz alone.

He suddenly stopped hiccupping, his heart gave a thump and dropped away somewhere for an instant, then came back, but with a blunt needle lodged in it.

Besides that, Berlioz was gripped by fear, groundless, yet so strong that he wanted to flee the Ponds at once without looking back.

Berlioz looked around in anguish, not understanding what had frightened him.

He paled, wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, thought:

"What's the matter with me?

This has never happened before. My heart's acting up... I'm overworked...

Maybe it's time to send it all to the devil and go to Kislovodsk...'[5]