21. The Flight

Invisible and free! Invisible and free! After flying down her own lane, Margarita found herself in another one that sliced across the first at a right angle. In one moment she had cut across this patched, darned, long and crooked lane, with the rickety door of the oil shop where they sell paraffin by the mug and a liquid to combat parasites in flasks, and at that point she recognized that, even being completely free and invisible, she must all the same be just a little prudent in her enjoyment too. Only because by some miracle she braked did she not crash to her death into the old leaning lamp-post on the corner. Turning away from it, Margarita squeezed the broom a little tighter and began to fly more slowly, peering at the electric wires and the signs hanging out across the pavement.

A third lane led straight to the Arbat. Here Margarita began to feel perfectly comfortable with controlling the broom, realized that it obeyed the slightest touch of the hands or legs, and that, while flying over the city, it was necessary to be very attentive and not too boisterous. Apart from that, it had become quite obvious even in the lane that passers-by could not see the flying woman. Nobody craned their necks, nobody cried, “Look, look!”, nobody shied away, screamed or fainted, or roared with wild laughter.

Margarita flew soundlessly, very slowly and low, at about the level of the first floor. But even flying slowly, by the very exit onto the blindingly illuminated Arbat she made a slight misjudgement and struck her shoulder against some illuminated disk on which an arrow was drawn. This angered Margarita. She checked the obedient broom, flew off to one side, and then, suddenly hurling herself at the disk, she smashed it to smithereens with the tip of the broom. Splinters fell with a crash, passers-by shied away, someone somewhere began whistling, while Margarita, having done this unnecessary thing, burst out laughing. “I have to be even more careful on the Arbat,” thought Margarita, “there’s so much stuff entangled here, you can’t make anything of it.” She set about diving between the wires. Below Margarita swam the roofs of trolleybuses, buses and motor cars, and along the pavements, as it seemed to Margarita from above, there swam rivers of caps. Streams separated out from these rivers and flowed into the fiery jaws of all-night shops.

“Ooh, what a jumble!” Margarita thought angrily. “You can’t turn around here.” She cut across the Arbat, rose higher, up to the third floors, and, past the blindingly shining tubes on a theatre building on a corner, she sailed into a narrow lane of tall apartment blocks. All the windows in them were open, and everywhere in the windows radio music could be heard. Out of curiosity Margarita glanced into one of them. She saw a kitchen. Two Primus stoves were roaring on the hob, and beside them two women with spoons in their hands stood quarrelling.

“You need to turn the toilet light off after you, that’s what I’m telling you, Pelageya Petrovna,” said a woman with a saucepan containing eats of some sort in front of her, from which steam was pouring, “or else we’ll apply for you to be evicted!”

“You’re a fine one to talk,” the other replied.

“You’re both fine ones,” said Margarita sonorously, crossing over the window sill into the kitchen. Both squabbling women turned at the voice, and froze with their dirty spoons in their hands. Margarita carefully reached her arm between them and turned the taps on both Primuses, putting them out. The women gasped and opened their mouths. But Margarita was already bored in the kitchen and flew out into the lane.

At its end her attention was attracted by the sumptuous hulk of an eight-storey, evidently newly built block. Margarita descended and, landing, saw that the façade of the house was faced with black marble, that the doors were wide, that behind their glass could be seen the cap with a gold galloon and the buttons of a doorman, and that above the door an inscription was traced out in gold: “House of Dramwrit”.

Margarita squinted at the inscription, trying to grasp what the word “Dramwrit” could mean. Taking the broom under her arm, Margarita went in through the entrance, hitting the surprised doorman with the door, and saw on the wall beside the lift a huge black board, and written out on it in white lettering the numbers of the apartments and the names of the tenants. The inscription crowning the list, “House of Dramatists and Writers”, made Margarita emit a heartfelt, predatory shriek. Rising a little higher in the air, she began reading the names rapaciously: Khustov, Dvubratsky, Kvant, Beskudnikov, Latunsky.

“Latunsky!” Margarita screamed. “Latunsky! But it was him, wasn’t it. It was him that destroyed the Master!”

The doorman by the doors gazed at the black board with his eyes popping out, and even jumped up and down in surprise, trying to understand such a wondrous thing: why was it that the list of tenants had started screaming all of a sudden?

But by this time Margarita was already going swiftly up the stairs, repeating in a kind of rapture:

“Latunsky – 84. Latunsky – 84.”

Here’s 82 to the left, 83 to the right, higher still, to the left – 84. Here! And here’s his card – “O. Latunsky”.

Margarita leapt off the broom and her heated soles were pleasantly cooled by the stone landing. Margarita rang once, then again. But nobody opened up. Margarita began pressing the button more firmly and could hear for herself the peal that burst out inside Latunsky’s apartment. Yes, the resident of apartment No. 84 on the seventh floor should be grateful to the late Berlioz to his dying day for the fact that the Chairman of MASSOLIT had fallen under a tram, and for the fact that the memorial meeting had been arranged for that very evening. The critic Latunsky was born under a lucky star. It saved him from a meeting with Margarita, who that Friday had become a witch.

Nobody opened up. Then Margarita flew downstairs at full speed; counting off the floors, she reached the bottom, tore out into the street and, looking up, counted off and checked the floors from the outside, trying to grasp which windows were actually those of Latunsky’s apartment. There was no doubt that it was the five dark windows at the corner of the building on the seventh floor. Having satisfied herself of this, Margarita rose into the air, and a few seconds later was going through an open window into an unlit room in which there was only a narrow little path of silvery moonlight. Margarita ran down it and felt for the light switch. A minute later the whole apartment was lit up. The broom was standing in a corner. After making sure that no one was at home, Margarita opened the door onto the staircase and checked whether the card was there. There was the card: Margarita was in the right place.

Yes, they say the critic Latunsky turns pale even now when he remembers that terrible evening, and even now pronounces the name of Berlioz with reverence. There is absolutely no knowing what dark and foul criminal acts might have marked that evening – on her return from the kitchen there was a heavy hammer in Margarita’s hands.

Naked and invisible, the flying woman was controlling herself and urging herself on, and her hands were trembling with impatience. Taking careful aim, Margarita struck the keys of the grand piano, and the first plaintive howl spread throughout the entire apartment. The utterly innocent Bäcker baby grand cried out frenziedly. Its keyboard was collapsing, the ivory caps were flying in all directions. The instrument droned, howled, wheezed, rang. With the sound of a pistol shot the polished upper sounding board split under a hammer blow. Breathing hard, Margarita tore and crumpled the strings with the hammer. Finally, tired, she fell back and plopped into an armchair to regain her breath.

Water was making a terrible noise in the bathroom, and in the kitchen too. “It seems to have started spilling onto the floor already…” thought Margarita, and added out loud:

“However, it’s no good sitting around.”

A stream was already running from the kitchen into the corridor. Splashing her bare feet in the water, Margarita carried buckets of water from the kitchen to the critic’s study and poured it out into the desk drawers. Then, after breaking up the doors of the cabinet in that same study with the hammer, she rushed into the bedroom. Having smashed the mirrored wardrobe, she pulled the critic’s suit out of it and drowned it in the bath. The inkpotful of ink that she had seized in the study she poured out into the opulently plumped-up double bed in the bedroom. The destruction she was effecting gave her fiery pleasure, but at the same time it constantly seemed to her that the results were proving rather trifling. And so she began doing anything and everything. She smashed the pots of ficus plants in the room where the piano was. Without finishing the job, she returned to the bedroom and cut up the sheets with a kitchen knife and smashed the glass in the photograph frames. She felt no tiredness, only the sweat ran down her in streams.

At this time in No. 82, underneath Latunsky’s apartment, the dramatist Kvant’s maid was drinking tea in the kitchen, perplexed by the fact that there was some sort of crashing, running around and clanging coming from above. Tilting her head up to the ceiling, she suddenly saw that before her eyes it was exchanging its white colour for a kind of deathly bluish one. The stain was spreading wider before her eyes, and suddenly drops swelled out upon it. The maid sat for a minute or two, wondering at such a phenomenon, until finally real rain started falling from the ceiling and pattering on the floor. At this point she leapt up and put a basin under the streams, which did not help in the least, since the rain had spread wider and started spilling onto both the gas hob and the dresser. Then, with a cry, Kvant’s maid ran out of the apartment onto the stairs, and straight away in Latunsky’s apartment the ringing of the telephone began.

“Well, they’ve started ringing… Time to get ready to go,” said Margarita. She sat on the broom, listening to a female voice shouting through the chink in the door:

“Open up, open up! Dusya, open up! Is your water leaking, or something? It’s come through to us!”

Margarita went up by a metre and hit the chandelier. Two bulbs blew, and pieces of hanging glass flew in all directions. The cries in the chink in the door ceased; the clatter of feet was heard on the stairs. Margarita floated through the window, found herself outside, took a gentle swing and struck the glass with the hammer. It gave a sob, and the fragments cascaded down the marble-faced wall. Margarita rode to the next window. Far below, people started running along the pavement, and of the two cars standing by the entrance one began to hum and drove away.

Finishing with Latunsky’s windows, Margarita floated to the apartment next door. The blows became more frequent, the lane was filled with a clanging and a crashing. The doorman ran out from entrance No. 1, looked up, wavered a little, evidently not immediately grasping what he should do, stuck a whistle in his mouth and began whistling furiously. Having smashed the last pane of glass on the seventh floor with particular fervour to the sound of this whistle, Margarita descended to the sixth and started shattering the glass there.

Frustrated by his lengthy inactivity behind the plate-glass doors of the entrance, the doorman was putting his heart and soul into his whistling, and was, moreover, following Margarita exactly, as though accompanying her. In the pauses when she was flying from window to window, he was taking in air, and each time Margarita struck, he, blowing out his cheeks, would start to warble and pierce the night air to the very sky.

His efforts, in conjunction with those of the infuriated Margarita, produced great results. Inside the building there was panic. Window panes that were still intact were thrown wide open; people’s heads appeared in them and then hid straight away, and open windows, on the contrary, were closed. In the buildings opposite, against lighted backgrounds, there appeared in the windows the dark silhouettes of people trying to understand why the windows in the new Dramwrit building were breaking without any reason.

In the lane folk were running to the Dramwrit building, while inside it people were making a clatter on all the staircases, rushing about without any sense or purpose. Kvant’s maid was shouting to those running up and down the stairs that they had been flooded, and she was soon joined by Khustov’s maid from No. 80, located beneath Kvant’s apartment. At the Khustovs’ it had gushed from the ceiling both in the kitchen and in the toilet. Finally at the Kvants’ a huge layer of plaster came down from the ceiling in the kitchen and smashed all the dirty crockery, after which genuinely torrential rain began: it poured from the squares of sagging wet lathing as though from a bucket. Then shouting began from the staircase of entrance No. 1. Flying past the penultimate window on the third floor, Margarita glanced into it and saw a man who had pulled on a gas mask in his panic. Striking his window pane with the hammer, Margarita scared him off, and he disappeared from the room.

And then the savage devastation unexpectedly ceased. Slipping down to the second floor, Margarita glanced into the window at the end with its flimsy, dark blind drawn. A weak little light was burning under a shade in the room. A boy of about four was sitting in a small bed with sides made of netting and listening out in fright. There were no adults in the room. Everyone had evidently run out of the apartment.

“They’re breaking the windows,” the boy said, and called: “Mama!”

No one responded, and then he said:

“Mama, I’m scared.”

Margarita threw the blind aside and flew through the window.

“I’m scared,” the boy repeated, and started trembling.

“Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, little one,” said Margarita, trying to soften her criminal voice, which had grown hoarse in the wind, “it was some boys breaking windows.”

“With a catapult?” the boy asked, ceasing to tremble.

“Yes, with a catapult,” Margarita confirmed, “now you go to sleep!”

“It’s Sitnik,” said the boy, “he’s got a catapult.”

“Well of course it’s him!”

The boy gave a sly look somewhere off to one side and asked:

“And where are you, lady?”

“I’m not here,” replied Margarita, “I’m in your dream.”

“That’s what I thought,” said the boy.

“You lie down,” ordered Margarita, “put your hand under your cheek, and I’ll be in your dream.”

“Yes, all right, do be in my dream – do,” the boy agreed, and immediately lay himself down and put his hand under his cheek.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Margarita began, and lay a heated hand on his closely cropped head. “There was once a lady. And she had no children, and generally had no happiness either. And so at first she cried for a long time, and then she became wicked…” Margarita fell silent and took her hand away – the boy was asleep.

Margarita gently put the hammer on the window sill and flew out of the window. Beside the building there was a commotion. People were running about on the asphalted pavement, which was littered with broken glass, and yelling something. Policemen could already be glimpsed among them. Suddenly a bell rang, and into the lane from the Arbat rolled a red fire engine with a ladder.

But what happened thereafter was no longer of any interest to Margarita. Taking aim, so as not to catch on any wire, she squeezed the broom quite firmly and in an instant found herself higher than the ill-starred building. The lane beneath her tilted to one side and disappeared downwards. In place of just the lane there appeared beneath Margarita’s feet a multitude of roofs, criss-crossed at angles by glittering little roads. The whole of it unexpectedly slipped aside, and the chains of lights blurred and merged.

Margarita made one more spurt, and then the whole throng of roofs was swallowed up by the earth, and instead of it there appeared below a lake of trembling electric lights, and this lake suddenly rose up vertically, and then appeared above Margarita’s head, while beneath her feet there shone the moon. Realizing she had turned a somersault, Margarita assumed a normal position and, turning back, saw that the lake had already gone too, and that there, back there behind her, only a pink glow on the horizon remained. It too disappeared in a second, and Margarita saw that she was alone with the moon, which was flying above her and to the left. Margarita’s hair had already long been piled up in a heap, and the moonlight whistled as it washed over her body. From the way two rows of infrequent lights down below merged into two unbroken fiery lines, and from the rate at which they vanished behind her, Margarita guessed she was flying at a monstrous speed and was amazed she was not gasping for breath.

After a lapse of a few seconds, far below in the terrestrial blackness a new lake of electric light flared out and rolled up beneath the flying woman’s feet, but straight away it started to spiral and was swallowed up by the earth. A few seconds more… exactly the same phenomenon.

“Towns! Towns!” Margarita shouted.

Two or three times after that she saw below her dimly reflective sabres of some sort lying in open black cases, and she grasped that they were rivers.

Turning her head upwards and to the left, the flying woman admired the way the moon was rushing back to Moscow like a mad thing above her, and was at the same time in a strange way standing still, so that distinctly visible upon it was some mysterious, dark shape, perhaps a dragon, perhaps a little humpbacked horse, with its sharp muzzle directed towards the city she had left.

At this point Margarita was seized by the thought that as a matter of fact there was no point in her driving the broom on so frenziedly – that she was depriving herself of the opportunity of examining anything properly, of revelling properly in the flight. Something told her they would wait for her in the place she was flying to and there was no purpose in her being bored at such a mad speed and height.

Margarita bent the bristles of the broom forward so that its tail rose up, and, slowing greatly, she set off right down towards the earth. And this sliding down, as if on an aerial sledge, brought her the greatest enjoyment. The earth rose towards her, and in its black stodge, formless until now, its secrets and delights during a moonlit night were revealed. The earth was moving towards Margarita, and already wafting over her was the scent of the woods coming into leaf. Margarita flew just above the mists of a dewy meadow, then over a pond. Below Margarita a choir of frogs was singing, and somewhere in the distance was the noise of a train, which for some reason greatly troubled her heart. Margarita soon caught sight of it. It was crawling slowly, like a caterpillar, scattering sparks into the air. After overtaking it, Margarita passed over one more watery mirror, in which a second moon floated past beneath her feet; she descended still further and went on her way, very nearly catching the tops of huge pine trees with her feet.

The harsh noise of the air being cut through became audible from behind and began catching up with Margarita. Gradually this noise of something flying like a missile was joined by a woman’s raucous laughter, which could be heard at a distance of many kilometres. Margarita glanced round and saw she was being overtaken by some compound dark object. As it caught up with Margarita, it was revealed more and more, and it became evident that someone was flying on something’s back. And finally it was completely revealed as Natasha, slowing down, overtook Margarita.

Completely naked, with her tousled hair fluttering in the air, she was flying on the back of a fat hog, which was clutching a briefcase in its fore trotters and thrashing wildly at the air with its hind ones. Gleaming in the moonlight from time to time and then dying away, a pince-nez that had toppled off the hog’s nose was flying alongside it on a cord, and a hat kept on slipping down over the hog’s eyes. After having a good close look, Margarita recognized the hog to be Nikolai Ivanovich, and then her raucous laughter began thundering over the wood, mingling with the laughter of Natasha.

“Natashka!” Margarita cried piercingly. “Did you rub the cream on?”

“Darling!” Natasha replied, waking the sleeping pine forest with her cries. “My Queen of France, I rubbed it on his bald spot as well, didn’t I, on him as well!”

“Princess!” yelled the hog tearfully, carrying his rider at a gallop.

“Darling! Margarita Nikolayevna!” cried Natasha, racing alongside Margarita. “I confess, I took the cream! I mean, we want to live and fly too! Forgive me, mistress, but I won’t return, I won’t return, not for anything! Ah, it s great, Margarita Nikolayevna!.. He was proposing to me,” Natasha started prodding her finger into the neck of the hog, who was puffing in embarrassment, “proposing! What was it you were calling me, eh?” she cried, leaning down to the hog’s ear.

“Goddess!” the latter howled. “I can’t fly this fast! I could lose some important papers. Natalya Prokofyevna, I protest!”

“To hell with you and your papers!” cried Natasha, roaring with impudent laughter.

“What are you doing, Natalya Prokofyevna! Someone will hear us!” yelled the hog beseechingly.

Flying at a gallop alongside Margarita, Natasha laughed as she told her about what had happened in the house after Margarita Nikolayevna had flown off over the gates.

Natasha confessed that, without touching any of the things she had been given, she had thrown off her clothes and rushed to the cream and immediately rubbed it on. And the same thing had happened to her as to her mistress. As Natasha, chuckling with joy, was revelling in her magical beauty before the mirror, the door had opened, and Nikolai Ivanovich had appeared before Natasha. He was greatly agitated and was holding Margarita Nikolayevna’s nightshirt and his own hat and briefcase in his hands. On seeing Natasha, Nikolai Ivanovich was stupefied. Getting the better of himself somewhat, all red as a lobster, he had announced that he had considered it his duty to pick the shirt up and bring it in person…

“The things he said, the good-for-nothing!” Natasha screamed with laughter. “The things he said, the things he was enticing me to! The money he was promising! Said Klavdia Petrovna would know nothing about it. What, are you going to say I’m lying?” Natasha cried to the hog, but the latter only turned his snout away in embarrassment.

Getting mischievous in the bedroom, Natasha had put a dab of the cream on Nikolai Ivanovich and had herself been struck dumb in surprise. The face of the respectable downstairs tenant had been reduced to a snout, while his arms and legs had proved to have trotters. Looking at himself in the mirror, Nikolai Ivanovich had started up a desperate and wild howling, but it was already too late. A few seconds later, straddled by a rider, he was flying out of Moscow, the devil knew where to, sobbing with grief.

“I demand the return of my normal appearance!” the hog suddenly wheezed, and started grunting, half frenziedly, half beseechingly. "I don’t intend to fly to an illegal assembly! Margarita Nikolayevna, it’s your duty to control your maid!”

"Oh, so I’m a maid for you now? A maid?” Natasha exclaimed, pinching the hog’s ear. "When I used to be a goddess? What was it you called me?”

"Venus!” the hog replied tearfully, flying over a stream that roared between some rocks, and rustling some hazel bushes as he caught them with his trotters.

“Venus! Venus!” cried Natasha triumphantly, putting one hand on her hip and stretching the other out towards the moon. “Margarita! Queen! Ask for me to be left as a witch! They’ll do anything for you, power has been granted you!”

And Margarita responded:

"All right, I promise.”

“Thank you!” Natasha cried, and suddenly began shouting sharply and somehow mournfully: “Hey! Hey! Hurry! Hurry! Come on now, speed it up!” With her heels she squeezed the hog’s flanks, which had grown thinner in the mad gallop, and he jerked forward so hard that the air was again ripped apart, and a moment later Natasha was already visible up ahead only as a black dot, and then she disappeared completely, and the noise of her flight melted away.

Margarita flew slowly, as before, in a deserted and unfamiliar place over hills with a sprinkling of infrequent boulders lying between huge, isolated pines. Margarita flew and thought about the fact that she was probably somewhere very far from Moscow. The broom was flying not above the tops of the pines, but already between their trunks, silvered on one side by the moon. The light shadow of the flying woman slid across the earth up ahead – the moon was now shining on Margarita’s back.

Margarita sensed the proximity of water and guessed her destination was near. The pines parted, and Margarita quietly rode up through the air towards a chalk cliff. Beyond this cliff, in the shade down below, lay a river. A mist was hanging and catching on the bushes at the bottom of the vertical cliff, but the opposite bank was flat and low-lying. On it, under a solitary group of spreading trees of some sort, a little light from a bonfire was tossing about and some small moving figures could be seen. It seemed to Margarita that some nagging, jolly music was carrying from there. Further on, as far as the eye could see, no signs either of habitation or people were visible on the silvered plain.

Margarita jumped down from the cliff and quickly descended to the water. The water was tempting for her after her race through the air. Tossing the broom aside, she took a run up and threw herself into the water head first. Her light body pierced the water like an arrow and threw out a column of water almost as far as the moon itself. The water proved to be warm, like in a bathhouse, and, coming up from the depths, Margarita swam to her heart’s content in complete solitude in that river in the night.

There was nobody near Margarita, but a little further away beyond the bushes splashes and snorting could be heard – somebody was swimming there too.

Margarita ran out onto the bank. Her body was glowing after bathing. She did not feel any tiredness and hopped about joyfully on the moist grass. Suddenly she stopped dancing and was on her guard. The snorting began to get closer, and a fat, naked man clambered out from behind some willow bushes wearing a black silk top hat, cocked onto the back of his head. The soles of his feet were so covered in muddy silt, it seemed as though the bather was wearing black boots. Judging by the way he was puffing and hiccuping, he had had a decent amount to drink, which was also confirmed, moreover, by the fact that the river suddenly began giving off the smell of brandy.

Catching sight of Margarita, the fat man began peering, and then yelled out joyfully:

“What’s this? Is it her I see? Claudine, it’s you, isn’t it, the merry widow! Are you here too?” and at this point he went to greet her.

Margarita retreated and replied with dignity:

“Go to the devil. I’m not this Claudine of yours! You watch who you’re talking to,” and, after a moment’s thought, she added to her words a long unprintable oath. All this had a sobering effect on the flippant fat man.

“Oh dear!” he exclaimed quietly, and winced. “Be generous and forgive me, radiant Queen Margot! I took you for someone else. But it’s the brandy that’s to blame, curse it!” The fat man dropped onto one knee, held the top hat out to one side, bowed and, mixing Russian phrases with French ones, began babbling some nonsense about the bloody wedding of his friend Guessard in Paris, and about brandy, and about his being depressed by his sad mistake.

“You might put your trousers on, you son of a bitch,” said Margarita, softening.

The fat man grinned joyfully, seeing that Margarita was not angry, and informed her rapturously that he was without his trousers at the present moment only because through forgetfulness he had left them on the river Yenisei, where he had been bathing just before, but that he was flying there at once – thankfully it was no distance at all; and then, entrusting himself to her favour and protection, he began retreating backwards, and he continued retreating until he slipped and fell on his back into the water. Yet, even as he fell, he maintained on his face, with its fringe of little sideburns, a smile of rapture and devotion.

But Margarita gave a piercing whistle and, straddling the broom, which flew up, she was carried over the river to the opposite bank. The shadow of the chalk hill did not reach that far, and the whole bank was flooded with moonlight.

As soon as Margarita touched the damp grass, the music under the willows struck up louder, and the sheaf of sparks from the bonfire flew up more gaily. Under the willow branches – covered with delicate, fluffy catkins, which were visible in the moonlight – sat two rows of fat-faced frogs, swelling up as though made of elastic and playing a bravura march on wooden pipes. Glowing pieces of rotten wood hung on the willow withes in front of the musicians and lit up the sheet music, and the darting light from the bonfire played on the faces of the frogs.

The march was played in Margarita’s honour. The reception given her was the most festive. Transparent water nymphs stopped their round dance above the river and started waving water-weeds to Margarita, and their greetings, heard from afar, moaned out above the deserted, greenish bank. Leaping out from behind the willows, naked witches lined up in a row and began dropping curtsies and bowing as if at court. Someone with the legs of a goat rushed up and kissed her hand, spread a silk cloth out on the grass, enquired as to whether the Queen had enjoyed her bathe, and invited her to lie down and rest.

Margarita did just that. The goat-legged one presented her with a glass of champagne; she drank it and her heart was immediately warmed. Enquiring where Natasha was, she received the reply that Natasha had already finished bathing and had flown on ahead to Moscow on her hog to give advance warning that Margarita would soon be there, and to help prepare a costume for her.

Margarita’s short stay beneath the willows was marked by one episode. A whistling rang out in the air, and a black body, clearly missing its target, came down in the water. A few moments later there appeared before Margarita that same fat man with sideburns who had introduced himself so unfortunately on the other bank. He had evidently managed to dash to the Yenisei and back, for he was wearing tails, but was wet from head to toe. The brandy had got him in a fix for a second time: while landing he had, after all, fallen into the water. But he had not lost his smile, and in this unfortunate instance Margarita, laughing, did allow him to kiss her hand.

Then everyone began getting ready to leave. The water nymphs finished their dance in the moonlight and melted away in it. The goat-legged one enquired respectfully of Margarita how she had arrived at the river. Learning she had come riding on a broomstick, he said:

"Oh, but why, that’s uncomfortable,” and in a trice he had constructed a suspicious-looking sort of telephone from two twigs and demanded of someone that a car be sent this very minute – which was indeed done in one minute. The dun-coloured open car came down on an island, but in the driver’s seat there sat not an ordinary-looking driver, but a black, long-nosed rook in an oilskin cap and funnel-shaped gloves. The islet was emptying. The witches, who had flown off, had dissolved in the glow of the moon. The bonfire was burning out, and the coals had a coating of grey cinders.

The man with the sideburns and the goat-legged one helped Margarita into the car, and she dropped onto the wide back seat. The car howled, jumped and rose up almost to the moon itself; the island disappeared, the river disappeared, and Margarita sped off to Moscow.