30. It's Time! It's Time!

“You know,” said Margarita, “just as you fell asleep last night I was reading about the darkness which came from the Mediterranean Sea… and those idols, ah, the golden idols! For some reason they give me no peace all of the time. I think there’ll be rain now too. Do you feel it getting fresher?”

“This is all well and good,” replied the Master, smoking and dispersing the smoke with his hand, “and those idols, blow them. but what happens next, that really is unclear!”

This conversation took place at sunset, just at the time when Levi Matthew came to Woland on the terrace. The basement’s little window was open, and if anyone had glanced into it, they would have been surprised at how strange those conversing looked. Thrown straight onto Margarita’s naked body was a black cloak, and the Master was wearing his hospital linen. This was the case because Margarita had nothing whatsoever to put on, since all her things had remained in the detached house, and though that house was not very far away, there was, of course, no question of her going there and getting her things. And the Master, all of whose suits had been found in the wardrobe, as though he had not even been away anywhere, simply did not wish to get dressed, as he elaborated before Margarita the idea that some utter nonsense was going to begin at any moment. True, he was shaved for the first time since that autumn night (in the clinic his beard had been trimmed with clippers).

The room had a strange look too, and it was very difficult to understand anything in its chaos. On the rug lay manuscripts, and they were on the divan as well. Some book or other was lying with its spine sticking up in the armchair. And the round table was set for dinner, and standing among the hors d’oeuvres were several bottles. Where all these victuals and drinks had come from was unknown to both Margarita and the Master. On waking up, they had found all of it already on the table.

Having slept through to sunset on Saturday, both the Master and his girl felt fully strengthened, and there was only one thing to remind them of the previous day’s adventures: both felt a slight ache in the left temple. But on the psychological side, very great changes had taken place in both of them, as anyone who could have overheard the conversation in the basement apartment would have been convinced. But there was absolutely nobody to overhear. That was the good thing about this yard: that it was always empty. With every day the increasingly green lime trees and the white willow outside the window were giving off the scent of spring more powerfully, and the beginnings of a breeze were carrying it into the basement.

“Damn it all!” the Master exclaimed unexpectedly. “I mean, it’s, just think…” He extinguished the cigarette stub in the ashtray and squeezed his head in his hands. “No, listen, you’re an intelligent person and haven’t been mad. Are you seriously convinced that yesterday we were with Satan?”

“Absolutely,” replied Margarita.

“Of course, of course,” said the Master ironically, “and so here we now have instead of one mad person. two! Both the husband and the wife.” He raised his hands to the sky and cried: “No, it’s the devil knows what – the devil, the devil, the devil!”

Instead of replying, Margarita collapsed onto the divan, began roaring with laughter and kicking her bare feet about, and only then did she exclaim:

“Oh, it’s too much! Oh, it’s too much! Just take a glance at what you look like!”

While the Master was bashfully pulling up his hospital long johns, Margarita finished chuckling and became serious.

“You unwittingly said something true just now,” she began. “The Devil does know what’s going on, and the Devil, believe me, will arrange everything!” Her eyes suddenly blazed; she leapt up, began dancing on the spot and started crying out: “How happy I am, how happy I am that I struck a bargain with him! Oh, the Devil, the Devil!. You, my dear, are going to have to live with a witch!” After this, she rushed to the Master, flung her arms around his neck and began kissing him on the lips, the nose, the cheeks. Locks of unbrushed black hair jumped on the Master, and his cheeks and forehead flared up under the kisses.

“You really have become like a witch!”

“And I don’t deny it,” Margarita replied. “I am a witch, and I’m very happy about it.”

“Well, all right,” said the Master, “a witch, so be it. Very fine and splendid! And so I was abducted from the clinic. very nice too! We were returned here, we’ll assume that’s so as well… We’ll even suppose that no one will notice we’re missing. But just you tell me, for the sake of all that’s holy, on what and how are we going to live? In saying that, it’s you I’m concerned about, believe me!”

At that moment there appeared in the window a pair of blunt-toed boots and the bottom part of a pair of pin-striped trousers. Then these trousers bent at the knee, and the daylight was shut out by somebody’s weighty backside.

“Aloizy, are you at home?” asked a voice outside the window somewhere up above the trousers.

“There you are, id s starting,” said the Master.

“Aloizy?” asked Margarita, going up closer to the window. “He was arrested yesterday. And who is it asking for him? What’s your name?”

At the same instant the knees and the backside disappeared and the banging of the gate was heard, after which everything returned to normal. Margarita dropped onto the divan and began laughing so hard that tears rolled out of her eyes. But when she quietened down, her face changed in the most drastic way: she started speaking seriously and, while speaking, she slid down off the divan, crawled up to the Master’s knees and, gazing into his eyes, began stroking his head.

“How you’ve suffered, how you’ve suffered, my poor thing! Just I alone know about that. Look, you’ve got grey threads in your hair and a perpetual line by your lips! My only one, my dear one, don’t think about anything. You’ve had to think too much, and now I’m going to think for you. And I guarantee you, I guarantee, that everything will be dazzlingly good!”

“I’m not afraid of anything, Margot,” the Master suddenly answered her, and, raising his head, he seemed to her just as he had been when composing the things he had never seen but knew for sure had happened, “and I’m not afraid because I’ve already been through everything. I’ve been frightened too much, and can’t be frightened by anything more. But I feel sorry for you, Margot, that s the whole point, and that s why I keep going on about one and the same thing. Come to your senses! Why should you wreck your life with a sick man and a beggar? Go back home! I feel sorry for you, and that’s why I say this.”

“Oh, you, you,” Margarita whispered, shaking her tousled head, “oh you unhappy man of little faith. Because of you I stood all last night naked and shaking, I lost my own nature and replaced it with another one, I sat for several months in a tiny dark room and thought about only one thing – about the storm over Yershalaim – I cried my eyes out, and now, when happiness has fallen upon us, you’re driving me away? Well, all right then, I’ll go, but know that you are a cruel man! They’ve drained your soul!”

There was a surge of bitter tenderness in the Master’s heart, and for some unknown reason he burst into tears with his head buried in Margarita’s hair. She, crying, whispered to him, and her fingers jumped on the Master’s temples.

“Yes, threads, threads… before my eyes his head’s getting covered in snow. ah, my poor head, poor head that has suffered so much! Look at your eyes! There’s a wilderness inside them. And the shoulders, shoulders with a burden. He’s maimed, maimed.” Margarita’s speech was becoming incoherent, she was shaking from her crying.

Then the Master wiped away her tears, raised Margarita from her knees, stood up and himself said firmly:

“Enough! You’ve put me to shame. Never again will I permit faint-heartedness, and I won’t return to this question, rest assured. I know that we’re both victims of our mental illness, which I’ve perhaps passed on to you… Well, all right, together we’ll bear it too.”

Margarita brought her lips close to the Master’s ear and whispered:

“I swear to you by my life, I swear by the astrologer’s son divined by you, all will be well.”

“Well, that’s fine, fine,” the Master responded, and added with a laugh: “Of course, when people have been completely ravaged, like you and me, they seek salvation from a preternatural force! Well, all right, I’m agreeable to seeking it there.”

“There you are, there you are, now you’re the man you used to be, you’re laughing,” replied Margarita, “and you can go to the devil with your clever words. Preternatural or not preternatural – isn’t it all the same? I’m hungry.”

And she dragged the Master by the arm to the table.

“I’m not certain this food won’t be swallowed up by the earth in a moment, or won’t fly away through the window,” he said, quite calm again.

“It won’t fly away!”

And at that very moment a nasal voice was heard through the window:

“Peace be unto you.”

The Master gave a start, but Margarita, already accustomed to the extraordinary, exclaimed:

“Why, it’s Azazello! Ah, what a nice thing, what a good thing!” And whispering to the Master: “There, you see, you see, they’re not abandoning us!” she rushed to open the door.

“At least cover yourself up,” the Master cried after her.

“I don’t give a fig about that,” replied Margarita, already from the corridor.

And there was Azazello, already exchanging bows, greeting the Master, flashing his one eye at him, while Margarita exclaimed:

“Oh, how glad I am! I’ve never been so glad in my life! But forgive me, Azazello, for being naked!”

Azazello told her not to worry, assured her he had seen not only naked women, but even women with their skin completely stripped off, and sat down willingly at the table, after first putting some sort of package in dark brocade into the corner by the stove.

Margarita poured Azazello some brandy, and he willingly drank it down. The Master, without taking his eyes off him, occasionally gave his own left wrist a surreptitious pinch under the table. But these pinches did not help. Azazello did not dissolve into thin air, and, to tell the truth, there was no need for that at all. There was nothing frightening about the short, rather gingerhaired man, only perhaps the eye with the cataract, but that is possible without any sorcery, after all, and only perhaps the not entirely ordinary clothes – some sort of cassock or cloak – but again, if you think about it seriously, you do come across that sometimes too… The brandy he drank smartly as well, like all good people, by the glassful and without any food. That same brandy started a buzzing in the Master’s head, and he began to think:

“No, Margarita’s right! Of course, before me sits an envoy of the Devil. I mean, no further back than the night before last I was myself trying to prove to Ivan that he’d met none other than Satan at Patriarch’s, and now for some reason I’ve taken fright at the idea and begun jabbering some stuff about hypnotists and hallucinations. What the devil have hypnotists to do with it?”

He started looking closely at Azazello and became convinced that some sort of constraint could be seen in the his eyes, some thought that he was not revealing until the time was ripe. “He’s not simply come visiting, he’s appeared with some kind of errand,” thought the Master.

His powers of observation had not betrayed him.

After drinking his third glass of brandy, which had no effect at all on Azazello, the visitor began speaking thus:

“This is a cosy little basement though, damn it! Only one question arises: what can you do in it, in this little basement?”

“And I say the same thing too,” replied the Master with a laugh.

“Why are you alarming me, Azazello?” asked Margarita. “We’ll manage somehow!”

“Come, come!” exclaimed Azazello. “I had no thought of alarming you. I myself say ‘somehow’ too. Yes! I almost forgot… Messire sent you his greetings and also told me to say that he invites you to take a little walk with him – if, of course, you wish to. So what do you say to that?”

Margarita nudged the Master with her foot under the table.

“With great pleasure,” the Master replied, studying Azazello, and the latter continued:

“We hope Margarita Nikolayevna won’t refuse either?”

“It’s a certainty that I won’t refuse,” said Margarita, and again her foot travelled over the Master’s leg.

“The most wonderful thing!” exclaimed Azazello. “Now that I like! One, two, and it’s done! Not like back then in the Alexandrovsky Garden.”

“Ah, don’t remind me, Azazello! I was stupid then. But anyway, you can’t be too severe with me for that either – after all, it’s not every day you meet up with unclean spirits!”

“I should think not,” Azazello confirmed, “if it were every day, that would be a fine thing!”

“I like speed too,” said Margarita excitedly, “I like speed and being naked… As if from a Mauser – bang! Oh, the way he shoots,” exclaimed Margarita, turning to the Master. “A seven under a pillow, and any of the pips!” Margarita was starting to get drunk, which made her eyes flare up.

“And again I’d forgotten,” cried Azazello, slapping himself on the forehead, “I’ve got myself so wound up! Messire sent you a present, didn’t he” – here he addressed himself specifically to the Master – “a bottle of wine. Please note, it’s that same wine which was drunk by the Procurator of Judaea. Falernum wine.”

It is perfectly natural that such a rarity elicited a great deal of attention from both Margarita and the Master. Azazello drew out from the piece of dark funeral brocade a jug completely covered in mould. They sniffed the wine, poured it into glasses, looked through it to the light in the window which was disappearing before the storm. They saw everything being stained the colour of blood.

“Woland’s health!” exclaimed Margarita, raising her glass.

All three put their lips to their glasses and each took a large gulp. Immediately the pre-storm light began to fade in the Master’s eyes; there was a catch in his breathing, and he sensed that the end was coming. He also saw Margarita, now deathly pale and helplessly reaching out her arms to him, drop her head onto the table and then slide down onto the floor.

“Poisoner.” the Master still had time to cry. He wanted to seize a knife from the table with which to strike Azazello, but his hand slipped helplessly from the tablecloth – everything surrounding the Master in the basement turned black, and then disappeared altogether. He fell backwards and, as he fell, cut the skin on his temple open on a corner of the top of the bureau.

When the poisoned couple had fallen quiet, Azazello began to act. First and foremost he threw himself out of the window, and a few moments later he was inside the detached house in which Margarita Nikolayevna used to live. Always precise and thorough, Azazello wanted to check that everything had been carried out as was required. And everything proved to be in perfect order. Azazello saw a gloomy woman awaiting the return of her husband come out of her bedroom, suddenly turn pale, clutch at her heart and, with a helpless cry: “Natasha! Anyone… come here!” fall to the floor in the living room without reaching the study.

“All in order,” said Azazello. A moment later he was beside the prostrate lovers. Margarita lay with her face buried in the rug. With his iron hands Azazello turned her like a doll to face him and peered at her. Before his eyes the poisoned woman’s face was changing. Even in the approaching twilight of the storm her temporary witch’s squint and the hardness and wildness of her features could be seen to be disappearing. The deceased woman’s face lightened and finally softened, and her bared teeth became not predatory, but simply the bared teeth of a woman’s suffering. Then Azazello unclenched her white teeth and poured into her mouth a few drops of that same wine with which he had poisoned her. Margarita sighed, then without Azazello’s help began to rise, sat up and asked weakly:

“Why, Azazello, why? What have you done to me?”

She caught sight of the supine Master, shuddered and whispered:

“I didn’t expect this. murderer!”

“Not at all, no,” replied Azazello, “he’ll get up in a minute. Oh dear, why are you so jumpy?”

Margarita believed him at once, so convincing was the voice of the red-haired demon. She leapt up, strong and lively, and helped give the supine man some wine to drink. Opening his eyes, he gave a gloomy look and repeated his last word with hatred:

"Poisoner…"

“Oh dear! Insult is the usual reward for good work," replied Azazello. "Are you really blind? Do recover your sight quickly, then!"

At this point the Master rose, looked around with a gaze that was lively and bright, and asked:

"And what does this new thing mean?"

"It means," replied Azazello, "that it’s time for us to go. The storm’s already rumbling, do you hear it? It’s getting dark. The horses are pawing the ground, the little garden’s shaking. Say goodbye to the basement, quickly, say goodbye."

"Ah, I understand," said the Master, gazing around, "you’ve killed us, we’re dead. Ah, what a clever thing, what a timely thing! Now I understand it all."

"Oh, for pity’s sake," replied Azazello, "is it you I’m hearing? Your girl calls you the Master, doesn’t she, and you’re thinking, aren’t you, so how can you be dead? In order to consider yourself alive, is it really absolutely essential to be sitting in a basement wearing a shirt and hospital long johns? It’s ridiculous!"

"I understand everything you’ve said," exclaimed the Master, "don’t go on! You’re a thousand times right!"

"Great Woland," Margarita began to echo him, "great Woland! He devised it much better than I did. Only the novel, the novel," she cried to the Master, "take the novel with you wherever you fly!"

“There’s no need,” replied the Master, “I remember it by heart.”

“But will you not forget a word… not a word of it?” asked Margarita, pressing up against her lover and wiping away the blood on his badly cut temple.

“Don’t worry! I shall never forget anything now,” he replied.

“Then fire!” exclaimed Azazello. “Fire, from which everything began and with which we end everything.”

“Fire!” cried Margarita in a terrible voice. The little window in the basement banged, the blind was blown aside by the wind. There was a brief, merry rumbling in the sky. Azazello thrust his clawed hand into the stove, pulled out a smoking brand and set light to the cloth on the table. Then he set light to a bundle of old newspapers on the divan, and after that to the manuscript and the curtain at the window.

The Master, already intoxicated by the gallop to come, threw some book out onto the table from a shelf, riffled its leaves in the burning tablecloth, and the book flared up in cheerful flame.

“Burn, burn, former life!”

“Burn, suffering!” cried Margarita.

The room was already flickering in crimson columns, and the trio ran out through the doors together with the smoke, went up the stone stairs and found themselves in the little yard. The first thing they saw there was the house owner’s cook sitting on the ground, and beside her lay some spilt potatoes and several bunches of onions. The cook’s state was understandable. A trio of black horses were snorting by the shed, quivering and pawing up the earth in fountains. Margarita leapt up first, after her Azazello, last the Master. The cook, with a groan, wanted to raise her hand to make the sign of the cross, but Azazello cried threateningly from the saddle:

“I’ll cut your hand off!” He whistled, and the horses, breaking the branches of the limes, soared up and pierced a low, black cloud. Immediately smoke poured out from the little window of the basement. From below there carried the cook’s weak, pitiful cry:

“We’re on fire!”

The horses were already racing above the roofs of Moscow.

“I want to say goodbye to the city,” the Master cried to Azazello, who was riding along in front. Thunder devoured the end of the Master’s phrase. Azazello nodded his head and set his horse off at a gallop. A cloud was flying headlong to meet the flying riders, but not yet splashing out any rain.

They were flying over a boulevard; they could see the little figures of people running in all directions, sheltering from the rain. The first drops were falling. They flew over some smoke – all that remained of Griboyedov. They flew over the city, which was already being flooded in darkness. There were flashes of lightning above them. Later the roofs gave way to greenery. Only then did the rain lash down and turn the flying riders into three huge bubbles in the water.

The sensation of flight was already familiar to Margarita, but not to the Master, and he wondered at how quickly they found themselves at their objective, the man to whom, having no one else, he wished to say goodbye. He recognized immediately in the shroud of rain the building of Stravinsky’s clinic, the river, and the wood he had studied so closely on the other bank. They came down in a clearing in a grove not far from the clinic.

“I’ll wait for you here,” cried Azazello, clasping his hands together and now lit up by lightning, now disappearing in the grey shroud, “say goodbye, but quickly!”

The Master and Margarita leapt from their saddles and could be glimpsed like watery shadows as they flew off across the clinic garden. In another moment, with an accustomed hand, the Master was moving aside the grille in room 117. Margarita followed him. They went in to Ivanushka unseen and unnoticed in the crashing and the howling of the storm. The Master stopped beside the bed.

Ivanushka was lying motionless, just as when he had for the first time observed a storm in the house of his repose. But he was not crying like that time. When he had properly examined the dark silhouette that had burst in on him from the balcony, he rose a little, reached out his hands and said joyfully:

“Ah, it’s you! I’ve been waiting and waiting for you. And here you are, my neighbour.”

To this the Master replied:

“I’m here! But, unfortunately, I can no longer be your neighbour. I’m flying away for ever, and I’ve come to see you only to say goodbye.”

“I knew it, I guessed,” Ivan replied quietly, and asked: “Did you meet him?”

“Yes,” said the Master, “I came to say goodbye to you because you were the only person I’d spoken with recently.”

Ivan brightened up, and said:

“It’s a good thing that you dropped in here. I’ll keep my word, you know: I won’t write any more poetry. Something else interests me now” – Ivanushka smiled, and his mad eyes looked somewhere past the Master – “I want to write something else. While I’ve been lying here, you know, I’ve come to understand a very great deal.”

The Master grew agitated at these words and, taking a seat on the edge of Ivanushka’s bed, said:

“Now that’s good, that’s good. You write a sequel about him!” Ivanushka’s eyes flared up.

“Won’t you be doing that yourself, then?” At this point he hung his head and added pensively: “Ah yes… what ever am I asking,” Ivanushka cast a sidelong glance at the floor, then gave a frightened look.

“That’s right,” said the Master, and his voice seemed to Ivanushka unfamiliar and muffled, “I won’t be writing about him any longer. I’ll be busy with something else.”

A distant whistle cut through the noise of the storm.

“Do you hear?” asked the Master.

“It’s the noise of the storm…”

“No, it’s me being called; it’s time for me to go,” the Master explained, and rose from the bed.

“Hang on! One more word,” requested Ivan, “did you find her? Did she stay true to you?”

“Here she is,” said the Master, and pointed at the wall. The dark Margarita detached herself from the white wall and went up to the bed. She looked at the young man lying there, and grief could be read in her eyes.

“Poor thing, poor thing,” Margarita whispered soundlessly, and bent towards the bed.

“What a beautiful woman,” said Ivan, without envy, but with sadness and with a kind of quiet emotion, “look how well it’s turned out for you. But that’s not how it is for me.” Here he had a think and added pensively: “But then perhaps it is…”

“It is, it is,” Margarita whispered, and leant right down to the supine man, “now I shall kiss you on the forehead, and everything will be as it should be for you. now you just believe me on this score, I’ve already seen everything, I know everything.”

The prostrate young man put his arms around her neck and she kissed him.

“Farewell, disciple,” the Master said, scarcely audibly, and began melting into thin air. He vanished, and together with him Margarita vanished too. The balcony grille closed.

Ivanushka fell into disquiet. He sat up on the bed, looked around in alarm, even gave a groan, began talking to himself, rose. The storm was raging ever more violently and had evidently stirred up his soul. He was also worried by the fact that outside the door his hearing, already accustomed to the constant quiet, had picked up anxious footsteps, muffled voices. Fretting and already quivering, he called:

“Praskovya Fyodorovna!”

Praskovya Fyodorovna was already coming into the room, gazing at Ivan in enquiry and alarm.

“What? What is it?” she asked. “Is the storm worrying you? Well, never mind, never mind… We’ll help you right away. I’ll call a doctor right away.”

“No, Praskovya Fyodorovna, there’s no need to call a doctor,” said Ivanushka, anxiously gazing not at Praskovya Fyodorovna, but at the wall, “there’s nothing in particularly wrong with me. I can sort everything out now, don’t you worry. It’d be better if you told me” – Ivan’s request was heartfelt – “what’s just happened next door there, in room 118?”

“In 118?” asked Praskovya Fyodorovna in return, and her eyes became shifty. “Nothing’s happened there.” But her voice was insincere; Ivanushka noted it immediately and said:

“Hey, Praskovya Fyodorovna! You’re such a truthful person. Do you think I’ll start raging? No, Praskovya Fyodorovna, there’ll be none of that. But better tell me straight. I can sense everything through the wall, you know.”

“Your neighbour has just died,” whispered Praskovya Fyodorovna, powerless to overcome her truthfulness and kindness, and, completely clothed in the glare of the lightning, she gave Ivanushka a frightened look. But nothing terrible happened to Ivanushka. He only raised a finger meaningfully and said:

“I knew it! I can tell you for sure, Praskovya Fyodorovna, that another person has just died in the city too. I even know who” – here Ivanushka smiled mysteriously. “It’s a woman.”