7. A Bad Apartment

If next morning someone had said this to Styopa Likhodeyev: “Styopa! You’ll be shot if you don’t get up this very minute!” – Styopa would have replied in a languid, scarcely audible voice: “Shoot me, do with me what you will, but I shan’t get up.”

It seemed to him that he couldn’t open his eyes, let alone get up, because he only had to do so for lightning to flash and his head to be smashed to pieces at once. Inside that head a heavy bell was booming, brown spots with fiery green rims were swimming by between his eyeballs and his closed eyelids, and to crown it all, he felt nauseous, and it seemed, moreover, that this nausea was linked with the sounds of some importunate gramophone.

Styopa tried to call something to mind, but there was only one thing that would come: that yesterday, there was no knowing where, he had apparently been standing with a napkin in his hand and trying to kiss some lady or other, while promising her that next day, and precisely at noon, he would pay her a visit. The lady had been declining this, saying: “No, no, I shan’t be at home!” – but Styopa had stubbornly insisted on having it his way: “Well, I shall just go and turn up!”

Styopa had absolutely no idea who the lady had been, or what time it was now, or what day of what month – and worst of all, he could not understand where he was. He attempted to elucidate this last point at least, and to do so he unstuck the glued-up lids of his left eye. In the semi-darkness there was something shining dimly. Styopa finally recognized a cheval glass, and realized he was lying on his back on his bed – that is, on the former jeweller’s wife’s bed – in his bedroom. At this point he received such a blow on the head that he closed his eye and began groaning.

Let us explain ourselves: Styopa Likhodeyev, the Director of the Variety Theatre, had come round in the morning at home, in the very apartment he had shared with the late Berlioz, in a large six-storey building shaped like the letter pokoi on Sadovaya Street.

It should be said that this apartment – No. 50 – had already long enjoyed if not a bad, then in any event a strange reputation. Just two years before, its owner had been the widow of the jeweller De Fougeré. Anna Franzevna de Fougeré, a respectable and very businesslike fifty-year-old lady, had rented out three of her five rooms to lodgers: one whose name seems to have been Belomut and another with a name that has been lost.

And then, two years before, inexplicable things had started happening in the apartment: people had begun disappearing from this apartment without trace.

One day, on a holiday, a policeman appeared at the apartment, summoned the second lodger (whose name has been lost) into the entrance hall and said that the latter was requested to drop into the police station for a moment to sign for something. The lodger asked Anfisa, Anna Franzevna’s devoted and longtime maid, to say, in the event of anybody phoning him, that he would be back in ten minutes, and off he went with the correctly behaved policeman in white gloves. But not only did he not come back in ten minutes, he never came back at all. Most surprising of all is the fact that the policeman evidently disappeared along with him as well.

The pious – or to put it more candidly, the superstitious – Anfisa came straight out and declared to Anna Franzevna, who was most upset, that it was witchcraft, and that she knew very well who had stolen away both the lodger and the policeman – only, with night approaching, she did not want to say.

Well, and witchcraft, as is well known, only has to start, and then you simply can’t stop it with anything. That second lodger disappeared, if memory serves, on the Monday, and on the Wednesday Belomut vanished into thin air – but under different circumstances, it is true. A car stopped by for him in the morning as usual, to take him to work, and it did take him away, but it brought nobody back, and it came back itself no more.

The grief and horror of Madame Belomut beggar description. But, alas, both the one and the other were short-lived. That same night, returning with Anfisa from the dacha, to which she had for some reason hurriedly gone away, Anna Franzevna found Citizeness Belomut no longer at the apartment. But that is not all: the doors of both the rooms which had been occupied by the Belomuts proved to have been sealed!

Somehow two days passed. And on the third day, Anna Franzevna, who had been suffering from insomnia all this time, went off to the dacha hurriedly once again… Does it need to be said that she did not come back?!

Anfisa, remaining on her own, cried and cried to her heart’s content and went to bed after one o’clock in the morning. What happened to her afterwards is unknown, but the tenants in other apartments told how some sort of knocking was allegedly to be heard all through the night in No. 50, and the electric light was allegedly burning in the windows till morning. In the morning it became clear that Anfisa was not there either!

For a long time all sorts of legends were told in the building about those who had disappeared and about the apartment with a curse on it, such as, for example, that the dried-up and pious Anfisa had allegedly carried twenty-five large diamonds belonging to Anna Franzevna in a little chamois-leather pouch on her withered breast. And that there allegedly came to light of their own accord, in the firewood shed at that same dacha to which Anna Franzevna had been hurriedly going, some incalculable treasures in the form of those same diamonds, and also gold currency of tsarist coinage. And more of the same sort of thing. Well, what we don’t know, we can’t vouch for.

Whatever the case, the apartment stood empty and sealed for only a week, and then it was moved into by the late Berlioz and his wife and that same Styopa, also with his wife. It is perfectly natural that no sooner did they find themselves in the accursed apartment than the-devil-knows-what began happening to them too. Namely, in the course of a single month both wives disappeared – but these two not without trace. Of Berlioz’s wife it was said she had allegedly been seen in Kharkov with some ballet-master, while Styopa’s wife is supposed to have come to light on Bozhedomka, where, as gossip had it, the Director of the Variety, exploiting his innumerable acquaintances, had contrived to procure a room for her, on the one condition that she should not show her face on Sadovaya Street…

And so Styopa began groaning. He wanted to call the maid, Grunya, and demand some pyramidon of her, but managed to grasp, after all, that this was stupid, that Grunya, of course, did not have any pyramidon. He tried to call Berlioz to his assistance, twice groaned out: “Misha. Misha…” – but, as you can understand for yourselves, received no reply. The most complete silence reigned in the apartment.

Upon moving his toes, Styopa guessed he was lying in his socks, and he passed a shaky hand over his hip to decide whether or not he was wearing trousers, but could not decide. Finally, seeing that he was abandoned and alone, that there was no one to help him, he decided to get up, whatever the inhuman effort it cost.

Styopa unstuck his gummed-up eyelids and saw he was reflected in the cheval glass in the guise of a man with his hair poking out in all directions, with a swollen physiognomy covered in black stubble, with puffy eyes, and wearing a dirty shirt with a collar and a tie, long johns and socks.

That was how he saw himself in the cheval glass, but beside the mirror he saw a stranger, dressed in black and in a black beret.

Styopa sat up on the bed and, as best he could, opened his bloodshot eyes wide at the stranger.

The silence was broken by this stranger pronouncing in a low, heavy voice and with a foreign accent the following words:

“Good day, dearest Stepan Bogdanovich!”

There was a pause, after which, having made the most terrible effort with himself, Styopa said:

“What do you want?” and was himself amazed, not recognizing his own voice. The word “what” he had pronounced in a treble, “do you” in a bass, while “want” had not come out at all.

The stranger grinned amicably, took out a big gold watch with a diamond triangle on the case, let it ring eleven times and said:

“Eleven! And exactly an hour that I’ve been awaiting your awakening, for you gave me an appointment to be at your home at ten. And here I am!”

Styopa fumbled for his trousers on the chair beside the bed and whispered:

“Excuse me…” He put them on and asked hoarsely: “Tell me, please, your name?”

Talking was difficult for him. At every word someone was sticking a needle into his brain, causing hellish pain.

“What? You’ve forgotten my name as well?” here the stranger smiled.

“Forgive me,” wheezed Styopa, feeling that his hangover was favouring him with a new symptom: it seemed to him that the floor beside the bed had gone away somewhere and that this very minute he would fly head first to the Devil in the netherworld.

“Dear Stepan Bogdanovich,” began the visitor, smiling shrewdly, “no pyramidon is going to help you. Follow the wise old rule – take the hair of the dog. The only thing that will return you to life is two shots of vodka with something hot and spicy to eat.”

Styopa was a cunning man and, however ill he may have been, he grasped that, seeing as he had been caught like this, he had to admit everything.

“To be frank,” he began, scarcely in control of his tongue, “yesterday I had a little…”

“Not a word more!” the caller replied, and moved aside on the armchair.

With his eyes popping out, Styopa saw that on a little table a tray had been prepared, on which there were slices of white bread, a dish of pressed caviar, a plate of pickled boletuses, something in a little saucepan and, finally, vodka in the jeweller’s wife’s voluminous carafe. Styopa was particularly struck by the fact that the carafe was covered in condensation from the cold. That was understandable, though – it was standing in a slop basin packed with ice. It had all been laid out, in short, neatly and capably.

The stranger did not let Styopa’s astonishment develop to an unhealthy degree, and deftly poured him a half-shot of vodka.

“What about you?” squeaked Styopa.

“With pleasure!”

Styopa brought the glass up to his lips with a jerky hand, while the stranger swallowed the contents of his glass in a single breath. Munching a bit of caviar, Styopa squeezed out of himself the words:

“But what about you. something to eat with it?”

“My thanks, I never have anything to eat with it,” the stranger replied, and poured a second glass each. The saucepan was uncovered – it proved to hold sausages in tomato sauce.

And now the damned greenery in front of his eyes melted away, words began to be pronounced properly, and, most importantly, Styopa remembered one or two things. Namely, that yesterday’s doings had been at Skhodnya, at the dacha of Khustov, the sketch-writer, where this Khustov had taken Styopa in a taxicab. Even the way they had hired this taxicab near the Metropole came to mind: there had been some actor or something of the kind there too at the time… with a gramophone in a little suitcase. Yes, yes, yes, it had been at the dacha! And also, he seemed to recall, that gramophone had made the dogs howl. It was just the lady Styopa had wanted to kiss that remained unclarified. the devil knew who she was. she worked in radio, he thought, but maybe not.

The previous day was thus gradually being cleared up, but Styopa was now much more interested in the present one and, in particular, in the stranger’s appearance in his bedroom, and with vodka and food to go with it, what’s more. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to clarify that.

“Well then, I hope you’ve remembered my name now?”

But Styopa only smiled bashfully and spread his hands.

“Well, really! I sense you were drinking port after the vodka! For pity’s sake, how can you possibly do that!”

“I’d like to request that this should remain just between us,” said Styopa in an ingratiating tone.

“Oh, of course, of course! But it goes without saying that I can’t vouch for Khustov.”

“So you know Khustov, then?”

“I caught a glimpse of that individual in your office yesterday, but one cursory glance at his face is sufficient to realize that he’s a bastard, a troublemaker, a time-server and a toady.”

“Quite correct!” thought Styopa, amazed at such a true, accurate and concise definition of Khustov.

Yes, the previous day was being pieced together, but even so, uneasiness was not abandoning the Director of the Variety. The thing was that in that previous day there yawned an absolutely enormous black hole. Now this here stranger in the beret, say whatever you like, Styopa had definitely not seen him in his office yesterday.

“Woland, Professor of Black Magic,” the caller said weightily, seeing Styopa’s difficulties, and he recounted everything in order.

Yesterday afternoon he had arrived in Moscow from abroad, and had immediately presented himself to Styopa and proposed his temporary engagement at the Variety. Styopa had rung the Moscow District Spectacles Commission and submitted the question for approval (Styopa blenched and began blinking), had signed a contract with Professor Woland for seven shows (Styopa opened his mouth), had arranged that Woland should call on him to specify the details further at ten o’clock in the morning today… And so here Woland was. On arrival he had been met by the maid, Grunya, who had explained that she had only just arrived herself, that she was non-resident, that Berlioz was not at home, and that if the caller wished to see Stepan Bogdanovich, then he should go through into the bedroom himself. Stepan Bogdanovich was sleeping so soundly, she would not take it upon herself to wake him. Seeing the condition Stepan Bogdanovich was in, the artiste had sent Grunya to the nearest grocer’s for the vodka and the food, to the chemist’s for the ice, and.

“Allow me to settle up with you,” the crushed Styopa whimpered, and began searching for his wallet.

“Oh, what nonsense!” exclaimed the touring artiste, and would hear no more of it.

And so the vodka and the food became clear, but all the same Styopa was a sad sight to see; he certainly could not remember anything about a contract, and had not seen this Woland on the previous day for the life of him. Yes, Khustov there had been, but Woland there had not.

“Permit me to take a look at the contract,” Styopa requested quietly.

“Certainly, certainly…”

Styopa glanced at the document and went numb. Everything was in place. Firstly, Styopa’s devil-may-care signature in his own writing! A slanting inscription to the side in the hand of the Financial Director, Rimsky, with permission to pay out ten thousand roubles to the artiste Woland against the thirty-five thousand roubles due to him for seven performances. What is more, here too was Woland’s signature to the effect that he had already received the ten thousand!

“What on earth is this?” thought the unhappy Styopa, and his head began to spin. Is this the start of ominous memory lapses?! But it goes without saying that after the contract had been produced, further expressions of surprise would have been simply improper. Styopa asked permission of his guest to absent himself for a moment, and just as he was, in his socks, he ran to the telephone in the hall. On the way he shouted in the direction of the kitchen:

“Grunya!”

But no one responded. At this point he glanced at the door of Berlioz’s study, which was next to the hall, and at this point he became, as they say, rooted to the spot. On the door handle he could make out the most enormous wax seal on a string. “Hello!” somebody roared inside Styopa’s head. “That’s all I need!” And at this point Styopa’s thoughts started running along what was now a double track, but, as is always the way during a catastrophe, in just the one direction and, all in all, the devil knows where. It is difficult even to convey the muddle inside Styopa’s head. There was this devilish business with the black beret, the cold vodka and the incredible contract – and now, to add to all that, if you please, a seal on the door! That is to say, tell anyone you like that Berlioz had done something wrong, and he wouldn’t believe it – honest to God, he would not believe it! And yet the seal, there it is! Yes, sir. Yes indeed…

And at this point there began to stir in Styopa’s brain some most unpleasant little thoughts about an article which, as ill luck would have it, he had recently forced upon Mikhail Alexandrovich to be printed in his journal. An idiotic article too, between ourselves! Pointless, and the money wasn’t much.

Following immediately upon the recollection of the article, the recollection came flying in of some dubious conversation that had taken place, as he recalled, on the twenty-fourth of April, in the evening, right here, in the dining room, while Styopa had been having dinner with Mikhail Alexandrovich. That is to say, of course, in the full sense of the word this conversation could not have been called dubious (Styopa would not have entered into such a conversation), but it had been a conversation on some needless subject. They could perfectly freely not have embarked upon it at all, Citizens. Before the seal, there is no doubt, that conversation could have been considered utterly trifling, but now, after the seal.

“Oh, Berlioz, Berlioz!” it came boiling up in Styopa’s head. “I just can’t believe it!”

But this was not the occasion to spend a long time grieving, and Styopa dialled the office number of the Variety’s Financial Director, Rimsky. Styopa’s position was a ticklish one: firstly, the foreigner might be offended by Styopa checking up on him after the contract had been shown, and talking to the Financial Director was extremely difficult too. After all, you really wouldn’t just ask him like this: “Tell me, did I draw up a contract with a Professor of Black Magic for thirty-five thousand roubles yesterday?” It wouldn’t do to ask like that!

“Yes!” Rimsky’s abrupt, unpleasant voice was heard in the receiver.

“Hello, Grigory Danilovich,” Styopa began quietly, “it’s Likhodeyev. Why I’m ringing is… hm. hm. I’ve got this. er… artiste Woland here with me. The thing is. I wanted to ask how things were with regard to this evening?”

“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? 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!”

“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, to damn well chuck him out of Moscow?”

“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.