The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life. Andy Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ But today the view across Viking Bay has vanished behind fogged-up windows.

      We leave Morelli’s and walk up the promenade to the Charles Dickens museum. Hmm, some other time. But around the corner on Albion Street is the Albion Bookshop. I yank the pushchair up the steps, holding open the heavy door with one foot, and once inside try to find a corner where we shan’t be in anyone’s way, even though the shop is empty. Down the street a little way is another Albion Bookshop, a huge, endearingly dingy secondhand place – fun for Dad, who could easily lose hours in there, but less so for three-year-old boys. So while Alex decides which Mr Men book he would like, I browse this shop’s smaller selection of titles. There is a cookery section, a local interest section – Broadstairs In Old Photographs, etc. – and a Dan Brown section, with his four novels to date: The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons and the other two, and a plenteous range of spin-offs and tie-ins: Cracking the Da Vinci Code, Rosslyn and the Grail, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.^fn4 On the fiction shelves, between Maeve Binchy and The Pilgrim’s Progress, I am surprised to find Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. I pick it up – small format, £3.99, good value. The grinning cat on the front cover^fn5 makes Alex laugh, so I take it to the till along with his choice, Mr Small.

      fn4. I am aware The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published long before The Da Vinci Code. The Albion Bookshop has since closed down.

      fn5. The book is orange, the cat is black.

      It is time for us to go home. On the long climb back up the hill to Broadstairs station, the combination of sea air and ice cream finally catches up with Alex and he nods off. We find the space on the train next to the disabled toilet and, with my son still asleep and nothing to do for half an hour, I start to read.

      ‘Mr Small was very small. Probably the smallest person you’ve ever seen in your whole life.’

      No, better wait till Alex wakes up. I turn my attention to the other book.

      ‘At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch’s Ponds …’

      Later that evening, after reading Mr Small three times in a row, after Alex is tucked up and sleeping, I hazard a few more pages of The Master and Margarita. The two gentlemen at Patriarch’s Ponds in Moscow are Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, editor of a highbrow literary magazine, and the poet Ivan Nikolayich Poniryov, ‘who wrote under the pseudonym of Bezdomny’. Before they have had a chance even to exchange pleasantries, a third character materialises:

      ‘Just then the sultry air coagulated and wove itself into the shape of a man – a transparent man of the strangest appearance. On his small head was a jockey-cap and he wore a short check bum-freezer made of air. The man was seven feet tall but narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin and with a face made for derision.’

      It seems this character, ‘swaying from left to right … without touching the ground’, is the Devil. But no sooner has He manifested himself, than the Devil vanishes. Shortly thereafter, Berlioz and Bezdomny are joined by a ‘professor’, a foreigner, country of origin unclear. The three of them have a rambling, opaque conversation. At the end of the first chapter, the action suddenly shifts to Rome at the time of Christ, and the palace of Pontius Pilate. What?

      I cannot really fathom it. But the sheer novelty of reading a book of this sort after such a long lay-off is reward in itself. I am doing something difficult – good for me.

      ‘Your head will be cut off!’ the foreigner informs Berlioz in the course of their baffling chat, ‘by a Russian woman, a member of the Komsomol.’ (I have no idea what the Komsomol is.) After the mysterious detour to Rome in Chapter 2, back at Patriarch’s Ponds the editor and poet decide this ‘professor’ is certifiably crazy – ‘his green left eye was completely mad, his right eye, black, expressionless and dead’. Leaving Bezdomny to watch over this lunatic, Berlioz runs to telephone the authorities. (‘The professor, cupping his hands into a trumpet, shouted: “Wouldn’t you like me to send a telegram to your uncle in Kiev?” Another shock – how did this madman know that he had an uncle in Kiev?’)

      Then this happens:

      ‘Berlioz ran to the turnstile and pushed it. Having passed through he was just about to step off the pavement and cross the tramlines when a white and red light flashed in his face and the pedestrian signal lit up with the words “Stop! Tramway!” A tram rolled into view, rocking slightly along the newly-laid track that ran down Yermolayevsky Street and into Bronnaya. As it turned to join the main line it suddenly switched its inside lights on, hooted and accelerated.

Although he was standing in safety, the cautious Berlioz decided to retreat behind the railings. He put his hand on the turnstile and took a step backwards. He missed his grip and his foot slipped on the cobbles as inexorably as though on ice. As it slid towards the tramlines his other leg gave way and Berlioz was thrown across the track. Grabbing wildly, Berlioz fell prone. He struck his head violently on the cobblestones and the gilded moon flashed hazily across his vision. He just had time to turn on his back, drawing his legs up to his stomach with a frenzied movement and as he turned over he saw the woman tram-driver’s face, white with horror above her red necktie, as she bore down on him with irresistible force and speed. Berlioz made no sound, but all around him the streets rang with the desperate shrieks of women’s voices. The driver grabbed the electric brake, the car pitched forward, jumped the rails and with a tinkling crash the glass broke in all its windows. At this moment Berlioz heard a despairing voice: “Oh, no …!” Once more and for the last time the moon flashed before his eyes but it split into fragments and then went black.

      Berlioz vanished from sight under the tramcar and a round, dark object rolled across the cobbles, over the kerbstone and bounced along the pavement.

      It was a severed head.’

      Google tells me the Komsomol was the popular name for the youth wing of the Communist party of the Soviet Union and not the Moscow municipal tram network. But it’s academic: I’m in.

      Right here is where my life changes direction. This is the moment I resolve to finish this book – a severed head bouncing across the cobblestones. Life must be held at bay, just for a few days, if for no reason other than to prove it can be done. I need to know what happens next.

      Mikhail Bulgakov was born in Kiev in 1891 and died in Moscow in 1940 and at no point in-between, as far as I can establish, did he ever visit Broadstairs – never toured the Dickens Museum on a drizzly afternoon, never ordered a milkshake at Morelli’s. But let’s pretend he did. Imagine he manifested himself in the Albion Bookshop on Albion Street and discovered, as I had done, a copy of something called The Master and Margarita, with his name on the spine and cover. For a number of reasons, he would be astonished.

      Macтep и Mapгapитa, usually translated as The Master and Margarita, was unpublished at the time of Bulgakov’s death – unpublished and, in one sense, unpublishable. For many years, it was available only as samizdat (written down and circulated in secret); to be found in possession of a copy was to risk imprisonment. Even its first official appearance in the journal Moskva in 1966 was censored; the first complete version was not published until 1973. Yet here it is in Broadstairs, available to purchase and in English to boot. ‘Бoжe мoй!’^fn6

      fn6. ‘Good Heavens!’

      Another reason Bulgakov might be astounded to find his novel, in English, in a small Kent bookshop, might stagger out onto the pavement to catch his breath and, with a trembling hand, light a cigarette – ‘Я нyждaюcь в дымe!’^fn7 – is that back when he died, СКАЧАТЬ