The Master and Margarita / Мастер и Маргарита. Книга для чтения на английском языке. Михаил Булгаков

Чтение книги онлайн.

      “You mustn’t be envious, Comrades. There are only twenty-two dachas, and there are only seven more being built, and there are three thousand of us in MASSOLIT”

      “Three thousand one hundred and eleven,” someone put in from the corner.

      “Well, you see,” continued the Navigator, “what’s to be done? It’s natural that the dachas were given to the most talented among us…”

      “The generals!” the scriptwriter Glukharev butted into the squabble bluntly.

      Beskudnikov left the room with an artificial yawn.

      “Alone in five rooms in Perelygino,” said Glukharev in his wake.

      “Lavrovich is alone in six,” cried Deniskin, “and the dining room’s panelled in oak.”

      “Oh, that isn’t the point at the moment,” droned Ababkov, “the point is that it’s half-past eleven.”

      A din started up – something akin to a revolt was brewing. They began ringing the hateful Perelygino, got through to the wrong dacha, to Lavrovich, learnt that Lavrovich had gone off to the river, and were thoroughly put out by that. Off the tops of their heads they rang the Commission for Belles-Lettres[164] plus the extension 930, and, of course, found nobody there.

      “He could have telephoned!” cried Deniskin, Glukharev and Kvant.

      Ah, they cried unjustly: Mikhail Alexandrovich could not have telephoned anywhere. Far, far from Griboyedov, in a huge hall lit by thousand-candle bulbs, on three zinc tables there lay what had until only recently been Mikhail Alexandrovich.

      On the first was his naked body, covered in dried blood, with a broken arm and a crushed ribcage, on the second was his head, with the front teeth knocked out and with dulled, open eyes, unperturbed by the extremely harsh light, and on the third was a heap of stiffened rags.

      Alongside the decapitated man stood a professor of forensic medicine, a pathological anatomist and his prosector, representatives of the investigation team, and Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz’s deputy at MASSOLIT, the writer Zheldybin, summoned by telephone away from his sick wife.

      A car had called for Zheldybin and, as a first priority, he had been taken, along with the investigators (this was around midnight) to the dead man’s apartment, where the sealing of his papers had been carried out, and only then had they all come to the morgue.

      And now the men standing beside the remains of the deceased were conferring as to what would be better: to sew the severed head back onto the neck or to display the body in the Griboyedov hall with the dead man simply covered with a black cloth right up to the chin?

      No, Mikhail Alexandrovich could not have telephoned anywhere, and Deniskin, Glukharev, Kvant and Beskudnikov were quite wrong to be shouting and indignant. At exactly midnight all twelve writers left the upper floor and went down to the restaurant. Here again they spoke ill of Mikhail Alexandrovich to themselves: all the tables on the veranda turned out, naturally, to be already occupied, and they had to stay and have dinner in those beautiful but stuffy halls.

      And at exactly midnight in the first of those halls something crashed, rang out, rained down, began jumping. And straight away a thin male voice shouted out recklessly to the music: “Hallelujah!”[165] It was the renowned Griboyedov jazz band striking up. Faces covered in perspiration seemed to light up; the horses drawn on the ceiling appeared to come to life; there seemed to be added light in the lamps; and suddenly, as though they had broken loose, both halls began to dance, and after them the veranda began to dance as well.

      Glukharev began to dance with the poetess Tamara Polumesyats, Kvant began to dance, Zhukopov the novelist began to dance with some film actress in a yellow dress. Dragoonsky and Cherdakchy were dancing, little Deniskin was dancing with the gigantic Navigator George, the beautiful architect Semyeikina-Gall was dancing in the tight grasp of a stranger in white canvas trousers. The regulars and invited guests were dancing, Muscovites and visitors, the writer Johann from Kronstadt, some Vitya Kuftik or other from Rostov, a director, apparently, with a purple rash completely covering his cheek, the most eminent representatives of the poetry subsection of MASSOLIT – that is, Pavianov, Bogokhulsky, Sladky, Shpichkin and Adelphina Buzdyak – were dancing, young men of unknown profession with crew cuts and padded shoulders were dancing, some very elderly man with a beard in which a little bit of spring onion had become lodged was dancing, and dancing with him was a sickly young girl, being eaten up by anaemia, in a crumpled little orange silk dress.

      Bathed in sweat, waiters carried misted mugs of beer above their heads, shouting hoarsely and with hatred: “Sorry, Citizen!” Somewhere through a megaphone a voice commanded: “Karsky kebab, one! Venison, two! Imperial chitterlings!” The thin voice was no longer singing, but howling “Hallelujah!” The crashing of the golden cymbals in the jazz band at times drowned out the crashing of the crockery which the dishwashers slid down a sloping surface into the kitchen. In a word, hell.

      And at midnight there was a vision in hell. Onto the veranda emerged a handsome black-eyed man in tails with a dagger of a beard who cast a regal gaze over his domains. It was said, it was said by mystics, that there was a time when the handsome man had not worn tails, but had been girdled with a broad leather belt, from which had protruded the butts of pistols, and his hair, black as a raven’s wing, had been tied with scarlet silk, and under his command a brig had sailed the Caribbean beneath a funereal black flag bearing a skull.

      But no, no! The seductive mystics lie: there are no Caribbean Seas on earth, and desperate filibusters do not sail them, and a corvette does not give chase, and cannon smoke does not spread above the waves. There is nothing, and never was there anything either! There is, look, a sorry lime tree, there is a cast-iron railing and, beyond it, the boulevard… And the ice is melting in a bowl, and at the next table someone’s bloodshot, bull-like eyes can be seen, and it’s terrible, terrible. O gods, my gods, give me poison, poison!.

      And suddenly at a table a word flew up: “Berlioz!” Suddenly the jazz band went to pieces and fell quiet, as though somebody had thumped it with their fist. “What, what, what, what?!” – “Berlioz!!!” And people started leaping up, started crying out.

      Yes, a wave of grief surged up at the fearful news about Mikhail Alexandrovich. Someone was making a fuss, shouting that it was essential, at once, here and now, right on the spot, to compose some collective telegram and send it off immediately.

      But what telegram, we’ll ask, and where to? And why should it be sent? Indeed, where to? And what good is any sort of telegram at all to the man whose flattened-out occiput[166] is now squeezed in the prosector’s rubber hands, whose neck is now being pricked by the curved needles of the professor? He’s dead, and no telegram is any good to him. It’s all over, we won’t burden the telegraph office any more.

      Yes, he’s dead, dead. But us, we’re alive, you know![167]

      Yes, a wave of grief surged up, but it held, held and started to abate, and someone had already returned to his table, and – at first stealthily, but then quite openly – had drunk some vodka and had taken a bite to eat. Indeed, chicken cutlets de volaille[168] weren’t to go to waste, were they? How can we help Mikhail Alexandrovich? By staying hungry? But us, you know, we’re alive!

      Naturally, the piano was locked, the jazz band dispersed, a number of journalists left for their offices СКАЧАТЬ