However it may have been, the apartment stood empty and sealed for only a week. Then the late Berlioz moved in with his wife, and this same Styopa, also with his wife. It was perfectly natural that, as soon as they got into the malignant apartment, devil knows what started happening with them as well! Namely, within the space of a month both wives vanished. But these two not without a trace. Of Berlioz’s wife it was told that she had supposedly been seen in Kharkov with some ballet-master, while Styopa’s wife allegedly turned up on Bozhedomka Street, where wagging tongues said the director of the Variety, using his innumerable acquaintances, had contrived to get her a room, but on the one condition that she never show her face on Sadovaya ...
And so, Styopa moaned. He wanted to call the housekeeper Grunya and ask her for aspirin, but was still able to realize that it was foolish, and that Grunya, of course, had no aspirin. He tried to call Berlioz for help, groaned twice: ‘Misha ... Misha ...’, but, as you will understand, received no reply. The apartment was perfectly silent.
Moving his toes, Styopa realized that he was lying there in his socks, passed his trembling hand down his hip to determine whether he had his trousers on or not, but failed. Finally, seeing that he was abandoned and alone, and there was no one to help him, he decided to get up, however inhuman the effort it cost him.
Styopa unstuck his glued eyelids and saw himself reflected in the pier-glass as a man with hair sticking out in all directions, with a bloated physiognomy covered with black stubble, with puffy eyes, a dirty shirt, collar and necktie, in drawers and socks.
So he saw himself in the pier-glass, and next to the mirror he saw an unknown man, dressed in black and wearing a black beret.
Styopa sat up in bed and goggled his bloodshot eyes as well as he could at the unknown man. The silence was broken by this unknown man, who said in a low, heavy voice, and with a foreign accent, the following words:
‘Good morning, my most sympathetic Stepan Bogdanovich!’
There was a pause, after which, making a most terrible strain on himself, Styopa uttered:
‘What can I do for you?’ — and was amazed, not recognizing his own voice. He spoke the word ‘what’ in a treble, ’can I’ in a bass, and his ‘do for you’ did not come off at all.
The stranger smiled amicably, took out a big gold watch with a diamond triangle on the lid, rang eleven times, and said:
‘Eleven. And for exactly an hour I’ve been waiting for you to wake up, since you made an appointment for me to come to your place at ten. Here I am!’[73]
Styopa felt for his trousers on the chair beside his bed, whispered: ‘Excuse me ...’, put them on, and asked hoarsely: ‘Tell me your name, please?’
He had difficulty speaking. At each word, someone stuck a needle into his brain, causing infernal pain.
‘What! You’ve forgotten my name, too?’ Here the unknown man smiled.
‘Forgive me ...’ Styopa croaked, feeling that his hangover had presented him with a new symptom: it seemed to him that the floor beside his bed went away, and that at any moment he would go flying down to the devil’s dam in the nether world.
‘My dear Stepan Bogdanovich,’ the visitor said, with a perspicacious smile, ‘no aspirin will help you. Follow the wise old rule - cure like with like. The only thing that will bring you back to life is two glasses of vodka with something pickled and hot to go with it.’
Styopa was a shrewd man and, sick as he was, realized that since he had been found in this state, he would have to confess everything.
‘Frankly speaking,’ he began, his tongue barely moving, ‘yesterday I got a bit...’
‘Not a word more!’ the visitor answered and drew aside with his chair.
Styopa, rolling his eyes, saw that a tray had been set on a small table, on which tray there were sliced white bread, pressed caviar in a little bowl, pickled mushrooms on a dish, something in a saucepan, and, finally, vodka in a roomy decanter belonging to the jeweller’s wife. What struck Styopa especially was that the decanter was frosty with cold. This, however, was understandable: it was sitting in a bowl packed with ice. In short, the service was neat, efficient.
The stranger did not allow Styopa’s amazement to develop to a morbid degree, but deftly poured him half a glass of vodka.
‘And you?’ Styopa squeaked.
‘With pleasure!’
His hand twitching, Styopa brought the glass to his lips, while the stranger swallowed the contents of his glass at one gulp. Chewing a lump of caviar, Styopa squeezed out of himself the words:
‘And you ... a bite of something?’
‘Much obliged, but I never snack,’ the stranger replied and poured seconds. The saucepan was opened and found to contain frankfurters in tomato sauce.
And then the accursed green haze before his eyes dissolved, the words began to come out clearly, and, above all, Styopa remembered a thing or two. Namely, that it had taken place yesterday in Skhodnya, at the dacha of the sketch-writer Khustov, to which this same Khustov had taken Styopa in a taxi. There was even a memory of having hired this taxi by the Metropol, and there was also some actor, or not an actor ... with a gramophone in a little suitcase. Yes, yes, yes, it was at the dacha! The dogs, he remembered, had howled from this gramophone. Only the lady Styopa had wanted to kiss remained unexplained ... devil knows who she was ... maybe she was in radio, maybe not ...
The previous day was thus coming gradually into focus, but right now Styopa was much more interested in today’s day and, particularly, in the appearance in his bedroom of a stranger, and with hors d’œuvres and vodka to boot. It would be nice to explain that!
‘Well, I hope by now you’ve remembered my name?’
But Styopa only smiled bashfully and spread his arms.
‘Really! I get the feeling that you followed the vodka with port wine! Good heavens, it simply isn’t done!’
‘I beg you to keep it between us,’ Styopa said fawningly.
‘Oh, of course, of course! But as for Khustov, needless to say, I can’t vouch for him.’
‘So you know Khustov?’
‘Yesterday, in your office, I saw this individuum briefly, but it only takes a fleeting glance at his face to understand that he is a bastard, a squabbler, a trimmer and a toady.’
‘Perfectly true!’ thought Styopa, struck by such a true, precise and succinct definition of Khustov.
Yes, the previous day was piecing itself together, but, even so, anxiety would not take leave of the director of the Variety. The thing was that a huge black hole yawned in this previous day. Say what you will, Styopa simply had not seen this stranger in the beret in his office yesterday.
‘Professor of black magic Woland,’[74] the visitor said weightily, seeing Styopa’s difficulty, and he recounted everything in order.
Yesterday afternoon he arrived in Moscow from abroad, went immediately to Styopa, and offered his show to the Variety. Styopa telephoned the Moscow Regional Entertainment Commission and had the question approved (Styopa turned pale and blinked), then signed a contract with Professor Woland for seven performances (Styopa opened his mouth), and arranged that Woland should come the next morning at ten o’clock to work out the details ... And so Woland came. Having come, he was met by the housekeeper Grunya, who explained that she had just come herself, that she was not a live-in maid, that Berlioz was not home, and that if the visitor wished to see Stepan Bogdanovich, he should go to his bedroom himself. Stepan Bogdanovich was such a sound sleeper that she would not undertake to wake him up. Seeing what condition Stepan Bogdanovich was in, the artiste sent Grunya to the nearest grocery store for vodka and hors d’œuvres, to the druggist’s for ice, and ...
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