Reading Master and Margarita - 14

Chapter 14

Glory to the Cock!

We haven’t visited Variety after the black magic show. Let’s see what’s going on there. Findirector Rimsky was unhappy with the magician and his show. After the ‘exposure’ of Simpleyarov, he was no longer able to control his nerves and comes back to his cabinet. Looking at the currency notes which he collected from the hall he was lost in thoughts.

Suddenly he hears the shrill whistle of police which never brings happiness.

He goes to the window facing Sadovaya and peeps down….people were coming out of Variety, and some people were surrounding a woman who was just in undergarments…they were whistling, laughing, taunting the poor woman whose fashionable dress from Fagot’s shop had suddenly disappeared…another victim was also facing a similar ordeal a little away…and enthusiastic Samaritans were too eager to escort her to her place!

Rimsky spat with repulsion and came back to his seat and decided to ACT. He had to inform THEM about Styopa’s disappearance followed by that of Varenukha; episode with currency notes; the shocking incidence with George Bengalsky and the scandal that took place with Simpleyarov.

But the moment he was about to lift the receiver, the phone rang on its own and a lewd female voice warns him not to ring anywhere.

Soon after this the key in the key-hole started moving by itself, the door opened and entered Varenukha.

Well, you will read what all happened there after: how Varenukha, who was not Varenukha but some devil in the guise of Varenukha tried to kill Rimsky; how a naked woman tries to enter the Findirector’s cabinet from window and how she along with fake Varenukha had to leave the room at the cock’s third crow ….and Rimsky, who is looking like an 80 years old man, with all his hair white, rushes to the Railway station and vanishes from Moscow. How magically Bulgakov describes it!

As soon as the findirector became firmly convinced that the administrator was lying to him, fear crept over his body, starting from the legs, and twice again the findirector fancied that a putrid malarial dankness was wafting across the floor.

Never for a moment taking his eyes off the administrator - who squirmed somehow strangely in his armchair, trying not to get out of the blue shade of the desk lamp, and screening himself with a newspaper in some remarkable fashion from the bothersome light - the findirector was thinking of only one thing: what did it all mean? Why was he being lied to so brazenly, in the silent and deserted building, by the administrator who was so late in coming back to him? And the awareness of danger, an unknown but menacing danger, began to gnaw at Rimsky's soul. Pretending to ignore Varenukha's dodges and tricks with the newspaper, the findirector studied his face, now almost without listening to the yarn Varenukha was spinning. There was something that seemed still more inexplicable than the calumny invented.

God knows why, about adventures in Pushkino, and that something was the change in the administrator's appearance and manners.

No matter how the man pulled the duck-like visor of his cap over his eyes, so as to throw a shadow on his face, no matter how he fidgeted with the newspaper, the findirector managed to make out an enormous bruise on the right side of his face just by the nose. Besides that, the normally full-blooded administrator was now pale with a chalk-like, unhealthy pallor, and on this stifling night his neck was for some reason wrapped in an old striped scarf. Add to that the repulsive manner the administrator had acquired during the time of his absence of sucking and smacking, the sharp change in his voice, which had become hollow and coarse, and the furtiveness and cowardliness in his eyes, and one could boldly say that Ivan Savelyevich Varenukha had become unrecognizable.

Something else burningly troubled the findirector, but he was unable to grasp precisely what it was, however much he strained his feverish mind, however hard he peered at Varenukha. One thing he could affirm, that there was something unprecedented, unnatural in this combination of the administrator and the familiar armchair.

"Well, we finally overpowered him, loaded him into the car,' Varenukha boomed, peeking from behind the paper and covering the bruise with his hand.

Rimsky suddenly reached out and, as if mechanically, tapping his fingers on the table at the same time, pushed the electric-bell button with his palm and went numb. The sharp signal ought to have been heard without fail in the empty building. But no signal came, and the button sank lifelessly into the wood of the desk. The button was dead, the bell broken.

The findirector's stratagem did not escape the notice of Varenukha, who asked, twitching, with a clearly malicious fire flickering in his eyes:

"What are you ringing for?'

'Mechanically,' the findirector replied hollowly, jerking his hand back, and asked in turn, in an unsteady voice: "What's that on your face?'

'The car skidded, I bumped against the door-handle,' Varenukha said, looking away.

'He's lying!' the findirector exclaimed mentally. And here his eyes suddenly grew round and utterly insane, and he stared at the back of the armchair.

Behind the chair on the floor two shadows lay criss-cross, one more dense and black, the other faint and grey. The shadow of the back of the chair and of its tapering legs could be seen distinctly on the floor, but there was no shadow of Varenukha's head above the back of the chair, or of the administrator's legs under its legs.

`He casts no shadow!' Rimsky cried out desperately in his mind. He broke into shivers.

Varenukha, following Rimsky's insane gaze, looked furtively behind him at the back of the chair, and realized that he had been found out.

He got up from the chair (the findirector did likewise) and made one step back from the desk, clutching his briefcase in his hands.

'He's guessed, damn him! Always was clever,' Varenukha said, grinning spitefully right in the findirector's face, and he sprang unexpectedly from the chair to the door and quickly pushed down the catch on the lock. The findirector looked desperately behind him, as he retreated to the window giving on to the garden, and in this window, flooded with moonlight, saw the face of a naked girl pressed against the glass and her naked arm reaching through the vent-pane and trying to open the lower latch. The upper one was already open.

It seemed to Rimsky that the light of the desk lamp was going out and the desk was tilting. An icy wave engulfed Rimsky, but - fortunately for him - he got control of himself and did not fall. He had enough strength left to whisper, but not cry out:

'Help...'

Varenukha, guarding the door, hopped up and down by it, staying in air for a long time and swaying there. Waving his hooked fingers in Rimsky's direction, he hissed and smacked, winking to the girl in the window.

She began to hurry, stuck her red-haired head through the vent, reached her arm down as far as she could, her nails clawing at the lower latch and shaking the frame. Her arm began to lengthen, rubber-like, and became covered with a putrid green. Finally the dead woman's green fingers got hold of the latch knob, turned it, and the frame began to open. Rimsky cried out weakly, leaned against the wall, and held his briefcase in front of him like a shield. He realized that his end had come.

The frame swung wide open, but instead of the night's freshness and the fragrance of the lindens, the smell of a cellar burst into the room. The dead woman stepped on to the window-sill.

Rimsky clearly saw spots of decay on her breast.

And just then the joyful, unexpected crowing of a cock came from the garden, from that low building beyond the shooting gallery where birds participating in the program were kept. A loud, trained cock trumpeted, announcing that dawn was rolling towards Moscow from the east.

Savage fury distorted the girl's face, she emitted a hoarse oath, and at the door Varenukha shrieked and dropped from the air to the floor.

The cock-crow was repeated, the girl clacked her teeth, and her red hair stood on end. With the third crowing of the cock, she turned and flew out and after her, jumping up and stretching himself horizontally in the air, looking like a flying cupid, Varenukha slowly floated over the desk and out the window.

Let’s have a look at Rimsky’s character:

Rimsky was a very intelligent man; his observations were always keen; he was very sensitive…Bulgakov even comments that his sensitivity could compete even with the best seismograph of the world…he was feeling the putrid darkness entering the room from below the door; he could see the decaying breast of the naked woman; he could feel that she too was enveloped in the same putrid, rotten smell; he could notice that sitting on the chair Varenukha was not casting any shadow on the floor and he came to the conclusion that it is some devil and not Varenukha, who has come at midnight not only to inform about Styopa’s misadventures, but with some sinister design in his mind!

I shall again reiterate that Bulgakov has once again drawn the readers into a 3D film, where we don’t only read: don’t only visualize but we participate in everything that’s taking place in Rimsky’s cabinet.

We analyze like a detective, along with Rimsky, why Varenukha came so late, stealthily, after presuming that Rimsky had left the theatre? Why was he telling lies about Styopa Likhodeev; why was he not coming out of the shadow of table lamp; why was he hiding his face from Rimsky; how did he acquire the repulsive habit of sucking and smacking; where was the wound on his cheek from?

We share the terrible mental turmoil that Rimsky was going through; we share, we experience that his nerves are about to break out of scare for his own life and we heave a sigh of relief when the cock crows and the evil souls have to dissipate and disappear.

Bulgakov has mentioned repeatedly in the novel that the LIGHT from the EAST was coming to Moscow…don’t we feel that he had some specific ideas about the eastern wisdom?

In short, it is a marvelous, breathtaking chapter; you can’t leave the novel without reading it in one sitting!