The Master and Margarita Read Online Free PDF Page B

Feeling that something is wrong, you rush to learned doctors, then to quacks, and sometimes to fortune-tellers as well.
    Like the first, so the second and third are completely senseless, as you understand. And it all ends tragically: a man who still recently thought he was governing something, suddenly winds up lying motionless in a wooden box, and the people around him, seeing that the man lying there is no longer good for anything, burn him in an oven.
    “And sometimes it’s worse still: the man has just decided to go to Kislovodsk” – here the foreigner squinted at Berlioz – “a trifling matter, it seems, but even this he cannot accomplish, because suddenly, no one knows why, he slips and falls under a tram-car! Are you going to say it was he who governed himself that way? Would it not be more correct to think that he was governed by someone else entirely?” And here the unknown man burst into a strange little laugh.
    Berlioz listened with great attention to the unpleasant story about the cancer and the tram-car, and certain alarming thoughts began to torment him.
    “He’s not a foreigner ... he’s not a foreigner ...” he thought, “he’s a most peculiar specimen ... but, excuse me, who is he then?...”
    You’d like to smoke, I see?” the stranger addressed Homeless unexpectedly. "Which kind do you prefer?”
    “What, have you got several?” the poet, who had run out of cigarettes, asked glumly.
    “Which do you prefer?” the stranger repeated.
    “Okay — Our Brand,” Homeless replied spitefully.
    The unknown man immediately took a cigarette case from his pocket and offered it to Homeless: “Our Brand ...”
    Editor and poet were both struck, not so much by Our Brand precisely turning up in the cigarette case, as by the cigarette case itself. It was of huge size, made of pure gold, and, as it was opened, a diamond triangle flashed white and blue fire on its lid.
    Here the writers thought differently. Berlioz: “No, a foreigner!”, and Homeless: “Well, devil take him, eh! ...”
    The poet and the owner of the cigarette case lit up, but the non-smoker Berlioz declined.
    “I must counter him like this,” Berlioz decided, “yes, man is mortal, no one disputes that. But the thing is ...”
    However, before he managed to utter these words, the foreigner spoke: “Yes, man is mortal, but that would be only half the trouble. The worst of it is that he’s sometimes unexpectedly mortal — there’s the trick! And generally he’s unable to say what he’s going to do this same evening.”
    “What an absurd way of putting the question ...” Berlioz thought and objected: “Well, there’s some exaggeration here. About this same evening I do know more or less certainly. It goes without saying, if a brick should fall on my head on Bronnaya...”
    “No brick,” the stranger interrupted imposingly, “will ever fall on anyone’s head just out of the blue. In this particular case, I assure you, you are not in danger of that at all. You will die a different death.”
    “Maybe you know what kind precisely?” Berlioz inquired with perfectly natural irony, getting drawn into an utterly absurd conversation. “And will tell me?”
    “Willingly,” the unknown man responded. He looked Berlioz up and down as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something like: “One, two ... Mercury in the second house ... moon gone ... six disaster ... evening – seven ...” then announced loudly and joyfully: “Your head will be cut off!”
    Homeless goggled his eyes wildly and spitefully at the insouciant stranger, and Berlioz asked, grinning crookedly: “By whom precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?”[24]
    “No,” replied his interlocutor, “by a Russian woman, a Komsomol[25]girl.”
    “Hm ...” Berlioz mumbled, vexed at the stranger’s little joke, “well, excuse me, but that’s not very likely.”
    “And I beg you to excuse me,” the foreigner replied, “but it’s so.