‘I do,’ replied the master, ‘my neighbour in the madhouse was that boy, Ivan Homeless. He told me about you.’
‘Ah, yes, yes,’ Woland responded, ‘I had the pleasure of meeting that young man at the Patriarch’s Ponds. He almost drove me mad myself, proving to me that I don’t exist. But you do believe that it is really I?’
‘I must believe,’ said the visitor, ‘though, of course, it would be much more comforting to consider you the product of a hallucination. Forgive me,’ the master added, catching himself.
‘Well, so, if it’s more comforting, consider me that,’ Woland replied courteously.
‘No, no!’ Margarita said, frightened, shaking the master by the shoulder. ‘Come to your senses! It’s really he before you!’
The cat intruded here as well.
‘And I really look like a hallucination. Note my profile in the moonlight.’ The cat got into the shaft of moonlight and wanted to add something else, but on being asked to keep silent, replied: ‘Very well, very well, I’m prepared to be silent. I’ll be a silent hallucination,’ and fell silent.
‘But tell me, why does Margarita call you a master?’ asked Woland.
The man smiled and said:
‘That is an excusable weakness. She has too high an opinion of a novel I wrote.’
‘What is this novel about?’
‘It is a novel about Pontius Pilate.’
Here again the tongues of the candles swayed and leaped, the dishes on the table clattered, Woland burst into thunderous laughter, but neither frightened nor surprised anyone. Behemoth applauded for some reason.
‘About what? About what? About whom?’ said Woland, ceasing to laugh. ‘And that — now? It’s stupendous! Couldn’t you have found some other subject? Let me see it.’ Woland held out his hand, palm up.
‘Unfortunately, I cannot do that,’ replied the master, ‘because I burned it in the stove.’
‘Forgive me, but I don’t believe you,’ Woland replied, ‘that cannot be: manuscripts don’t burn.’2 He turned to Behemoth and said, ‘Come on, Behemoth, let’s have the novel.’
The cat instantly jumped off the chair, and everyone saw that he had been sitting on a thick stack of manuscripts. With a bow, the cat gave the top copy to Woland. Margarita trembled and cried out, again shaken to the point of tears:
‘It’s here, the manuscript! It’s here!’
She dashed to Woland and added in admiration:
‘All-powerful! All-powerful!’
Woland took the manuscript that had been handed to him, turned it over, laid it aside, and silently, without smiling, stared at the master. But he, for some unknown reason, lapsed into anxiety and uneasiness, got up from the chair, wrung his hands, and, quivering as he addressed the distant moon, began to murmur:
‘And at night, by moonlight, I have no peace ... Why am I being troubled? Oh, gods, gods ...’
Margarita clutched at the hospital robe, pressing herself to him, and began to murmur herself in anguish and tears:
‘Oh, God, why doesn’t the medicine help you?’
‘It’s nothing, nothing, nothing,’ whispered Koroviev, twisting about the master, ‘nothing, nothing... One more little glass, I’ll keep you company...’
And the little glass winked and gleamed in the moonlight, and this little glass helped. The master was put back in his place, and the sick man’s face assumed a calm expression.
‘Well, it’s all clear now,’ said Woland, tapping the manuscript with a long finger.
‘Perfectly clear,’ confirmed the cat, forgetting his promise to be a silent hallucination. ‘Now the main line of this opus is thoroughly clear to me. What do you say, Azazello?’ he turned to the silent Azazello.
‘I say,’ the other twanged, ‘that it would be a good thing to drown you.’
‘Have mercy, Azazello,’ the cat replied to him, ‘and don’t suggest the idea to my sovereign. Believe me, every night I’d come to you in the same moonlight garb as the poor master, and nod and beckon to you to follow me. How would that be, Azazello?’
‘Well, Margarita,’ Woland again entered the conversation, ‘tell me everything you need.’
Margarita’s eyes lit up, and she said imploringly to Woland:
‘Allow me to whisper something to him.’
Woland nodded his head, and Margarita, leaning to the master’s ear, whispered something to him. They heard him answer her.
‘No, it’s too late. I want nothing more in my life, except to see you. But again I advise you to leave me, or you’ll perish with me.’
‘No, I won’t leave you,’ Margarita answered and turned to Woland: ‘I ask that we be returned to the basement in the lane off the Arbat, and that the lamp be burning, and that everything be as it was.’
Here the master laughed and, embracing Margarita’s long-since-uncurled head, said:
‘Ah, don’t listen to the poor woman, Messire! Someone else has long been living in the basement, and generally it never happens that anything goes back to what it used to be.’ He put his cheek to his friend’s head, embraced Margarita, and began muttering : ‘My poor one ... my poor one ...’
