‘Stop mystifying me and tormenting me with your riddles. I’m an unhappy person, and you’re taking advantage of it ... I’m getting myself into some strange story, but I swear, it’s only because you lured me with words about him! My head’s spinning from all these puzzlements ...’
‘No dramas, no dramas,’ Azazello returned, making faces, ‘you must also put yourself in my position. To give some administrator a pasting, or chuck an uncle out of the house, or gun somebody down, or any other trifle of the sort — that’s right in my line. But talking with a woman in love, no thanks! ... It’s half an hour now that I’ve been wangling you into it ... So you’ll go?’
‘I will,’ Margarita Nikolaevna answered simply.
‘Be so good as to accept this, then,’ said Azazello, and, pulling a round little golden box from his pocket, he offered it to Margarita with the words: ‘Hide it now, the passers-by are looking. It’ll come in useful, Margarita Nikolaevna, you’ve aged a lot from grief in the last half-year.’ Margarita flushed but said nothing, and Azazello went on: Tonight, at exactly half past nine, be so good as to take off all your clothes and rub your face and your whole body with this ointment. Then do whatever you like, only don’t go far from the telephone. At ten I’ll call you and tell you all you need to know. You won’t have to worry about a thing, you’ll be delivered where you need to go and won’t be put to any trouble. Understood?‘
Margarita was silent for a moment, then replied:
‘Understood. This thing is pure gold, you can tell by the weight. So, then, I understand perfectly well that I’m being bribed and drawn into some shady story for which I’m going to pay dearly ...’
‘What is all this?’ Azazello almost hissed. ‘You’re at it again?’
‘No, wait!’
‘Give me back the cream!’
Margarita clutched the box more tightly in her hand and said:
‘No, wait! ... I know what I’m getting into. But I’m getting into it on account of him, because I have no more hope for anything in this world. But I want to tell you that if you’re going to ruin me, you’ll be ashamed! Yes, ashamed! I’m perishing on account of love!’ — and striking herself on the breast, Margarita glanced at the sun.
‘Give it back!’ Azazello cried angrily. ‘Give it back and devil take the whole thing. Let them send Behemoth!’
‘Oh, no!’ exclaimed Margarita, shocking the passers-by. ‘I agree to everything, I agree to perform this comedy of rubbing in the ointment, agree to go to the devil and beyond! I won’t give it back!’
‘Hah!’ Azazello suddenly shouted and, goggling his eyes at the garden fence, began pointing off somewhere with his finger.
Margarita turned to where Azazello was pointing, but found nothing special there. Then she turned back to Azazello, wishing to get an explanation of this absurd ‘Hah!’ but there was no one to give an explanation: Margarita Nikolaevna’s mysterious interlocutor had disappeared.
Margarita quickly thrust her hand into her handbag, where she had put the box before this shouting, and made sure it was there. Then, without reflecting on anything, Margarita hurriedly ran out of the Alexandrovsky Garden.
CHAPTER 20
The moon in the clear evening sky hung full, visible through the maple branches. Lindens and acacias drew an intricate pattern of spots on the ground in the garden. The triple bay window, open but covered by a curtain, was lit with a furious electric light. In Margarita Nikolaevna’s bedroom all the lamps were burning, illuminating the total disorder in the room.
On the blanket on the bed lay shifts, stockings and underwear. Crumpled underwear was also simply lying about on the floor next to a box of cigarettes crushed in the excitement. Shoes stood on the night table next to an unfinished cup of coffee and an ashtray in which a butt was smoking. A black evening dress hung over the back of a chair. The room smelled of perfume. Besides that, the smell of a red-hot iron was coming from somewhere.
Margarita Nikolaevna sat in front of the pier-glass, with just a bathrobe thrown over her naked body, and in black suede shoes. A gold bracelet with a watch lay in front of Margarita Nikolaevna, beside the box she had received from Azazello, and Margarita did not take her eyes from its face.
At times it began to seem to her that the watch was broken and the hands were not moving. But they were moving, though very slowly, as if sticking, and at last the big hand fell on the twenty-ninth minute past nine. Margarita’s heart gave a terrible thump, so that she could not even take hold of the box right away. Having mastered herself, Margarita opened it and saw in the box a rich, yellowish cream. It seemed to her that it smelled of swamp slime. With the tip of her finger, Margarita put a small dab of the cream on her palm, the smell of swamp grass and forest grew stronger, and then she began rubbing the cream into her forehead and cheeks with her palm.
The cream spread easily and, as it seemed to Margarita, evaporated at once. Having rubbed several times, Margarita glanced into the mirror and dropped the box right on her watch crystal, which became covered with cracks. Margarita closed her eyes, then glanced once again and burst into stormy laughter.
Her eyebrows, plucked to a thread with tweezers, thickened and lay in even black arches over her greening eyes. The thin vertical crease cutting the bridge of her nose, which had appeared back then, in October, when the master vanished, disappeared without a trace. So did the yellowish shadows at her temples and the two barely noticeable little webs of wrinkles at the outer comers of her eyes. The skin of her cheeks filled out with an even pink colour, her forehead became white and clear, and the hairdresser’s waves in her hair came undone.
From the mirror a naturally curly, black-haired woman of about twenty was looking at the thirty-year-old Margarita, baring her teeth and shaking with laughter.
Having laughed her fill, Margarita jumped out of her bathrobe with a single leap, dipped freely into the light, rich cream, and with vigorous strokes began rubbing it into the skin of her body. It at once turned pink and tingly. That instant, as if a needle had been snatched from her brain, the ache she had felt in her temple all evening after the meeting in the Alexandrovsky Garden subsided, her leg and arm muscles grew stronger, and then Margarita’s body became weightless.
She sprang up and hung in the air just above the rug, then was slowly pulled down and descended.
‘What a cream! What a cream!’ cried Margarita, throwing herself into an armchair.
The rubbings changed her not only externally. Now joy was boiling up in her, in all of her, in every particle of her body, which felt to her like bubbles prickling her body all over. Margarita felt herself free, free of everything.
