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1. Never Talk to Strangers

 At the sunset hour of one warm spring day two men were to be seen at Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them--aged about forty, dressed in a greyish summer suit--was short, dark-haired, well-fed and bald. He carried his decorous pork-pie hat by the brim and his neatly shaven face was embellished by black hornrimmed spectacles of preternatural dimensions. 

The other, a broad-shouldered young man with curly reddish hair and a check cap pushed back to the nape of his neck, was wearing a tartan shirt, chewed white trousers and black sneakers. The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, editor of a highbrow literary magazine and chairman of the management cofnmittee of one of the biggest Moscow literary clubs, known by its abbreviation as massolit; his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolayich Poniryov who wrote under the pseudonym of Bezdomny. Reaching the shade of the budding lime trees, the two writers went straight to a gaily-painted kiosk labelled'Beer and Minerals'. There was an oddness about that terrible day in May which is worth recording : not only at the kiosk but along the whole avenue parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street there was not a person to be seen. It was the hour of the day when people feel too exhausted to breathe, when Moscow glows in a dry haze as the sun disappears behind the Sadovaya Boulevard--yet no one had come out for a walk under the limes, no one was sitting on a bench, the avenue was empty. 'A glass of lemonade, please,'said Berlioz. 'There isn't any,'replied the woman in the kiosk. For some reason the request seemed to offend her. 

 'Got any beer?' enquired Bezdomny in a hoarse voice. 'Beer's being delivered later this evening' said the woman. 'Well what have you got?' asked Berlioz. 'Apricot juice, only it's warm' was the answer. 'All right, let's have some.' The apricot juice produced a rich yellow froth, making the air smell like a hairdresser's. After drinking it the two writers immediately began to hiccup. They paid and sat down on a bench facing the pond, their backs to Bronnaya Street.Then occurred the second oddness, which affected Berlioz alone. He suddenly stopped hiccuping, his heart thumped and for a moment vanished, then returned but with a blunt needle sticking into it. In addition Berlioz was seized by a fear that was groundless but so powerful that he had an immediate impulse to run away from Patriarch's Ponds without looking back. 

Berlioz gazed miserably about him, unable to say what had frightened him. He went pale, wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and thought: ' What's the matter with me? This has never happened before. Heart playing tricks . . . I'm overstrained ... I think it's time to chuck everything up and go and take the waters at Kislovodsk. . . .' Just then the sultry air coagulated and wove itself into the shape of a man--a transparent man of the strangest appearance. On his small head was a jockey-cap and he wore a short check bum-freezer made of air. 

The man was seven feet tall but narrow in the shoulders, incredibly thin and with a face made for derision. Berlioz's life was so arranged that he was not accustomed to seeing unusual phenomena. Paling even more, he stared and thought in consternation : ' It can't be!' But alas it was, and the tall, transparent gentleman was swaying from left to right in front of him without touching the ground. Berlioz was so overcome with horror that he shut his eyes. When he opened them he saw that it was all over, the mirage had dissolved, the chequered figure had vanished and the blunt needle had simultaneously removed itself from his heart. 'The devil! ' exclaimed the editor. ' D'you know, Ivan, the heat nearly gave me a stroke just then! I even saw something like a hallucination . . . ' He tried to smile but his eyes were still blinking with fear and his hands trembled. 

However he gradually calmed down, flapped his handkerchief and with a brave enough ' Well, now. . . ' carried on the conversation that had been interrupted by their drink of apricot juice. They had been talking, it seemed, about Jesus Christ. The fact was that the editor had commissioned the poet to write a long anti-religious poem for one of the regular issues of his magazine. 

Ivan Nikolayich had written this poem in record time, but unfortunately the editor did not care for it at all. Bezdomny had drawn the chief figure in his poem, Jesus, in very black colours, yet in the editor's opinion the whole poem had to be written again. And now he was reading Bezdomny a lecture on Jesus in order to stress the poet's fundamental error. It was hard to say exactly what had made Bezdomny write as he had--whether it was his great talent for graphic description or complete ignorance of the subject he was writing on, but his Jesus had come out, well, completely alive, a Jesus who had really existed, although admittedly a Jesus who had every possible fault. Berlioz however wanted to prove to the poet that the main object was not who Jesus was, whether he was bad or good, but that as a person Jesus had never existed at all and that all the stories about him were mere invention, pure myth. 

The Master and Margarita Mikhail Bulgakov Translated from the russian by Michael Glenny. Published by Collins and Harvill Press, London, 1967