The Master and Margarita. loneliness in her eyes!

loneliness in her eyes!

" Obeying that yellow sign, I, too, turned into the side street and followed her. We walked silently along the dull winding lane, I on one side, and she on the other. And, imagine, there wasn't a soul in the street. I was in torment because I felt that I had to talk to her, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to utter a word, and she would go away, and I would never see her again.

" And then, imagine, she said unexpectedly, 'Do you like my flowers? '

" I distinctly remember the sound of her voice, rather low, but halting, and however silly this may seem, I felt that an echo sounded in the lane and reverberated off the dirty yellow wall. I quickly crossed over to her side of the street and, walking up to her, replied, 'No.'

" She looked at me with surprise, and I suddenly and completely unexpectedly realized that this was the woman I had loved my whole life! Amazing, isn't it? Naturally, you'll say I'm a madman, right? "

" I'm not saying anything, " Ivan exclaimed, adding, " Please, go on! "

And the guest continued, " Yes, she gave me a look of surprise, and then she asked, 'Is it that you just don't like flowers? '

" I thought I detected hostility in her voice. I walked alongside her, trying to keep in step with her, and to my surprise, I felt no constraint whatsoever.

" 'No, I like flowers, but not those, ' I said.

" 'What kind do you like? '

" 'I like roses.'

" Then I regretted having said that because she smiled guiltily and threw her flowers into the gutter. A bit flustered, I retrieved them nonetheless, and handed them back to her, but she pushed them away with a smile, and I ended up carrying them.

" Thus we walked in silence for awhile until she took the flowers out of my hand and threw them on the pavement. Then she put her hand, in a flared black glove, through my arm, and we walked off together."

" Go on, " said Ivan, " and please don't leave anything out."

" Go on? " the guest echoed. " Well, you yourself can guess what happened next." Suddenly he wiped away an unexpected tear with his right sleeve and continued, " Just like a murderer jumps out of nowhere in an alley, love jumped out in front of us and struck us both at once! The way lightning strikes, or a Finnish knife! She, by the way, would later say that it wasn't like that, that we had, of course, loved each other for a very long time, without knowing or ever having seen each other, and that she was living with another man... and I was then... with that... what's her name..."

" With whom? " asked Bezdomny.

" With that... well... with that... well..." the guest answered, snapping his fingers.

" You were married? "

Enter the Hero 117

" Well, yes, that's why I'm snapping my fingers... To that Varenka... Manechka... no, Varenka... with the striped dress, at the museum... But I can't remember.

" And so she used to say that she had gone out that day carrying the yellow flowers so that I would at last find her, and that if it hadn't happened, she would have poisoned herself because her life was empty.

" Yes, love struck us instantly. I knew it that very day, an hour later, when we lost track of where we were and found ourselves on the embankment by the Kremlin wall.

" We talked as if we had parted only the day before, as if we had known each other for many years. We agreed to meet the next day on the same spot by the Moscow River, and we did. The May sun was shining for us. And very, very soon afterwards, that woman became my secret wife.

" She would come to me every day, and from morning on I'd start waiting for her. My impatience expressed itself in the way I endlessly rearranged the things on my table. Ten minutes before she arrived I would sit by the window and start listening for the creaking sound of the decrepit gate. And, oddly, before I met her, hardly anyone—in fact, no one—ever visited our little yard, but now it seemed that the whole city was beating a path to our door. The gate would creak, my heart would jump, and, imagine, I'd look through the window and there, level with my head, I'd see a pair of dirty boots. A knife grinder. Who in my house would need a knife grinder? What was there to sharpen? What sort of knives?

" She would come through the gate only once, but until that happened, my heart would suffer at least ten palpitations, I'm not lying. And then, when it was time for her arrival and the hands were pointing to noon, my heart wouldn't stop pounding until her shoes, noiselessly, without tapping, with their black suede bows and steel buckles, drew level with the window.

" Sometimes she'd play games and stop at the second window and tap her toe against the glass. I'd be at the window in a second, only to find that the shoes had disappeared along with the black silk dress that blocked the sun, and I'd go and let her in.

" Nobody knew about our affair, I can swear to that, although that rarely happens. Her husband didn't know and neither did her friends. Of course, the people in the old house where my basement apartment was knew, they could see a woman was coming to visit me, but they did not know her name."

" And what was her name? " asked Ivan, who was totally mesmerized by the love story.