The Master and Margarita. Margarita ran up on shore

Margarita ran up on shore. Her body tingled after her swim. Feeling no fatigue whatsoever, she danced about joyfully on the wet grass. Suddenly she stopped and listened. The snorting sounds came closer, and a naked fat man with a black silk top hat perched on the back of his head came out from behind some broom bushes. The bather's feet were covered with mud so it looked as if he were wearing black shoes. Judging by his panting breath and hiccups, he had had quite a bit to drink, a fact confirmed by the brandy fumes starting to rise from the river.

The fat man saw Margarita and stared, then he let out a joyous whoop, " Well, what do we have here? Is it her I see? Claudine, it's really you, the merry widow! Are you here, too? " —here he came forward to say hello.

Margarita stepped back and said with dignity, " Go to the devil's mother. What do you mean, Claudine? Mind who you're talking to, " and, after a second's thought, she added a long, unprintable oath. All this had a sobering effect on the thoughtless fat man.

" Oh my! " he exclaimed sofdy with a shudder. " Please forgive me, radiant Queen Margot! I mistook you for someone else. The brandy's to blame, a curse upon it! " The fat man then got down on one knee, swept off his top hat, bowed, and started mumbling some nonsense—half in Russian, half in French—about his friend Guessard's bloody wedding in Paris, and about brandy, and about how crushed he was by his grievous mistake.

" You should have put your trousers on, you son of a bitch, " said Margarita, softening.

The fat man broke out in a happy grin when he saw that Margarita wasn't angry, and he announced rapturously that his trouserless state was due simply to his having absentmindedly left them on the banks of the Yenisei River where he had been bathing before coming there, and that he would fly back there at once, seeing it was only a stone's throw away. Then, after commending himself to her good favor and protection, he began edging backwards, until he slipped and fell on his back in the water. But even as he fell, he kept a smile of rapture and devotion on his whisker-framed face.

Margarita summoned her broom with a piercing whistle, mounted it, and was carried over the river to the opposite shore. The shadow cast by the chalk cliff did not reach that far, and the riverbank was flooded in moonlight.

As soon as Margarita touched down on the wet grass, the music under the willows grew louder, and the sparks from the campfire cascaded more merrily into the air. Under the willow branches, studded with soft, fluffy catkins visible in the moonlight, sat two rows of fat-faced frogs, their cheeks distended like rubber, playing a spirited march on wooden pipes. Glowing pieces of rotten wood hung on willow twigs in front of the musicians, to illuminate their music, and the flickering light from the campfire played on the frogs' faces.