Thus the dawn of the fifteenth day of Nisan was greeted by the fifth procurator of Judea, Pontius Pilate.

XXVII

The End of Apartment No. 50

hen Margarita got to the final words of the chapter— "...Thus the dawn of the fifteenth day of Nisan was greeted by the fifth procurator ofjudea, Pontius Pilate, " —morning had arrived.

From the yard came the cheerful, exdted, morning sounds of sparrows conversing in the branches of the white willow and the linden tree.

Margarita got up from her chair, stretched, and only then realized how worn out her body was and how much she craved sleep. It is interesting to note that Margarita's soul was in perfect shape. Her thoughts were not in disarray, and she was not at all unnerved by having spent the previous night supematurally. Memories of her time at Satan's ball did not disturb her, nor did the fact that the Master had been returned to her by a kind of miracle, that his novel had risen from the ashes, and that everything was back in place in the basement apartment, from which the informer Aloisy Mogarych had been expelled. In short, her encounter with Woland had caused her no psychic distress. Everything was seemingly as it should have been.

She went into the adjoining room, assured herself that the Master was sleeping deeply and peacefully, turned off the desk lamp, which was no longer necessary, stretched out on the small couch along the opposite wall, and covered herself with an old, torn sheet A minute later she was asleep, and that morning she had no dreams. All the rooms in the basement were silent, the private home builder's entire small house was silent, and silence also reigned in the deserted lane outside.

Meanwhile, at the same time, that is, at dawn on Saturday, an entire floor of one of Moscow's official buildings was wide awake, and its windows, which looked out on a large, asphalt-covered square being cleaned by the whirring brushes of special, slow-moving machines, were all lit up with a stark light that outshone the rising sun.

The entire floor was busy with the investigation of the Woland case, and lamps in ten offices had been burning all night long.

The Master and Margarita

Stricdy speaking, the rudiments of the case had been clear since the previous day, Friday, when the Variety Theater had to be closed due to the disappearance of its entire administrative staff and the disruptive events surrounding the notorious performance of black magic. But the fact of the matter was that new material kept pouring in to the sleepless floor.

Now it was the task of those investigating this strange case, which blended elements of utterly obvious deviltry with hypnotic trickery and blatant criminality, to take all the various and muddled incidents that had occurred all over Moscow and mold them into some kind of coherent whole.