Julie Himes - Mikhail and Margarita

“I suppose it makes sense to hold the woman for the time being. Then he can be arrested.” Ilya tried to sound mildly skeptical as though already anticipating someone’s complaint about the extra paperwork.

“That would be one approach.”

The pencil scratched. “Who is she?” said Ilya.

“No one,” said Pyotr. “At least not to you or me.” He raised his eyes to Ilya’s face as if hoping to catch his expression. “But she’s someone to him.”

So this was it—she was in terrible danger. “I would think it better to take the writer himself,” said Ilya. He tried to sound as though it mattered little to him.

Pyotr made a face. “That business with Mandelstam was bad.”

What if he could do nothing for her? “Perhaps he doesn’t care about her.”

Pyotr bobbed his head. “He’ll care. We can make certain of that.”

Ilya was well aware of their capabilities.

“I’m having Yuri Mikhaylov question her,” said Pyotr. “She may be useful in other ways too.”

Mikhaylov was a sadist. This evening, this interview had quickly worsened to disastrous proportions.

“I should leave you to your good work,” said Ilya. Another misstep. He could see Pyotr’s new interest: why was he so eager to leave? Ilya glanced at his own hands; they seemed overly large and awkward. He felt so new.

Pyotr set down his pencil and leaned back in his chair. He regarded Ilya with what might be considered a mixture of concern and affection. His fingers tented over his midsection. Pyotr wasn’t ready to let him go.

“I’ve always thought your obsession was an interesting one,” he said.

“I might take exception to ‘obsession,’” said Ilya.

“With certain writers, I mean.”

“You’re not much of a reader, are you?”

Pyotr’s expression didn’t change. His fingers parted briefly.

“It seems just as much a personal crusade.” Pyotr leaned forward as if to emphasize his concern. “I wonder if it may be hampering your advancement, quite honestly.”

Pyotr was finding too much enjoyment in this.

“Mandelstam, to be certain,” he went on. “Mayakovsky, of course. Others, though, you seem to approach without the discriminating hand. This is not typical for my friend, Ilya Ivanovich, whose deeds are legendary.”

Pyotr had risen through the hierarchy, past other capable men for a reason. His methods had been gathered into textbooks. The remembered cadence of his voice could rob sleep from both guard and victim years later. “My friend”—the words seemed to tag one; the victim upon hearing them felt their menace as a spotlight. “My friend” who was not. “My friend” who would come to learn the meaning of atrocity. Words that were a preamble to indecencies that would be enacted.

“Have you a wife? A girlfriend.” Pyotr said it as if he’d answered his own question.

Ilya had read these textbooks; Pyotr looked not for the truth but the reaction to the falsehood.

“I am committed to my work,” said Ilya.

“Family? A sister.”

Ilya’s lips felt dry.

“A brother,” he answered.

“You are close?”

Ilya chose a random word.

“Very.”

Pyotr smiled as though the prisoner had capitulated. “Family is so important to keeping one grounded.”

Ilya stood. Pyotr’s gaze followed him. A disinterested Stalin looked away. Ilya touched the door.

“You may go,” said Pyotr, a pointed command. Its belatedness mattered not at all.

“I’m glad I was able to play some small role in this evening’s success,” said Ilya with a bow.

“Of course you are,” said Pyotr.

She was somewhere in that complex. Somewhere beyond his reach.

Ilya wouldn’t recall leaving Pyotr’s office. He wouldn’t remember the maze of passages he took as he fled. Or if he’d closed Pyotr’s door behind him. But if he hadn’t, if the interrogator-turned-Director had listened to the anxious cascade of footsteps in his retreat, he’d have understood as well as if Ilya had barked forth his confession.

He loved her. Dear God—he loved her.

Margarita was processed then taken to a large room of grey painted cinderblock, occupied by a dozen or so women. It was early morning. Those who were awake looked at her, pale ovals turning toward the light from the hallway. They looked away again as though what they saw was simply a reflection of themselves. She brought no answers to their particular concerns. The door shut loudly behind her. The sound of its locking mechanism lingered. One of the guards who had escorted her laughed in response to something another guard had said.

She sat down on a bunk board. There was a woman on the other end.

“You’re bleeding,” said the woman.

Margarita touched her ear. It was sticky. “It’s stopped,” she said.

“You were beaten,” said the woman. She sounded alarmed. Margarita sensed others around them turn with curiosity. She felt them withdraw as if she among them was the true criminal, the one they should fear.

Margarita lay down, first toward the wall; however, this pressed the injured ear against the wood, so she rolled over and faced outward. She heard snoring; and perhaps also weeping, though it was faint and could have been the breathiness of dreaming. Strangely, the grey, boxlike room seemed more real to her than the other world. As if the former could be easily dismissed, and in her dreamlike meditations she thought that the world had been turned inside out: all that had been external: the buildings, streets, landscape, sky, was now squeezed down inside her, perhaps as a memory or as a miniaturized version of creation for her to keep as a souvenir. And those things internal, her secrets and fears, were real and manifest in the shadowy space, available for all to touch and comment upon.

When she opened her eyes the lights had been turned on. The clock on the wall indicated it was close to eight. It was covered by a metal cage.

She sat up. The room tipped for a moment.

On the edge of her sleeve was something—a piece of goose down from one of their pillows. She touched it, then held it between her fingers; it was so light she couldn’t feel it. She remembered the snow of it falling in the dim room—she needed to keep it—she hadn’t a pocket—where? She closed her hand around it. She opened it to ensure it was there, then closed it again.

A woman sat down beside her. Different from the woman earlier. Margarita guessed they were of similar age. She seemed of lesser means with a roughness that came of less education. Margarita had the sense she’d been waiting for her to awaken. She touched Margarita’s hair where it was matted to the blood by her ear.

“Does it hurt?” she asked. She didn’t ask who’d done this to her.

Margarita lied and said no.

“Look at them,” said the woman, indicating the others who sat in groups of twos and threes. “You’d think they were at some kind of newcomers’ tea party.”

Others were chatting in lowered tones. Exchanging information about their families and children, their jobs and their circumstances. Two had just discovered they had been neighbors as children; they spoke warmly of the grocer that had once lived on their block. Their voices rose for a moment over the memory of the man’s son who’d been a few years older than them; a memory once dull that was now precious in their current situation. They clasped hands briefly in what they shared.

“They act like bosom friends,” said the woman with scorn.

“You’ve been here before?” said Margarita.

The woman seemed not to hear. “Like this is all some silly mistake,” she said. “Like they’ll get to go home.”

Some of the others stared at them. Margarita felt their fear, and, more particularly, their dread of her. She touched her ear. She was what they feared they might be.

There were footsteps. All faces turned to the door. It opened but no one entered. A man’s voice rang through the cell.

“Margarita Nikoveyena Sergeyev.”

Margarita stood and felt at once dizzy and slightly nauseous. She didn’t want to leave; who could say where they might take her. Hands from behind shoved her forward.

The woman who’d engaged her in conversation now pushed her. She hissed. “Go!”

Margarita started toward the door. Its opening seemed to dip. She grabbed at its frame to steady herself. The other woman rose and spoke out.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” she said. “There’s been a mistake. Check your records. I’m not supposed to be here.”

Margarita passed through and fell against the chest of the guard. He grabbed her arm to right her. No response had been given to the other woman. Her voice was lost in the shutting of the door.

They descended stairs then sloping passages. Walls were in places rough-hewn as though of a medieval dungeon. Her questions wrapped themselves in the pounding of her head and her growing nausea. Lights came and went overhead. She stumbled again and they hauled her upright. She wanted to tell them to take her back. She’d feel better tomorrow if they gave her more time. She’d speak nicely with the other women, share stories, express sympathy. She thought she had said that, but she heard her own voice, ragged and begging, utter different thoughts.

“Just tell me,” she said. Just say what was coming; tell her what she needed to fear.

They didn’t answer.

Molière opened despite Margarita not being there to see it. This was the case with many things in those first weeks. Streetcars kept to their schedules. Newspapers continued to print. The world had changed—yet passersby appeared to give no notice to it. They bent their hats against the weather, they walked back and forth from work as before. The world had changed—yet it seemed to maintain some stubborn indifference to this, and if Bulgakov mistrusted it; if he resented it in fact, it was for this disregard.

The play’s reviews were generally positive. Stanislawski was pleased, and, perhaps more so, he was relieved. He arranged interviews for Bulgakov with major literary magazines and with Pravda. When Bulgakov missed his appointment for this, not once, but twice, Stanislawski first called, then came to his apartment to harangue him in person. This was important, the director told him. Actually, it was more than important—Bulgakov needed to earn the privilege of keeping Molière on the stage. He told him he would reschedule the interview once more—and that there would be others to follow. Now was the time to become a true literary figure. After everything he’d invested, that they both had invested. Bulgakov said he’d do better in order to get him to leave and Stanislawski slammed the door behind him.

Bulgakov cleaned up the mess from the night she was taken. He’d acquired a new kind of pragmatism with this. Rather than repair a tear, he turned the cushion over. Shattered picture glass was swept and prints were rehung on the wall without its protection. As if his anticipation of the agents’ return and further mischief was protection against it. Her blouses and skirts he hung in the wardrobe. Sweaters and slacks he returned to their drawers. Her boots near the door where they waited for her. Their belief in her release seemed alternately reassuring and absurdly naïve.

The novel itself remained on the table where they’d left it. One early morning when sleep gave no reprieve, he returned to his chair and laid his hand on the first page. It was as impenetrable as a grave. He put it back in the drawer of the wardrobe then lay down again. Still he sensed it as though that part of the room had settled under its weight.

He debated what to do about the curtains and one night he rehung them. They were rumpled from having sat in piles for too long. Most of the pins she’d used still lay on the sills; some had been scattered and, with the hanging of the final panel, he found himself on the floor, on his knees searching the seams between the floor’s planks for the last remaining ones. What looked like a pin was a grain in the wood, a stray thread, a strand of hair. He would go to pick it up and his fingers grasped air. The world had done this to him. Ilya had done it. Then one small part of his brain went past this to think absurdly, selfishly, childishly, perhaps she’d had some hand in it. How could he blame himself and go on? Did he know how hard it was to lay one’s hands on pins? He pressed his forehead against the wood. How could he have known?