Julie Himes - Mikhail and Margarita

Mandelstam spoke. “Enough.”

“You’re not so terribly funny,” chimed the shorter officer. “Perhaps you would like to be arrested for public drunkenness.” He hooked his thumbs onto his belt.

“Oh but I am funny,” said Bulgakov in a show of astonishment. “I am a satirist. Humor is my tool.” He lowered his voice as if conspiratorial. “It is my weapon.”

The policeman looked alarmed.

“But perhaps you think satire is a kind of fish that swims in the Volga.”

“Enough.” This time it seemed Mandelstam was speaking to the greater world. “I will give you a poem.” He touched Bulgakov’s sleeve.

The poet’s manner had a dousing effect and Bulgakov was given to the uncomfortable sense that this was something Mandelstam had intended; and even if it was not precisely intended, then perhaps it was quite simply an opportunity he would take.

The streets were empty, as if Moscow had availed them some privacy. Mandelstam’s voice rose as though he was speaking to a gathering of hundreds, as though this was his most beloved of works.

Mandelstam said:

We live, deaf to the land beneath us,

Ten steps away no one hears our speeches,

All we hear is the Kremlin mountaineer,

The murderer and peasant-slayer.

His fingers are fat as grubs

And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips,

His cockroach whiskers leer

And his boots gleam.

Every killing is a treat

For the broad-chested Ossete.

It was the shorter officer who made a sound, a sharp sigh.

Mandelstam licked his lips, as though he’d become parched. “I think even a Bolshevik can understand that much,” he said.

With that Bulgakov staggered forward and threw his arms around Mandelstam’s shoulders. He pressed the poet’s head into his neck.

“He’s drunk, Comrades. Can’t you see? What a night we’ve had! His words—what words—I could barely understand such slurring. Can’t you see—his wife left him, truly—just today. Left him for a younger man, a bookkeeper. The poor old goat. And his daughter is pregnant.” This he added in a whisper.

“Stand away,” said the taller policeman. The baton was in his hand.

It seemed ridiculous—could this be happening? He clutched Mandelstam harder. “No, no, no—he’s drunk, I tell you. I’ll take him home. I’ll tuck him in. The headache he’ll have tomorrow. I should drive a car over his foot so he can forget the pain in his head.” He looked from one officer to the other. He maneuvered Mandelstam past.

He broke into a jog, half-dragging the poet down the street. He imagined them following. They weren’t far from the DRAMALIT house where Mandelstam shared an apartment with his wife.

He thrust them both through the front door. The street behind was silent. Only then did he release him.

“You should come by tomorrow,” said Mandelstam. “There may be an apartment made newly available. A nice place, I hear.” He appeared to enjoy his joke.

Bulgakov was shaking. “I don’t think they followed us,” he said.

Mandelstam shook his head. He seemed suddenly quite weary. “They’re upstairs.” He glanced at the ceiling. “Can you hear them? Roaches in the walls.”

“Here? They cannot be here already.”

The poet stepped back into the hall under the ceiling light. His scalp shone brightly. He looked upward. “She’s alone with them,” he said. He meant his wife. “They will have a time of it.” He sounded mildly sympathetic.

“We must get you away. We’ll go to my place. It’s not far.”

There was a distant thump, then the thinner crack of breaking wood. Mandelstam closed his eyes. “The sideboard. What we went through to haul that monstrosity up those stairs.”

Bulgakov reached for the poet’s arm. Tentatively, as if in this gesture he might disappear. “What can I do?” he said.

Mandelstam looked at him as though he’d not considered this before and Bulgakov saw in his face his sad realization: there was nothing Bulgakov could do; there was nothing anyone could do.

Mandelstam took hold of the stair rail. This slant of wood was his immediate future. He would follow it momentarily. All of his earlier passion seemed to have fled him. His face appeared to have aged even further and Bulgakov realized he was witnessing despair.

“Perhaps we’ve been fools to write.” Mandelstam seemed to speak to all of that building’s occupants. As if this was his revelation. As if they would have served better as window washers or carpet-layers. There would have been clean windows, straight carpets.

Bulgakov didn’t know how to answer. He watched him ascend. He wanted to call him back.

The single bulb overhead whined. Moments later there was a distant rumble, a deeper disturbance. He put his ear to the plaster. Nothing, then a crash, a door slam—it seemed close. What did it mean that he stood there? What did it mean that he waited, listening as some poor widowed neighbor would listen? What did it mean? The building seemed to murmur a distant chorus. Could he stand there and do nothing? He pressed his hands to the wall. He held it dear. Yes, he could.

Bulgakov waited across the street in the shadows of a small apartment building. The road remained empty apart from a dark sedan. A streetlight crackled intermittently. Later, as the sky paled to gray, three secret police exited the DRAMALIT house. One carried a box; Mandelstam walked between the other two, his arms behind his back. They didn’t notice Bulgakov. In an alley nearby, a trashcan was disturbed by a scavenging animal. They got into the car. It pulled away, turning at the end of the block. Bulgakov crossed the street.

At Mandelstam’s apartment, the door was ajar and he entered. The lamps were extinguished. Grey light filtered from a window; beneath was a bookcase and nearby an upholstered chair and sofa. The light reached no further. Before him, in the semidarkness, shadowy, unrecognizable forms seemed strewn about the floor. He hesitated.

Across, a checked curtain was pushed aside and Mandelstam’s wife emerged from a shallow hallway. She was thin and pale; her hair was short and very dark, cut at an angle across her face. She wore a loose cotton dress. She gazed past Bulgakov as if he was of no more consequence than a piece of furniture set out of place. She moved toward the window and knelt on the floor.

They’d known each other for years; he considered she was in shock.

“Nadya?” He stumbled against the leg of an overturned chair, then set it upright. Its seat and armrest were missing. Objects around him seemed to emerge from the darkness. The floor was covered with books and papers; a large bookcase was upended and broken shelves hung loose. The fabled sideboard laid across the floor in a diagonal; broken glass glimmered dimly from the carpet. A desk chair sat across the room, upside down. Its legs turned slowly about its stem, as if its occupant had recently and quite absurdly departed.

Paper was everywhere. He picked up one. Notes in Mandelstam’s hand.

“I can’t find it,” she said. “I know it’s here. Here—” She pointed, between the floorboards. “A pin?” As if he was too dense to understand. “Do you know how hard it is to lay your hands on pins?” She looked up at him. “No, you wouldn’t.” Her expression was unreadable in the light.

He couldn’t make sense of her tone; it bordered on contempt as though some part of this was his doing.

He turned on a lamp. In its light the devastation was complete. “Did they find what they were looking for?” he asked.

She shook her head. She sat back on her heels, her hands on her thighs, as if to say, damn the pin. They could live in a world without pins, for all her concern.

“He offered to write it out for them,” she said. “So that even with their myopic vision, they could read it.” Those were his words, of course. As she spoke, her anger went to incredulity then to sorrow. As if she couldn’t believe she was saying these things; that they could even be said.

She crawled into the chair near the window. Through the wall came the faint sound of a man singing a popular tune. Bulgakov sat on the sofa near her. He picked up a displaced toy that lay at his feet; three carved horses wired together crudely and arranged on a small set of wheels. He moved one of them and the others bobbled up and down on their own, one after the other, as if galloping across the steppe. Bulgakov looked up and found she was watching him.

“Osip’s?” he asked.

“It was mine,” she said flatly.

She made no movement to take it, as if it’d belonged to a different and no longer relevant version of herself, and he set it on the floor again. A postcard stuck out from under the skirt of the sofa and he retrieved it. It was of the coastline of Yalta. It’d been written by Osip to Nadya’s parents. He recognized the long looping strokes. The postmark was 1924.

He imagined a 1924 version of Osip. This one smiled square to the camera, his hands on his hips as if challenging it, with exuberant hair and teeth.

Nadya took the card from him.

“That was from our honeymoon,” she said. “Well, we called it that.” She studied the picture. “We stayed—there,” and she pointed to a small jut of land, east of the city. “The place was terrible. Let by an older couple. I wouldn’t let Osip sit on the bed until I’d boiled the sheets.” She smiled. “There was a palm tree outside our door. Every morning, he’d kiss it. So silly. He’d do things to make me laugh. He was a wonderful man.”

Then her face changed. “They’re going to kill him, aren’t they?” As if her utterance had set their decision. She began to cry.

“No, they’re not.” He covered her hand with his. “He’s important, an important writer.” He smiled to show how ridiculous this would be. “They wouldn’t dare. I can’t imagine it.” He tried to appear convinced.

She wiped her face with her hands, then touched her hair. “What should we do?”

At first he was uncertain what she meant; as though their sitting together further endangered her husband. Then he understood: what could they do?

“Go to Bukharin,” he said. “Tell him of—this.” He didn’t know what he would say, but it was something she could do, and immediately she nodded.

“He got us tickets to the Kirov last June. We didn’t ask. They just came. I told him—Osip, of course. Well, it was nice, I told him. It was one nice thing. He could have given them to his housekeeper. The very least we could do was go.”

The apartment door behind her opened and closed. Someone had entered. “Is it Anna?” she asked.

Although the light was dim, he could see it was Margarita. Why had she come?

Nadya turned to look, then got up abruptly and went to the checked curtain. He stood as she left. On the other side, in the bedroom, clothes and books had been tossed about; a terrible gash cut through a bare and overturned mattress. All disappeared as the curtain fell.

The room felt oddly crowded with now just the two of them. She nodded, as though acknowledging their recent encounter at the restaurant. He wondered if she was surprised to see him. He could only think of all of the reasons why she shouldn’t have come. He hesitated to speak lest he start enumerating them for her.

She didn’t seem surprised by the wreckage. Her hair was pulled back in a loose knot at the base of her neck. She wore trousers and a man’s shirt, cinched at the waist. She lifted one hand for balance as she stepped through the remains of the sideboard.

He wondered whose shirt.

“Careful,” he said. “There is glass.”

She picked up some loose pages near her feet, then sat in the chair as Nadya had. In the better light he could see she’d been crying.

There was a noise from the bedroom but the curtain was still. He sat again.

“I’m surprised you’re here,” he said. It wasn’t meant to be unkind.

He was nervous of Nadya’s reaction.

Margarita looked over her shoulder as well.

She’d have known a Mandelstam different from his, perhaps even different from Nadya’s. Seeing her face in this light he tried to imagine how the poet’s hands would have touched her. Would he have used gestures different than those practiced on a wife of ten years?

But she was speaking. “Were you here when they came?”