Julie Himes - Mikhail and Margarita

The guard announced that an accountant was needed. A replacement for Raisa, though this was not explicit. He made eye contact with no one. Was there one among them with adequate experience? Nearly everyone raised their hands. He started down the aisle. Anyuta grabbed his coat and he stopped.

“Pick me, Comrade,” she said gaily. “You need a ‘counter?’ I can make it to a hundred on most days.”

His empty face filled with humor. “You?” he began. “We all know your talents.” He glanced at Margarita as though suddenly embarrassed and remembered his mission.

“You,” he said to her. “You have sufficient training?”

Margarita sensed calculation in her every move. She could not appear too eager, too intelligent, too conniving, too fearful. Too memorable. She watched him measure her. Perhaps he recalled the fainting episode a few days earlier. Perhaps not entirely, but somehow, choosing her would make sense to him. Perhaps because she was close to the front of the bus; because she could save him a few steps, a few more encounters; those simple truths were in her favor.

She shrugged a little. “Yes, Comrade. I have some experience.” She tried to keep all expression from her face.

From the other side of the aisle, Klavdia spoke. “It should be me,” she said, her voice rising as she saw opportunity slip from her. “It was my job, my work, before—I should be the one.” The guard ignored her. She was too new.

He stood back to let Margarita pass from the seat. Audible protests echoed from the back of the bus.

Margarita felt a light push against the small of her back. It was the stump. She turned and saw Anyuta’s shining face. Margarita touched the sleeve again, then followed the guard.

As she descended the stairs she caught Klavdia’s expression: fear and disappointment, and a modest measure of resentment. Margarita would later speak to Anyuta. She’d ask her to look after the older woman at the work sites, help her navigate the prison world. Anyuta wouldn’t want to. Why her, she’d say. Because she’s new, Margarita would tell her. Because she needs your help. Finally, Just do it for me. Anyuta would make a face in the older woman’s direction. She smells funny, she’d say. Margarita would laugh at this. No different from the rest of us.

Margarita followed the guard across the slushy roadway. There was a broad square of yard covered evenly with snow in front of a flat-faced building. The sign indicated that within were produced the materials for shoes for the betterment of Soviet women.

She took this as a message from the universe to her specifically.

Pyotrovich arrived in Irkutsk several weeks after Bulgakov. He seemed annoyed that Bulgakov had learned nothing of Ilya’s plans. When Bulgakov demanded to see Margarita, Pyotrovich suggested he make the request through typical channels.

“That will take too long,” said Bulgakov.

“In the provinces, people find they are happy with time,” said Pyotrovich.

Bulgakov did as he suggested; his letters went unanswered as did Pyotrovich’s promises to investigate the matter.

Pyotrovich had made the arrangements for Bulgakov’s apartment. It was the larger part of the ground floor of a house; in the rear there was a small garden with a metal bench and a koi pond, though at the present it lay snowy and undisturbed. His neighbors were notable for their friendliness and lack of curiosity about him. One evening he was invited to supper by the couple who lived upstairs; he’d knocked, inquiring about the location of the library in town, and had commented favorably on the aroma of the stew the wife had prepared. Conversation was warm, though limited to the weather and local current events. She had the hint of a foreign accent. Bulgakov told them he was a writer; there was a fleeting expression of concern on the man’s face but it quickly disappeared, and the subsequent conversation was about the latest upgrades that had been approved and initiated on the town’s supply of drinking water. After he’d departed, he heard their voices for hours through the ceiling of his bedroom. From the next morning onward, though, it was so quiet he might have been the only occupant of the building.

He had brought the novel manuscript with him; it’d been neglected for months and at first it seemed to resist his revisiting of its scenes. He approached it with great discipline; the isolation allowed for this. He wrote from midmorning each day until the waning light of afternoon at which time he would prepare tea and a light meal. The rest of the evening he would read. Saturday mornings and Wednesday afternoons he would visit the library as well as replenish his supplies. Occasionally he would knock on the door of the couple above to inquire if they needed anything but there was never a response and he was given to imagining that they’d been spirited away in the night by demons or the secret police, though the truth was more likely that they’d decided to finish the winter in warmer climes. Whatever the reason, his present aloneness transformed itself into loneliness and he found that he would watch the meanderings of falling snow from his window, attributing its varying uplifts and descents with vague notions of hope and despair.

One Saturday morning after nearly a month, he heard the faint tapping of footsteps above him. It was past the time he would have typically left on his errands. Could it be mice? The sounds, though soft, were discrete and he rose from his chair to go to the door. Was it an intruder? The sounds immediately stopped and he waited. Had he imagined it? He went upstairs and tapped on the door.

The hallway was dim and chilled and he pulled his jacket across his chest. There was no answer. He tapped again, then turned to leave. The door opened slightly. He saw only part of the woman’s face before it started to close again.

“Wait,” he said. He put up his hand to keep the door from closing. “I thought you’d gone. Both of you.”

She opened the door more fully. Her hair was covered in a large kerchief. A momentary expression of guilt crossed her face, then she recovered. “My husband says writers need quiet. We were hoping not to disturb you.”

“May I come in?” said Bulgakov. He looked past her hopefully.

The door did not move. “Saturday mornings I clean,” she said. She held a cloth in her hand.

“No doubt this is why I thought you were traveling,” said Bulgakov. “I’m typically out, otherwise I would have heard you.”

She smiled slightly at his conclusion.

“Oh—I have something for you,” he said. “I’ll be right back—don’t go.” He laughed aloud at the absurdity of his speech; did he think she would vanish the moment he turned his back? He returned with a small stack of letters. She was waiting as promised.

“These were delivered to me in error,” he said.

She took the mail. “It was at one time our apartment,” she said. It was her enunciation of “our” that caught him. The door had opened wider; the light from the interior showed the careworn lines of her face; she was quite a bit older than he’d thought.

“You’re not Russian, are you?”

She hesitated. “I’m Scottish,” she said.

“You have only the faintest accent.” He wanted to ask how she’d come to live in Irkutsk. One might wonder that of any of them.

“This place is a long way from Moscow, I have to say,” he said. “I guess even further from Scotland.”

Her expression shifted a little. Perhaps, like him, she’d come here for love. Perhaps she’d been traveling through the region and had stopped, expecting to move on, yet still had not. The place itself seemed a midway of sorts; a point of pause in one’s journey, one’s life; not somewhere one would intend to stay. It struck him that despite the years which had passed, she was still quite homesick.

A curl of hair had escaped her cloth; what he’d thought was chestnut-colored from their evening together was nearly grey.

“I’m here because of my fiancée,” he said. “I told you of her—she’s innocent, of course. I’m hoping that I may see her.”

The woman nodded politely.

“Perhaps there is a story as to why you are here as well,” he said.

Behind her, a figure, her husband, passed between rooms. She gave no reaction to this. She gazed pointedly at Bulgakov as though challenging him in some way. As if to say that not all stories end well; some end poorly in fact. Was this something he wished to know, and he felt a strange chill, as though he’d just witnessed the passing of a ghost.

“My husband is planning to varnish the stairs,” she said. She nodded to the space behind him. “If you don’t mind; it can take some time to dry. We wouldn’t want shoe prints in the treatment.” He heard the lilt in her speaking of these words.

“I suppose next time I can simply slide your mail under your door,” he said. “Now that I know you are home.”

“That would be kind,” she said.

“Once the floors have dried.”

She had already closed the door.

The next morning Bulgakov noticed a dark sedan in front of the house. Moments later there was a knock at his door. The driver indicated that Bulgakov was to pack a small bag and accompany him. Pyotrovich was in the backseat. As he got in next to him, Bulgakov recognized the leather valise upright on his lap.

Bulgakov was to visit Margarita. “Here?” he asked. The driver was negotiating the smaller side streets. Had they brought her to Irkutsk? Was she with Ilya?

No; Pyotrovich indicated he was to travel to the camp. He wiped his nose with a handkerchief repeatedly. It was swollen and chapped. Each time he returned the cloth to his pocket as though determined to maintain some tangible hope for wellness.

It would take three days to get there. Possibly longer depending on the weather and conditions. This was an important opportunity, Pyotrovich emphasized, as though any amount of time or distance should not dissuade.

“We are certain now that Ilya intends to help her escape. Convince her to give herself up. Once she has escaped, of course. To give them both up. There will be any number of opportunities. Convince her that such cooperation will be rewarded. Previous offenses pardoned.” He waved his hand as though he would say more, but instead retrieved the cloth from his pocket and hurried it to his nose.

“Then she will be released,” said Bulgakov.

“Of course.” Pyotrovich nodded. The cloth fluttered as it moved. “He’s the one we want.” Pyotrovich glanced at him, then away as though he did not care to remember his face. “Promise whatever you feel is necessary. Tell her we are capable of such.” The cloth went into his pocket again. “Then you may be together.” He spoke cheerily at the street before them; he had no interest in knowing what those words might actually mean.

“What if I can’t convince her?” said Bulgakov.

“Of course you can,” he said, and Bulgakov sensed some vague annoyance with the suggestion. Pyotrovich then added, perhaps more to himself, “We’ll get them regardless.” His tone now carried a cold assuredness. He studied the sooty snow-banks with a general expression of disapproval and it struck Bulgakov that he might wish for all of them, the snow, the driver, Bulgakov as well, to be eliminated, if for no better reason than the tidiness of it.

Ilya had said that she’d refused to save herself before. What did she know about that kind of bargain that he’d not considered? Why did he think she would make it now? What rationalization might he have her practice?

“I do hate traveling during this time of year,” said Pyotrovich. As though even he could be demoralized by the continuous winter. He sniffed.

“I’ll convince her,” said Bulgakov.

Pyotrovich’s car took him only to the outskirts of the town. There a troika waited. Its driver, a burly man of forty possessing a full and reddish beard, was accompanied by a thin teenage girl who giggled more than she spoke. They sat close together, high in the front with Bulgakov alone in the back. Beneath the layers of fur a coal foot warmer radiated faint heat. The driver did not give his own name but introduced her as Delilah. Bulgakov suspected this was made-up, a lusty joke between the two of them, and he avoided speaking to her so that he wouldn’t have the need to use it. Indeed, her interest seemed fixed on the driver; Bulgakov could as well have been a sack of feed.

There was no discernible road and the drifting snow lent to the landscape the quality of a frothing sea. The city behind them melted into the grey horizon. Hills rose in the distance. The troika bells jangled anxiously as they went. The driver was an enthusiastic Marxist who desired to discuss politics; however, his words were lost in the bells and the wind and the perpetual high-pitched hum of the runners and he soon gave up his attempts to converse. Bulgakov suspected the girl was distracting in her own way beneath the fur robes; he watched the two of them, their backs to him.