Julie Himes - Mikhail and Margarita

“They were here when we got back,” he said.

Perhaps she was wondering if she could have prevented these events. Would things have gone differently had she chosen different words? Worn a different dress? Would he have come home with her instead? Bulgakov imagined all of this as he watched her thoughts work, as his own worked in the same manner, searching for his own culpability. Suppose he had been a better friend? Had been attentive of Mandelstam’s growing discontent? Could he have dissuaded him from taking action? There must have been something he could have done. Better to have been at fault than to have been powerless.

It occurred to him that in sitting with her, he was in some way colluding with the mistress. Nadya, he knew, would view it thusly. He could check on her; the other room was now quiet. He could begin to tidy the place. He could leave Margarita to her own accounting.

He continued to sit with her. He didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry for the way he behaved in the restaurant,” he said. He realized how odd it sounded. Was Nadya listening? He lowered his voice.

“What I mean is that I’m sorry you had to see that—I mean if it’s the last time—God, I mean I’m certain that’s not the way he feels.” His words had become haphazard, going from odd to reckless.

She glanced at the pages, as though they might give better comfort.

The curtain pushed aside and Nadya appeared. They both stood and he moved between them as if he would mediate or divert her from examining the obvious.

Nadya’s arms were crossed over her chest. She studied Margarita.

“I guess I’m not surprised,” she said finally. Her voice lacked the earlier chilliness that he’d received. He found her calm unnerving. Her face was empty; something was about to happen there.

“I’ve wanted to see you,” said Margarita. “I wish this was under different circumstances.”

Nadya’s face darkened slightly but her words were still assured. “Are you suggesting we could have arranged to meet for lunch? The way friends do?”

“I’ve missed you.”

They knew each other. Perhaps even had been friends, and suddenly he knew, as though he’d been told, or really, as though he’d been witness: Nadya had introduced them to each other. Nadya, her arm through Margarita’s, at some sort of gathering, had delivered to her husband his future mistress. Perhaps she’d read the desire in his eyes at that first encounter. In any case, she had known.

“A ladies’ tête-à-tête?” Nadya’s voice rose.

He thought to pull Margarita away. His hand edged to her arm, but she seemed not to notice. She had the same demeanor as in the restaurant the night before: there was something she needed to say.

“I know I’ve hurt you, Nadyusha.”

“Slut.” The word was well formed as though it had been waiting for its opportunity.

“I’m so sorry.”

Nadya raised her hand to strike her. As though Margarita’s regret was itself a kind of insult. As though some had rights to certain losses, to certain grievances, and some did not.

Bulgakov took Nadya’s wrist. She pulled her arm away.

“I’ve hated you both,” she said to Margarita. “Selfish—that’s what you are—selfish—thoughtless.” He could see her trying to get the words right. “No—I never hated him. It was you who made him selfish.”

“He’s not selfish,” said Margarita. Nadya laughed.

“The wife knows ‘selfish.’” She nodded. “The wife.” She jabbed her fingers into her own chest. “Believe me. All of this.” She gestured to the room. “All of this—he brought into being. Selfish.”

“Nadya,” he said. He knew he sounded reproachful. She turned on him with her anger and self-pity.

“The—wife—” She looked as if the need to explain this took something from her; particularly to explain to him, who should have known better. The wife who had suffered the humiliations of police searches. Who had borne the shame of gossip and curiosity. And now—an uncertain future. This was the currency of devotion measured against the currency of desire. They all should know better.

They had all become perpetrators of a kind, Mandelstam included. Their crimes might be different, but she was their victim. It was reflected in her face. Perhaps she had guessed it when Bulgakov had first appeared that morning: that he would fall in with them; that she would be alone, once again, as always; and he saw how she hated him for it.

She disappeared again behind the curtain.

Margarita didn’t move. She looked at the fabric as though waiting for it to become something else.

The curtain stayed closed.

What else was there to do? Bulgakov set the desk upright, then the desk chair. He pushed the smaller bookcase back against the wall. Below was the wrecked sideboard. He swept the bits of glass onto a loose page. Everywhere were books and papers.

She pushed her sleeves up past her elbows, knelt, and began to return the books to their shelves. He worked at this too. Her hair slipped from its knot. She finally tucked it back and continued.

She smelled of soap.

Nadya appeared. She crouched and gathered as many papers as she could reach, then went back into the bedroom. There was something about her movements that made him follow.

A small stove extended from an older fireplace. It hummed. Nadya opened the grate and stuffed some papers into it. Next to her, a steamer’s trunk sat open, filled with notebooks and more papers and letters. She watched, then slowly fed more to the flames.

The curtain moved and Margarita came up behind him.

“What are you doing?” he asked. He took the page in her hands. There were handwritten lines of verse. She pulled it back and pushed it through the grate.

He sensed some part of her was doing this to him, forcing him to watch. Asking who he thought the perpetrator was now.

“You’re just angry,” he said. “You’re upset,” he repeated, thinking to negotiate. “I understand. But you can’t do this.”

Nadya reached into the trunk for more papers. This seemed too easy for her.

“They’re not yours to burn.” He tried to keep his voice even.

She sneered. “They’re yours?”

“Yes—perhaps. Yes—they could be.”

“This will save him,” she said. “Despite everything—because of everything. I will save him.”

“But this—Nadya—it is his work,” he said. She must be made to be reasonable.

Her face shimmered in the fire’s light. He was suddenly afraid for himself.

She opened the grate again. “There are enough poets in this world,” she said.

“I’ll help you,” said Margarita.

He turned in disbelief. She was already beyond the curtain. He followed her.

She was on her knees, turning over books and furniture, gathering pages from the floor. With the growing light, they seemed to be everywhere.

“What are you doing?” he whispered.

She considered the sheets in her hand. Slowly she paged through them. She pulled out several and hid them in her shirt. Not everything was verse.

He dropped to his knees and began to do the same.

Nadya appeared. Margarita gave her the assortment in her hands.

He paused and let the papers he held slowly fall to the floor. Nadya didn’t seem to notice.

“You understand,” she said to him. “This is his life we’re talking about. His flesh and blood life. I cannot live without him.” She spoke as if she was the first to ever say such things, the first to ever contemplate those feelings.

“I understand,” he said. He couldn’t look at her.

She disappeared behind the curtain.

“What about the trunk,” he said.

Margarita looked pained but said nothing. She slipped more pages into her shirt.

He scrambled to collect others. One held a new poem. Its opening line rattled him. He shut his eyes.

Nadya took them from him and went into the bedroom.

What were those words? Their order became confused; then they dropped from his memory, first the smaller ones, then the larger ones followed. They were gone.

Margarita went to the desk and began to go through the drawers. He went to the bedroom again.

Nadya was kneeling next to the stove. The collection in the trunk had noticeably shrunk.

“He would not agree to this.”

She stared through the open grate. “Get out of my apartment,” she said.

“Please—”

She turned on him. “Get out. I will call the police. I will turn you over to them as a traitor. An enemy of the people.” Her face loosened; the calm was gone. She was shaking. She went back to the stove. “I would hand you over in exchange for him.”

He slid along the wall and passed through the curtain.

Margarita was kneeling on the floor. He took the pages from the corner of the bookcase as he went toward the door. Beyond it, as he rounded the upper landing, Nadya called to him.

“Never fear, Bulgakov! They will come for you too.”

He clattered down the stairs, fleeing her. Only silence followed. The entry hall was cool and grey in the early light as though part of a different world. He looked at the pages.

A shopping list, a letter from the housing committee chairman, a memorandum from the Writers Union. He’d saved nothing. He struggled to remember the line taken by the flames.

He saw Mandelstam in a grey-green cell under the interrogator’s light. No one really wants you to write. Not even the ones who love you most. Did you not see how easily she’d burned them?

Margarita appeared from around the stairway’s landing. She descended to the bottom step. She carried a modest collection of loose pages. She measured him. He was an uncertain ally.

The fabric under her arm was dark with perspiration.

“I have to go back.” She held out the pages. “Nadya moves quickly. She may realize I’m not as helpful as she thinks.”

He took them and thumbed through. Stanzas flashed past. Phrases of new music. Something fresh and beating had been pulled from the wreckage. A life had been saved. It felt like it was his.

His eyes took to that darker place under her sleeve again. Somewhere above it floated shoulders and a head, but he stopped there. Here was enough. He didn’t care whose shirt it was.

It was rumored that the Writers’ Union would formally protest Mandelstam’s arrest. A meeting was scheduled, then postponed—once because of a newish and unexpected work holiday, then again when the acting chairman developed a head cold. Bulgakov had not returned to Mandelstam’s apartment though he made inquiries around the Union. The exchange of information was generally the same. Most lamented the event. All secretly desired to know what Mandelstam had done to bring such disaster upon himself, though only a few asked, and then with varying degrees of delicacy. It was clear to Bulgakov that they’d not heard of the poem. Of course those who knew would not be asking questions. He heard that Nadya had met with Bukharin, but reports of this differed. His own play had been delayed by additional edits that Stanislawski had requested. The director seemed to be taking arguably random trips to Crimea, and with these and various other excuses Bulgakov worked on the changes alone and worried. Occasionally he walked past the DRAMALIT house. He counted the frames of glass that made up the third-floor windows, guessing at those which would be Mandelstam’s. Generally it was at night and their panes were dark. He shrank from risking Nadya’s vitriol. Several weeks later, an unsigned note appeared in his postal box; it gave only a date and a time. There was something about the script; he guessed it was a woman’s. Was it Margarita’s? It was written on the back of a line of verse that was in Mandelstam’s hand. He could envision the masculine arm that had made those strokes; he could hear the words shaped by his voice. It was a reminder of his loss and an inducement to attend. He studied the other side of it as well. It was hope that she might be there too.

Bulgakov was modestly late and yet the second to arrive. The conference room was at the top of the stairs leading from the foyer of the Union’s first floor. Sounds from the kitchen funneled up through the stairwell and into the room, lending an impression of greater activity and purpose than it deserved. Its only other occupant was the Chairman’s assistant who sat mid-length along the oblong table, writing into what appeared to be a composition book. The room’s window casements had been left open and were filled with the streetlight’s amber color; drab and stained curtains hung through them and over the outside sills. Despite this, the temperature within was stifling.