Julie Himes - Mikhail and Margarita

Those with whom he shared a train carriage nicknamed him the “professor.” He’d purchased a ream of writing paper and sat with it for hours each day, pausing for meals and tea and sleep. The paper had seemed something of a habit he wished to acquire. He would finger his pen and watch the landscape pass.

He considered the balance of what had transpired. Why had he only been hospitalized rather than arrested? What price had been paid that made this a reasonable exchange? The physical laws which governed the world seemed untrustworthy.

He wondered about Ilya and Margarita. They were distant, floating in a vague realm of grey light. He tried to place them on the streets of a Cantonese city, or on an eastward boat to another land; but always the sea was becalmed and the sky swathed in mists. He couldn’t see her future; he wondered if she was happy.

The pages before him remained hopeful in their whiteness: surely he would conceive of something worth saying. Even better, he might write something funny.

In Moscow, Bulgakov returned to the apartment on Sadovaya Street. As he climbed the stairs, he startled a medium-sized black cat lurking on the landing. “A new tenant,” he said, scratching it behind its ears, and when he opened his door, the animal trotted in. “So you’ve taken over the place,” he said.

But the room was unchanged, simply dusty. One of the curtain panels was still half hung. He would buy more pins, he thought. Her boots stood by the door, her book on the table. The cat leapt onto the armrest of her chair. Bulgakov picked up the book, examined it briefly, then returned it to the shelf. Its binding was unremarkable among the others. One might wonder why it’d been picked. He went to unpack; no one would know. Eventually it would be forgotten.

Several weeks later, a letter came. He recognized the script. The envelope was slender; it held a page at most. Its postage was Soviet. He sat on the edge of the bed and opened it carefully.

She was safe, living in a town she did not name. Working as a house cleaner.

I’ve learned to disappear. If I passed you on the street, you would not see me.

He finished reading then folded the letter and returned it to the envelope.

Outside, the afternoon was unusually warm for mid-spring. Patriarch’s Ponds was nearly empty. The linden trees were a pale green, their leaves still new. He took a bench in their shade.

Along the path that bordered the water, a figure approached. At such a distance and with the humidity of the air, it seemed to shimmer like a mirage. As it drew close, it gained substance and an older gentleman emerged. He walked with a cane; more from habit, Bulgakov would surmise. His posture was straight and his gait appeared sound. He slowed as he neared, then, with a nod of acknowledgment, he sat on the other end of the bench. He was dressed entirely in black. He held the cane before him, planted between his feet; both hands rested atop its handle. His wrists were pale and thin; his skin was mottled with age. He was clearly much older than what Bulgakov had guessed.

“Take care,” said the man, nodding toward the other side of the pond. “The light can play tricks—it’s played many before.”

Across the water, as though materializing from the heat, another figure took form. Slender, young; a woman; she turned to stare at him. He recognized the clothes: buttercup yellow. The hair, the shape of her face. He couldn’t perceive her expression. Could it be her?

“A perfect afternoon,” said the man. He looked about as though the weather was a performance that had been staged for him specifically. “I should think God would want to spend more time here.”

“I imagine he has other concerns,” said Bulgakov. Who could know what a deity might find important?

“Perhaps so—perhaps he is in America.” The man nodded, laughing silently at his own joke. After a moment, though, he tapped the pavement before him with the tip of his cane and drew a more serious tone. “I, on the other hand, am more inclined to this place.”

She had written: To disappear is my freedom; for you, my dearest, it would be your prison.

The man went on. “Typically I offer food to the starved, power to the weak, love to the lonesome; but I suspect you want none of those things,” he said.

Across the water, the woman was gone. The water rippled outward as though it’d been disturbed. Likely it was fish feeding on surface insects.

“There’s nothing you can offer me,” said Bulgakov.

The man got up stiffly, as though to continue on his way. “Then write us a good story, Messire Bulgakov. Give us something enjoyable to read.”

My principal literary debt is clear, however those familiar with Mikhail Bulgakov’s The White Guard, A Country Doctor’s Notebook, and A Dead Man’s Memoir will no doubt enjoy some echo of those writings herein. Likewise I am grateful to Johann von Goethe and Christopher Marlowe and Charles Gounod for their particular interpretations of the Faust legend. Of those who were emboldened to tell their stories of this time, I’m indebted to Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Against Hope) and Anna Larina (This I Cannot Forget). Similarly, to the many individuals, hundreds in fact, who, as expatriates in the early 1950s, allowed their narratives to be captured in the faint and bluish hues of vintage mimeograph and to the Harvard College Library that has made them accessible (the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System Online).

I am grateful for the warmth and empathy of James H. Billington (The Icon and the Axe), Orlando Figes (Natasha’s Dance), and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Everyday Stalinism) which taught a foreigner an abiding regard and love for this people’s character and history and fortune.

I am grateful for Joseph Himes, who in his resolute passion to help first the Soviet Union, then the countries of Ukraine and Russia, advance their nuclear safety, traveled frequently to those places, learned their language, and introduced me to The Master and Margarita.

To those who dutifully read (and I believe in affection for me) those early and highly unsatisfactory versions of this story, Susan Tacent, Robin McLean, Krishna Lewis, Susan Robison, Dona Bolding, Robert Anthony, Priya Balasubramanian, and Claire Burdett, I am unbounded in my gratitude. And further, to my teachers, who through no fault of their own other than to be unflaggingly generous and remarkable in their teaching and their personage and their friendship and whom I call my mentors: Margot Livesey and Jim Shepard.

I am grateful for Dani Shapiro, Michael Marin, and Hannah Tinti.

For Christopher Castellani and Sonya Larson.

I am indebted to the patience and astuteness of Adam Schear. Likewise I am wholly grateful for the editorial wisdom of Michael Reynolds.

And finally, for those who have abided for years (yes, years), those souls who are my best mirrors of humanity and myself, I am grateful to Kristen Lekstrom; to Chris Thiem; to Vivian and Elie Aoun; to Inez Mostue; to Paul, Ryan, and Mark Himes; and above and beyond, to the one for whom I am most thankful that he roams the planet with me, Daniel Himes.

Julie Lekstrom Himes’s short fiction has been published in Shenandoah, The Florida Review (Editor’s Choice Award 2008), Fourteen Hills (nominated for Best American Mysteries 2011), and elsewhere. This is her debut novel. She lives with her family in Marblehead, Massachusetts.

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This is a work of fiction. While many elements of the story are drawn from the life of Mikhaíl Afanasievich Bulgakov, other details are purely fictional.

Copyright © 2017 by Julie Lekstrom Himes

First publication 2017 by Europa Editions

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco

www.mekkanografici.com

Cover photo © MLADEN ANTONOV/AFP/Getty Images

Stalin Epigram by Osip Mandelstam, reprinted with permission from the Osip Mandelshtam Papers (C0539); 1900s–1970s, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Excerpts from The Master and Margarita, reprinted with permission from Andrew Nurnberg Associates, London, UK

ISBN 9781609453749