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The Master and Margarita / Мастер и Маргарита. Книга для чтения на английском языке
The Master and Margarita / Мастер и Маргарита. Книга для чтения на английском языке
© Hugh Aplin, 2008
© Каро, 2020
Part One
1. Never Talk to Strangers
At the hour of the hot spring sunset at Patriarch’s Ponds two citizens appeared. The first of them – some forty years old and dressed in a nice grey summer suit – was short, well fed and bald; he carried his respectable pork-pie hat[1] in his hand, and had a neatly shaved face adorned by spectacles of supernatural proportions in black horn frames. The second – a broad-shouldered, gingery, shock-headed young man with a checked cloth cap cocked towards the back of his head – was wearing a cowboy shirt, crumpled white trousers and black soft shoes.
The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz, the editor of a thick literary journal and chairman of the board of one of Moscow’s biggest literary associations, known in abbreviation as MASSOLIT[2],[3] while his young companion was the poet Ivan Nikolayevich Ponyrev, who wrote under the pseudonym Bezdomny.[4]
Entering the shade of the lime trees that were just becoming green, the writers first and foremost hurried towards a colourfully painted little booth with the inscription "Beer and Minerals”.
Yes, the first strange thing about that terrible May evening should be noted. Not just by the booth, but along the entire tree-lined avenue running parallel to Malaya Bronnaya Street, not a single person was about. At that hour, when people no longer even seemed to have the strength to breathe, when the sun, having heated Moscow up to an unbearable degree, was toppling in a dry mist somewhere down beyond the Garden Ring Road, nobody had come along here under the lime trees, nobody had sat down on a bench: the avenue was empty.
“Narzan,[5] please,” requested Berlioz.
“There’s no Narzan,” replied the woman in the booth, and for some reason took umbrage[6].
“Is there beer?” enquired Bezdomny in a hoarse voice[7].
“They’ll be bringing beer towards evening,” the woman replied.
“What is there, then?” asked Berlioz.
“Apricot squash – only it’s warm,” said the woman.