The Fantastic Novel. Arrests and
Cannibalism.
“How do I know you are
what you say you are?” he demanded weakly.
Merrilees flapped back his coat for a moment, showing a
badge. Edward stared at him with eyes that popped out of his head…
Agatha Christie. The
Rajah’s Emerald.
So,
what has our troika been doing in Moscow over the last two years? We already
know that on Yeshua’s request they found Master, and they had to stick around
in Moscow until the novel about Pontius Pilate was done. [Master had been
writing it for more than a year until August the following year.] For this
reason, it was decided to hold the next Ball of the Spring Full Moon in Moscow,
so that their next assignment would become to find an apartment in Moscow where
it would take place, and also to find a Moscow-born resident named Margarita
who would serve as the Queen of that Ball. [Woland would join the troika in
Moscow when everything was ready, that is by the time of the Russian Orthodox
Easter.]
It
is clear that the demonic force picked the jeweler’s widow’s apartment not by
accident. They obviously had had some dealings with her late husband, who was
by no means a perfectly upright man, judging by the nature of his profession.
The troika presently had to rid the apartment of five tenants living in it, in
order to fill it with two useful new tenants: the Variety Theater director
Stepa Likhodeev and the militant atheist M. Berlioz. And therefore the troika
began to rat on one old tenant after another. They also reported on the
jeweler’s widow, regarding her “countless treasures” hidden at her dacha
(country house). The security organs used this opportunity to sweep the widow’s
housemaid, who had been helping her in the conduct of her unsavory activities.
The apartment walls and floors were tapped through and through, for secret
compartments. The troika also snitched on the tenant Belomut and his wife. One
fine day his limousine picked him up as usual to drive him to work, but neither
Belomut nor the car ever came back. The next day, “filled with grief and
horror,” his wife disappeared too. The two rooms occupied by the Belomuts were
sealed off, clearly indicating that the couple was officially arrested…
How
did these arrests and disappearances start in the first place? They began with
a strange incident: a tenant disappeared from this “no-good” and “strange”
apartment #50, whose last name seemed to have been lost. Bulgakov does not give
us his first name either. So, this is how it happened.---
“Once on a day off (Bulgakov
specifies this as Monday, the “second nameless” tenant’s day off), a policeman came to the apartment and summoned the second tenant
(in Bulgakov’s count, the first tenant was Belomut) (whose name got lost) and said that the tenant was needed at
the police station to sign some papers. The tenant told Anfisa, the loyal
longtime housemaid of Anna Franzevna (the jeweler’s widow) to answer the phone, should he get a call, that he would be
back in ten minutes, and then he left together with the polite policeman in white gloves. But he did not return in
ten minutes, and in fact he never came back. The oddest thing was that the
policeman apparently disappeared with him…”
Something
is very wrong with this picture. Bulgakov uses his superstitious character
Anfisa to call it “sorcery.” But there are indeed several glaring
irregularities here.
Had
the nameless tenant been arrested, he would have been picked up by two
plainclothes policemen, and his room would subsequently have been sealed, which
apparently did not happen, although in other cases Bulgakov says it explicitly.
Why
was the policeman wearing white gloves? In Bulgakov’s symbolic universe of Master and Margarita, the wearers of
gloves (notably including Margarita) are usually associated with the demonic
force. I will be writing much about this later in this chapter, when I comment
on Margarita’s river trip right before the ball.
If
the policeman was bona fide, why did the police fail to come to the apartment
after his disappearance and start interrogating witnesses and aggressively
looking for clues? Who and how learned about the disappearance of the
policeman; was it a call to the apartment pretending to be from the police, in
which case it must have been the PR wizard Koroviev, like he had done it with
Nikanor Ivanovich, which story will follow?
The
theme of arrest interested Bulgakov. Two of his protagonists: HaNozri in Pontius Pilate and Master are being
arrested, as well as several other characters of Master and Margarita. It comes to the absurd, when as the late
Berlioz’s rooms are being sealed, Stepa Likhodeev thinks that Berlioz has been
arrested. The same suspicion occurs to Rimsky when Varenukha fails to return to
work. It’s just that it does not enter people’s heads that something else can happen to people, something
more terrible than an arrest…
Reading
the description of arrest happening to Nikanor Ivanovich Bosoy, we can figure
out how a “normal” arrest takes place:
---There
are always two men who come to make the arrest.
---They
introduce themselves and show their IDs.---If the arrested person lived alone, the room/apartment is sealed up.
Bulgakov
does not tell us whether the arresting duo showed their ID’s to Bosoy’s wife,
but it is reasonable to suppose that they did. As for Bosoy, he had to ask for
the men’s ID’s, which they dutifully produced. It shows that having indeed
shown their documents to the wife, they simply put them away, considering this
procedure completed, but when asked by the husband they naturally complied,
thus fulfilling the standard requirement.
As
we know, Bosoy was ratted on by none other than Koroviev, who introduced
himself on the phone to the police as a certain Timofey Kondratyevich Kvastsov,
tenant of Apartment #11 and a known snitch. As soon as Bosoy is arrested, comes
Kvastsov’s turn.
“…an unknown citizen appeared, who summoned Kvastsov [out of the
kitchen] with his finger into the hall and told him something, after which they
together disappeared.”
Another
arrest is of special interest to us, in view of our theatre macabre. The ‘arrested’ is second deputy to the arrested
Bosoy. And previously, Bulgakov tells us what happened to the director’s first
deputy: “…and with the departing group left a confused
and depressed secretary of the building administration Prolezhnev”
So,
how does the second deputy fare?
“And then a certain citizen entered the room. On seeing the
newcomer, the man at the table grew pale.
‘Member of the Board
Pyatnazhko?’ asked the newcomer.‘Me,’ answered the other barely audibly.
The newcomer whispered something to the man sitting at the desk, and totally upset, the other rose from his chair, and in a few seconds Poplavsky [the uncle from Kiev of the deceased Berlioz] was left all by himself in the empty room.”
And
naturally Poplavsky has no doubt that
Pyatnazhko has just been “swept.”
(To
be continued…)
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