“Cap” Continues.
“O if it’s true that in the night,
When the living are asleep,
And from the sky the rays of moon
Slide down upon the tombstones,
O if it’s true that at that time
The quiet graves are left empty,
I am calling upon a shadow…
Appear, beloved shadow!
The way you were before the parting…”
A. S. Pushkin. Incantation.
There
is a very big difference between these two transformations. In The Fantastic Novel of Master and Margarita I
am writing that the demonic force in Bulgakov’s works can create supernatural
forms of people, and, moreover, these forms can exist in parallel to the real
people.
Such
is the case with Master and Margarita.
There actually exist, simultaneously and in parallel, two pairs of them, as
Bulgakov shows us two double deaths, and of course one cannot kill the same
people twice. The real Margarita continues to live in her mansion and dies
there of a heart attacj. The real Master continues to live in the psychiatric clinic and dies
there. They never see each other again.
I
write about this in The Fantastic Novel
of Master and Margarita (segments XXXI-XXXIII), as well as in the
forthcoming chapter Ivanushka.
But,
using the example of Master and Margarita,
“returning” to their basement apartment, I demonstrated that after Woland’s
departure from Moscow these supernatural forms would have ceased to exist,
disintegrating, just like those “dead corpses”, that is, the “guests,”
disintegrated at the end of Satan’s Ball.
All
this so-called “reality” is false; it exists only in the presence of the
demonic force, and properly ceases to exist by the will of the demonic force,
by the same token as time and space exist likewise at the
command of the demonic force, according to Bulgakov. About this, in Odds and Ends.
In
order for a genuine transformation to take place in Master and Margarita,
1. The real Master and Margarita had to die;
2. Only divine power, namely, Christ in this case, who
personally took interest in the fate of Master and Margarita, could transfer
the souls of the real people, presently deceased, into their recreated images,
or forms. The devil [Woland] could recreate their forms, but he could not
transfer the souls of the real people into these forms without divine involvement.
All
the more interesting then is the case of transformation in the short story Cockroach. The human form of Cap was
created by the demonic force for this specific work on earth, that is, in
Moscow, on Novinsky Boulevard. In order to obtain the human soul of Vasili
Rogov, Cap was supposed to allow himself to be killed. But instead, as we can
see, Cap does everything in his limited power which is quite the opposite. That
is, instead of going after Vasili Rogov’s soul, Cap is desperately trying to
prevent the inevitable.
Cap’s
resistance to this evil is depicted superbly by Bulgakov in a single sentence, which pierces the reader to the bone.---
“Cap, rasping, lifted his arms to heaven.”
It
is as though in this moment Cap makes his final appeal to heaven, but not for
himself, who is already long dead, but for the lost soul of Vasili Rogov.
Having
been slaughtered by Cockroach, the appearance of Cap changes instantly.
Cap’s
face “dried up,” “became more handsome,” without any “traces of oil,” and the
formerly “mousy eyes turned into huge black plums.”
Bulgakov’s
description of the transformation of Cap’s face focuses on the eyes. He is the
ultimate sketch artist, he does this throughout his work, which attracts the
reader, and makes us think. In this case, he puts the emphasis on the “huge
black plums,” that is, on the eyes of the murdered man, giving the reader a
pretty good clue as to who that may be, considering that Cap has now shed the
form created by the demonic force, and is assuming his actual appearance as
when he was alive.
I
believe that this idea of transformation is Bulgakov’s original idea, as I have
not read anything like it anywhere else. This is further proof that Bulgakov
was a genius as a writer that the second transformation, this time in Master and Margarita, is shown in an
entirely different way, as the two situations are so very different, albeit the
same at the core.
What
occurs in Master and Margarita is a
reverse transformation. From the two people alive up to that moment, their souls transmigrate into bodies created in their exact likeness.
After
committing the murder, Cockroach says:
“I’m dead… Black is my fate. Who was that, devil,
who sold me the knife, and why?”
[This is Bulgakov’s frequent
technique of inserting the answer into his own question. He especially likes to
do it when the demonic force is involved, and the reader naturally assumes that
this is done to embellish the narrative. If we pick out all the sentences where
Bulgakov makes references to the devil or the demons, and such, it becomes
clear that the author does it deliberately, as if pointing out to the reader
what he really has in mind.]
In this instance, Bulgakov
strongly suggests that the devil himself has sold the Finnish knife to
Cockroach. Why? The answer is equally clear: “With such a knife, if you just swipe a man
under the rib, you could just slaughter anyone.”
We may assume that, having
sold the knife, the devil lost himself in the crowd, from where he watched and
waited for his moment to utter the following comment:
“Hey, you, give it to him, give it to him,
why long talk!”
We know that Cap got even
more scared on hearing these words:
“Cap’s eyes now
started rolling all over, fidgeting like mice.”
We can safely assume that Cap
knew what would follow next. The demonic force unites them both, Cockroach and
Cap in bringing them both to the same end: death. It turns out that Cap had
been trying to prevent not only his own death, but Cockroach’s as well.
“…Old trick,” came a
voice from the gallery. “That one in the
stalls is one from their company!” Bulgakov
uses this method in Master and Margarita,
at the séance of black magic. I wrote about this already in the chapter I
called The Spy Novel, referring to
Azazello, sitting in the gallery, prodding on the people around him in the
audience, to the effect that all the tricks which the public sees at the show
have been fixed by the actors’ accomplices planted among the audience. And of
course there is no other way to explain the stern voice coming from the gallery
demanding that the compere’s head be ripped off, which does indeed happen but
already in the fantastic dimension.
It is eerily strange that Cap
appears to know Vasili Rogov’s nickname. When Cockroach in a hysterical voice
calls Cap a crook: “…Bought my own boots with my own
tenner!”, Cap shifts sideways:
“Bought them from…
a tall man with a cataract on one eye, and you are a small--- c-cockroach!”
This is already far too
strange, because before this Cap twice tells the other guy: “I don’t know you, and I see you for the first time!”
But Cockroach already knows
that Cap and Voice were working together. We’ve also established the fact that
Cap knows the character with the “rotten” and “nasal” voice, and, probably, he
is the same person whom Cap is searching out in the crowd, and is clearly
afraid of, trying to flee from Novinsky Boulevard. Who is this third character?
Ironically, we learn it from Cockroach himself. It’s the devil himself who sold
him the Finnish knife!
This is the clue which
Bulgakov gives us, to help us understand what is going on.
Bulgakov
shows that the forces are not equal from the moment that Cockroach succumbs to
the temptation of buying something completely useless to him, as he immediately
realizes, just because it is being sold to him on the cheap, namely, the
Finnish knife. From that moment on, he loses control over his thoughts, over
his actions, and basically over his own life. (This devilish idea that nothing
really is under man’s control is graphically promoted by Woland to Berlioz and
Ivanushka in their conversation on the Patriarch
Ponds, in Master and Margarita.)
So, nothing presumably depends from this point on, on the will of the baker Vasili
Rogov. He has been turned into a veritable Cockroach. Bulgakov now stops
calling him Vasili Rogov and will be calling him only Cockroach.
And
Cap is obviously unable to save Cockroach, who will be facing and certainly
getting capital punishment for the murder. It so happens that Cap is himself in
the power of the devil, who suddenly “grew from under the ground.”
To be continued…
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