Михаил Булгаков – The Master and Margarita / Мастер и Маргарита. Книга для чтения на английском языке (страница 13)
Following the example of the members of MASSOLIT, nobody called the house “The Griboyedov House”: everyone simply said “Griboyedov”: “I was hanging about for two hours at Griboyedov yesterday.” – “Well, and?” – “I got myself a month in Yalta.” – “Good for you!” Or: “Go and talk to Berlioz, he’s seeing people between four and five today at Griboyedov.” and so on.
MASSOLIT had settled into Griboyedov so well that nothing better or cosier could be imagined. Anyone going into Griboyedov involuntarily became acquainted first of all with the notices of various sports clubs, and with group and also individual photographs of members of MASSOLIT, hanging (the photographs) all over the walls of the staircase leading to the first floor.
On the doors of the very first room on that upper floor could be seen the large inscription: “Fishing and Dacha Section”, and there too was a picture of a crucian caught on the end of a rod.
On the doors of room No. 2 was written something not entirely comprehensible: “One-day writing trip. Apply to M. V. Podlozhnaya”.
The next door bore the brief but this time completely incomprehensible inscription “Perelygino”.[155] Then Griboyedov’s chance visitor would start to be dazzled by the inscriptions abounding on the auntie’s walnut doors: “Registration for Waiting List for Paper at Poklyovkina’s”, “Cashier’s Office. Sketch-writers’ Personal Accounts”…
Cutting through the longest queue, which had already started downstairs in the doorman’s room, one could see the inscription on the door people were trying to force their way into at every moment: “Housing Question[156]”.
Beyond the Housing Question there opened up a splendid poster on which was depicted a crag, and along its crest rode a horseman in a Caucasian cloak with a rifle over his shoulders. A little lower down were palm trees and a balcony, and on the balcony sat a young man with a little tuft of hair, gazing upwards with ever such lively eyes, and holding a fountain pen in his hand. The caption: “Fully inclusive writing holidays from two weeks (short story-novella) to one year (novel, trilogy). Yalta, Suuk-Su, Borovoye, Tsikhidziry, Makhindzhaury, Leningrad (Winter Palace)”. At this door there was also a queue, but not an excessive one: of about a hundred and fifty people.
Further on there followed, obeying the fanciful twists and ups and downs of the Griboyedov House, “MASSOLIT Board”, "Cashiers’ Offices Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 5”, "Editorial Board”, "MASSOLIT Chairman”, "Billiards Room”, various ancillary organizations and, finally, that very hall with the colonnade where the auntie had enjoyed her brilliant nephew’s comedy.
Any visitor who got into Griboyedov – if, of course, he wasn’t a complete dimwit – grasped at once how good a life those lucky members of MASSOLIT enjoyed, and sullen envy would immediately begin to torture him. And immediately he would address words of bitter reproach to the Heavens for their having failed to endow him at birth with literary talent, without which, naturally, there was no point even dreaming of securing a MASSOLIT membership card – brown, smelling of expensive leather and with a broad gold border – a card known to the whole of Moscow.
Who will say anything in defence of envy? It is a rotten category of feeling, but all the same, one must put oneself in the visitor’s shoes too. After all, what he saw on the upper floor was not everything – was still far from everything. The entire lower floor of auntie’s house was occupied by the restaurant, and what a restaurant! It was rightly considered the best in Moscow. And not only because it was accommodated in two large halls with vaulted ceilings, decorated with lilac horses with Assyrian manes, not only because on each table there stood a lamp covered with a shawl, not only because it could not be penetrated by the first person you came across in the street, but also because Griboyedov could beat any restaurant in Moscow at will with the quality of its provisions, and because those provisions were served at the most reasonable, by no means burdensome prices.
Thus there is nothing surprising in a conversation such as this, for example, which was once heard by the author of these most truthful lines beside the cast-iron railings of Griboyedov:
“Where are you dining today, Amvrosy?”
“What a question! Here of course, dear Foka! Archibald Archibaldovich whispered to me today that there’s going to be portions of pikeperch
“You really know how to live, Amvrosy!” sighed Foka, emaciated, run-down and with a carbuncle on his neck, in reply to the rosy-lipped giant, the golden-haired, plump-cheeked poet Amvrosy.
“I don’t have any particular know-how,” Amvrosy objected, “just an ordinary desire to live like a human being. What you mean to say, Foka, is that you can come across pikeperch at the Coliseum too. But at the Coliseum a portion of pikeperch costs thirteen roubles fifteen copecks, whereas here it’s five fifty! Apart from that, at the Coliseum the pikeperch is three days old, and apart from that, you have no guarantee either that at The Coliseum you won’t get a bunch of grapes in the face from the first young man that comes bursting in from Teatralny Passage. No, I’m categorically against the Coliseum!” the gourmet Amvrosy thundered for the whole boulevard to hear. “Don’t try and persuade me, Foka!”
“I’m not trying to persuade you, Amvrosy,” squealed Foka. “We can have dinner at home.”
“Your humble servant,” trumpeted Amvrosy. “I can imagine your wife attempting to construct portions of pikeperch
Oh-ho-ho… Yes, it was so, it was so! Long-time residents of Moscow remember the renowned Griboyedov! Never mind boiled portions of pikeperch! That’s cheap stuff, dear Amvrosy! What about the sterlet, sterlet in a silver saucepan, pieces of sterlet interlaid with crayfish necks and fresh caviar? What about eggs
At half-past ten on the evening when Berlioz was killed at Patriarch’s, only one upstairs room in Griboyedov was lit, and in it languished the twelve writers who had gathered for their meeting and were waiting for Mikhail Alexandrovich.
Those sitting on the chairs, and on the tables, and even on the two window sills in MASSOLIT’s boardroom were suffering dreadfully from the stifling heat. Not a single breath of fresh air was penetrating through the open windows. Moscow was emitting the heat accumulated in the asphalt during the course of the day, and it was clear that the night would bring no relief. There was a smell of onions from the basement of auntie’s house where the restaurant’s kitchen was at work, and everyone wanted a drink – everyone was on edge[161] and getting angry.
The belletrist Beskudnikov – a quiet, respectably dressed man with attentive and at the same time elusive eyes – took out his watch. The hand was crawling towards eleven. Beskudnikov tapped the face with his finger and showed it to his neighbour, the poet Dvubratsky, who was sitting on a table, and out of boredom swinging his feet, shod in yellow rubber-soled shoes.
“Really,” grumbled Dvubratsky.
“The guy probably got stuck on the Klyazma,” responded the rich voice of Nastasya Lukinishna Nepremenova, a Moscow merchant’s orphan who had become a writer composing maritime battle stories under the pseudonym “Navigator George”.
“Forgive me!” the author of popular sketches Zagrivov began boldly. “I’d be happy to be drinking some tea on a balcony myself just now, instead of stewing in here. The meeting was arranged for ten, wasn’t it?”
“It’s nice on the Klyazma now,” Navigator George egged the company on, knowing that the literary dacha village of Perelygino on the River Klyazma was a shared sore point. “The nightingales are probably already singing. My work always goes better out of town somehow, especially in the spring.”
“I’m in my third year of paying in money to send my wife and her Basedow’s disease[162][163] to that paradise, but there doesn’t seem to be anything visible on the horizon,” said the novelist Ieronym Poprikhin with venom and bitterness.
“It’s just a matter of who gets lucky,” droned the critic Ababkov from the window sill.