The Master and Margarita - Opening

BOOK ONE
CHAPTER I

Never Talk With Strangers

At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds. One of them, approximately forty years old, dressed in a grey summer suit, was short, dark-haired, plum, bald, and carried his respectable fedora hat in his hand. His neatly shaven face was adorned with black horn-rimmed glasses of a supernatural size. The other, a broad-shouldered young man with tousled reddish hair, his checkered cap cocked back on his head, was wearing a cowboy shirt, wrinkled white trousers and black sneakers.

'... who are you, then?'
'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.'

Goethe, Faust

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group

First published as Master i Margarita in serial form in Moskva, 1966-7
This translation published in Penguin Books 1997

Text copyright Mikhail Bulgakov, 1966, 1967
Translation, Further Reading and Notes copyright Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1997
Introduction copyright Richard Pevear 1997
All rights reserved

Set in 10/12pt Monotype Garamond
Printed in the United States of America

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 84

Worse trials still awaited them in Canudos; they must not allow fear to overcome them, the Blessed Jesus would aid those who had faith. The end of the world continued to be a subject he very often spoken of. The earth, worn out after so many centuries of giving forth plants and animals and sheltering man, would ask the Father if it might rest. God would give His consent and the acts of destruction would commence. That was what was meant by the words of the Bible: "I bring not peace, but a sword!"

Book Cycle: This Week

• Hayat-e-Javed - 100pgs: pg. 248/900
• Quarantine
  
• Republic
  
• Meditations
• Persian 70/75
  

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 82

I asked him if they were prepared for more attacks, since the bourgeoisie reacts like a wild beast when the sacrosanct right of private ownership of property is violated. He left me dumbfounded by murmuring that all land belongs to the Good Lord Jesus, and that the Counselor is building the largest church in the world in Canudos. I tried to explain to him that it was not becaue they were building churches that the powers that be had sent soldiers to do battle with them, but he answered that it was precisely for that reason, since the Republic is trying to wipe out religion. I then heard, comrades, a strange diatribe against the Republic, delivered with quiet self-assurance, without a trace of passion. Th Republic is bent on oppressing the Church and the faithful, doing away with all the religious orders as it has already suppressed the Society of Jesus, and the most notorious proof of its intentions is its having instituted civil marriage, a scandalous act of impiety when the sacrament of marriage created by God already exists.
I can imagine the disappointment of many of my readers, and their suspicions on reading the foregoing, the Canudos, like the Vendee uprising at the time of the French Revolution, is a reactionary movement, inspired by priests. It is not as simple as that, comrades. As you know from my last letter, the Church condemns the Counselor and Canudos, and the jaguncos have seized the lands of a baron. I asked the man with the scar on his face if the poor of Brazil were better off during the monarchy. He immediately answered yes, since it was the monarchy that had abolished slavery. And he explained to me that the Devil, using Freemasons and Protestants as his tools, overthrew the Emperor Dom PedroII, in order to restore slavery. Those were his very words: the Counselor has inculcated upon his followers the belief that the republicans are advocates of slavery.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 79

He returned a week later. The floodwaters had begun to recede. Honorio, the Sardelinha sisters, and the half-dozen laborers who no worked for them were dejected, but Antonio took this latest catastrophe calmly. He inventoried what had been salvaged, made calculations in a little notebook, and raised their spirits by telling them that he still had many debts to collect and that like a cat he had too many lives to live to feel defeated by one flood.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 78

When he was better, they continued on south, a harrowing journey of weeks and weeks during which the only things they came upon were ghost towns, deserted haciendas, caravans of skeletons drifting aimlessly, as though hallucinated.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 77

Antoni's face was pale. "We have to start all over again," Honorio murmured. "Not in this city, though," his brother answered.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 71

Shortly thereafter the other soldiers fled, and as they ran for their lives some of them fell amid the nests of jaguncos that had formed in this corner or that, where they were beaten to death with spades and shovels and done in with knives in less time than it takes to tell. They died hearing themselves called dogs and devils, amid prognostications that their souls would be condemned as their corpses rotted.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 48

"The Church has lost its authority there on account of a crazy man who spends his time making the whole mob work all day long building a stone temple." I was unable to share his consternation and instead felt only happiness and sympathy for those men, thanks to whom, it would appear, there is being reborn from its ashes, in the backlands of Brazil, the Idea that the forces of reaction believe they have drowned in the blood of revolutions defeated in Europe. Till my next letter or never.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 37

The sun burns the backlands to a cinder, gleams on the greenish-black waters of Itapicuru, reflects off the houses of Queimadas lining the right edge of the river, at the foot of gullies of reddish clay. Sparse trees cast their shadow over the rocky, rolling terrain stretching south eastward, in the direction of Riacho da Onca. The rider -- boots, broad-brimmed hat, black frock coat -- escorted by his shadow and that of his mule, heads unhurriedly toward a thicket of lead-colored bushes. Behind him, already far in the distance, the rooftops of Queimadas still glow like fire. To his left, several hundred meters away, a hut at the top of a rise can be seen.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 29

They were lying underneath a tree, smoking cigars, and in a sudden fit of boldness he asked him point-blank: "Why did you kill the mistress?" "Because I've got the Dog in me," Big Joao answered immediately. "Don't talk to me about that any more." The Kid thought that his companion had told him the truth.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 25

He does not resemble the government officials or the doctor in the white smock with whom he has come here. Young, nearsighted, with thick eyeglasses. He does not take notes with a pencil but with a goose-quill pen. He is dressed in a pair of trousers coming apart at the seams, an off-white jacket, a cap with a visor, and all of his apparel seems fake, wrong, out of place on his awkward body. He is holding a clipboard with a number of sheets of paper and dips his goose-quill pen in an inkwell, with the cork of a wine bottle for a cap, that is fastened to the sleeve of his jacket. He looks more or less like a scarecrow.

The War Of The End Of The World - pg. 18

During the many months of drought the Counselor and his disciples worked unceasingly, burying those dead of starvation, disease, or anguish whom they came across along the sides of the roads, rotting corpses that were food for wild beasts and even humans. They made coffins and dug graves for these brothers and sisters. They were a motley group, a chaotic mixture of races, backgrounds, and occupations. Among them were whites dressed all in leather who had made their living driving the herds of the "colonels," the owners of great cattle ranches; full-blooded Indians with reddish skins whose great great-grandfathers had gone about half naked and eaten the hearts of their enemies; mestizos who had been farm overseers, tinsmiths, black smiths, cobblers, or carpenters; and mullatoes and blacks who had been runaway from the sugarcane plantations on the coast and from the rack, the stocks, the floggings with bull pizzles and the brine thrown on the raw lash marks, and other punishments invented for slaves in the sugar factories.

Quarantine - Opening

1

The writing of a text presupposes the existence of a fine net of relationships binding the different threads that weave within it.

A.J.L., in memoriam

First published in Great Britain by Quartet Books Limited 1994
27 Goodge Street, London W1p 1FD

Originally published under the title La Cuarantena
by Mondadori Espana, S.A. in 1991

Copyright 1991 by Juan Goytisolo
Translation copyright 1994 by Peter Bush



All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form or by any means without the prior
written permission of the publisher

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

Book Cycle: This Week

• War Of The End Of The World - 150 pgs: pg.350/568
  
• Hayat-e-Javed - 100pgs: pg. 248/900
• Quarantine - 50pgs/122
• Meditations

Message

Out of the corpse-warm foyer of heaven steps the sun.
There it is not the immortals,
but rather the fallen, we perceive.


And brilliance doesn't trouble itself with decay. Our godhead,
history, has ordered for us a grave
from which there is no resurrection.

Book Cycle: November

1. Plato: Forum, Republic
2. Enquiries Into Human Understanding
3. Treatises
4. Hayat-e-Javed
5. War of the end of the world
6. Early Xtian Writers
7. The Bible: Genesis
8. Twilight in Delhi
9. Aab-e-Hayat
10. Kleist
11. Ingeborg Bachmann (2010, rest of,)
12. Muslim Women in India

Days of 1964

posted by Shigekuni: shigekuni.wordpress.com

Houses, an embassy, the hospital.
Our neighborhood sun-cured if trembling still
In pools of the night’s rain . . .
Across the street that led to the center of town
A steep hill kept one company part way
Or could be climbed in twenty minutes
For some literally breathtaking views,
Framed by umbrella pines, of city and sea.
Underfoot, cyclamen, autumn crocus grew
Spangled as with fine sweat among the relics
Of good times had by all. If not Olympus,
An out-of-earshot, year-round hillside revel.

I brought home flowers from my climbs.
Kyria Kleo who cleans for us
Put them in water, sighing Virgin, Virgin.
Her legs hurt. She wore brown, was fat, past fifty,
And looked like a Palmyra matron
Copied in lard and horsehair. How she loved
You, me, loved us all, the bird, the cat!
I think now she was love. She sighed and glistened
All day with it, or pain, or both.
(We did not notably communicate.)
She lived nearby with her pious mother
And wastrel son. She called me her real son.

I paid her generously, I dare say.
Love makes one generous. Look at us. We’d known
Each other so briefly that instead of sleeping
We lay whole nights, open, in the lamplight,
And gazed, or traded stories.

One hour comes back—you gasping in my arms
With love, or laughter, or both,
I having just remembered and told you
What I’d looked up to see on my way downtown at noon:

poor old Kleo, her aching legs,
Trudging into the pines. I called.
Called three times before she turned.
Above a tight, skyblue sweater, her face
Was painted. Yes. Her face was painted
Clown-white, white of the moon by daylight,
Lidded with pearl, mouth a poinsettia leaf.
Eat me, pay me—the erotic mask
Worn the world over by illusion
To weddings of itself and simple need.

Startled mute, we had stared—was love illusion?—
And gone our ways. Next, I was crossing a square
In which a moveable outdoor market’s
Vegetables, chickens, pottery kept materializing
Through a dream-press of hagglers each at heart
Leery lest he be taken, plucked,
The bird, the flower of that November mildness,
Self lost up soft clay paths, or found, foothold,
Where the bud throbs awake
The better to be nipped, self on its knees in mud—
Here I stopped cold, for both our sakes;

And calmer on my way home bought us fruit.

Forgive me if you read this. (And may Kyria Kleo,
Should someone ever put it into Greek
And read it aloud to her, forgive me, too.)
I had gone so long without loving,
I hardly knew what I was thinking.

Where I hid my face, your touch, quick, merciful,
Blindfolded me. A god breathed from my lips.
If that was illusion I wanted it to last long;
To dwell, for its daily pittance, with us there,
Cleaning and watering, sighing with love or pain.
I hoped it would climb when it needed to the heights
Even of degradation as I for one
Seemed, those days, to be always climbing

Book Cycle: This Week

• Hayat-e-Javed :150pgs
• Never Let Me Go (100 pgs)
• The War Of The End Of The World (70 pgs)
• The Republic : Start