Narrative Voice- Literature and Language Teaching 1

Michail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

CH:19 MARGARITA

Follow me, reader !who told you that there is no such thing as real, true, eternal love? Cut out his lying tongue!
Follow me, reader, and only me and I will show you that love!
The master was wrong when he told Ivan with such bitterness, in the hospital that hour before midnight,
that she had forgotten him. It was impossible. Of course she had not forgotten him.
First let us reveal the secret that the master refused to tell Ivan. His beloved mistress was called
Margarita Nikoleyevna. Everything the master said about her to the wretched poet was the strict truth. She was
beautiful and clever. It is also true that many women would have given anything to change places with Margarita
Nikoleyevna. Thirty years old and childless, Margarita was married to a brilliant scientist, whose work was of
national importance. Her husband was young, handsome, kind, honest and he adored his wife. Margarita
Nikoleyevna and her husband lived alone in the whole of the top floor of a delightful house in a garden in one of
the side streets near the Arbat . It was a charming place. You can see for yourself whenever you feel like having
a look. Just ask me and I’ll tell you the address and how to get there; the house is standing to this day.
Margarita Nikoleyevna was never short of money. She could buy whatever she liked. Her husband had
plenty of interesting friends. Margarita never had to cook. Margarita knew nothing of the horrors of living in a
shared flat. In short . . . was she happy? Not for a moment. Since the age of nineteen when she had married and
moved into her house she had never been happy. Ye gods! What more did the woman need? Why did her eyes
always glow with a strange fire? What else did she want, that witch with a very slight squint in one eye, who
always decked herself with mimosa every spring? I don’t know. Obviously she was right when she said she
needed him, the master, instead of a Gothic house, instead of a private garden, instead of money. She was
right__she loved him.
Even I, the truthful narrator, yet a mere onlooker, feel a pain when I think what Margarita went through
when she came back to the master’s basement the next day (fortunately she had not been able to talk to her
husband, who failed to come home at the time arranged) and found that the master was not there. She did
everything she could to discover where he might be, but in vain. Then she returned home and took up her old
life.
Dirty Weekend (by H. Zahavi)
This is the story of Bella, who woke up one morning and realised she’d had enough.
She’s no-one special. You must have seen them. You’ve probably passed them. You’ve certainly
stepped on them.
She could have done the decent thing. She could have done what decent people do. She could have
filled her gently rounded belly with barbiturates or flung herself, with gay abandon, from the top of a tower
block. They would have thought it said, but not unseemly. Alas, poor Bella, they would have said, as they
shovelled what remained of her into the waiting earth.
But pain and Bella made poor companions. She ran from pain, and thought it wouldn’t find her. There
might have been another reason why she couldn’t do the deed. Another reason why she carried on, regardless.
Perhaps it was the thought of having been, and gone, and left no mark. The thought that no-one even knew her
name. She wanted them, if nothing else, at least to know her name.
Some people are good at life, and some are bad. Bella was bad. No-one had taught her how to do it, so
she stumbled along in the dark. All she wanted was to be left alone, which didn’t seem a lot to ask. And nothing
would have changed, no-one would have known her name, but for the man who watched her. He sae her in her
basement, and had to have a go. He didn’t have the sense to let her be.
He thought he’d take her by the hair and pull her through the street. He thought he’d clamp a hand
across her mouth, and bend her into what he wanted. His trouble was he thought too much. A little mind with big
ideas.
For Bella couldn’t bend.
As he found out, as she found out, Bella could only break.

She stood outside the shop with light flakes of snow falling on her bare head. Deflated. The
momentum suddenly halted. The adrenalin gradually leaking away. She began walking down the road,
going nowhere.