Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita (1997) -
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objected:
'Well, there's some exaggeration here. About this same evening I do
know more or less certainly. It goes without saying, if a brick should fall
on my head on Bronnaya . . '
'No brick,' the stranger interrupted imposingly, 'will ever fall on
anyone's head just out of the blue. In this particular case, I assure you,
you are not in danger of that at all. You will die a different death.'
'Maybe you know what kind precisely?' Berlioz inquired with perfectly
natural irony, getting drawn into an utterly absurd conversation. 'And will
tell me?'
'Willingly,' the unknown man responded. He looked Berlioz up and down
as if he were going to make him a suit, muttered through his teeth something
like: 'One, two . . . Mercury in the second house . . . moon gone ... six -
disaster . . . evening - seven . . .' then announced loudly and joyfully:
'Your head will be cut off!'
Homeless goggled his eyes wildly and spitefully at the insouciant
stranger, and Berlioz asked, grinning crookedly:
'By whom precisely? Enemies? Interventionists?'[23]
'No,' replied his interlocutor, 'by a Russian woman, a Komsomol[24
]girl.'
'Hm . . .' Berlioz mumbled, vexed at the stranger's Utde joke, 'well,
excuse me, but that's not very likely.'
'And I beg you to excuse me,' the foreigner replied, 'but it's so. Ah,
yes, I wanted to ask you, what are you going to do tonight, if it's not a
secret?'
'It's not a secret. Right now I'll stop by my place on Sadovaya, and
then at ten this evening there will be a meeting at Massolit, and I will
chair it.'
'No, that simply cannot be,' the foreigner objected firmly.
'Why not?'
'Because,' the foreigner replied and, narrowing his eyes, looked into
the sky, where, anticipating the cool of the evening, black birds were
tracing noiselessly, 'Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has