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 * BOOK ONE * 


1. Never Talk to Strangers

     At the sunset  hour of one warm spring day two  men were  to be seen at
Patriarch's Ponds. The first of them--aged about forty, dressed in a greyish
summer  suit--was  short,  dark-haired,  well-fed  and bald.  He carried his
decorous pork-pie hat by the brim and his neatly shaven face was embellished
by  black hornrimmed spectacles of  preternatural  dimensions. The other,  a
broad-shouldered young  man with  curly reddish hair  and a check cap pushed
back  to the nape of  his neck,  was  wearing a tartan  shirt,  chewed white
trousers and black sneakers.
     The first was none other than Mikhail Alexandrovich  Berlioz, editor of
a  highbrow literary magazine  and chairman of the management cofnmittee  of
one of the  biggest Moscow  literary  clubs, known by  its  abbreviation  as
massolit; his  young companion  was  the  poet Ivan  Nikolayich Poniryov who
wrote under the pseudonym of Bezdomny.
     Reaching  the shade  of the budding lime  trees,  the two writers  went
straight to a gaily-painted kiosk labelled'Beer and Minerals'.
     There was an oddness about  that  terrible day in  May  which  is worth
recording  : not  only at  the  kiosk but along the whole avenue parallel to
Malaya Bronnaya Street there was not a person to be seen. It was the hour of
the  day  when people  feel too exhausted to breathe, when Moscow glows in a
dry haze as the sun disappears behind the Sadovaya Boulevard--yet no one had
come  out for a walk under the limes,  no one  was  sitting  on a bench, the
avenue was empty.
     'A glass of lemonade, please,'said Berlioz.
     'There isn't any,'replied the woman  in the kiosk. For some reason  the
request seemed to offend her.
     'Got any beer?' enquired Bezdomny in a hoarse voice.
     'Beer's being delivered later this evening' said the woman.

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