Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita -
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eleven. Beskudnikov tapped the watch face with his finger and showed it to
his neighbour, the poet Dvubratsky, who was sitting on the table, bored and
swinging his feet shod in yellow rubber-soled slippers.
'Well, really . . .' muttered Dvubratsky.
'I suppose the lad's got stuck out at Klyazma,' said Nastasya
Lukinishna Nepremenova, orphaned daughter of a Moscow business man, who had
turned writer and wrote naval war stories under the pseudonym of ' Bo'sun
George '.
'Look here! ' burst out Zagrivov, a writer of popular short stories. '
I don't know about you, but I'd rather be drinking tea out on the balcony
right now instead of stewiing in here. Was this meeting called for ten
o'clock or wasn't it? '
'It must be nice out at Klyazma now,' said IBo'sun George in a tone of
calculated innocence, knowing that the writers' summer colony out at
Perelygino near Klyazma was a sore point. ' I expect the nightingales are
singing there now. Somehow I always seem to work better out of town,
especially in the spring.'
'I've been paying my contributions for three years now to send my sick
wife to that paradise but somehow nothing ever appears on the horizon,' said
Hieronymus Poprikhin the novelist, with bitter venom.
'Some people are lucky and others aren't, that's all,' boomed the
critic Ababkov from the window-ledge.
Bos'un George's little eyes lit up, and softening her contralto rasp
she said:
'We mustn't be jealous, comrades. There are only twenty-two dachas,
only seven more are being built, and there are three thousand of us in
MASSOLIT.'
'Three thousand one hundred and eleven,' put in someone from a corner.
'Well, there you are,' the Bo'sun went on. ' What can one do?
Naturally the dachas are allocated to those with the most talent. . .'
'They're allocated to the people at the top! ' barked Gluk-haryov, a