Mikhail Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita -
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white gloves. But he not only failed to come back in ten minutes; he never
came back at all. Odder still, the policeman appeared to have vanished with
him.
Anfisa, a devout and frankly rather a superstitious woman, informed the
distraught Anna Frantsevna that it was witchcraft, that she knew perfectly
well who had enticed away the lodger and the policeman, only she dared not
pronounce the name at night-time.
Witchcraft once started, as we all know, is virtually unstoppable. The
anonymous lodger disappeared, you will remember, on a Monday ; the following
Wednesday Belomut, too, vanished from the face of the earth, although
admittedly in different circumstances. He was fetched as usual in the
morning by the car which took him to work, but it never brought him back and
never called again.
Words cannot describe the pain and distress which this caused to madame
Belomut, but alas for her, she was not fated to endure even this unhappy
state for long. On returning from her dacha that evening, whither she had
hastily gone with Anfisa, Anna Frantzevna found no trace of madame Belomut
in the flat and what was more, the doors of both rooms occupied by the
Belomuts had been sealed. Two days of uncertainty and insomnia passed for
Anna Frantzevna ; on the third day she made another hasty visit to her dacha
from whence, it need hardly be said, she never returned. Anfisa, left alone,
cried her eye s out and finally went to bed at two-o'clock in the morning.
Nobody knows what happened to her after that, but tenants of the
neighbouring flat described having heard knocking coming from No. 50 and
having seen lights burning in the windows all night. By morning Anfisa too
was gone. Legends of all kinds about the mysterious flat and its vanishing
lodgers circulated in the building for some time. According to one of them