The barman put a piece into his mouth out of politeness, and understood at once that he was chewing something very fresh indeed, and, above all, extraordinarily delicious. But as he was chewing the fragrant, juicy meat, the barman nearly choked and fell a second time. From the neighbouring room a big, dark bird flew in and gently brushed the barman’s bald head with its wing. Alighting on the mantelpiece beside the clock, the bird turned out to be an owl. ‘Oh, Lord God! ...’ thought Andrei Fokich, nervous like all barmen. ‘A nice little apartment! ...’
‘A cup of wine? White, red? What country’s wine do you prefer at this time of day?’
‘My humble ... I don’t drink ...’
‘A shame! What about a game of dice, then? Or do you have some other favourite game? Dominoes? Cards?’
‘I don’t play games,’ the already weary barman responded.
‘Altogether bad,’ the host concluded. ‘As you will, but there’s something not nice hidden in men who avoid wine, games, the society of charming women, table talk. Such people are either gravely ill or secretly hate everybody around them. True, there may be exceptions. Among persons sitting down with me at the banqueting table, there have been on occasion some extraordinary scoundrels! ... And so, let me hear your business.’
‘Yesterday you were so good as to do some conjuring tricks ...’
‘I?’ the magician exclaimed in amazement. ‘Good gracious, it’s somehow even unbecoming to me!’
‘I’m sorry,’ said the barman, taken aback. ‘I mean the seance of black magic ...’
‘Ah, yes, yes, yes! My dear, I’ll reveal a secret to you. I’m not an artiste at all, I simply wanted to see the Muscovites
‘If you please, you see, among other things there were banknotes flying down from the ceiling ...’ The barman lowered his voice and looked around abashedly. ‘So they snatched them all up. And then a young man comes to my bar and gives me a ten-rouble bill, I give him eight-fifty in change ... Then another one...’
‘Also a young man?’
‘No, an older one. Then a third, and a fourth ... I keep giving them change. And today I went to check the cash box, and there, instead of money — cut-up paper. They hit the buffet for a hundred and nine roubles.’
‘Ai-yai-yai!’ the artiste exclaimed. ‘But can they have thought those were real bills? I can’t admit the idea that they did it knowingly.’
The barman took a somehow hunched and anguished look around him, but said nothing.
‘Can they be crooks?’ the magician asked worriedly of his visitor. ‘Can there be crooks among the Muscovites?’
The barman smiled so bitterly in response that all doubts fell away: yes, there were crooks among the Muscovites.
‘That is mean!’ Woland was indignant. ‘You’re a poor man ... You are a poor man?’
The barman drew his head down between his shoulders, making it evident that he was a poor man.
‘How much have you got in savings?’
The question was asked in a sympathetic tone, but even so such a question could not but be acknowledged as indelicate. The barman faltered.
‘Two hundred and forty-nine thousand roubles in five savings banks,’ a cracked voice responded from the neighbouring room, ‘and two hundred ten-rouble gold pieces at home under the floor.’
The barman became as if welded to his tabouret.
‘Well, of course, that’s not a great sum,’ Woland said condescendingly to his visitor, ‘though, as a matter of fact, you have no need of it anyway. When are you going to die?’
Here the barman became indignant.
‘Nobody knows that and it’s nobody’s concern,’ he replied.
‘Sure nobody knows,’ the same trashy voice came from the study. The binomial theorem, you might think! He’s going to die in nine months, next February, of liver cancer, in the clinic of the First Moscow State University, in ward number four.‘
The barman’s face turned yellow.
‘Nine months ...’ Woland calculated pensively. ‘Two hundred and forty-nine thousand ... rounding it off that comes to twenty-seven thousand a month ... Not a lot, but enough for a modest life ... Plus those gold pieces ...’
‘He won’t get to realize the gold pieces,’ the same voice mixed in, turning the barman’s heart to ice. ‘On Andrei Fokich’s demise, the house will immediately be torn down, and the gold will be sent to the State Bank.’
‘And I wouldn’t advise you to go to the clinic,’ the artiste went on. ‘What’s the sense of dying in a ward to the groans and wheezes of the hopelessly ill? Isn’t it better to give a banquet on the twenty-seven thousand, then take poison and move on to the other world to the sounds of strings, surrounded by drunken beauties and dashing friends?’
The barman sat motionless and grew very old. Dark rings surrounded his eyes, his cheeks sagged, and his lower jaw hung down.
