Yes, they say that to this day the critic Latunsky turns pale remembering that terrible evening, and to this day he utters the name of Berlioz with veneration. It is totally unknown what dark and vile criminal job would have marked this evening - returning from the kitchen, Margarita had a heavy hammer in her hands.
Naked and invisible, the lady flier tried to control and talk sense into herself; her hands trembled with impatience. Taking careful aim, Margarita struck at the keys of the grand piano, and a first plaintive wail passed all through the apartment. Becker’s drawing-room instrument, not guilty of anything, cried out frenziedly. Its keys caved in, ivory veneer flew in all directions. The instrument howled, wailed, rasped and jangled. With the noise of a pistol shot, the polished upper soundboard split under a hammer blow. Breathing hard, Margarita tore and mangled the strings with the hammer. Finally getting tired, she left off and flopped into an armchair to catch her breath.
Water was roaring terribly in the bathroom, and in the kitchen as well. ‘Seems it’s already overflowing on the floor ...’ Margarita thought, and added aloud:
‘No point sitting around, however.’
The stream was already running from the kitchen into the corridor. Splashing barefoot through the water, Margarita carried buckets of water from the kitchen to the critic’s study and emptied them into his desk drawers. Then, after smashing the door of the bookcase in the same study with her hammer, she rushed to the bedroom. Shattering the mirror on the wardrobe, she took out the critic’s dress suit and drowned it in the tub. A large bottle of ink, picked up in the study, she poured over the luxuriously plumped-up double bed.
The devastation she wrought afforded her a burning pleasure, and yet it seemed to her all the while that the results came out somehow meagre. Therefore she started doing whatever came along. She smashed pots of ficus in the room with the grand piano. Before finishing that, she went back to the bedroom, slashed the sheets with a kitchen knife, and broke the glass on the framed photographs. She felt no fatigue, only the sweat poured from her in streams.
Just then, in apartment no. 82, below Latunsky’s apartment, the housekeeper of the dramatist Quant was having tea in the kitchen, perplexed by the clatter, running and jangling coming from above. Raising her head towards the ceiling, she suddenly saw it changing colour before her eyes from white to some deathly blue. The spot was widening right in front of her and drops suddenly swelled out on it. For about two minutes the housekeeper sat marvelling at this phenomenon, until finally a real rain began to fall from the ceiling, drumming on the floor. Here she jumped up, put a bowl under the stream, which did not help at all, because the rain expanded and began pouring down on the gas stove and the table with dishes. Then, crying out, Quant’s housekeeper ran from the apartment to the stairs and at once the bell started ringing in Latunsky’s apartment.
‘Well, they’re ringing ... Time to be off,’ said Margarita. She sat on the broom, listening to the female voice shouting through the keyhole:
‘Open up, open up! Dusya, open the door! Is your water overflowing, or what? We’re being flooded!’
Margarita rose up about a metre and hit the chandelier. Two bulbs popped and pendants flew in all directions. The shouting through the keyhole stopped, stomping was heard on the stairs. Margarita floated through the window, found herself outside it, swung lightly and hit the glass with the hammer. The pane sobbed, and splinters went cascading down the marble-faced wall. Margarita flew to the next window. Far below, people began running about on the sidewalk, one of the two cars parked by the entrance honked and drove off. Having finished with Latunsky’s windows, Margarita floated to the neighbour’s apartment. The blows became more frequent, the lane was filled with crashing and jingling. The doorman ran out of the main entrance, looked up, hesitated a moment, evidently not grasping at first what he ought to undertake, put the whistle to his lips, and started whistling furiously. To the sound of this whistle, Margarita, with particular passion, demolished the last window on the eighth floor, dropped down to the seventh, and started smashing the windows there.
Weary of his prolonged idleness behind the glass doors of the entrance, the doorman put his whole soul into his whistling, following Margarita precisely as if he were her accompanist. In the pauses as she flew from window to window, he would draw his breath, and at each of Margarita’s strokes, he would puff out his cheeks and dissolve in whistling, drilling the night air right up to the sky.
His efforts, combined with the efforts of the infuriated Margarita, yielded great results. There was panic in the house. Those windows left intact were flung open, people’s heads appeared in them and hid at once, while the open windows, on the contrary, were being closed. In the buildings across the street, against the lighted background of windows, there appeared the dark silhouettes of people trying to understand why the windows in the new Dramlit building were bursting for no reason at all.
In the lane people ran to Dramlit House, and inside, on all the stairways, there was the stamping of people rushing about with no reason or sense. Quant’s housekeeper shouted to those running up the stairs that they were being flooded, and she was soon joined by Khustov’s housekeeper from apartment no. 80, located just below Quant’s apartment At Khustov’s it was pouring from the ceiling in both the kitchen and the toilet. Finally, in Quant’s kitchen a huge slab of plaster fell from the ceiling, breaking all the dirty dishes, after which came a real downpour, the water gushing from the grid of wet, hanging lath as if from a bucket. Then on the steps of the main entrance shouting began.
Flying past the penultimate window of the fourth floor, Margarita peeked in and saw a man who in panic had pulled on a gas mask. Hitting his window with the hammer, Margarita scared him off, and he disappeared from the room.
And unexpectedly the wild havoc ceased. Slipping down to the third floor, Margarita peeked into the end window, covered by a thin, dark little curtain. In the room a little lamp was burning weakly under a shade. In a small bed with net sides sat a boy of about four, listening timorously. There were no grown-ups in the room, evidently they had all run out of the apartment.
‘They’re breaking the windows,’ the boy said and called: ‘Mama!’
No one answered, and then he said:
‘Mama, I’m afraid.’
Margarita drew the little curtain aside and flew in.
‘I’m afraid,’ the boy repeated, and trembled.
‘Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid, little one,’ said Margarita, trying to soften her criminal voice, grown husky from the wind. ‘It’s some boys breaking windows.’
‘With a slingshot?’ the boy asked, ceasing to tremble.
‘With a slingshot, with a slingshot,’ Margarita confirmed, ‘and you go to sleep.’
‘It’s Sitnik,’ said the boy, ‘he’s got a slingshot.’
‘Well, of course it’s he!’
The boy looked slyly somewhere to the side and asked:
‘And where are you, ma’am?’
‘I’m nowhere,’ answered Margarita, ‘I’m your dream.’
‘I thought so,’ said the boy.
‘Lie down now,’ Margarita ordered, ‘put your hand under your cheek, and I’ll go on being your dream.’