The Master and Margarita / Мастер и Маргарита. Книга для чтения на английском языке

50 – had already long enjoyed if not a bad, then in any event a strange reputation. Just two years before, its owner had been the widow of the jeweller De Fougeré. Anna Franzevna de Fougeré, a respectable and very businesslike fifty-year-old lady, had rented out three of her five rooms to lodgers: one whose name seems to have been Belomut and another with a name that has been lost.

And then, two years before, inexplicable things had started happening in the apartment: people had begun disappearing from this apartment without trace.

One day, on a holiday, a policeman appeared at the apartment, summoned the second lodger (whose name has been lost) into the entrance hall and said that the latter was requested to drop into the police station for a moment to sign for something. The lodger asked Anfisa, Anna Franzevna’s devoted and longtime maid, to say, in the event of anybody phoning him, that he would be back in ten minutes, and off he went with the correctly behaved policeman in white gloves.

The pious – or to put it more candidly, the superstitious – Anfisa came straight out and declared to Anna Franzevna, who was most upset, that it was witchcraft, and that she knew very well who had stolen away both the lodger and the policeman – only, with night approaching, she did not want to say.

Well, and witchcraft, as is well known, only has to start, and then you simply can’t stop it with anything. That second lodger disappeared, if memory serves, on the Monday, and on the Wednesday Belomut vanished into thin air – but under different circumstances, it is true. A car stopped by for him in the morning as usual, to take him to work, and it did take him away, but it brought nobody back, and it came back itself no more.

The grief and horror of Madame Belomut beggar description. But, alas, both the one and the other were short-lived. That same night, returning with Anfisa from the dacha, to which she had for some reason hurriedly gone away, Anna Franzevna found Citizeness Belomut no longer at the apartment. But that is not all: the doors of both the rooms which had been occupied by the Belomuts proved to have been sealed!

Somehow two days passed.