Black magic and its revelation

Chapter summary

On the night of the same day, the financial director Rimsky, alone in the office of the Variety Theater, still with no word of Stepan or Varenukha, receives the foreign artist Woland, who arrives in a black half-mask, accompanied by a tall man in checked clothing with a cracked pince-nez, who introduces himself as his assistant, and by a black cat walking on its hind legs. On stage, the master of ceremonies Bengalsky, a plump and jovial man, announces the black magic session and already warns that it is all illusionism, which will be explained at the end. Woland then asks Korovyov, whom he calls Fagot, whether the Muscovites have changed inside, and not only outside. To answer, Fagot performs a card trick and then fires a pistol into the air: a rain of real banknotes falls from the dome and the audience rushes to catch them. Bengalsky tries to rationalize the number as "mass hypnosis" and is beheaded by Behemoth, who tears off his head. The audience, moved, begs forgiveness for him, and Woland, before ordering the head put back on, pronounces the verdict that answers his question: the Muscovites are people like any others, they like money as humanity always has, they are frivolous, but mercy sometimes beats in their hearts, and only the housing problem has corrupted them.

Bengalsky runs off shouting for his own head, offering the apartment and the paintings to get it back, and is taken away by ambulance. Fagot then opens on stage a Parisian clothing shop, where the women in the audience trade the dresses and shoes they are wearing for new models for free, and the shop vanishes at the end of a minute, along with the pile of old clothes, while the women leave in their new dresses. A man in box number two, Arkady Apollonovich Semplyarov, chairman of the Moscow Theaters Acoustics Commission, demands that the performer reveal the technique behind the tricks. Fagot responds by asking where Semplyarov spent the previous night and tells, in front of his wife and a young female relative who lives in their home, that Semplyarov dismissed his driver and spent four hours with an actress. The young relative begins hitting him on the head with an umbrella, the wife screams for the police, and the cat orders the orchestra to play a march. When the police reach the box, Fagot and Behemoth have already vanished, just as the magician had before.