Chapter summary
The narrator calls the reader to accompany him to show the true and faithful love, that of Margarita Nikolayevna: thirty years old, childless, married to a rich and good husband, a renowned specialist whom she does not love, she has lived for months in mourning for a man no one knows is alive, the Master, who vanished without a trace after burning his own novel. She blames herself for having left that night and thinks she has only two ways out: to forget him or to die. One Friday she wakes with the feeling that something is about to change, after dreaming for the first time of the Master, in rags, beckoning to her with his hand in front of a log house in a desolate place. Taking advantage of her husband's three-day trip, she rereads the scorched passage of the novel that she keeps in an album and looks at his photograph. She goes out for a walk, and on the trolleybus she overhears two people whispering that the head of a dead man had been stolen that morning, the man who was to be buried that day, Berlioz. She sits down on a bench by the Kremlin wall, in Alexander Garden, where the funeral procession will pass.
A redhead with a canine showing strikes up a conversation during the procession and points out to her the critic Latunsky among those following the coffin, the man she hates. Margarita is irritated and wants to leave, but he calls her back by reciting by heart the sentence from the burned novel, "The darkness coming from the Mediterranean Sea covered the city hated by the procurator," and by showing that he knows about the notebook and the dried rose. He says his name is Azazello, assures her that the Master is alive and that she will learn everything about him if she accepts the invitation he brings: a visit, that evening, to a famous foreigner. Margarita accepts. Azazello gives her a round little gold box with a cream, which she must rub on her face and body at half past nine that evening, before waiting at home for a phone call at ten.
Analysis
What moves Margarita is the question left unanswered for months, whether the Master is alive. She wakes with the feeling after dreaming of him for the first time, rereads the burned passage and goes to the bench on the day of Berlioz's funeral. Azazello only holds her back when he shows that he knows the burned novel and the dried rose she keeps with the notebook; she accepts because the invitation promises news of him.
She had to either forget him or die. For she could no longer go on living like this.
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