Chapter summary
Margarita, invisible and naked, flies over Moscow on the broomstick, learns to control it, bumps into a street clock and breaks the glass with the broomstick. She enters through a kitchen window and puts out the stoves of two neighbors who were quarreling, and on reading on the notice board of the Dramlit House building the name of the critic Latunsky (the man whose article destroyed the publication of the Master's novel, and with it the Master himself), she shouts that it was he who ruined the Master. She goes up to his apartment, on the eighth floor, but no one opens the door, because the critic has gone out to a meeting of mourning for the death of Berlioz. She then enters through the window, destroys the piano and the cupboards with a hammer, soaks the desk and other objects in the apartment, leaves the taps running and floods the neighbors below, and then breaks the windows of the building while the doorman whistles. She stops only when she finds, in a room on the third floor, a boy of about four, alone and frightened by the noise; she calms him with a kind lie, that it was the boys who broke the windows, and gets him to sleep with the story of an aunt who had no children, cried a great deal and became a wicked witch.
Then she flies out of the city, and on the way she meets Natasha, the maid, who has also applied the cream, applied it to the neighbor Nikolai Ivanovich as well and turned him into a pig, which now serves her as a mount; she asks Margarita to intercede so that she may remain a witch, and hears the promise. Margarita descends to a river, where she plunges in and is welcomed festively by mermaids, singing toads and naked witches under the willows; there she drinks champagne and is driven back to Moscow for the ball.
Analysis
Margarita flies to settle the Master's score and chooses her target from what she reads on the notice board: the name of Latunsky. Since he is not there, she unloads on the apartment, with hammer and water, and only stops when she finds the boy. Then she goes on to the river, where she is welcomed festively, and is taken back to Moscow for the ball. The new power serves first the settling of scores, then the consolation.
Latunsky! [...] Latunsky! It was he who... It was he who ruined the Master!
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