Chapter summary
After a flight by car and a stop at a cemetery, where Azazello receives her, Margarita returns to Moscow and enters Apartment 50 (see Apartment 50) on Sadovaya Street, the sinister apartment of chapter 7. Korovyov receives her in the dark with an oil lamp, in tailcoat and monocle, and explains, chattering, that the fifth dimension lets the apartment hold a colonnaded hall without end. He says that his master gives the full moon ball every year, the ball of the hundred kings, and that its hostess must be called Margarita and be a native of the place. Of the one hundred and twenty-one Margaritas found in Moscow, none had the desired profile, until a happy coincidence; and she, says Korovyov, descends from a sixteenth-century French queen. Margarita accepts the task.
In the bedroom, Margarita is introduced to the retinue: Azazello, Hella, who massages the sick knee of Woland, and Behemoth, the black cat who plays chess with Woland in a game of living pieces and cheats without shame. Woland is lying down, ill, in a dirty, patched shirt, and addresses her as a queen, asking her to forgive his house clothes. Margarita, holding back her fear, asks that the game not be interrupted and offers to rub his knee. The narrator identifies Hella with the naked young woman who opened the door to Sokov and with the vampire the rooster drove off on Rimsky's night.
Woland turns the globe and shows Margarita a war that begins in a land bathed by the ocean: a house blows up, and on the ground lie a woman and, in a pool of blood, a small child. He remarks that the child had no time to sin and that Abaddon's work is impeccable. Margarita asks which side Abaddon is on, and Woland answers before calling him: from behind a wall a thin man appears, in dark glasses, whose glasses Woland does not allow him to take off. Woland explains that Abaddon is impartial and tends to feel compassion for both sides and that, for that very reason, the results for both sides are the same.
Analysis
Margarita is received to be the hostess of the ball, and the text gives the reasons for the choice: the hostess must be called Margarita, be a native of the city and carry queen's blood; none of the one hundred and twenty-one Margaritas found in the city served, until they found her. Woland treats her as a queen despite her illness and her patched shirt. The scene of the globe, the war and the dead child is what he chooses to show her before the ball.
I greet you, madam queen, and beg you to forgive my house clothes.
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