The End of Apartment 50

Chapter summary

Back in Moscow, Margarita finishes reading a chapter of the Master's novel at dawn, calm after the night of the ball, undisturbed by what she has lived through, and sleeps in the basement on Arbat. In an official building, meanwhile, a commission of investigators, awake all night, tries to reconstruct, testimony by testimony, the episodes caused by Woland and his retinue. The accounts pile up and contradict one another: Sempleyarov, who frankly recounts the shameful session and the fight in the box; Rimsky, found hidden in a wardrobe of the Astoria hotel in Leningrad, who refuses to tell the truth and denies having seen any Hella; Stepan Likhodeyev, brought back by plane from the Crimea with a fur hat on his head, a felt cape over his pajama shirt and new blue slippers, who blames everything on Woland's hypnosis; Varenukha, who gradually confesses his encounter with the vampires; and Annushka, arrested when she tried to pay with a ten-dollar bill (see The foreign money), who insists that the bill she received was for ten rubles. The investigator who visited Ivan, now indifferent to everything, concludes that the origin of it all was Berlioz's death. There is enough material to arrest those responsible, but no one manages to arrest whoever lives in Apartment 50, which searches conducted several times fail to find.

At about four in the afternoon, a team of men in plain clothes, armed with pistols, silk nets, lassos, and gas masks, breaks into Apartment 50 through the front door and the back. The residents have already left, and in the dining room lie the remains of breakfast, abandoned in haste. They find only the cat Behemoth, who warns that the cat is an ancient, sacred animal and refuses to be taken. He pretends to be wounded by a shot and cured with a sip of benzine from his own stove, and then, hanging from the chandelier, he exchanges fire with the intruders without anyone being hurt. Voices from the bedroom remind them that it is Saturday, that the sun is setting, and that it is time. Surrounded, the cat spreads the benzine, which explodes and sets the apartment on fire, and he escapes through the window. From the smoke, residents in the courtyard see four silhouettes emerge, three men and one naked woman. In the spot where the cat had feigned injury, the corpse of Baron Meigel appears among the flames, dead since the night of the ball, in chapter 23.