The Master and Margarita

  The prisoner glanced at the procurator in perplexity.

  “I don’t even have an ass, Hegemon,” he said. “I did enter Yershalaim by the Susa gate, but on foot, accompanied only by Matthew Levi, and no one shouted anything to me, because no one in Yershalaim knew me then.”

  “Do you happen to know,” Pilate continued without taking his eyes off the prisoner, ‘such men as a certain Dysmas, another named Gestas, and a third named Bar-Rabban?”[47]

  “I do not know these good people,” the prisoner replied.

  Truly?”

  Truly.”

  “And now tell me, why is it that you use me words "good people" all the time? Do you call everyone that, or what?”

  “Everyone,” the prisoner replied. There are no evil people in the world.”

  The first I hear of it,” Pilate said, grinning. “But perhaps I know too little of life! ... You needn’t record any more,” he addressed the secretary, who had not recorded anything anyway, and went on talking with the prisoner. “You read that in some Greek book?”

  “No, I figured it out for myself.”

  “And you preach it?”

  “Yes.”

  “But take, for instance, the centurion Mark, the one known as Rat-slayer – is he good?”

  “Yes,” replied the prisoner. True, he’s an unhappy man. Since the good people disfigured him, he has become cruel and hard. I’d be curious to know who maimed him.”

  “I can willingly tell you that,” Pilate responded, “for I was a witness to it. The good people fell on him like dogs on a bear. There were German!

  Fastened on his neck, his arms, his legs. The infantry maniple was encircled, and if one flank hadn’t been cut by a cavalry turim, of which I was the commander — you, philosopher, would not have had the chance to speak with the Ratslayer. That was at the battle of Idistaviso,[48] in the Valley of the Virgins.”

  “If I could speak with him,” the prisoner suddenly said musingly, “I’m sure he’d change sharply.”

  “I don’t suppose,” Pilate responded, “that you’d bring much joy to the legate of the legion if you decided to talk with any of his officers or soldiers. Anyhow, it’s also not going to happen, fortunately for everyone, and I will be the first to see to it.”

  At that moment a swallow swiftly flitted into the colonnade, described a circle under the golden ceiling, swooped down, almost brushed the face of a bronze statue in a niche with its pointed wing, and disappeared behind the capital of a column. It may be that it thought of nesting there.

  During its flight, a formula took shape in the now light and lucid head of the procurator. It went like this: the hegemon has looked into the case of the vagrant philosopher Yeshua, alias Ha-Nozri, and found in it no grounds for indictment. In particular, he has found not the slightest connection between the acts of Yeshua and the disorders that have lately taken place in Yershalaim. The vagrant philosopher has proved to be mentally ill. Consequently, the procurator has not confirmed the death sentence on Ha-Nozri passed by the Lesser Sanhedrin. But seeing that Ha-Nozri’s mad Utopian talk might cause disturbances in Yershalaim, the procurator is removing Yeshua from Yershalaim and putting him under confinement in Stratonian Caesarea on the Mediterranean – that is, precisely where the procurator’s residence was.

  It remained to dictate it to the secretary.

  The swallow’s wings whizzed right over the hegemon’s head, the bird darted to the fountain basin and then flew out into freedom. The procurator raised his eyes to the prisoner and saw the dust blaze up in a pillar around him.

  “Is that all about him?” Pilate asked the secretary.

  “Unfortunately not,” the secretary replied unexpectedly and handed Pilate another piece of parchment.

  “What’s this now?” Pilate asked and frowned.

  Having read what had been handed to him, he changed countenance even more: Either the dark blood rose to his neck and face, or something else happened, only his skin lost its yellow tinge, turned brown, and his eyes seemed to sink.

  Again it was probably owing to the blood rising to his temples and throbbing in them, only something happened to the procurator’s vision. Thus, he imagined that the prisoner’s head floated off somewhere, and another appeared in its place.[49] On this bald head sat a scant-pointed golden diadem. On the forehead was a round canker, eating into the skin and smeared with ointment. A sunken, toothless mouth with a pendulous, capricious lower lip. It seemed to Pilate that the pink columns of the balcony and the rooftops of Yershalaim far below, beyond the garden, vanished, and everything was drowned in the thickest green of Caprean gardens. And something strange also happened to his hearing: it was as if trumpets sounded far away, muted and menacing, and a nasal voice was very clearly heard, arrogandy drawling: “The law of lese-majesty...”

  Thoughts raced, short, incoherent and extraordinary: “I’m lost! ...” then: “We’re lost! ...” And among them a totally absurd one, about some immortality, which immortality for some reason provoked unendurable anguish.

  Pilate strained, drove the apparition away, his gaze returned to the balcony, and again the prisoner’s eyes were before him.

  “Listen, Ha-Nozri,” the procurator spoke, looking at Yeshua somehow strangely: the procurator’s face was menacing, but his eyes were alarmed, ‘did you ever say anything about the great Caesar? Answer! Did you? ...

  Yes ... or ... no?” Pilate drew the word “no” out somewhat longer than is done in court, and his glance sent Yeshua some thought that he wished as if to instil in the prisoner.

  To speak the truth is easy and pleasant,” the prisoner observed.

  “I have no need to know,” Pilate responded in a stifled, angry voice, “whether it is pleasant or unpleasant for you to speak the truth. You will have to speak it anyway. But, as you speak, weigh every word, unless you want a not only inevitable but also painful death.”

  No one knew what had happened with the procurator of Judea, but he allowed himself to raise his hand as if to protect himself from a ray of sunlight, and from behind his hand, as from behind a shield, to send the prisoner some sort of prompting look.

  “Answer, then,” he went on speaking, ‘do you know a certain Judas from Kiriath,[50] and what precisely did you say to him about Caesar, if you said anything?”

  “It was like this,” the prisoner began talking eagerly. The evening before last, near the temple, I made the acquaintance of a young man who called himself Judas, from the town of Kiriath. He invited me to his place in the Lower City and treated me to ...”

  “A good man?” Pilate asked, and a devilish fire flashed in his eyes.

  “A very good man and an inquisitive one,” the prisoner confirmed. “He showed the greatest interest in my thoughts and received me very cordially...”

  “Lit the lamps ...”[51] Pilate spoke through his teeth, in the same tone as the prisoner, and his eyes glinted.

  “Yes,” Yeshua went on, slightly surprised that the procurator was so well informed, “and asked me to give my view of state authority. He was extremely interested in this question.”

  “And what did you say?” asked Pilate. “Or are you going to reply that you’ve forgotten what you said?” But there was already hopelessness in Pilate’s tone.

  “Among other things,” the prisoner recounted, “I said that all authority is violence over people, and that a time will come when there will be no authority of the Caesars, nor any other authority. Man will pass into the kingdom of truth and justice, where generally there will be no need for any authority.”

  “Go on!”

  “I didn’t go on,” said the prisoner. “Here men ran in, bound me, and took me away to prison.”

  The secretary, trying not to let drop a single word, rapidly traced the words on his parchment.

  “There never has been, is not, and never will be any authority in this world greater or better for people than the authority of the emperor Tiberius!” Pilate’s cracked and sick voice swelled. For som
e reason the procurator looked at the secretary and the convoy with hatred.

  “And it is not for you, insane criminal, to reason about it!” Here Pilate shouted: “Convoy, off the balcony!” And turning to the secretary, he added: “Leave me alone with the criminal, this is a state matter!”

  The convoy raised their spears and with a measured tramp of hobnailed caligae walked off the balcony into the garden, and the secretary followed the convoy.

  For some time the silence on the balcony was broken only by the water singing in the fountain. Pilate saw how the watery dish blew up over the spout, how its edges broke off, how it fell down in streams.

  The prisoner was the first to speak.

  “I see that some misfortune has come about because I talked with that young man from Kiriath. I have a foreboding, Hegemon, that he will come to grief, and I am very sorry for him.”

  “I think,” the procurator replied, grinning strangely, “that there is now someone else in the world for whom you ought to feel sorrier than” for Judas of Kiriath, and who is going to have it much worse than Judas! ...

  So, then. Mark Ratslayer, a cold and convinced torturer, the people who, as I see,” the procurator pointed to Yeshua’s disfigured face, “beat you for your preaching, the robbers Dysmas and Gestas, who with their confrères killed four soldiers, and, finally, the dirty traitor Judas — are all good people?”

  “Yes,” said the prisoner.

  “And the kingdom of truth will come?”

  “It will, Hegemon,” Yeshua answered with conviction.

  “It will never come!” Pilate suddenly cried out in such a terrible voice that Yeshua drew back. Thus, many years before, in the Valley of the Virgins, Pilate had cried to his horsemen the words: “Cut them down! Cut them down! The giant Ratslayer is trapped!” He raised his voice, cracked with commanding, still more, and called out so that his words could be heard in the garden: “Criminal! Criminal! Criminal!” And then, lowering his voice, he asked: “Yeshua Ha-Nozri, do you believe in any gods?”

  “God is one,” replied Yeshua, “I believe in him.”

  Then pray to him! Pray hard! However ...” here Pilate’s voice gave out, “that won’t help. No wife?” Pilate asked with anguish for some reason, not understanding what was happening to him.”

  “No, I’m alone.”

  “Hateful city ...” the procurator suddenly muttered for some reason, shaking his shoulders as if he were cold, and rubbing his hands as though washing them, “if they’d put a knife in you before your meeting with Judas of Kiriath, it really would have been better.”

  “Why don’t you let me go, Hegemon?” the prisoner asked unexpectedly, and his voice became anxious. “I see they want to kill me.”

  A spasm contorted Pilate’s face, he turned to Yeshua the inflamed, red-veined whites of his eyes and said: “Do you suppose, wretch, that the Roman procurator will let a man go who has said what you have said? Oh, gods, gods! Or do you think I’m ready to take your place? I don’t share your thoughts! And listen to me: if from this moment on you say even one word, if you speak to anyone at all, beware of me! I repeat to you — beware!”

  “Hegemon ...”

  “Silence!” cried Pilate, and his furious gaze followed the swallow that had again fluttered on to the balcony. “To me!” Pilate shouted.

  And when the secretary and the convoy returned to their places, Pilate announced that he confirmed the death sentence passed at the meeting of the Lesser Sanhedrin on the criminal Yeshua Ha-Nozri, and the secretary wrote down what Pilate said.

  A moment later Mark Ratslayer stood before the procurator. The procurator ordered him to hand the criminal over to the head of the secret service, along with the procurator’s directive that Yeshua Ha-Nozri was to be separated from the other condemned men, and also that the soldiers of the secret service were to be forbidden, on pain of severe punishment, to talk with Yeshua about anything at all or to answer any of his questions.

  At a sign from Mark, the convoy closed around Yeshua and led him from the balcony.

  Next there stood before the procurator a handsome, light-bearded man with eagle feathers on the crest of his helmet, golden lions” heads shining on his chest, and golden plaques on his sword belt, wearing triple-soled boots laced to the knees, and with a purple cloak thrown over his left shoulder. This was the legate in command of the legion.

  The procurator asked him where the Sebastean cohort was stationed at the moment. The legate told him that the Sebasteans had cordoned off the square in front of the hippodrome, where the sentencing of the criminals was to be announced to the people.

  Then the procurator ordered the legate to detach two centuries from the Roman cohort. One of them, under the command of Ratslayer, was to convoy the criminals, the carts with the implements for the execution and the executioners as they were transported to Bald Mountain,[52] and on arrival was to join the upper cordon. The other was to be sent at once to Bald Mountain and immediately start forming the cordon. For the same purpose, that is, to guard the mountain, the procurator asked the legate to send an auxiliary cavalry regiment — the Syrian ala.

  After the legate left the balcony, the procurator ordered the secretary to summon to the palace the president of the Sanhedrin, two of its members, and the head of the temple guard in Yershalaim, adding that he asked things to be so arranged that before conferring with all these people, he could speak with the president previously and alone.

  The procurator’s order was executed quickly and precisely, and the sun, which in those days was scorching Yershalaim with an extraordinary fierceness, had not yet had time to approach its highest point when, on the upper terrace of the garden, by the two white marble lions that guarded the stairs, a meeting took place between the procurator and the man fulfilling the duties of president of the Sanhedrin, the high priest of the Jews, Joseph Kaifa.[53]

  It was quiet in the garden. But when he came out from under the colonnade to the sun-drenched upper level of the garden with its palm trees on monstrous elephant legs, from which there spread before the procurator the whole of hateful Yershalaim, with its hanging bridges, fortresses, and, above all, that utterly indescribable heap of marble with golden dragon scales for a roof – the temple of Yershalaim – the procurator’s sharp ear caught, far below, where the stone wall separated the lower terraces of the palace garden from the city square, a low rumble over which from time to time there soared feeble, thin moans or cries.

  The procurator understood that there, on the square, a numberless crowd of Yershalaim citizens, agitated by the recent disorders, had already gathered, that this crowd was waiting impatiently for the announcement of the sentences, and that restless water sellers were crying in its midst.

  The procurator began by inviting the high priest on to the balcony, to take shelter from the merciless heat, but Kaifa politely apologized[54] and explained that he could not do that on the eve of the feast.

  Pilate covered his slightly balding head with a hood and began the conversation. This conversation took place in Greek.

  Pilate said that he had looked into the case of Yeshua Ha-Nozri and confirmed the death sentence.

  Thus, three robbers – Dysmas, Gestas and Bar-Rabban – and this Yeshua Ha-Nozri besides, were condemned to be executed, and it was to be done that day. The first two, who had ventured to incite the people to rebel against Caesar, had been taken in armed struggle by the Roman authorities, were accounted to the procurator, and, consequently, would not be talked about here. But the second two, Bar-Rabban and Ha-Nozri, had been seized by the local authorities and condemned by the Sanhedrin. According to the law, according to custom, one of these two criminals had to be released in honour of the great feast of Passover, which would begin that day. And so the procurator wished to know which of the two criminals the Sanhedrin intended to set free: Bar-Rabban or Ha-Nozri?[55]

  Kaifa inclined his head to signify that the question was clear to him, and replied: “The Sanhedrin asks that Bar-Rabban be r
eleased.” The procurator knew very well that the high priest would give precisely that answer, but his task consisted in showing that this answer provoked his astonishment.

  This Pilate did with great artfulness. The eyebrows on the arrogant face rose, the procurator looked with amazement straight into the high priest’s eyes.

  “I confess, this answer stuns me,” the procurator began softly, “I’m afraid there may be some misunderstanding here.”

  Pilate explained himself. Roman authority does not encroach in the least upon the rights of the local spiritual authorities, the high priest knows that very well, but in the present case we are faced with an obvious error. And this error Roman authority is, of course, interested in correcting.

  In fact, the crimes of Bar-Rabban and Ha-Nozri are quite incomparable in their gravity. If the latter, obviously an insane person, is guilty of uttering preposterous things in Yershalaim and some other places, the former’s burden of guilt is more considerable. Not only did he allow himself to call directly for rebellion, but he also killed a guard during the attempt to arrest him. Bar-Rabban is incomparably more dangerous than Ha-Nozri.

  On the strength of all the foregoing, the procurator asks the high priest to reconsider the decision and release the less harmful of the two condemned men, and that is without doubt Ha-Nozri. And so? ...

  Kaifa said in a quiet but firm voice that the Sanhedrin had thoroughly familiarized itself with the case and informed him a second time that it intended to free Bar-Rabban.

  “What? Even after my intercession? The intercession of him through whose person Roman authority speaks? Repeat it a third time. High Priest.”

  “And a third time I repeat that we are setting Bar-Rabban free,” Kaifa said softly.

  It was all over, and there was nothing more to talk about. Ha-Nozri was departing for ever, and there was no one to cure the dreadful, wicked pains of the procurator, there was no remedy for them except death. But it was not this thought which now struck Pilate. The same incomprehensible anguish that had already visited him on the balcony pierced his whole being. He tried at once to explain it, and the explanation was a strange one: it seemed vaguely to the procurator that there was something he had not finished saying to the condemned man, and perhaps something he had not finished hearing.