“Not the entire. Only the parts he loved most. The Master. Margarita. Woland’s ball. The flight through the dark. He said the rest was commentary. He died in ’72. Heart attack. They said it was natural. I never believed them.” She paused. “I want you to transfer them to digital. I want to hear his voice again before I… before I can’t.”
He listened to the first tape straight through. At the end, László whispered, “Alvás. Holnap folytatom. Ha engedik.” (“Sleep. I will continue tomorrow. If they permit.”)
László was reading the scene of Margarita’s great ball. The voice trembled with exhaustion, as if the teacher himself had been standing for hours, greeting the dead. And in the background, perfectly synchronized, was the sound of a waltz. Not a radio. Not a neighbor. A grand, ghostly orchestra, playing just below the threshold of audibility. And above it all, the woman’s voice from before, now laughing, speaking Hungarian with a slight Russian accent: “Kenőcs. A testem ég. De nem fáj.” (“The ointment. My body burns. But it does not hurt.”) a mester es margarita hangoskonyv
He proceeded to the second tape.
On the second listen, at the exact moment László described Margarita flying naked over Moscow, there was a faint, impossible sound beneath his voice. Not tape hiss. Not distortion. It was a wind. A rushing, freezing wind, as if a window had blown open in the room where he recorded—except László’s apartment, Éva had said, was a sealed interior flat with no cross-draft. “Not the entire
Bálint rewound and listened again. Then he noticed something strange.
And then, a whisper. Not László’s. A woman’s whisper, barely above the noise floor, speaking Russian: “Она летит.” (“She is flying.”) Margarita
“What is it?” Bálint asked.