Read Online The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov - Free Book Online Page A

that Bar-Rabban be released.” 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.
    Pilate drove this thought away, and it flew off as instantly as it had come flying. It flew off, and the anguish remained unexplained, for it could not well be explained by another brief thought that flashed like lightning and at once went out — “Immortality ... immortality has come ...” Whose immortality had come? That the procurator did not understand, but the thought of this enigmatic immortality made him grow cold in the scorching sun.
    “Very well,” said Pilate, “let it be so.”
    Here he turned, gazed around at the world visible to him, and was surprised at the change that had taken place. The bush laden with roses had vanished, vanished were the cypresses bordering the upper terrace, and the pomegranate tree, and the white statue amidst the greenery, and the greenery itself. In place of it all there floated some purple mass,[56] water weeds swayed in it and began moving off somewhere, and Pilate himself began moving with them. He was carried along now, smothered and burned, by the most terrible wrath – the wrath of impotence.
    “Cramped,” said Pilate, “I feel cramped!”
    With a cold, moist hand he tore at the clasp on the collar of his cloak, and it fell to the sand.
    “It’s sultry today, there’s a storm somewhere,” Kaifa responded, not taking his eyes off the procurator’s reddened face, and foreseeing all the torments that still lay ahead, he thought: “Oh, what a terrible month of Nisan we’re having this year!”
    “No,” said Pilate, “it’s not because of the sultriness, I feel cramped with