And then, the other voice—the woman’s—came through, not as a whisper, not as a ghost. Clear as a bell. She was reading with him. In Russian. Their voices intertwined like two rivers meeting.
Bálint agreed. The price was modest. The responsibility felt immense.
“И тогда Маргарита сказала: ‘Прости меня, Мастер…’” (“And then Margarita said: ‘Forgive me, Master…’”)
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. a mester es margarita hangoskonyv
“A reading,” Éva said. “My father, László, was a literature teacher. But this was not allowed. The novel was banned here. You could go to prison for owning it, let alone recording it. He had a samizdat typescript—someone smuggled it from Moscow. He said the words were too important to remain silent. So every night, after the building’s listening device was tested—there was always a test tone at 11 p.m.—he would wait an hour, then speak into this microphone.” She pointed to a heavy, Soviet-made dynamic mic, also in the box.
Bálint stopped the tape. He looked at the label: 2. fejezet – A Fekete Mágus . The chapter where Woland and his retinue appear in Moscow’s Variety Theatre.
That night, alone in his studio, he threaded the first tape onto his restored Studer machine. The tape smelled of vinegar and dust. He put on his best headphones—the ones that reveal every ghost in the signal—and pressed play. In Russian
Bálint never told her what he heard. But late at night, when he puts on his headphones and listens to his own copy, he still catches it: the faint rush of wind, the jingle of spurs, and two voices—one tired, one eternal—reading each other into the dark.
“My father made these,” she said, placing the box on his workbench. “In the winter of 1968. He said it was the only way to save it.”
“He recorded the entire novel?”
The tape ran out. There was a moment of silence. Then, a final sound: a door closing, softly, and the woman’s voice, clear as life, saying in Hungarian: “Köszönöm, hogy meghallgattál. Most már befejezhetjük.” (“Thank you for listening. Now we can finish.”)
And then, a whisper. Not László’s. A woman’s whisper, barely above the noise floor, speaking Russian: “Она летит.” (“She is flying.”)