Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (12 page)

Sailor monks holding up the hems of their cassocks ran around the deck, securing the dancing lifeboats and muttering prayers in a habitual murmur. On the bridge they could see the massive figure of the captain, also wearing a cassock, but with a peaked leather cap on his head and a broad leather belt around his hips. The captain was shouting into a megaphone in a hoarse bass voice: “Porfirii, may you choke on unction! Cast on two hitches!”

At the stern, where the wind was blowing less furiously, the strolling couple halted. Natalya Genrikhovna surveyed the boundless expanse of stormy water and the lowering, gray black sky and shuddered.

“My God, how frightening it is! As if we'd fallen into a hole between time and space!”

Lagrange realized the moment had come to launch a full frontal offensive. A frightened woman was like an enemy cowed by a blast of grapeshot. He conducted his attack brilliantly. Lowering his voice to a trembling baritone, he said, “I am really quite terribly lonely. And you know, sometimes I long for understanding, warmth and … affection, yes, that's it—ordinary, simple human affection.” He lowered his forehead onto the lady's shoulder, which required him to bend his knees slightly, and heaved a sigh.

“That … that wasn't the reason I decided to make the trip to Ararat,” Natalya Genrikhovna whispered, disconcerted, making as if to push Felix Stanislavovich's head away, but at the same time running her fingers through his thick hair. “Not to commit new sins, but to pray for the forgiveness of the old ones …”

“Then you can ask forgiveness for everything all at once,” said the colonel, adducing an argument of irrefutable logic.

Five minutes later they were kissing in the dark cabin—in a purely romantic fashion as yet, but the police chief's fingers had already identified the disposition of buttons on Natalya Genrikhovna's dress and even stealthily unfastened the upper one …

IN THE MIDDLE of the night Felix Stanislavovich was woken by a powerful jolt. Raising himself up on one elbow, he saw a pair of frightened eyes—a woman's eyes—close beside him. Although the narrow bed was not designed for two, the colonel had been sleeping very soundly indeed, as he always did, and if he had been woken, the blow must have been a serious one.

“What is it?” asked Lagrange, still half-asleep and not remembering where he was, but he immediately glanced toward the door. “Your husband?”

The lady (what was her name?) said in a low, breathy voice, “We're sinking …”

The colonel shook his head briskly and then, fully awake at last, he heard the roaring of the storm and felt the hull of the ship shuddering so violently that it seemed strange the lovers had not yet been thrown out of their bed.

“Pagan freaks!” he heard the captain roar somewhere above him. “Bestial Sadducees, may Moloch have the lot of you, you vipers!”

On every side—from out on deck and in the lower cabins—he could hear the despairing shouts and weeping of terrified passengers.

Natalya Genrikhovna (yes, that was what her name was) said with profound conviction, “This is the reward for my blasphemy. For sinning on the way to a holy monastery.” And she burst into pitiful, hopeless tears.

Lagrange patted her wet cheek reassuringly and got dressed quickly, military fashion.

“Where are you going?” his pilgrim lover asked in horror, but the door had already slammed shut behind him.

Half a minute later the colonel was out on the boat deck. Holding his cap on with his hand to prevent it from taking flight, he summed the situation up in a jiffy. The situation was decidedly of the water-closet variety.

The captain was dashing around the deckhouse, trying in vain to make half a dozen sailors, who were down on their knees praying, get to their feet. Felix Stanislavovich could make out some of the words: “In Thy mercy do we seek refuge, Virgin Mother …” The wheel in the deckhouse was twirling this way and that as if it were drunk, and the steamship was hurtling on, plowing headlong through the huge, towering waves on its way to God only knew where.

“Why have you abandoned the helm, Nakhimov?” Lagrange yelled to the captain.

The captain swung his huge fist through the air. “I can't turn it on my own! This ship's a heap of junk—it can't hold its course in a high sea! I told the archimandrite! This rust bucket was made for taking young ladies on rides along the Neva, but this is the Blue Sea! We're being carried onto Devil's Rock—there are shoals there!”

At that very moment the steamship gave a sudden jerk and stopped dead in its tracks. The police chief and the captain were both flung against the wall of the deckhouse and they almost fell. The ship shifted a little and began slowly turning around its own axis.

“That's it, we're aground!” the captain shouted in despair. “Unless we can turn the bow into the waves, in a quarter of an hour we'll heel over and that'll be the end—we'll be done for! Oh, those blockheaded peasants.” He raised a threatening hand in the direction of his praying crew. “I should give them a good thrashing, but I can't—I've taken a vow of nonviolence!”

Felix Stanislavovich wrinkled up his brow in intense concentration. “And if they get a good thrashing, then what?”

“Everyone heaves on the cable, and we can bring her around. But what point is there now?” The captain threw his hands up in the air, then went down on his knees himself and began intoning in a nasal voice, “Accept, Oh Lord, the soul of Thy servant, whose hope is set in Thee, our God the Creator and Sustainer …”

“Heave on a cable?” the colonel asked brusquely. “Why, we can get that done soon enough.” He walked up to the nearest monk, leaned down over him, and said emphatically, “Right then, up you get, Father, or I'll knock your Eucharist around the back of your head.”

The praying man failed to heed the warning. Then Felix Stanislavovich jerked him to his feet and in two ticks put his violent intention into effect. He left the holy man spitting out bloody saliva in amazement, and immediately set about the next one. In less than a minute all the deckhands had been restored to a state of complete subordination.

“Now what is it we have to pull on?” Lagrange asked the captain, who was stunned by his efficient initiative.

And everything was all right, God is merciful: they all heaved together and swung the bow around in the right direction. No one was drowned.

AS THEY WERE saying goodbye, with the ship already standing at the quayside in New Ararat, Brother Jonah (that was the captain's name) clung to Felix Stanislavovich's hand for a long time with his own claw of iron.

“Give up your job,” Jonah boomed, gazing into the colonel's face with the bright blue eyes that were set so strikingly in his own broad, coarse features. “Come and be my first mate. We'll have a grand time sailing together. Things can get pretty interesting here on the Blue Sea—you've seen that for yourself. And you'll be saving your soul at the same time.”

“If it weren't for the female passengers,” said the colonel, stroking his mustache, because just at that moment Natalya Genrikhovna had come out to the gangway, with a stern expression on her face and wearing a severe black head scarf instead of her frivolous hat. The porter following her down the slope was carrying an entire pyramid of suitcases, bags, and boxes, managing somehow to balance this entire ancient Egyptian structure on his head. The lady pilgrim halted, crossed herself with broad, sweeping gestures, and bowed from the waist to this splendid town—or rather, to its illuminated quayside, because it was evening and New Ararat itself could not be seen: the
Basilisk
had been stuck on the shoal for half a day while it waited for the tug, and had only reached the island very late, when it was already dark.

Lagrange bowed gallantly to his accomplice in romantic adventure, but she had evidently already prepared herself for spiritual enlightenment and purgation, and she simply strode on by, without even turning her head to look at the colonel.

Ah, women, Felix Stanislavovich thought to himself with a smile of complete understanding and respect for the lady's redemptive state of mind.

“All right, Father, we'll meet again on my return voyage. I think that will be in two or three days—it's hardly going to be any longer than that. Since you believe that by then the weather will have sett—” Turning back to face the captain, he stopped short, because Brother Jonah was staring off into the darkness and his face had changed quite strikingly: it had become enraptured and strangely perplexed at the same time, as if the bold captain had heard the fateful song of a Siren or spied a young maiden running over the waves—a sign to sailors that their sorrows will soon be forgotten and good fortune is coming their way.

Following the direction of the strangely silent captain's gaze, La-grange did indeed see a supple young female silhouette, only it was not slipping along between the foaming crests of the waves, but standing absolutely still under a lamppost on the quayside. The young lady raised a finger and beckoned the captain peremptorily, and he set off toward the gangway, moving like a sleepwalker, without even glancing around at the man who would not be his first mate.

Being curious both by constitution and by virtue of his job, as well as naturally passionate and attracted to female beauty, Felix Stanislavovich picked up his yellow traveling bag of patent pigskin and set off, following stealthily in the captain's footsteps or—as sailors say—in his wake. Intuition and experience told the colonel that with such a marvelous figure and assured bearing, the waiting woman's face was bound to be beautiful. But he had to make sure, did he not?

“Hello, Lidia Evgenievna,” Jonah boomed timidly as he approached the lady.

She reached out an imperious hand in a long gray glove—but not, as it turned out, to be kissed or shaken.

“Did you bring it?” she asked.

The captain took something very small from inside the front of his monk's robe and laid it on the slim palm, but the colonel had no chance to see what it was, because at that moment the lady turned her face toward him and raised her veil with a gentle movement of her hand— evidently in order to take a better look at the stranger. Two seconds, or perhaps three, were all the time she needed, but that briefest possible period was also long enough for Lagrange to be struck dumb.

Oh!

The chief of police clutched at his tight collar. Those immense, fathomless eyes, with that strange glimmer! Those hollows below the cheekbones! And that curve of the eyelashes! And that mournful hint of shadow beside those defenseless lips! Damnation!

Lagrange shouldered aside the bisonlike Brother Jonah and raised his cap.

“My lady, I am here for the first time—I know nobody and nothing. I have come to pray at the holy places. Please help a man who has suffered terribly and advise me where the most heinous of sinners should direct his steps first. To the monastery? To Basilisk's Hermitage? Or, perhaps, to some shrine? And incidentally, allow me to introduce myself: Felix Stanislavovich Lagrange, former cavalry colonel.”

The beautiful lady's face was already half-concealed again behind the light, flimsy gauze, but he saw her lovely mouth twist into a disdainful grimace below the edge of the veil. Paying absolutely no attention to the police chief's cunning and psychologically faultless approach, the young woman whom the captain had called Lidia Evgenievna put the small bundle in her handbag, turned gracefully on her heels, and walked away. Brother Jonah heaved a deep sigh and Lagrange began blinking rapidly.

This is unheard of, thought Lagrange. First that nanny goat from St. Petersburg hadn't even bothered to say goodbye to him, and now he had to suffer this humiliation! Disconcerted, the colonel took a convenient little mirror out of the pocket of his waistcoat and checked to see whether anything off-putting could possibly have happened to his face—a sudden nervous eczema, a pimple, or, God forbid, a string of snot dangling from his nose. But no, Felix Stanislavovich's appearance was as handsome and agreeable as always: that manly chin and resolute mouth, that magnificent mustache and moderately proportioned, perfectly clean nose.

The colonel's mood was finally ruined completely by some short little idiot in a beret wearing gigantic dark glasses. First he blocked La-grange's path, then fiddled with the frame of his clownish oculars for some reason, and finally muttered, “Perhaps this one? Red—that's good. But the head! Crimson! No, he won't do!” And then he cast any pretense at civil behavior to the four winds and began waving his hands angrily at the colonel. “Go on, get away! What are you standing there for? Numskull! Blockhead!”

What a town!

THE NOAH'S ARK HOTEL, about which the colonel had heard from His Grace Mitrofanii, was good, except for the prices. It was really quite incredible—six rubles for a room! Naturally, the colonel had been provided with a certain sum from the bishop's personal fund, quite adequate to cover even such an extravagant billet as this one, but the chief of police decided to draw on the resourcefulness that was so essentially typical of his character. He signed the guest book, thereby indicating his firm intention to take a room for at least three days, and then, after finding fault with the view from the window, did not stay in the Ark at all, but sought out a more economical lodging for himself. Rooms in the Refuge of the Lowly cost the guests only a ruble a night—in other words, he would make a clear profit of five rubles a day. Father Mitrofanii wasn't the kind of individual to go delving into petty details, and if someday, when the accounts were being checked, the consistorial auditor should go poking his nose into the matter, then there was the entry in the book: F. S. Lagrange had been at Noah's Ark and left his mark, and all the rest was sheer nonsensical conjecture.