Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (23 page)

But even so he paused in front of the crookedly boarded-up door and crossed himself, making small movements that would not be visible from behind. The idea of taking all his clothes off was absurd, of course, Matvei Bentsionovich decided. He couldn't remember the formula from the medieval treatise properly anyway. But that was all right, he would manage somehow without any formula. He could touch the cross scratched on the glass and say something about an agreement between the archangel Gabriel and the Evil One. Come hither, blessed spirit— wasn't that how it went? And if things started to get unpleasant, he had to shout out in Latin that he believed in the Lord, and everything would be settled quite excellently.

Joking made the investigator feel bolder. He took hold of the edge of the door and pulled, straining with all his might.

He need not have strained at all, as it turned out, for the door yielded easily. As he stepped across the creaking floor, Matvei Bentsionovich tried to determine where the window was. He froze in indecision and just at that moment the moon, which had been hidden briefly behind a cloud, lit up the vault of heaven once again, also illuminating a silvery square to his left.

The investigator turned his head and choked on a convulsive shriek.

There was someone standing there!

Motionless, black, in a pointed cowl!

No, no, no, thought Berdichevsky, shaking his head to drive the vision away. As if the shaking were too much for it to bear, his head suddenly exploded in unbearable agony that seared through his brain.

Then Matvei Bentsionovich's consciousness, overwhelmed, abandoned him, and he saw and heard nothing more.

After some indefinite period of time the unfortunate investigator's senses returned to him, but not all of them—his vision still refused to function. Berdichevsky's eyes were open, but they could not see anything.

He listened. He heard the rapid pitter-patter of his own heart; he could even hear his eyelashes blinking, the silence was so intense. His nose inhaled a smell of dust and wood shavings. His head hurt and his body felt numb, and that meant he was alive.

But where was he? In the hut?

No. It had been dark there, but not this dark, not
absolutely
dark, as dark as in a coffin.

Matvei Bentsionovich tried to get up, and he struck something with his forehead. He moved his arms, and he could not spread his elbows. He bent his knees, and they also hit something hard.

Then the assistant public prosecutor realized that he really was lying in a closed coffin, and he began calling out.

At first not very loudly, as if he had not yet lost hope: “A-ah! A-a-ah!” And then as loud as his lungs could shout:
“A-a-a-ah!”

Once Berdichevsky had emptied his lungs of air by shouting, he broke into choking sobs. His brain, trained to think logically, took advantage of this brief respite to offer him the answer to a riddle—alas, too late. That was why Lagrange had shot himself with his left hand, from below! There was no other way he could turn the revolver inside the coffin. He had pulled out his Smith & Wesson as best he could, pointed it at his heart, and fired.

Matvei Bentsionovich was overwhelmed by a fierce envy of the deceased chief of police. What a relief, what incredible happiness it would be to have a revolver with him! Just press the trigger, and the nightmare would be over, gone forever.

Swallowing his tears, Berdichevsky muttered, “Masha, my little Masha, forgive me. I have betrayed you again, and more seriously than back there on the road! I am leaving you, abandoning you …”

But meanwhile his brain continued its work, the work that was no longer of any use to anyone.

So it was clear what had happened to Lentochkin, too. After the coffin he couldn't tolerate any roofs or walls—or any restrictions of his body at all.

The sobbing suddenly stopped of its own accord—Berdichevsky had been struck by another realization. Lentochkin had managed to get out of the coffin somehow after all. He might be insane, but he was alive! That meant there was hope!

The prayer! How could he have forgotten about the prayer!

However, the Latin that Matvei Bentsionovich thought he had mastered so thoroughly during his years in the grammar school and at university seemed to have been completely erased from his memory by the fear of death. He could not even remember the Latin for
Lord!

And so His Grace Mitrofanii's spiritual son began yelling in Russian, “I believe, Oh Lord, I believe!”

He braced himself in the wooden box, pressing against the lid with his forehead, his hands, and his knees—and a miracle happened. The top of the coffin flew off with a resounding crack and Berdichevsky sat up, gulping air, and looked around.

He saw the same hut as before, looking strangely bright after the pitch darkness—he could make out the stove in the corner, and even the oven fork. And the window was still where it had been, only that terrible silhouette had disappeared.

Repeatedly intoning “I believe, Oh Lord, I believe,” Berdichevsky clambered over the edge of the coffin and fell heavily onto the floor— the coffin was standing on a table.

Paying no attention to the pain that racked his entire body, he began working with his elbows and knees and crawled rapidly toward the door. He tumbled over the threshold, leapt to his feet, and limped toward the river.

“Lev Nikolaevich! Help! Save me!” the assistant public prosecutor called out hoarsely, afraid to look around in case he might see a black monk in a pointed cowl gliding above the ground after him. “Help me! I'm going to fall!”

There was the little bridge, and there was the fence. Lev Nikolaevich had promised to wait here. Berdichevsky dashed to the left, then to the right, but there was no one there.

It wasn't possible! Lev Nikolaevich wasn't the kind of man who would simply get up and walk away!

“Where are you?” Matvei Bentsionovich groaned. “I'm hurt, I'm afraid!”

When the dark figure silently detached itself from the wall of the chapel, the exhausted investigator shrieked, imagining that his nightmarish pursuer had overtaken him and been waiting in ambush.

But no, to judge from the silhouette, it was Lev Nikolaevich. Sobbing, Berdichevsky went dashing toward him. “Thank … Thank God! I believe, Oh Lord, I believe! Why didn't you answer? I thought …” As he came closer to his trusted comrade-in-arms, he mumbled, “I … I don't know what happened, but it was horrible … I think I'm losing my mind! Lev Nikolaevich, dear friend, what's happening? What's wrong with me?”

At that moment his silent companion turned to face the moonlight, and Berdichevsky fell silent in confusion. Lev Nikolaevich had undergone a strange metamorphosis. While his features were still the same, his face had changed, subtly but quite distinctly. His gentle, affectionate gaze had acquired a menacing glitter, his lips were twisted into a cruel smirk, his shoulders had straightened, and his forehead was dissected by a crease as dramatic as a scar left by a knife.

“I'll tell you what's wrong,” the unrecognizable Lev Nikolaevich hissed, twirling his finger beside his temple. “You, my friend, have lost your mind. My God, just look at that idiotic expression on your face!”

Matvei Bentsionovich started back in fright, and Lev Nikolaevich, with his right cheek twitching rapidly, bared his remarkably white teeth and exclaimed triumphantly three times, “Idiot! Idiot! Idiot!”

It was only then that Berdichevsky realized, with the very edge of his rapidly fading mind, that he really had gone mad, and not just a little while ago, in the hut, but earlier, much earlier. Dream and reality had become jumbled together in his sick head, so that now there was no way of telling which of the events of this terrible day had really happened, and which were the ravings of his delirious reason.

The insane official pulled his head down into his shoulders and ran off along the moonlit road wherever his feet might take him, dragging one leg and repeating over and over again, “I believe, Oh Lord, I believe!”

PART TWO

A Moscow Province Noblewoman

OF COURSE, IT just had to happen that immediately before the second letter from Dr. Korovin arrived, in fact on the very evening before, the bishop and Sister Pelagia had a conversation about men and women. In fact, His Grace and his spiritual daughter argued about this subject quite often, but on this occasion the pretext for their clash happened to be the question of strength and weakness. Pelagia attempted to prove that women should never have been dubbed the “weaker sex,” for it was not true, except perhaps in the matter of muscular strength, and even there it was not always true of everyone. The nun got quite carried away and even offered to run or swim in a race against the bishop in order to see who was quicker, but she immediately came to her senses and apologized. Mitrofanii, however, was not in the least bit angry; he simply laughed.

“The two of us would make a fine sight,” said His Grace. “Just imagine us dashing along Bolshaya Dvoryanskaya Street at full speed, with our cassocks tucked up, flinging up our heels, me with my beard flapping in the wind, you with your ginger locks fluttering about. All the people watching and crossing themselves, and us not taking the slightest bit of notice—we run as far as the river, plunge in off the cliff, and away we go, arm over arm.”

Pelagia laughed as well, but she pursued her theme relentlessly: “There is no strong sex or weak sex. Each half of humanity is strong in some ways and weak in others. Men, of course, are more subtle in logic, which is why they are stronger in the exact sciences, but it is also their shortcoming. You men always try to make everything fit the geometry you learned at grammar school, you dismiss anything you cannot squeeze into regular forms and right angles, and therefore you lose sight of what is most important. And you are great muddleheads, always constructing nonsensical schemes, and then suffering the dire consequences. And your pride is a great hindrance: more than anything else you are afraid of finding yourself in a ridiculous or humiliating situation. But women don't care about that—we know very well how stupid and childish that kind of fear is. We are more easily confused and misled in matters that are unimportant, but in the most important things of all, those that are truly significant, there is no logic that can delude us.”

“And what is all this leading to?” Mitrofanii asked, laughing. “What precisely is the point of your philippic? That men are stupid and control over society should be taken away from them and given to you?”

The nun pushed the spectacles that had slid down to the tip of her nose back up with her finger. “No, Your Grace, you are not listening to what I say! Both of the sexes are clever and stupid, strong and weak in their own way. But in different areas! And therein lies the majesty of God's plan, the meaning of love and marriage—so that the weaknesses of each person might be buttressed by the strengths of their spouse.”

However, the bishop was not in the mood for serious conversation that day. He feigned surprise: “Are you planning to marry then?”

“I am not talking about myself. I have a different Bridegroom, who lends me more strength than any man. What I am saying, Father, is that you are wrong to rely only on the male intellect in serious matters, that you forget about women's strength and men's weakness.”

Mitrofanii listened, chuckling into his whiskers, and that inflamed Pelagia even more.

“The worst thing of all is that condescending laugh of yours!” she said, finally exploding. “It comes from your male arrogance, which is entirely out of place in a monk! Have you not been told: ‘There is no male or female sex, for you all are one in Jesus Christ’?”

“I know why you are reading me this sermon, why you are so furious,” the perspicacious pastor replied. “You are offended because I did not send you to New Ararat. You are jealous of Matvei. What if he untangles the entire business without any help from your ginger head? And Matvei certainly will untangle it, because he is cautious, astute, and
logical.
” At this point Mitrofanii stopped smiling and spoke without a trace of jocularity. “Do I not appreciate your merits? Do I not know what sharp wits and subtle intuition you possess, how discerning you are with people? But you know yourself that a nun cannot go to Ararat. The charter of the monastery forbids it.”

“You have already mentioned that, and in Berdichevsky's presence I did not argue. Of course Sister Pelagia cannot go. But Polina Andreevna Lisitsyna certainly can.”