Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (30 page)

“You mean he saw an empty coffin in a dark room and immediately lost his reason?” Polina Andreevna asked emphatically.

“It is hard to say exactly what happened there. There can be no doubt that Berdichevsky had something like an epileptic fit. He must have slithered across the floor, striking himself against corners and household items, writhing convulsively. The skin on his hands was torn, the nails were ripped off, his fingers were absolutely covered in splinters, there was a bump on the back of his head, the tendons of his left ankle were sprained, and he had wet himself too, which is also typical for an epileptoid episode.”

Unable to control her agitation, his listener exclaimed, “Let's go out into the air! These walls are oppressing me.”

“So this poor man is quite insane?” she asked quietly once they were outside the cottage.

“Who, the artist?”

“No … Berdichevsky.”

Donat Savvich shrugged. “Well, you see, in a case of entroposis, day by day a person withdraws further into himself and gradually stops responding to what is going on around him. The other name for the illness is petrosis, since it seems as if the sick person is gradually turning to stone. As a result of the shock, Berdichevsky's personality has completely collapsed. And the worst thing of all is that he is still having hallucinations during the night. He is afraid to be left alone, and I have put him in cottage number seven, where another extremely interesting patient lives. He is a scientist, a physicist by profession, and his name is Sergei Nikolaevich Lampier. He is a kind man, a positive angel, and so he does not object to sharing his home. They get on very well together. Lampier conducts some kind of strange experiments on Berdichevsky—they are entirely harmless—and they are quite content with each other.”

Polina Andreevna pretended that her capricious attention had shifted from Berdichevsky to the mad physicist: “An extremely interesting patient? Oh, do tell me about him!”

They walked out into a meadow and stopped. The light of day had almost faded away and there were lights burning here and there in the cottages and the clinic buildings.

“I think Sergei Nikolaevich Lampier is probably also a genius, like Yoshihin. But the problem is that while Yoshihin has no need to demonstrate his genius in words—he paints a picture and everything is clear— Lampier is a scientist, and he conducts research in strange areas, bordering on quackery. And so he absolutely has to provide convincing, preferably eloquent, explanations. Unfortunately Sergei Nikolaevich suffers from a severe disorder of discursive expression.”

“From what?” Lisitsyna asked, puzzled.

“A disruption of coherent speech. To put it in simple terms, his words cannot keep up with his thoughts. It is almost impossible to understand what he says. Nine times out of ten even I cannot guess exactly what he is trying to say. And other people, well, they regard him as a complete idiot. But Lampier is very far from being an idiot. He graduated from grammar school with a gold medal and was the top student in his year at university. But he didn't study in the same way as everyone else; he did written papers instead of answering oral questions for all the exams: they made a special exception for him.”

“And how does his genius manifest itself?” asked Polina Andreevna, cautiously pursuing her line of inquiry. “What kind of experiments does he perform on the other man, what's his name, Boguslavsky?”

“Berdichevsky,” the doctor corrected her. “If Yoshihin is a genius of evil, then Lampier is undoubtedly a genius of good. He has a theory that everything around us is permeated with certain rays that are invisible to the naked eye and every person also gives off an emanation of various colors and shades. Sergei Nikolaevich spent many years on the invention of a device capable of perceiving and analyzing this aura.”

“And what kind of aura is it?” asked Lisitsyna, not yet daring to turn the conversation back to Berdichevsky.

“Sergei Nikolaevich is concerned most of all with the moral emanation,” Korovin said with a smile that was benign rather than mocking. “Certain precious orange rays, which are the sign of spiritual nobility and kindheartedness. Lampier claims that if we can learn to see this emanation, then there will be no place for evil people in the world, and they will be left with no choice but to develop the orange spectrum of radiation within themselves.”

“He is a truly remarkable man!” the doctor's visitor declared decisively. “I absolutely must see him, come what may. Let him study me to see if he can find an orange emanation!”

The doctor took a watch out of his pocket. “Well, let us assume that Lampier will not actually study you. In the first place, he is not very fond of women, and in the second, he has a strict timetable. If I am not mistaken, now is his time for experiments. Would you like to take a look? Especially since it is very close by? There it is, cottage number seven.”

“I certainly would!”

“Very well, I shall grant your request. And afterward you will grant mine, agreed?” Korovin's eyes glinted cunningly.

“What request?”

“I'll tell you later,” Donat Savvich said with a laugh. “Don't be frightened—I shan't ask you to do anything terrible.”

They were already approaching a lovely two-story cottage in the alpine style—built of logs, with broad steps and a decorative chimney on its slanting roof. There was no knocker or bell button or bell on the door. But what Polina Andreevna found strangest of all was that there was no handle—she couldn't understand how such a door could be opened.

The doctor explained: “Sergei Nikolaevich lives according to the principle ‘I don't need strangers, but I'm always glad to see friends.’ That is, a stranger will never get him to open the door, but his friends who know the secret can enter quite easily, without any forewarning.” He pressed a little concealed button at one side, and the door slid open with a jerk.

“How delightful!” Mrs. Lisitsyna exclaimed as she entered the hallway.

“The entrance to the bedroom is on the left, the laboratory on the right. The stairway leads up to the second floor. There is an observatory up there, where Mr. Berdichevsky, the victim of mysticism, is living temporarily. So we should go to the right.”

The lighting in the laboratory was unusual: there was an extremely bright electric lamp burning by the wall, beside a table completely covered with complex instruments intended for incomprehensible purposes, but a long metallic shade prevented the light from spreading, so that all the other parts of the rather large room were immersed in dense shadow.

The disorder in the room was so pervasive that it seemed not to have arisen spontaneously, but to have been created deliberately. The floor was littered with books, bottles, and scraps of paper, several squares of carefully cut turf, and some stones or other. The physicist himself, a small man with tousled hair, was sitting on a chair beside the lamp and the only armchair was occupied by a large heap of rags, so there was absolutely nowhere for the two new arrivals to put themselves.

“Yes, yes,” Lampier said instead of a greeting, glancing around. “What for?” He looked at the unfamiliar lady, frowned, and asked again, “What for?”

Korovin led his companion closer. “Mrs. Lisitsyna here has expressed a desire to make your acquaintance. She would like to know the spectrum of her emanation. Take a look at her through your remarkable spectacles. What if you should find orange radiation?”

The physicist muttered something incomprehensible, but he was clearly angry. “They don't have anything. Only from the womb. Reproductive automatons. No brains. Crimson, crimson, crimson. All the brains went to one, Masha.”

“Masha? Which Masha?” asked Polina Andreevna, who was listening intently.

Lampier gestured impatiently at her and launched a verbal assault on Korovin: “Orange later. No time. The emanation of death, I told you. And Masha and Toto! Only worse! A thousand times! Ah, but why, why?”

“Yes, yes,” Donat Savvich said gently, as if he were speaking to a child, and nodded. “Your new emanation. What was wrong with the last one, I wonder? At least you didn't get so excited. You already told me about the emanation of death, I remember. I hope you also remember how it all ended that time.”

The little man immediately fell silent and started back from the doctor. He put his hand over his mouth.

“Well now, that's a bit better,” said Korovin. “How are the experiments going with your faithful Sancho Panza? Where is he, by the way, upstairs?”

Realizing that the doctor meant Berdichevsky, Polina Andreevna held her breath.

“I'm here,” said a voice out of the semidarkness—the familiar voice of Matvei Bentsionovich, except that it sounded strangely feeble.

The form that Lisitsyna had taken for a heap of old rags dumped in the armchair stirred and carried on speaking: “Hello, sir. Hello, madam. Can you forgive me for not greeting you sooner? I did not think that my modest presence could be of any importance to anyone. You, sir, said ‘Sancho Panza.’ That is from the novel by the Spanish writer Miguel Cervantes. You were referring to me. In God's name, please forgive me for not getting up. I am absolutely exhausted. I know how impolite it is, especially in the presence of a lady. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. There is no forgiveness for me …” Matvei Bentsionovich carried on apologizing for a long time in the same pitiful, lost tone of voice, which Polina Andreevna had never heard from him before. She abruptly swung the shade of the lamp around, so that the circle of light took in the seated man, and gasped. Oh, how strangely the sharp-eyed, energetic assistant public prosecutor had changed! As if there were not a single bone left in his body—he was hunched over, with his shoulders drooping and his hands lying lifelessly on his knees. The gaze of his rapidly blinking eyes held absolutely no expression, and his lips kept moving all the time, muttering endless apologies gradually fading into silence.

“Good Lord, what happened to you?” Lisitsyna cried out in horror, forgetting about all her cunning plans.

As she entered cottage number seven, Polina Andreevna had been prepared for the possibility that Matvei Bentsionovich, who had seen her previously in her role as a “Moscow noblewoman,” might recognize his old acquaintance, and she had invented a plausible explanation to meet the case, but now it was quite clear that all her concern on that account had been unwarranted.

Berdichevsky slowly transferred his gaze to the young lady, screwed up his eyes, and said, “Something very unpleasant happened to me. I lost my mind. I'm sorry, but there is nothing to be done about it. I am really very ashamed. Please forgive me, for God's sake …”

Korovin walked up to the sick man, took hold of his limp wrist, and felt his pulse. “It is I, Dr. Korovin. You can't have forgotten me—we saw each other only this morning.”

“Now I remember,” said Berdichevsky slowly, nodding like a sprung wooden toy. “You are the head of this institution. I'm sorry for not recognizing you straightaway. I did not wish to offend you. I have never wished to offend anybody. Ever. Forgive me, if you can.”

“I forgive you,” Donat Savvich interrupted rapidly and half-turned to explain to his fellow visitor. “If he is not stopped, he will carry on apologizing for hours. Some strange, inexhaustible abyss of guilt.” He leaned down to the patient and raised his eyelid with his finger and thumb. “Mm, yes. You slept badly again. Was it Basilisk this time too?”

Without moving or even trying to close his extended eyelid, Matvei Bentsionovich began to cry—quietly, pitifully, inconsolably. “Yes. He glanced in through the window at me, knocked, and threatened me. He comes to steal my reason. I have almost nothing left as it is, but he keeps coming back, again and again …”

“At first I put Mr. Berdichevsky on that divan over there,” said Ko-rovin, pointing into a dark corner. “But the Black Monk came knocking on his window in the night. Then I had a bed made up for him upstairs, in the observatory. Two nights passed quite calmly, but now, as you can see, Basilisk has grown wings, and reaching the second floor is no trouble to him.”

“Yes,” the assistant public prosecutor sobbed. “It's all the same to him. I shouted out the formula and he moved away and dissolved.”

“Still the same one? ‘I believe, Oh Lord’?”

“Yes.”

“Well then, you see you have nothing to be afraid of. Basilisk is afraid of your magic formula.”

Berdichevsky whispered in a trembling voice, “He'll come again tonight. He'll steal all that's left. And then I'll forget who I am. I'll turn into an animal. And that will cause you tremendous inconvenience; after all, you're not a veterinary doctor—you don't treat animals. I beg your forgiveness in advance …”

“Mm, yes,” Donat Savvich sighed, rubbing his chin in bewilderment. “Of course, I could give him a sleeping draft for the night, but who knows what dreams he might have. He could dream of something even worse. What's to be done?”

Polina Andreevna's poor heart was breaking; she felt so sorry for the sick man, but she had no idea how to help him.

“Sleeping draft—rubbish,” Lampier muttered. “In my room. Very simple. Two of us. I don't mind and he's not afraid.”

“Put his bed in your bedroom? Is that what you mean?” Korovin asked, galvanized. “Well, if he has no objection, why not—it's one solution.”

“Hey, you!” the physicist suddenly shouted at Berdichevsky as if he were deaf. “Want to sleep in my room? Only I snore.”

The sick man fumbled clumsily at the armrests, got up out of his chair, and began waving his arms about. His tearful apathy was suddenly replaced by extreme excitement: “Yes I do! I should be quite exceptionally grateful! I'll have peace with you! Snore as much as you like, Mr. Lampier—that's even better! I am so grateful to you, so grateful!”