Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (40 page)

Nikolai Vsevolodovich's cheek began twitching nervously, so that his face seemed to be dancing a wild devil's cancan.

“Yes, yes, I am Satan!” his thin scarlet lips whispered. “Give yourself to Satan, bride of Christ!”

He lifted the woman up lightly in his arms, flung her onto the bearskin, and threw himself on top of her. Polina Andreevna raised her hand to scratch at the rapist's eyes with her nails, but suddenly felt she could not do it—and that was the most shameful and terrible thing of all.

Give me strength, she prayed to her patron, Saint Pelagia. The noble Roman woman, promised in marriage to the emperor's son, had preferred a fearsome, savage death to sinning with the handsome pagan. It was better to writhe in agony in a red-hot copper bull than to submit to the shameful embrace of a seducer!

“Forgive me, forgive me, save me,” poor Mrs. Lisitsyna babbled, confessing her accursed womanly weakness to her Eternal Bridegroom.

“Gladly!” Nikolai Vsevolodovich chuckled, tearing at her drawers.

But it turned out that the Heavenly Bridegroom was able to protect the honor of His betrothed after all.

Just as Polina Andreevna felt that all was lost and there could be no salvation, she heard a loud voice calling from outside: “Hey, Childe Harold! Are you not frozen to death in there? Your door's split in two.

I've brought you a warm rug and a basket with your breakfast from Maître Armand. Hey, Mr. Terpsichorov, are you still asleep?”

A hurricane blast seemed to tear Nikolai Vsevolodovich off the body of his victim.

For a second time the face of the tower's inhabitant changed beyond all recognition: from being demonic it became frightened, the face of a little boy who has been up to mischief.

“Ai-ai! Donat Savvich!” the amazing theomachist keened as he pulled on his dressing gown. “Now I'll really get it in the neck!”

Interesting People II

STILL NOT QUITE believing in this miracle, Polina Andreevna quickly stood up, adjusted the tattered remnants of her torn underwear as best she could, and dashed for the door.

Dr. Korovin was standing by the crooked fence, tying the bridle of a sturdy pony to the gatepost. The pony was harnessed to a two-seater English gig, and Donat Savvich was wearing a straw boater with a black ribbon and a light-colored coat. He took a large bundle out of the carriage and turned around, but did not immediately notice the tormented lady (she had instinctively ducked back inside the building). He stared at the unconscious figure of Brother Jonah lying on the ground.

“Did you get the monk drunk?” the doctor asked, shaking his head. “Are you still blaspheming, then? I must say, that's not a very substantial piece of sacrilege—you still have a long way to go before you're a real Stavrogin. Really, Mr. Terpsichorov, you should drop this role, it simply doesn't suit …”

At this point Korovin spotted the woman in her underwear peeping out from behind the door frame and stopped speaking. First he stared blankly, and then he frowned. “Aha,” he said sternly. “That too. It was to be expected. Of course, Stavrogin is a great womanizer. Good morning, madam. I'm afraid I shall have to explain something to you …”

Donat Savvich spoke these words as he walked up the steps onto the porch, but then he stopped short again, because he had recognized his guest of the previous day. “Polina Andreevna, you?” the doctor exclaimed, stunned. “I would never have … Good Lord, what has happened to you? What has he done to you?”

Korovin glanced at the lady's battered face and pitiful attire and went rushing through into the room. He tossed the basket and the rug aside, grabbed hold of Nikolai Vsevolodovich's shoulders, and shook him so hard that his head bobbled backward and forward. “This, my good fellow, is vile and infamous! Yes, sir! You have gone too far. The torn chemise I can understand. Seduction, African passion, and all the rest, but why beat a woman on the face? I tell you, you are not a brilliant actor— you are simply a scoundrel!”

The blond man whom Donat Savvich had called Terpsichorov exclaimed plaintively, “I swear I didn't beat her!”

“Silence, you villain,” Korovin shouted at him. “I shall deal with you later.”

He dashed back to Polina Andreevna, who had understood only one thing from this strange dialogue: fearsome as Nikolai Vsevolodovich might be, the owner of the clinic was clearly even more so. Otherwise, why would the Satan of New Ararat be so afraid of him?

“Yes, this is bad,” the doctor sighed as the lady backed away from him in fright. “What's wrong, my dear Polina Andreevna, it's me, Korovin. Do you not recognize me? I don't need another patient just at the moment! Allow me to put this around you.”

He picked the rug up off the floor and solicitously wrapped Mrs. Lisitsyna in it, and she suddenly burst into tears.

“Ah, Terpsichorov, Terpsichorov, what have you done,” Donat Savvich muttered, stroking the weeping woman's red hair. “Never mind, my dear, never mind. I swear I'll rip his head off and bring it to you on a plate. But first I'll take you back to my house and give you a tonic infusion to drink, and a sedative injection.”

“I don't want an injection,” Polina Andreevna sobbed. “Just take me to the guesthouse.”

Korovin shook his head and replied with gentle reproach, as if he were speaking to a foolish child. “In that condition? I won't hear of it. I have to examine you. What if you have a broken bone or a contusion somewhere? Or even, God forbid, concussion? Oh, no, my dear, I took the Hippocratic oath. Now, let's go. Where's your dress?”

He looked around and even glanced under the trestle bed. Lisitsyna didn't say anything, and neither did the limp, miserable Nikolai Vsevolodovich.

“All right, then, damn the dress. We'll find something for you there.”

He put one arm halfway around Polina Andreevna's shoulders and led her toward the door. She had no strength to resist, and anyway, how could she possibly appear in the town in such a state of undress?

For some reason Donat Savvich began by apologizing. Setting the pony moving at a light trot, he said guiltily, “Such an appalling thing to happen. I don't even know what excuse I can make. I have never had anything like it happen before. Naturally, you are entitled to complain to the authorities, take me to court, and so on. It will mean trouble for my clinic, perhaps even closure, but mea culpa, so I must be held responsible.”

“What have you got to do with it?” Polina Andreevna asked in surprise, pulling up her frozen feet; her shoes had been left in the lighthouse, and what good would they have been anyway—they were soaked through. “Why must you take responsibility for this man's crimes?”

She was on the point of revealing the whole truth about the Black Monk to the doctor, but before she could, Korovin gestured angrily and began speaking in a rapid, agitated manner.

“Because Terpsichorov is my patient and cannot stand trial. He is in my care and my responsibility. Ah, how could I have been so mistaken in my diagnosis! It is absolutely unforgivable! To fail to notice latent aggression, and such violent aggression! Using his fists on a woman—it's absolutely scandalous! In any case, I shall send him back to St. Petersburg. There is no place in my clinic for violent cases!”

“Who is your patient?” Lisitsyna asked, unable to believe her ears. “Nikolai Vsevolodovich?”

“Is that what he said his name was, Nikolai Vsevolodovich? Why, of course! Oh, I can guess who gave him that vile filth!”

“What filth?” asked Polina Andreevna, totally confused.

“You see, Laertes Terpsichorov (naturally, that is his stage name) is one of my most interesting patients. He used to be an actor, and a brilliant one—a gift from God, as they say. When he acted in a play, he was completely transformed into the character he played. The public and the critics adored him. Everybody knows that the very finest actors are those with a weak sense of their own individuality, whose own personality does not prevent them from mimicking every new role. Well, Terpsichorov has no distinctive personality of his own at all. If he is left without any roles to play, he will just lie on the divan all day long from morning till night, staring up at the ceiling, like a puppet lying in the puppet master's trunk. But the moment he enters into a role, he comes to life—he is charged with life and energy. Women fall madly, ecstatically in love with Terpsichorov. He has been married three times, and each time the marriage lasted for only a few weeks—on the longest occasion for a couple of months. Then every time, the wife realized that her chosen one was a zero, a nonentity—she had not fallen in love with Laertes Terpsichorov, but some literary character. Owing to his pathologically underdeveloped personality this actor used to immerse himself so deeply in his latest role that he even carried it with him into everyday life, extending the authors ideas, improvising, inventing new situations and lines. And he carried on like that until he was given the next play to learn. And so his first wife married Griboedov's Chatsky and then suddenly found herself the lifetime companion of Gogol's Khlestakov. The second one was wild about Cyrano de Bergerac, but soon ended up with Pushkin's Miserly Knight. The third one fell in love with the melancholy Prince of Denmark, but then he turned into Beaumarchais's foppish Count Almaviva. It was after the third divorce that Terpsichorov came to me. He loved his third wife very much and despair had driven him almost to the point of suicide. ‘I'll give up the theater,’ he said. ‘Help me to become myself!’ ”

“And did it not work?” asked Polina Andreevna, enthralled by this strange story.

“Oh, yes, it worked. The genuine, unadulterated Terpsichorov is a pale shadow of a man. He spends the whole day in a state of passive depression and is profoundly unhappy. Fortunately, I happened to acquire a Russian translation of a certain book, a collection of stories that describes a similar case. It also proposes a remedy—naturally, as a joke, but it seemed like a productive idea to me.”

“What idea was that?”

“A perfectly sensible one from the psychiatric point of view: it is not always the right thing to straighten out a crooked psyche—that can crush the individual personality. What is needed is to transform a weakness into a strength. After all, turn any depression through a hundred and eighty degrees, and it becomes an elevation. If a man cannot live without playacting, and only lives a full life when he is playing some part or other, he should be provided with a permanent repertoire. And the roles chosen should be ones that positively glitter with the finest, most exalted qualities of the human soul. No Khlestakovs, Miserly Knights, or—God forbid—Richard the Thirds.”

“So ‘Nikolai Vsevolodovich’ is Nikolai Vsevolodovich Stavrogin from Dostoyevsky's novel
The Possessed,”
Lisitsyna gasped. “But why did you choose such a dangerous part for your patient?”

“I didn't choose it at all,” the doctor exclaimed in annoyance. “I follow his reading very closely; I know what kind of role can enthrall him, and so for a year now the only book he has been allowed to read is another one by Dostoyevsky
—The Idiot.
Of all the characters in that book the only one suited to Terpsichorov is Prince Mishkin himself. And Laertes really took to the role. He was transformed into the absolutely inoffensive and extremely conscientious Lev Nikolaevich Mishkin, the very best of men in the entire world. Everything was going really well until some hooligan gave him a copy of
The Possessed
and I failed to notice. Well, of course, Stavrogin is far more impressive than Prince Mishkin, and so Terpsichorov switched roles. In dramatic terms: Byron-ism, theomachism, and the poeticization of Evil are far more attractive than feeble Christian compassion and forgiveness for all. When I realized what had happened, it was too late—Laertes had already become someone else, and I had to adapt as best I could. For the period of crisis, I moved him as far away as possible from the other patients and tried to choose some reading even more dramatic than
The Possessed
for him. But I must say, that is by no means easy. I had not suspected that Stavrogin could be so dangerous, and I had underestimated the strength of Laertes’ own creative fantasy. But even so, the idea of Stavrogin beating a woman is too bold an interpretation of the character. He is an aristocrat, after all.”

“He didn't beat me,” Mrs. Lisitsyna said in a quiet voice. She had guessed where the poor madman had acquired the detrimental novel: Father Mitrofanii had given it to Alyosha to read on his journey, for pedagogical purposes—and now look what it had led to!

Feeling almost like an accomplice to the crime (for it was she who had induced the bishop to start reading novels), Polina Andreevna said, “Do not throw Nikolai Vsevolodovich out—he is not to blame. I shall not make a complaint.”

“Really?” Korovin asked in a more cheerful voice. He wagged a threatening finger at an invisible Terpsichorov. “Well, now I shall have you learning the part of the sugar loaf in Maeterlinck's
Blue Bird!”
But then he immediately hung his head in dejection again. “I have to confess that I am not a very good healer of souls. The people I am able to help are too few. Terpsichorov's case is serious, but not hopeless; but how to save Lentochkin I have not the slightest idea.”

Lisitsyna shuddered as she realized that Alyosha's disappearance had not yet been discovered, but she said nothing.

The gig was already rolling through the pine grove, between the gaily colored little houses of the clinic in their various styles. The doctor's mansion appeared from around a corner: standing in front of it was a low black carriage with a gold crest on its door, harnessed to a four-in-hand.