Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (44 page)

“But where's Lampier?” Polina Andreevna asked in a whisper.

Korovin did not bother to lower his voice. “I have no idea. Whenever I come, he's not here. I suppose it must be several days since I last saw him. Our Sergei Nikolaevich is an independent character. He must have discovered some new emanation and gotten carried away with his ‘field experiments’—that's one of his special terms.”

The bishop stopped by the door and looked at the back of his spiritual son's head, blinking very rapidly.

“Matvei Bentsionovich!” Mrs. Lisitsyna called.

“Speak louder,” Donat Savvich advised her. “He only responds to powerful stimuli now.”

She shouted at the top of her voice: “Matvei Bentsionovich! Look who I've brought to see you!”

Polina Andreevna had just a faint hope that when Berdichevsky saw his beloved mentor he would rouse himself and come back to life.

The assistant public prosecutor looked around, searching for the source of the sound. He found it. But he only looked at the woman and paid no attention at all to her companions.

“Yes?” he asked slowly. “What do you want, madam?”

“He used to ask about you all the time!” she whispered despairingly to Mitrofanii. “And now he's not even looking … Where's Mr. Lampier?” she asked cautiously, moving closer to the seated man.

He answered in a dull, indifferent voice: “Under the ground.”

“You see,” Korovin said with a shrug. “He only reacts to the intonation and the grammar of a question, with a nonsensical response. It is a new stage in the development of his psychological illness.”

The bishop took a step forward, decisively moving the doctor to one side.

“Let me see him. Physical damage to the brain is definitely a matter for medicine, but a diseased soul—a soul, as they used to say in the old days, that has been possessed by the devil—that, doctor, falls into my department.” He raised his voice imperiously and said, “I tell you what, why don't you leave Mr. Berdichevsky and me alone together? And don't come back until I call you. If I don't call you for a week, then stay away for a week. Nobody must come, not a single person. Do you understand?”

Donat Savvich laughed. “Oh, Bishop, this is not your domain, believe me. You can't drive this demon out with prayers and holy water. And I won't allow any medieval nonsense in my clinic.”

“You won't allow it?” the bishop said, screwing up his eyes as he looked around at the doctor. “But you allow sick people to wander around among the healthy? Just what sort of muddle have you created here in Ararat? There's no way of telling which members of the public are sane. In the world we live in, it's hard enough to tell which of the people around you are mad and which aren't, but here on your island there is nothing but temptation and confusion. It's enough to make a sane man have doubts about himself. Why don't you just do as you are told? Or I'll forbid you to keep your institution on church land.”

Korovin did not dare to carry on arguing. He shrugged and spread his hands, as if to say, Do as you wish. Then he turned and walked out.

“Come along, Matiusha.”

The bishop took the sick man gently by the hand and led him out of the dark laboratory into the bedroom.

“Don't you come with us, Pelagia. I'll call when you can come.”

“All right, Father, I'll wait in the laboratory,” Lisitsyna replied with a bow.

The bishop sat Berdichevsky down on the bed and moved up a chair for himself. They sat in silence for a while. Mitrofanii looked at Matvei Bentsionovich, who looked at the wall.

“Matvei, do you really not recognize me?” His Grace could not help asking.

It was only then that Berdichevsky turned his eyes to look at him. He blinked several times and asked uncertainly, “Are you a cleric then? You have an icon hanging on your chest. Your face seems familiar. I must have seen you in a dream.”

“Touch me. I am not a dream. Are you not glad to see me?”

Matvei Bentsionovich obediently touched his visitor's sleeve and replied politely. “Of course I am, very glad.”

He looked at the bishop again and suddenly began to cry—quietly, without any sound, but with copious tears.

Mitrofanii was glad to see a demonstration of feeling, even of this kind. He began stroking the wretched man's head, repeating over and over again, “Cry, cry—tears wash the poison out of the soul.”

But Berdichevsky apparently intended to cry for a long time. His tears kept streaming down in a way that was oddly monotonous. And the way he cried was strange too, like the endless drizzle of autumn. His Grace's handkerchief was completely soaked through from wiping his spiritual son's face, and it was a very big handkerchief indeed.

The bishop frowned. “Well now, you've had a cry and that will do. I've brought you some good news, very good news.”

Matvei Bentsionovich batted his eyelids obediently and his eyes immediately dried up. “It's good to have good news,” he remarked.

Mitrofanii waited for a question, but it did not come. Then he declared solemnly, “Your promotion to the next rank has arrived. Congratulations. You have been waiting for a long time. You are now a state counselor.”

“I can't be a state counselor,” Berdichevsky said in a thoughtful voice, wrinkling up his brow. “Madmen can't be state officials of the fifth level—it is forbidden by law.”

“Oh, yes, they can,” said the bishop, trying to joke. “I know officials of the fourth rank and even, Lord help us, the third, who ought to be in an asylum.”

“You do?” asked Matvei Bentsionovich, slightly surprised. “And yet the articles of the state service absolutely forbid it.”

Again they sat in silence for a while.

“But that is still not my most important news,” said the bishop. He slapped Berdichevsky on the knee—the assistant public prosecutor started and winced tearfully. “You have a son, a fine baby boy! He is healthy, and Masha is well too.”

“It's very good when everybody is well,” Matvei Bentsionovich said with a nod. “Without health nothing brings any happiness—neither fame nor riches.”

“We've even chosen the name already. We thought for a long, long time and decided to call him …” Mitrofanii paused. “Akakii. So he'll be Akakii Matveevich. Doesn't that have a fine ring to it?”

Berdichevsky approved the name as well.

Silence descended again. This time they said nothing for about half an hour at least. It was clear that Berdichevsky did not find the silence irksome. He hardly even moved and just looked straight ahead. Once or twice, when Mitrofanii stirred, he looked at him and smiled benevolently.

Unsure of how to break through this blank wall, the bishop began a conversation about Berdichevsky's family—he had brought some photographs from Zavolzhsk for this purpose. Matvei Bentsionovich looked at the photographs with polite interest. He looked at his own wife and said, “A pretty smile, only rather stern.” And he liked the children too. “You have charming little ones, Father,” he said. “And so many of them. I didn't know that individuals of the monastic vocation were allowed to have children. It's a shame that I cannot have any children, because I am mad. The law forbids those who are mad from entering into marriage, and if someone has already done so, then the marriage is declared null and void. I think that I used to be married too. There's something I can rem—”

At this point there was a cautious knock and Polina Andreevna's freckled face appeared around the door—at just the wrong moment. The bishop waved one hand at his spiritual daughter: Go away, don't interfere—and the door closed. But the critical moment had been lost, and instead of exploring his memories, Berdichevsky became distracted by a cockroach that was crawling slowly across his bedside cabinet.

The minutes passed, and the hours. The day began growing dark and then faded away completely. No one knocked at the door again or dared to disturb the bishop and his insane charge.

“All right then,” said Mitrofanii, getting up with a quiet groan. “I'm feeling a bit tired. I'm going to settle down for the night. Your physicist is not here anyway, and if he turns up, the doctor can put him somewhere else.” He lay down on the second bed and stretched out his numb legs.

For the first time Matvei Bentsionovich showed signs of concern. He switched on the lamp and turned to his recumbent visitor. “You're not supposed to sleep here,” he said nervously. “This place is for madmen, and you are sane.”

Mitrofanii yawned and crossed his mouth so that the evil spirit would not fly into it. “What kind of madman are you? You don't howl or roll around on the floor.”

“I don't roll around on the floor, but I howl sometimes,” Berdichevsky confessed. “When I feel very afraid.”

“Well, I'm going to be with you.” His Grace's voice was serene. “From now on, Matiusha, I am never going to leave you. We shall always be together. Because you are my spiritual son and because I love you. Do you know what love is?”

“No,” replied Matvei Bentsionovich, “I don't know anything now.”

“Love means always being together. Especially when the one you love is suffering.”

“You can't stay here! Why can't you understand? You're a bishop!”

Aha! Mitrofanii clenched his fists in the semidarkness. He has remembered! Come on then, come on!

“That's all the same to me, Matiusha. I'm going to stay with you. And you won't be afraid anymore, because two people together are never afraid. We can both be madmen together, you and me. Dr. Korovin will take me in—it's an interesting case for him: a provincial prelate who has gone barmy.”

“No!” Berdichevsky said suddenly. “Two people can't go mad together!”

This also seemed a good sign to the bishop—previously Matvei Bentsionovich had agreed with everything. Mitrofanii sat up on the bed and hung his legs over the edge. He began speaking, looking his former investigator straight in the eye: “But I, Matvei, do not think that you have gone mad. You've just gone a little crazy. It happens to very clever people. Very clever people often want to squeeze the whole world into their heads. But it won't all fit in. It's God's world. It has a lot of corners, and some of them are very sharp. They poke out through your head, they squeeze your brain, they hurt you.”

Matvei Bentsionovich pressed his hands to his temples and complained: “Yes, they do squeeze. Do you know how badly it hurts sometimes?”

“But of course it hurts. If you clever people can't fit something inside your head, you start to get frightened of your own brain and you go out of your mind. But there is nowhere else for you to go, because apart from his mind a man can have only one other support—faith. Matvei, no matter how often you repeat ‘I believe, Oh Lord,’ you still won't really believe. Faith is a gift from God that is not given to everyone, and it is ten times more difficult for clever people to attain it. And so it turns out that you have gone out of your mind but not arrived at faith, and that is all there is to your madness. Well, I cannot give you faith—that is not in my power. But I will try to lead you back into your mind. So that you can fit God's world between your ears again.”

Berdichevsky listened suspiciously, but very attentively.

“You haven't forgotten how to read, have you? Here, read what another clever person writes, someone even cleverer than you. Read about the coffin, about the bullet, about Basilisk on stilts.”

The bishop took Sister Pelagia's letter out of his sleeve and held it out to the other man. Berdichevsky took it and moved it closer to the lamp. At first he read slowly, to himself, moving his lips laboriously at the same time. On the third page he shuddered, stopped moving his lips, and began batting his eyelids. He turned to the next page and began ruffling up his hair nervously.

Mitrofanii watched hopefully and also moved his lips—he was praying.

When he reached the end of the letter, Matvei Bentsionovich rubbed his eyes furiously. He shuffled the pages in the reverse direction and began reading them again. His fingers reached up to seize the tip of his long nose—in his former life this had been a habit of the assistant public prosecutor's that he indulged at moments of stress.

Suddenly he jerked bodily, put down the letter, and swung around to face the bishop.

“What do you mean—Akakii’? My son—Akakii? What sort of name is that? And Masha agreed?”

The bishop made the sign of the cross, whispered a prayer of gratitude, and pressed his lips fervently against his precious
panagia.
He began speaking in a light, happy voice: “I lied, Matveiushka. I wanted to shake you up. Masha hasn't given birth yet—she's still carrying the child.”

Matvei Bentsionovich frowned. “And was it a lie about the state counselor?”

At the sound of peals of laughter mingled with breathless panting and sobbing coming from the bedroom, the door opened without a knock, but it was not Mrs. Lisitsyna who looked in; it was Dr. Korovin and his assistant, both wearing white coats—they must have just gotten back from their rounds. They stared in fright at the crimson-faced bishop wiping away his tears and their tousle-headed patient.

“I had never imagined, dear colleague, that entropic schizophrenia was infectious,” Donat Savvich muttered.

His assistant exclaimed, “That, my dear colleague, is a genuine discovery!”

When he had finished laughing and wiped away the tears, Mitrofanii told the confused assistant public prosecutor, “I didn't lie about the new title—that would have been an unforgivable sin. So congratulations, Your Honor.”