Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog

by Boris Akunin

  At this point we ought perhaps to offer some explanation concerning the gift about which the general Tatishchev’s widow wrote, and which might appear not entirely becoming to a churchman of bishop’s rank. Be that as it may, reckoned among the reverend bishop’s more sublime merits was the precious talent, one very rarely encountered, for unraveling all sorts of baffling mysteries, especially those of a criminal complexion. One might even say that Mitrofanii had a genuine passion for mental gymnastics of this sort, and on more than one occasion the police authorities, even those from neighboring provinces, had respectfully requested his advice in some confusing investigation. The Bishop of Zavolzhsk secretly took great pride in this reputation of his, but not without certain pangs of conscience—first, because this pride undoubtedly deserved to be categorized as idle vanity, and, second, for another reason known only to himself and a certain other individual, which we will therefore pass over in silence.

  The previous evening, on first reading the letter, His Grace had found his aunt’s request—to go dashing to her estate and investigate the circumstances of Zagulyai’s death—somewhat amusing. And even now, having reread the letter, he thought: Nonsense, it’s just an old woman’s fancies. She’ll spend a day or two in bed and then get up.

  He snuffed out the candle and lay down, but his heart still felt uneasy. He tried to pray for his aunt’s recovery. It is well known that prayers at night ascend to God’s ears more easily. Saint Ioann Zlatoust writes that the Lord’s gracious mercy is aroused most powerfully by nocturnal prayers, “when you make the time of rest for many the time of your lament.”

  But his prayer had no soul, it was no more than an idle parroting of words, and the reverend bishop did not acknowledge prayers of that kind. He had never even imposed penances of prayer on anyone, regarding it as sacrilege. Prayer was not prayer at all if it merely passed through the lips without touching the heart.

  Very well, Pelagia can go, Mitrofanii decided. Let her find out what happened to that thrice damned Zagulyai.

  Immediately he felt easier, and the cicadas’ polyphonic chirping no longer chafed his weary soul but lulled it instead, and the moon no longer stung his eyes but seemed to bathe his face with warm milk. Mitrofanii closed his eyes and the wrinkles on his stern face relaxed. He slept.

  IN THE MORNING they blessed the fruit in the bishop’s chapel on the occasion of the Lord’s Transfiguration, otherwise known as the Feast of Our Savior of the Apples. Mitrofanii loved this festival, though it was not the greatest of the twelve, for its brilliance and pious frivolity. He did not lead the service himself but stood at the back, on the bishop’s dais at the side, which afforded him a better view of the apple-bedecked church, the large congregation, and the priests and deacons in their special “apple” chasubles of blue and gold with a pattern of fruits and leaves embroidered around the top. As they walked in from both sides, the choristers of the famous bishop’s choir thundered so loudly that up under the white vault the rainbow-bright pendants on the heavy crystal chandelier began to shake. Father Amfiteatrov began blessing the apples: “Our Lord and God, Who hast vouchsafed the use of Thy creations to those who believe in Thee, we pray Thee, bless these fruits we offer with Thy word…”

  It was good.

  The service at Transfiguration is short and joyful. The cathedral is filled with the smell of fresh fruit, because everybody has brought their baskets along to have their apples sprinkled with holy water. Even the table beside Mitrofanii bore a silver dish with immense red king-pineapple apples from His Grace’s orchard—succulent, sweet, and aromatic. When the reverend bishop gave these to someone, it was a mark of special distinction and favor.

  Mitrofanii sent the servant who looked after his bishop’s crook to the left-hand choir, where the nuns appointed to serve by teaching in the diocesan school for girls were standing placidly in a row. The emissary whispered into the ear of the tall, gaunt directrix, Sister Christina, that the reverend bishop wished to give her an apple, and she glanced around and made a slow grateful bow. Standing on her right, I think (one cannot be certain at first glance from the back), was Sister Emilia, who taught arithmetic, geography, and several other subjects. Then came the lopsided Sister Olympiada, the one who taught Scripture. After her came two equally stooped sisters, Ambrosia and Apollinaria, and there was no way to distinguish one from the other; one taught grammar and history and the other taught the domestic arts. And at the end, by the wall, stood the short, thin Sister Pelagia (literature and gymnastics). Even if one wished, it would be impossible to confuse her with anyone else: Her wimple had slipped over to one side, and protruding from under its edge in a manner quite shameful and impermissible for a nun was a lock of ginger hair, shimmering with a bronze sheen in a ray of sunlight.

  Mitrofanii sighed, wondering yet again whether he had not committed an error when he gave his blessing to Pelagia’s taking the veil. It had been impossible not to give it—the girl had been through such great grief and terrible suffering that not every soul would have withstood it, but she was really not cut out to be a nun: She was far too lively, fidgety, curious, and undignified in her movements. But you are just the same yourself, you old fool, the reverend bishop rebuked himself, and he sighed again even more ruefully.

  When the nuns lined up to receive an apple each from His Grace, he greeted each of them in a distinctive manner—some he allowed to kiss his hand, some he patted gently on the head, at some he simply smiled, but with the last of them, Pelagia, there was a mishap. The clumsy girl stepped on the father subdeacon’s foot, started back, apologizing, threw her arms out, and knocked the bowl over with her elbow. A loud rumbling, the ring of silver against the stone floor, red apples tumbling merrily in all directions, and the boys from the seminary, who were not supposed to have any apples because they were mischief-makers and scamps, had already grabbed up the precious king-pineapples and left nothing for the worthy and deserving people waiting their turn behind Pelagia. And so it always was with her—she was not a nun, but a walking disaster with freckles.

  Mitrofanii gnawed his lips, but he refrained from rebuking her, because this was the house of God and it was a holiday.

  He merely said as he blessed her: “Tuck away that lock of hair; it’s shameful. And get along to the library. I have something to say to you.”

  “A CERTAIN ASS once imagined himself to be a racehorse and began flaring his nostrils and stamping his hoof on the ground.” (This was how His Grace began the conversation.) “‘I’ll beat you all!’ he shouted. ‘I’m the swiftest and the fleetest!’ And he shouted so convincingly that everyone believed him and began repeating what he said: ‘Our ass is no ass at all; he is the purest possible thoroughbred. Now we must run him in the races so that he can win every last prize.’ And from that time on the ass knew no peace; whenever there was a race anywhere, they immediately bridled him and dragged him off to it, saying: ‘Come on, long-ears, don’t let us down.’ And so the ass now led a quite wonderful life.”

  The nun, long since accustomed to the bishop’s allegories, listened intently. At first glance she seemed a young girl: the clear, sweet, oval face was winsome and naïve, but this deceptive impression was created by the snub nose and the astonished look of the raised eyebrows, while the round brown eyes gazed out keenly through equally round spectacles with a look that was far from simple, and from the eyes one could tell that this was certainly no young innocent—she had already known suffering, seen something of life, and had time to reflect on her experiences. The air of youthful freshness came from the white skin that often complements ginger hair, and from its speckling of ineradicable orange freckles.

  “Tell me then, Pelagia, what is the point of this fable?”

  The nun pondered, taking her time before she answered. Her small white hands reached involuntarily for the canvas bag hanging at her belt, and the reverend bishop, knowing that Pelagia found it easier to think with her knitting in her hands, told her, “You may knit.”

  The point
ed steel needles began clacking furiously and Mitrofanii frowned as he recalled what dreadful creations those deceptively deft hands brought into the world. At Eastertide the sister had presented the bishop with a white scarf adorned with the letters CA for “Christ is Arisen,” rendered so crookedly that they seemed already to have celebrated the ending of the fast with some gusto.

  “Who is this for?” His Grace inquired cautiously.

  “Sister Emilia. A belt; I shall run a pattern of skulls and crossbones along it.”

  “Very good,” he said, relieved. “Well, what about the fable?”

  “I think,” sighed Pelagia, “that it is about me, sinner that I am. With this allegory, father, you were trying to say that I make as good a nun as an ass makes a racehorse. And you have reached this uncharitable judgment about me because I spilled the apples in the cathedral.”

  “Did you spill them deliberately? To create a commotion in the cathedral? Confess.” Mitrofanii glanced into her eyes, but then he felt ashamed, because the response he read in them was meek reproach. “All right, all right, I didn’t mean that…but that is not the point of my fable; you have guessed wrong. What is it about the way we human beings are constituted that makes us think every event that occurs and every word that is spoken center on ourselves? That is pride, my daughter. And you are too small a bird for me to go concocting fables about you.”

  Feeling suddenly annoyed, he rose, put his hands behind his back, and paced up and down the library.

  The bishop’s library, to which it is probably worth our while to pay some attention, was maintained in perfect order under the management of his secretary, Userdov, a most assiduous worker. The bookcase with the works on theology and patrology was located at the center of the longest of the walls (the one that had no windows or doors). It contained doctrinal compositions in Church Slavonic, Latin, Greek, and ancient Hebrew. Extending to its left were the bookcases of hagiography, with lives of the saints, both Orthodox and Roman Catholic; to the right were works on ecclesiastic history, liturgics, and canonics. A separate place was accorded to a broad bookcase with tracts on asceticism, a reminder of His Grace’s former enthusiasm. The same bookcase also contained extremely precious bibliographical rarities such as a first edition of Saint Teresa Avila’s The Internal Castle and Reisbruck the Amazing’s Robes of the Spiritual Marriage. Lying on a long table running the entire length of the room were bound files of Russian and foreign newspapers and magazines, among which pride of place was given to The Zavolzhsk Diocesan Gazette, a provincial newspaper that the bishop himself edited.

  Non-religious literature of the most various kinds, from mathematics to numismatics and from botany to mechanics, stood on the stout oak shelves that completely covered the surface of the other three walls of the library. The only kind of reading that the reverend bishop avoided and considered of little value was fiction. He used to say that the Heavenly Creator had contrived more than enough miracles, mysteries, and unique stories in this world, so there was no point in mere mortals inventing their own worlds peopled with puppets; besides, anything contrary to God’s own inventions would certainly be wretched and fail to delight. Sister Pelagia argued this point with the bishop, claiming that since the Lord had implanted the desire to create in the soul of man, He was the best judge of whether there was any sense and benefit in the writing of novels. However, this theological dispute was not initiated by Mitrofanii and his spiritual daughter and it will not conclude with them, either.

  Halting in front of Pelagia, who was waiting meekly for her spiritual teacher’s rather incomprehensible irritation to subside, Mitrofanii suddenly asked: “Why is your nose shiny? Have you been bleaching your freckles with elixir of dandelion again? Is that the right sort of thing for a bride of Christ to concern herself with? You are an intelligent woman, after all. And as the blessed Diadochus teaches us: ‘She who adorns her flesh is guilty of love of the body, which is the sign of disbelief.’”

  From his jesting tone of voice, Pelagia realized that the cloud had blown over, and she replied spryly: “Your Diadochus, my lord, is a well-known obscurantist. He even forbids us to wash. How does he put it in his Love of Virtue? ‘It is best, for the sake of abstinence, to avoid the bathhouse, for our body is weakened by its sweet wetness.’”

  Mitrofanii knitted his brows.

  “I’ll have you make a hundred bows to the ground for speaking so disrespectfully of an ancient martyr. And his teaching on the adornment of the flesh is correct.”

  Embarrassed, Pelagia launched into voluble excuses, claiming that she waged war on her freckles not for the sake of bodily beauty, God forbid, but exclusively out of a sense of decorum—a nun with a freckly nose was a ridiculous sight.

  “Oh, indeed?” said the bishop, shaking his head dubiously, still putting off getting down to the important business.

  Sister Pelagia’s transitions from boldness to meekness and back again always occurred with such lightning speed that it was impossible to keep track of them. And now again she asked in a bold voice, with a glint in her eye: “Your Grace, surely you did not summon me because of my freckles?”

  And once more Mitrofanii could not bring himself to speak of his business. He cleared his throat and walked up and down the length of the library yet again. He asked how her pupils were doing in school. Were they diligent, did they want to learn, were the sisters not perhaps teaching them anything superfluous that would not help, but merely hinder them, in their life?

  “I am told that you have begun to teach them swimming. Why? They say you have ordered a bathing hut to be set up on the River and you splash about with them there. Is this a good thing?”

  “Swimming is essential for girls, in the first place because it is good for their health and develops the flexibility of their limbs, and in the second place because it is good for their figures,” the nun replied. “They are from poor families, and most of them have no dowries. When they grow up, they will have to find husbands…Your Grace, you did not summon me here because of the school, either. We spoke about it only two days ago, and about the swimming, too.”

  Pelagia was not one of those people who can be duped for long, and so Mitrofanii finally began talking about the idea he had conceived before he fell asleep the night before.

  “The ass that I spoke of is myself. Acceding to your requests, and even more to the promptings of my own wretched vanity, which is absolutely improper for a pastor, I keep it a secret from everyone that it is not I who am the genuine expert in the field of unraveling obscure secrets and piercing through false appearances, but you, the meek and mild nun Pelagia. And now, like the ass who was so fond of fame, I am expected by everyone to produce new miracles and new revelations. Now no one will ever believe that the whole business was entirely your doing, and I did no more than to set you a work of penance.”

  The needles stopped clacking against each other and bright sparks sprang to the surface of the round brown eyes.

  “What has happened, father? It clearly can’t be in our province, or I should know about it. Has someone stolen the church treasury again, as they did last year at Shrovetide?” the sister asked with impatient curiosity. “Or, God forbid, killed a clergyman? What work of penance will Your Grace set me to perform this time?”

  “No, nobody has been killed,” said Mitrofanii, turning away in embarrassment. “This is something different. Not a criminal matter. At least, it is not a matter for the police…I’ll tell you what it is, and for the time being, you just listen. You can tell me afterward what you think. Yes, do knit. Knit and listen.”

  He walked across to the window and delivered the following explanation, gazing all the while out into the orchard, from time to time drumming on the window frame with his fingers.

  “Not far from here, about eight miles away, is the estate of my great aunt, Marya Afanasievna Tatishcheva. She is extremely old now, but there was a time, long ago, when she was considered one of the greatest beauties in St. Petersburg. I remember her comin
g to visit us when I was a boy. She was fun-loving then, young, and she used to play checkers with me…. She married an officer, a regimental commander, and made the rounds of various remote garrisons with him, then he retired and they settled at Drozdovka. Her husband, Apollon Nikolaevich, who is now deceased, was passionately fond of dogs. He kept the finest kennels in the entire province. He had racing dogs and hunting dogs and gundogs. He once bought a puppy for a thousand rubles, that’s the kind of reckless man he was. But he still felt that all this was not enough, and he began to dream of producing some special new breed, something absolutely new. He frittered away all the rest of his life on this project. He called the breed the ‘white Russian bulldog.’ It is a different color from an ordinary bulldog, as white as milk all over, and has a very distinct flatness of profile (I have forgotten the special term that dog-lovers use for it), and it is quite exceptionally slack-lipped—that is, its lips are droopy. But the most important feature, the real point of all this, is that while it is white all over, its right ear has to be brown. I don’t recall what the meaning of that is—something to do with a helmet…I think that when Apollon Nikolaevich served in the Horse Guards, it was the custom in his squadron to wear one’s helmet cocked slightly to one side. So the ear represents that daredevil attitude. Ah, yes, I forgot, they also have to be extremely slobbery—I don’t know what practical purpose that serves. All in all, as ugly a monster as you are likely to find anywhere. Apollon Nikolaevich proceeded as follows. He requested every bulldog-owning noble house in Russia not to drown the degenerate albino pups as they usually do, but send them immediately to Major-General Tatishchev, and he would pay good money for the rejects. White bulldog pups, especially pups with a brown right ear, are very rare. I don’t remember how rare, although I heard it many times from my uncle, and from my aunt…perhaps one in every hundred litters. Well, anyway, Apollon Nikolaevich collected these little freaks and bred them. The pups mostly came out as usual, reddish-brown, but sometimes there were white ones, too, with brown ears, and now they were more frequent—say, one in every ten litters. Again he selected those and bred them, and took care that they were as slack-lipped and slobbery as possible. A particular difficulty arose, of course, with that thrice-cursed ear. A very large number of pups had to be culled. And so on and on, generation after generation. By the time my uncle passed away, he had made a great deal of progress toward his dream, but even so he was still only halfway there, so to speak. As he was dying, he entrusted the completion of the work that he had begun to his wife. And Marya Afanasievna was an absolute treasure as a wife. She had made the change from high-society charmer to mother and commander’s wife and later to lady of the manor in stride. All with absolute sincerity and with a willing heart. Such was the womanly talent granted to her by God. If her husband had not given her any instructions to carry out on his deathbed, she would probably have withered away; she would never have coped with her grief. But as it is she has been a widow for twenty years now and is still strong, active, and cheerful. She talks about dogs all the time and thinks about absolutely nothing else. I have reproached her for her excessive passion and enthusiasm, upbraided her—but she does not listen. One day, as a joke, I teased her: ‘Aunty, what if Lucifer himself should suddenly appear and demand your Christian soul in exchange for a pure white breed, would you give it to him?’ ‘Lord bless you, Misha,’ she replied, ‘what nonsense is that you’re talking?’ And then she suddenly fell silent and started thinking about it. I tell you, Pelagia, this is no joking matter. But in any case, she continued her deceased husband’s work breeding the Russian white bulldog and was actually rather successful at it, especially along the lines of droopiness, slobberiness, and flatness of profile. But things did not go so well for her with the ear. Until just recently she had only accumulated three absolutely ideal male dogs. An old grandfather by the name of Zagulyai, already over eight years old. Then his son Zakidai, a four-year-old. And two or three months ago the old woman was delighted when Zagulyai’s grandson was born. They called him Zakusai. He turned out so exemplary in all points that my aunt ordered all the other dogs who were not perfect enough to be drowned, in order not to spoil the breed, and kept only those three for breeding. Oh, I forgot another important point: They have bandy legs and their noses are pink with black spots. That is also an important feature…”