Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk

by Boris Akunin

  Hmm, Berdichevsky suddenly said to himself, coming to a halt. Here I am thinking just like a regular police goon. As if I didn't understand that if there really is some kind of mystical material involved here, then the subtle thread connecting it with earthly reality could be snapped very easily. It would be exactly the same approach to the Gordian knot that I argued against so strongly.

  Even a blockhead like Lagrange, God rest his soul, had realized that supernatural phenomena can only be observed one to one, without any official witnesses or police constables. If the experiment was to be accurate, he had to do as Lentochkin described in his letter: go alone, naked, and pronounce the incantation. And if nothing out of the ordinary happened, only then conduct the investigation in the usual manner, in the firm conviction that he was dealing with physical phenomena.

  Matvei Bentsionovich realized that these considerations were largely a matter of theory, because nothing would make him go anywhere at night, at least not to a place where one man had gone crazy and another had shot himself through the heart.

  To launch into that kind of escapade would be stupid, ludicrous in fact, and, above all, it would be a betrayal of his responsibility to Masha and the children.

  He began thinking about his wife, thanks to whom his life had become complete, full of meaning and happiness. How dear and good his Masha was, especially when she was pregnant, even though at those times her eyes turned red, her eyelids were covered with broken veins, and her nose stuck out just like a duck's bill. The assistant public prosecutor smiled as he recalled Masha's fondness for singing (even though she had no ear for music at all), her superstitious fear of the pockmarked crescent moon and brown cockroaches, the rebellious lock of hair on the back of her head, and many more of those little details that have no meaning except to one who loves.

  His eldest daughter, Katyenka, had taken after her mother, thank God. Just as determined and all of a piece, always knowing what she wanted and how to get it.

  His second daughter, Ludmilochka, was probably more like her father—she liked to cry a bit and she was a compassionate soul, sensitive to the beauties of nature. Life would not be easy for her. May God grant her a husband who was considerate and humane.

  And his third daughter, Nastenka, promised to develop into a genuine musical talent. How fleetly her pink little fingers slid across the keys of the pianoforte! When she was a little older, he would definitely have to take her to St. Petersburg and show her to Iosif Solomonovich.

  This mental inventorying of the numerous members of his family was Berdichevsky's favorite pastime, but on this occasion he failed to get as far as his fourth daughter, Lizanka. Suddenly a woman on a black horse appeared from around the bend, riding toward him, her appearance as unexpected as it was out of keeping with the languid chiming of the monastery bells and the entire dreary landscape of Canaan: Matvei Bentsionovich was stupefied.

  The slim-legged stallion came trotting along the roadway, turned slightly sideways, as genuinely thoroughbred and frolicsome English horses sometimes do, and so the assistant public prosecutor had a full view of the woman riding sidesaddle—from her little hat with a veil to the toes of her lacquered boots.

  As she drew level with the man walking along, she looked down at him, and the piercing gaze of those black eyes, as sharp as any arrow, set the sober-minded official's heart fluttering.

  It was she—there was no doubt about it! The same stranger whose mere appearance had seemed to drive the blanket of fog from the island. The hat with ostrich feathers had been replaced by a cardinal's cap of scarlet velvet, but the dress was still black, the color of mourning, and Berdichevsky's sensitive nose also caught the familiar, dangerously exciting scent of that perfume.

  Matvei Bentsionovich stopped and watched the graceful horsewoman ride by. Rather than lashing on her English stallion, she was gently stroking its gleaming crupper with her riding crop, and in her left hand she was holding a small lacy handkerchief.

  Suddenly this light scrap of material broke free, swirled around in the air for a brief moment like a playful butterfly, and landed on the ground at the edge of the road. The horsewoman rode on without noticing her loss or bothering to glance around at the man, who was still standing there stock-still.

  Let it lie where it has fallen, Berdichevsky's reason cautioned him— or perhaps it was not even his reason, but his instinct for self-preservation. What was not meant to be should be left well alone.

  But Matvei Bentsionovich's feet were already carrying him toward the fallen handkerchief. “My lady, stop!” the investigator called out in a halting voice. “Your handkerchief! You have dropped your handkerchief!”

  He called out three times before the rider looked around. Realizing what was wrong, she nodded and turned back toward him. She rode up slowly, examining this gentleman in a palmerston coat and muddy shoes with a strange smile of inquiry or mockery.

  “Thank you,” she said, pulling back on the reins, but she did not reach out her hand for the handkerchief. “You are most kind.”

  Berdichevsky held out the handkerchief, gazing avidly into the dazzling face of this lady, wondering if she was married or not. The depths of those almond-shaped eyes! That bold line to the mouth, that stubborn chin, and those bitter shadows barely visible below the cheekbones!

  But he had to say something. He couldn't just stand there staring. “It's a fine cambric handkerchief. It would be a shame to lose it,” the assistant public prosecutor muttered, feeling himself blushing like a schoolboy.

  “You have intelligent eyes. Sensitive lips. I've never seen you here before.” The horsewoman stroked her black stallion on the neck. “Who are you?”

  He told her his title without mentioning his job: “A collegiate counselor.”

  For some reason the stranger found this amusing. “A counselor?” she said, laughing and revealing her regular white teeth. “I could do with a counselor just at present. Or are you merely fond of giving advice? Ah, but what difference does it make. Give me some advice, my dear collegiate counselor: What can be done with a ruined life?”

  “Whose?” Matvei Bentsionovich asked in a hoarse voice.

  “Mine. And perhaps yours. Tell me, advice-giver, could you take your entire life and just strike it out, destroy it, all for the sake of one single moment? Not even a moment, but the hope of that moment, a hope that might never be realized?”

  Berdichevsky babbled: “I do not understand you … What you say is strange.”

  But he did understand—he understood everything perfectly. The thing that could never under any circumstances happen to him, because his life flowed along an entirely different course, was close, very close. A moment? A hope? But what about Masha?

  “Do you believe in fate?” The woman on the horse was no longer smiling, her clear brow had clouded over, the crop was tapping insistently against the horse's crupper, and the black was shifting its feet nervously. “Do you believe everything is predetermined and there are no accidental meetings?”

  “I don't know …”

  But he did know that he was almost lost, and he was already prepared to be lost completely, he even desired it. The orange stripe of the sunset protruded on both sides of the black horse, as if it had suddenly grown wings of fire.

  “I believe it. I dropped my handkerchief, you picked it up. But perhaps it is not really a handkerchief at all?”

  The assistant public prosecutor looked in bemusement at the scrap of cloth that he was still clutching in his fingers and thought, I am like a beggar, standing with his hand held out.

  The horsewoman's voice assumed a menacing tone: “Do you want me to turn my horse and gallop away from here? So that you will never see me again? Then you will never know whether you have tricked fate or fate has tricked you.”

  She jerked on the bridle, swung around, and raised her riding crop.

  “No!” Matvei Bentsionovich exclaimed, instantly forgetting about Masha and the twelve children, and the thirteenth still to come—s
o unbearable was the thought that the strange horsewoman would gallop off forever into the gathering gloom.

  “Then take hold of the stirrup—take a good, firm grip if you want to keep hold!” she ordered.

  Spellbound, Berdichevsky grabbed the silvery bracket tight in his fist. The horsewoman gave a guttural cry and struck the black with her crop, and the horse set off at a brisk jog.

  Matvei Bentsionovich ran as fast as his legs would carry him, without understanding what was happening. After about fifty, or perhaps a hundred steps he stumbled, fell flat on his face, and went tumbling over and over.

  From out of the darkness he heard the sound of rapidly receding laughter.

  What kind of island is this? the investigator asked himself senselessly, over and over again, as he sat in the road nursing his bruised elbow. His knuckles were skinned and bleeding too, but Matvei Bentsionovich had kept hold of the cambric handkerchief.

  THIS UNBELIEVABLE, ABSOLUTELY incredible adventure clearly left the assistant public prosecutor in a disturbed state of mind. This is the only possible explanation for the fact that he completely lost track of the time and could not even remember walking back to his hotel. And when he finally did recover his senses, he discovered that he was sitting on the bed in his room and staring dull-wittedly out the window at the segment of orange hanging in the sky—the moon was young.

  He took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket with a mechanical movement. It was one minute after ten, from which Matvei Bentsionovich concluded that he must have been brought back to reality by the chiming of his Breguet, although the sound had left no trace in his memory.

  Lev Nikolaevich! He had promised to wait on the bench only until ten o'clock!

  The assistant public prosecutor leapt up off the bed and ran out of his room. And he carried on running, not walking, along the street and the waterfront. Passersby glanced around at him—in sedate New Ararat a man running, especially late in the evening, was obviously a rare sight.

  The chance to talk to a witness, even an important one, would not on its own have been enough to set Berdichevsky dashing along in this manner, but he suddenly felt a quite irresistible desire to see Lev Nikolaevich's serene, kind face and talk to him, simply talk to him, about something simple and important, something far more important than any investigation.

  The white dome of the Rotunda, one of the local beauty spots, was visible from a distance. The assistant public prosecutor ran all the way, arriving completely exhausted and with no hope left of finding Lev Nikolaevich still there—but there was his thin figure rising from the bench to greet the runner with a friendly wave of the hand.

  Both men were absolutely delighted. Of course, Matvei Bentsionovich's reaction was perfectly understandable, but Lev Nikolaevich was clearly very pleased as well.

  “And I was thinking that you wouldn't come!” he exclaimed, shaking the investigator firmly by the hand. “But I went on sitting here, just in case. And now here you are! How wonderful, how remarkable!”

  It was a bright or, as poetic souls might have it, magical night. Lev Nikolaevich's eyes and his marvelous smile were so full of such amiable benevolence, and Berdichevsky's heart was in such terrible turmoil, that before he had fully recovered his breath, without any introductions or preambles, he had told this man whom he barely knew about what had happened. Matvei Bentsionovich was reticent by nature, with a shyness that was deep-rooted, and it was by no means his natural inclination to share intimate confidences, especially with strangers. But, first, Lev Nikolaevich somehow did not seem like a stranger to him, and second, his need to speak out and ease the burden of his soul was far too urgent.

  Berdichevsky told Lev Nikolaevich about the mysterious horsewoman and his own fall (in both the literal sense and the moral) without concealing anything, every now and then wiping away the tears from his cheeks.

  Lev Nikolaevich proved to be an ideal confidant—he listened seriously, without interrupting, and with such intense sympathy that he almost burst into tears himself.

  “You are wrong to chastise yourself so!” he exclaimed as soon as Matvei Bentsionovich had finished his story. “Really, you shouldn't! I know very little about the love between men and women, but I have been told about it, and I have read that even the most exemplary and virtuous family man can suffer something like an eclipse of reason. After all, in the depths of his soul every man, no matter how orderly his way of thinking might be, is waiting for a miracle, and very often he thinks he has found this miracle in the form of some exceptional woman. It happens to wives too, but especially often to husbands—simply because men are more disposed to adventures. What you have told me is a mere nothing. That is, of course, I don't really mean it is nothing—I just blurted that out to reassure you—but after all, nothing happened. As far as your wife is concerned, you are entirely blameless—”

  “No, I am guilty, guilty,” said Matvei Bentsionovich, interrupting his kind companion. “Far more guilty than if I had gotten drunk and spent the night in a bawdy house. That would simply have been swinishness, physical filth, but I have been unfaithful, genuinely unfaithful! And so quickly, so easily—all in a moment!”

  Lev Nikolaevich looked closely at his new acquaintance and said thoughtfully, “No, it was not a genuine betrayal, not the most serious case.”

  “Then what, in your opinion, is genuine betrayal?”

  “Genuine, satanic betrayal is when you betray someone to their face, looking into their eyes, and take a special pleasure in your own baseness.”

  “Ha, pleasure,” said Berdichevsky, gesturing dismissively. “And as for baseness, I am an absolutely genuine scoundrel. I know now that I am, and I must live with that knowledge. Ah,” he said, rousing himself. “If only I could atone for that moment, wash it from my soul, eh? I would submit to any test, go through any torment, if I could feel once again that I was …” He had started to say “a noble man,” but he felt too ashamed and said simply, “a man.”

  “To put oneself to the test is useful, even necessary,” Lev Nikolaevich agreed. “What I think is that—”

  “Wait!” the assistant public prosecutor broke in, struck by a sudden idea. “Wait! I know what test I must submit to! Tell me, for God's sake, tell me: Where is the house in which the buoy keeper used to live? Do you know?”

  “Of course I do,” said Lev Nikolaevich, surprised. “It's over that way, along the shoreline as far as Lenten Spit, and then to the left. About two miles from here. But why do you want to know?”

  “I'll tell you why …”

  And then—that night must clearly have been special in some way— Berdichevsky revealed all the secrets of the investigation to his dear friend: he told him about Alyosha Lentochkin and about Lagrange and, naturally, about his own mission. His listener merely gasped and shook his head.

  “I swear to you,” Matvei Bentsionovich said in conclusion, raising his hand as if he were taking the oath in court, “that I shall set off immediately, this very moment, to that accursed hut, completely alone, wait until midnight, and then go in, just as Alexei Stepanovich and Felix Stanislavovich did. I don't care if there's nothing there, if it's all nothing but superstitious nonsense. The important thing is that I shall conquer my fear and in doing so recover my self-respect!”

  Lev Nikolaevich jumped to his feet and exclaimed in admiration, “What a wonderful thing you have just said! In your place I should do exactly the same thing. Only, you know …” He grabbed hold of Berdichevsky's elbow impetuously. “You must not go there alone. It's far too frightening. Take me with you. Yes, really! Let's go together, eh?” And he looked into Matvei Bentsionovich's eyes so imploringly that the investigator felt his chest constrict and fresh tears began pouring from his eyes.

  “Thank you,” the assistant public prosecutor said with feeling. “I appreciate your noble impulse, but my heart tells me I must go into that hut alone. Otherwise it will all amount to nothing and I shall not achieve genuine atonement.” He forced himself to smile and even at
tempted to joke. “And apart from that, you are a creature of such angelic appearance that the evil spirit might feel too shy to show himself before you.”

  “All right, all right,” said Lev Nikolaevich, nodding. “I won't interfere. You know, I'll just see you there and then stand on one side, well out of the way. At a distance of fifty paces, or even a hundred. But I will see you there. You won't feel so lonely, and I shall be less worried. You never know …”

  Berdichevsky was quite delighted by this idea since, on the one hand, it did not devalue the proposed trial of courage, while on the other it promised at least the illusion of a certain support. But then he immediately felt angry with himself for being so delighted.

  He frowned and said, “Not a hundred paces. Two hundred.” THEY PARTED ON the little bridge over the swift, narrow river that had no more than 150 feet left to run to the lake.

  “There it is, the buoy keeper's little house,” said Lev Nikolaevich, pointing to a dark cube with its white straw roof glinting in the moonlight. “Are you quite sure I can't come with you?”

  Berdichevsky shook his head. He did not try to say anything, because his teeth were clenched tightly together—he was afraid that if he set them free, they would start chattering shamefully.

  “Well then, God be with you,” his faithful second said excitedly. “I shall wait right here, by the Farewell Chapel. If anything happens, shout, and I'll come running straightaway.”

  Instead of answering, Matvei Bentsionovich put his arms awkwardly around Lev Nikolaevich's shoulders and pulled him against himself for a second, and then, with a wave of his hand, he stepped out toward the hut. There were two minutes left until midnight, but he had no real distance to go—not even two hundred paces, a hundred and fifty at the most.

  What nonsense it all is, the assistant public prosecutor thought to himself as he glanced toward the hut. I know for certain that nothing is going to happen. Nothing can happen. I'll go in, stand there for a while, and then come back out, feeling like a total blockhead. It's a good thing that at least I have such a kindhearted witness. Anyone else would have made me a public laughingstock for this—imagine the assistant provincial public prosecutor quaking in his boots on his way to keep appointments with evil spirits! Stung by his pride, the courage began to stir deep in his soul. Now he had to nurture it carefully, protect it like a small flame trembling in the wind, not allow it to go out. “Come on then, come on then,” Berdichevsky drawled, lengthening his stride.