by Boris Akunin
AT NOON THE following day she was already walking down the gangway onto the quayside in Nizhni Novgorod, no longer wearing her nun's habit, but a modest black dress that she had taken out of the trunk. And that was only the first stage of her metamorphosis.
In her hotel the redheaded guest first asked for a pile of the latest fashion magazines to be brought to her room, then armed herself with a pencil and began copying out all sorts of abstruse phrases onto a sheet of paper: capote écossaise, velvet peplos, wooln. talma, and more in the same vein.
Having completed this research as painstakingly as possible, spending no less than two hours on the task, Pelagia paid a visit to Nizhni Novgorod's very finest ready-made clothing emporium, Dubois et fils, where she gave the shop assistant remarkably precise and detailed instructions, which were received with a respectful bow and put into effect without delay.
An hour and a half later, having dispatched to the hotel an entire coachload of bundles and boxes, the plunderer of the bishop's private treasury, now decked out in that mysterious “velvet peplos” (a straight-cut dress of Utrecht velvet with no fitted bodice), committed a quite unimaginable act for a nun: she went to a salon de coiffures and had her short hair curled in the latest Parisian style, joli cherubin, which suited her oval, slightly freckled face very well.
As is the way with women, having dressed more smartly and paid some attention to her appearance, this lady from Zavolzhsk was transformed inwardly as well as outwardly. Her gait became lighter, as if she were gliding along, her shoulders straightened, and her neck held her head higher, with the face inclined upward instead of downward. Men walking past her glanced around; two officers actually stopped—one of them even whistled, and the other reproached him: “Fie, Michel, such manners!”
At the entrance to the office of the tourist agency Cook and Kan-torovich the stylish lady was pestered by a dirty, spiteful gypsy woman who began threatening her with inevitable disaster, nightmares, and death by drowning, and demanded ten kopecks to ward off her misfortune. Pelagia was not at all alarmed by this prophetess, especially since in the none-too-distant past she had successfully evaded a watery grave, but even so she gave the witch some money—a whole ruble, not just ten kopecks—so that in the future she would be more good-natured and not regard everybody as her enemy.
Inside the agency, which incorporated a shop selling traveling accessories, another one hundred and fifty rubles of the bishop's savings was spent on two wonderful Scottish suitcases, a manicure set, and a little mother-of-pearl spectacle case that could be attached to a belt (both elegant and convenient), in addition to the acquisition of a ticket to the monastery of New Ararat, which could only be reached by taking the railway to Vologda, then traveling by coach to Sineozersk, and finally boarding a steamship.
“Are you going on pilgrimage?” the assistant inquired politely. “Just the right time, madam, before the cold weather sets in. Perhaps you would like to book a hotel straightaway?”
“Which do you recommend?” the traveler asked in reply.
“The mayor's wife and her daughter recently booked their journey with us. They stayed at the Holofernes’ Head and were most complimentary about it.”
“The Holofernes’ Head?” the lady echoed with a frown. “Are there not any other hotels, a little less bloodthirsty, perhaps?”
“Why, of course there are. The Noah's Ark Hotel and the Promised Land boardinghouse. And those ladies who wish to isolate themselves completely from male company put up at the Immaculate Virgin. A most devout establishment for noble and well-to-do female pilgrims. The charges are not high, but each guest is expected to make a donation of at least a hundred rubles to the monastery treasury. Those who give three hundred or more are accorded a private audience with the archimandrite himself.”
This final item of information seemed to be of great interest to the prospective pilgrim. She opened her new reticule, took out a bundle of banknotes (still quite substantial), and began counting them. The assistant followed this procedure with tactful reverence. At five hundred rubles his client stopped and put the money back into her handbag without completing her count.
“Will your servant be sharing your room or in separate accommodation?”
“How can you ask?” the lady objected, tossing her bronze curls reproachfully. “Take a servant on a pilgrimage? Why, that's not Christian. I shall do everything myself—dress and wash, and perhaps even brush my own hair.”
“I beg your pardon. I'm afraid not everybody is quite so scrupulous, madam.” The clerk began scribbling on a blank form, deftly dunking his steel-nibbed pen in the inkwell. “In whose name shall I make out the order?”
The pilgrim sighed and for some reason crossed herself. “Write: ‘Polina Andreevna Lisitsyna, widow, hereditary noblewoman of the Moscow Province.’ ”
Travel Sketches
SINCE THE HEROINE of our narrative, having cast off her nun's habit, has chosen to call herself by a different name, we shall also call her by it—out of respect for the conventual calling and in order to avoid any blasphemous ambivalence. Let her be a noblewoman, and let her be Lisitsyna—after all, she should know.
Especially since, to all appearances, the spiritual daughter of the arch-pastor of Zavolzhsk felt quite as much at ease in her new persona as she had in her old one. It was easy to see that she did not find traveling wearisome; quite the contrary, it was a joy and a pleasure to her.
Riding along in the train, the young lady occasionally cast a favorable glance out of the window at the empty fields and autumnal forests, which had still not completely shed their farewell finery. In the tourist agency, as a complimentary gift to go with her various purchases, Polina Andreevna had been given a fine velvet needlework bag, which was now resting cosily on her chest, and she was whiling away the time knitting a warm merino pullover, which His Grace Mitrofanii was sure to need in the cold winter season, especially after such serious problems with his heart. It was extremely complicated work, with alternating bouclé and stocking stitches and colored inserts, and it was not going well: the stitches lay unevenly, the colored threads were drawn too tight, completely distorting the pattern, and yet Lisitsyna herself seemed pleased with the results of her creative efforts. Every now and then she would break off and survey her clumsy handiwork with evident satisfaction.
When the traveler grew weary of her knitting, she took up her reading, and she somehow managed to pursue this activity not only in the peaceful railway carriage, but also in a jolting omnibus. She was reading two books alternately, one of which was perfectly suited to a pilgrimage—An Outline of Christian Morality by Theophanes the Anchorite. The other was a very strange choice—A Textbook of Firearms Ballistics: Part 2— but she read it with no less care and attention.
Once on board the steamship St. Basilisk in Sineozersk, Polina Andreevna demonstrated in full measure one of her most distinctive characteristics—irrepressible curiosity. She walked around the entire vessel, spoke with the sailors in cassocks, watched the huge paddle wheels straining against the water. She visited the engine room and listened to the engineer telling those passengers who were interested how the flywheels, the crankshafts, and the boiler worked. Lisitsyna even put on her spectacles (which, following the transformation of the nun from Zavolzhsk into the hereditary noblewoman from Moscow, had been banished from the pilgrim's nose to the mother-of-pearl case) and glanced into the furnace, where the red-hot coals flashed and crackled in a most frightening fashion.
Then, together with the other curious passengers, who were all without exception male, she set out to investigate the captains wheelhouse.
The excursion had been arranged in order to demonstrate New Ararat's benevolent hospitality, which extended beyond the shores of the archipelago to include the ship that bore the name of the monastery's founder. The explanations about the fairway, the control of the steamship, and the unpredictable behavior of the winds on the Blue Lake were provided by the mate, a humble monk in a moth-eaten skullcap,
but Lisitsyna found the captain, Brother Jonah, far more intriguing. He was a red-faced bandit with a thick beard and an oilskin cap who stood at the helm in person, in order to have an excuse to avoid looking at the passengers.
Despite being dressed in a cassock, this colorful individual looked so very unlike a monk that Polina Andreevna could not resist the urge to sidle a little closer and ask him, “Tell me, Holy Father, is it long since you took monastic vows?”
The hulking brute squinted down at her and said nothing, hoping she would go away. Realizing that she would not, he answered her reluctantly in his rumbling voice: “Over four years now.”
The passenger immediately moved right in under the captain's elbow so that it would be more convenient to talk. “And who were you out in the world?”
The captain heaved a sigh that left no doubt at all that if he could have his own way, he would refuse to answer the pushy little lady's questions and march her out of the wheelhouse in a jiffy, because women had no right being in there. “The same as I am now. A helmsman. I used to hunt whales around Spitsbergen.”
“How very interesting!” exclaimed Polina Andreevna, not embarrassed in the least by his unfriendly tone. “That must be why they called you Jonah, I suppose? Because of the whales?”
In a genuinely heroic feat of Christian humility, the captain stretched his mouth out to both sides in an expression that was evidently intended to signify a polite smile. “Not because of the whales—because of one whale. The beast smashed the boat to pieces with his tail and everybody drowned. I was the only one who came back up. He sucked me right into his mouth and scraped me with his great whiskers, but he can't have liked the taste of me because he spat me out again. I couldn't have been in his mouth more than half a minute, but it was long enough for me to promise that if I survived, I'd go for a monk.”
“What an incredible story!” the passenger exclaimed admiringly. “And the most amazing thing about it is that after you were saved, you really did join a monastery. You know, many people make promises to God in a moment of despair, but afterward very few of them actually carry them out.”
Jonah stopped imitating a smile and knitted his shaggy eyebrows in a frown. “A promise is a promise.”
This short phrase was so full of adamantine resolution mixed with bitterness that Mrs. Lisitsyna suddenly felt terribly sorry for the poor whaler. “Ah, you should never have become a monk,” she said, distraught. “The Lord would have understood and forgiven you. The monastic life should be a reward, but for you it is like a punishment. You miss your old free life, don't you? I know seamen. Life without drink and oaths is a torment to you. And then there is the vow of celibacy …” the tenderhearted pilgrim finished in a low voice, as if she were talking to herself.
But the captain heard her anyway, and he gave the tactless creature a glance that made Polina Andreevna beat a rapid retreat from the wheel-house out onto the deck, and from there to her cabin.
A Male Heaven
THE CAPTAIN'S FURIOUS glance was explained to some extent when the St. Basilisk moored at the New Ararat landing stage the following morning. Polina Andreevna was detained on board for a while, waiting for the porter, and she was almost the last passenger to leave the ship. Her attention was caught by a slim, elegant young lady dressed in black who was waiting impatiently for someone on the quayside. After looking the waiting woman over carefully and noting certain distinctive features of her outfit (although it was fanciful, it was somewhat démodé—judging from the magazines, such broad hats and boots with silver buttons were no longer being worn this season), Lisitsyna concluded that this lady was probably one of the local inhabitants. She was very good-looking, but rather pale, and the impression she made was also spoiled by a glance that was far too rapid and hostile. The native woman also studied the noble lady from Moscow, resting her gaze on the fashionable talma, or cape, and the ginger curls protruding from beneath the mischievous-page-boy cap. The stranger's beautiful face contorted in fury and she turned away, looking for someone on the deck.
Intrigued, Polina Andreevna walked on a few steps, then turned back and put on her spectacles, and was rewarded for her prudence with an interesting scene.
Brother Jonah came out onto the gangway, saw the lady in black, and stopped dead in his tracks. But no sooner did she beckon him with a brief, imperious gesture than the captain went dashing down onto the quayside, almost skipping along. Recalling the monastic vow of celibacy once again, Polina Andreevna shook her head. She also observed another intriguing detail: as he drew level with the local woman, Jonah turned his head toward her slightly (the broad, coarse features of the captain's face were even redder than usual), but he did not stop—he only touched her hand gently. However, Mrs. Lisitsyna's eyes, assisted by her spectacles, observed some small, square paper object make the transition from the former whaler's massive hand to the gray suede glove covering the woman's slim palm—it was either a small envelope or a folded note.
Ah, the poor soul, Polina Andreevna sighed to herself and walked on, observing the holy town with interest.
The new pilgrim was extremely lucky with the weather that day. A gentle sun illuminated the golden domes of the churches and the bell towers, the white walls of the monastery, and the motley roofs of the local inhabitants’ houses with a placid melancholy. The new arrival especially liked the fact that in New Ararat the bright colors of autumn had not yet faded away: the trees were all warm yellows, browns, and reds, and the blue of the sky was not at all November-like, whereas in Zavolzhsk, even though it was located much farther south, the leaves had long since fallen and in the morning the puddles were covered with a crust of dirty ice.
Polina Andreevna recalled that in the wheelhouse the first mate had told them about some special “microclimate” on the islands, resulting from the whims of the warm currents and also, naturally, the Lord's especially favorable disposition toward this godly spot.
Before she even reached her hotel, the traveler had spied out all the unusual sights of New Ararat and formed her first impression of this peculiar town.
New Ararat appeared to Lisitsyna to be a very fine town, cleverly arranged, but at the same time strangely unfortunate, or, as she put it in her own mind, impoverished. Not in terms of a lack of public amenities or poor buildings—as far as that went, everything was in perfect order: the houses were very fine, mostly built of stone, the churches were numerous and magnificent (though they were very blocklike and did not reach for the heavens in that way that uplifts the soul), and the streets were a real treat for the eyes, with not a speck of dirt or a single puddle. Polina Andreevna dubbed the town impoverished because to her it seemed strangely joyless, and she had not expected that from a monastery so close to God.
It took the pilgrim a little time to puzzle out the reason for this state of deprivation. In fact, Mrs. Lisitsyna was only struck by the answer after she had settled into her hotel. The very first thing she did there was to announce that she wished personally to present the father superior with a donation of five hundred rubles—and she was immediately granted an audience, on the very first day. The population of the Immaculate Virgin, including the staff, consisted entirely of women, and so the décor in the rooms was dominated by embroidered curtains, padded pouffes and cushions, and little benches with cloth covers—the new guest, accustomed to the simplicity of a conventual cell, disliked this mawkish display intensely. And as she emerged from this female heaven out onto the street, the contrast suddenly brought home to Polina Andreevna what was wrong with the town itself.
It was also a simulacrum of Heaven, but in this case a male one. Everything here was run by men—they did everything and arranged everything as they saw fit, with no thought for any wives, daughters, or sisters, and therefore the town had turned out like a guards’ barracks: spruce and neat to the point of geometrical precision, and yet not the sort of place where you would want to live.
Having made this discovery, Lisitsyna began looking around her with redo
ubled curiosity. So this was how men would arrange life on earth if they were given total freedom! Praying, pushing broomsticks, growing huge beards, and marching in formation (Polina Andreevna had encountered a detachment of the monastery's “peacekeepers”). And then she began feeling sorry for everyone: New Ararat and the men and the women. But more for the men than the women, because women could get by somehow or other without men, but if the men were left to themselves, they were certain to come to grief. They would either run riot and start behaving like animals, or fall into this kind of arid lifelessness. She didn't know which was worse.
A Kitten Is Rescued
AS HAS ALREADY been mentioned, the generous female donor had been promised an almost immediate audience with His Reverence Vitalii, and so on leaving her hotel she set out straightaway in the direction of the monastery.
With its white walls and numerous domes, it could be seen from almost every point in the town, for it was located on the side of town that was elevated above the lake. From the last houses to the first structures flanking the monastery walls, most of which served some economic function, the path ran through a park laid out on the top of a rocky cliff with the indefatigable blue waves lapping gently at its foot.
As she walked along the edge of the lake, Polina Andreevna wrapped the woolen talma around her more tightly, for the wind was rather cool, but she did not move deeper into the park and away from the cliff edge—the view of the watery expanse was far too fine, and the gusty breeze refreshed rather than chilled her.
