by Boris Akunin
But this terrifying thought did not set the tears flooding from Mrs. Lisitsyna's eyes even faster, as it ought to have done. Instead, by some strange paradox, her tears suddenly dried up.
She put away her soaked handkerchief, stood up, and walked on through the bushes.
Night in the Abode of Woe
IT WAS EASIER to find her way through the grounds now: Polina Andreevna already had a clearer idea of the clinic's geography, and the moon was shining brightly high in the sky Her courage now recovered, the solitary warrior noted in passing the surprising mildness of the island's “microclimate,” which produced an abundance of clear, warm nights like this, even in November, and then directed her steps in the first instance toward the house of the clinic's owner.
But the windows in the white mansion with its decorative colonnade were all dark—the doctor was already asleep. Lisitsyna stood there for a while and listened without hearing anything of interest, and then walked on.
Now her path lay in the direction of cottage number three, the dwelling of the insane artist. Yoshihin was not sleeping: his little house was still brightly lit and she glimpsed a shadow flitting to and fro across one glowing rectangular window. Polina Andreevna walked around two sides of the house in order to look in from the opposite side. She glanced in.
Konon Petrovich was running rapidly along the wall, painting in the final specks of moonlight dotted across the ground in the panel Evening. The picture had reached the stage of absolute completeness and its perfection rivaled, or perhaps even surpassed, the magic of a real evening. But Mrs. Lisitsyna was only interested in the section of the canvas where the artist had depicted the elongated black silhouette with spider's legs. Polina Andreevna gazed at it for quite a long time, as if she were trying to solve some abstruse puzzle.
Then Yoshihin stuck his brush in his belt and climbed up onto the scaffolding standing in the center of the room. The secret observer pressed her cheek and nose against the glass in order to see what the artist would do up there. She realized that having finished Evening, Konon Petrovich had moved straight on to finish Night without taking even a moments break.
Lisitsyna shook her head and stopped watching.
The next point of call on her planned itinerary was the neighboring cottage, number seven, where the physicist Lampier lived with his houseguest. They were not sleeping either—all the windows on the ground floor were lit up. Polina Andreevna remembered that the bedroom was on the left of the door and the laboratory on the right. Matvei Bentsionovich must be in the bedroom.
She took hold of the windowsill with both hands, braced one foot against the narrow step in the wall, and looked inside.
She saw two beds. One was made up, but empty. A lamp was lit beside the other and there was a man half-sitting, half-lying in it on a tall heap of fluffed pillows, nervously turning his head first to the left, then to the right. Berdichevsky!
The spy craned her neck to see if Lampier was in the room, and the catch of her hood clinked against the glass—the sound was barely audible, but even so Matvei Bentsionovich started and turned to face the window. The assistant public prosecutor's face contorted in a grimace of horror. His lower jaw twitched convulsively, as if he were about to scream, but then his eyes rolled upward and his head slumped back onto the pillow. He had fainted.
Oh, how awful! Polina Andreevna even cried out in her frustration. Why, of course: when he saw the black figure with a hood lowered over its face in the window, the poor patient had imagined that Basilisk had appeared to him again. She had to correct Matvei Bentsionovich's mistake, no matter what the risk.
No longer trying to hide, she pressed herself against the glass, to make sure that the physicist was not in the room, and then took action. The main window, naturally, was latched, but the small window at the top was slightly open, and that was enough for the teacher of gymnastics. As quick as a flash, Lisitsyna dropped the cumbersome cloak on the ground and climbed in through the narrow opening, demonstrating quite an astonishing flexibility. She braced her fingers against the windowsill, performed a remarkable somersault through the air (her skirt inflated into a rather unseemly bell shape, but there was no one there to see it), and landed nimbly on the floor, making hardly any noise at all. Polina Andreevna waited for the sound of footsteps in the corridor—but no, everything was all right. The physicist must be too preoccupied with his strange experiments.
She moved a chair closer to the bed and cautiously stroked the sunken cheeks, the yellow forehead, and the eyelids—closed as if in mourning—of the man lying there. She moistened her handkerchief with water from a glass standing on the bedside cabinet and massaged the sick man's temples. Berdichevsky's eyelids trembled.
“Matvei Bentsionovich, it's me, Pelagia,” the woman whispered, leaning right down to his ear.
The man opened his eyes, saw the freckled face with its wide, anxious eyes, and smiled. “Sister … What a lovely dream … And is the bishop here?” Berdichevsky turned his head, evidently hoping to see Father Mitrofanii as well, and was disappointed when he didn't.
“It's terrible when I don't sleep,” he complained. “I wish I could never wake up at all.”
“Not waking up at all would be going too far,” said Polina Andreevna, still stroking the poor man's face. “But right now it would be good for you to sleep for a while. Close your eyes and take deep breaths. Perhaps you will dream of His Grace.”
Matvei Bentsionovich obediently closed his eyes tight and began breathing deeply—he obviously wanted very badly to dream of the bishop.
Perhaps things are not all that bad after all, Polina Andreevna thought, trying to console herself. If you tell him your name, he recognizes you. And he remembers His Grace.
Mrs. Lisitsyna glanced at the door and then looked in the bedside cabinet. Nothing out of the ordinary: handkerchiefs, a few blank sheets of paper, a wallet. And in the wallet some money and a photograph of his wife.
But under the bed she discovered a traveling bag of yellow pigskin. Beside the catch there was a small bronze plate with a monogram: “F. S. Lagrange.” And inside the bag she found the items that Berdichevsky had gathered for the investigation: the minutes of the inspection of the suicide's body, Alexei Stepanovich's letters to the bishop, a revolver wrapped in a piece of cloth (Polina Andreevna shook her head—that was fine work by Korovin, not even bothering to check a patient's belongings), and another two items of unknown origin: a long glove with a hole in it and a dirty cambric handkerchief.
Mrs. Lisitsyna decided to take the traveling bag with her—what good was it to Berdichevsky now? She looked around to see if there was anything else useful in the room and saw a thick notebook lying on the cabinet beside Lampier's bed. After a moment's hesitation, she picked it up, carried it across to the lamp, and began leafing through it.
Alas, it was quite impossible to understand a thing from all those formulae, graphs, and abbreviations. And the physicist's handwriting was no more comprehensible than his way of speaking. Polina Andreevna gave a sigh of disappointment and turned to the front page. With an effort, she could just make out the epigraph that was written there:
Measure everything that can be measured, render what cannot be measured measurable.
G. Galilei
But it was time to call a halt.
The uninvited guest put the notebook back in its place and climbed back through the small window, first throwing the traveling bag out, and then squeezing through herself.
The distance to the ground was greater than to the floor of the room, but once again the somersault was a great success. The flexible young lady landed in a comfortable squatting position, straightened up, and shook her head: after the light in the bedroom, the darkness of the night seemed impenetrable, and by a stroke of bad luck the moon had hidden behind a cloud.
Mrs. Lisitsyna decided to wait for her eyes to adjust to the gloom and leaned against the wall with one hand. But there was nothing wrong with Polina Andreevna's hearing, and when she hea
rd a rustling sound behind her she swung around abruptly.
Very close, only a few feet away, a slim black figure emerged from the darkness. The stupefied woman clearly saw a pointed hood with holes for the eyes and noticed the way the strange silhouette turned around its own axis, and then suddenly there was the whistle of something slicing through the air, and Lisitsyna felt a blow of appalling power strike her on the side of the head.
Polina Andreevna collapsed backward and fell across Lagrange's traveling bag.
New Sins
THE VICTIM WAS only able to assess the full extent of the damage that had been inflicted the following morning.
She did not know how long she had lain unconscious beside the wall of cottage number seven, until the cold had brought her around. She could barely even remember staggering back to the hotel, clutching her head in her hands. She had slumped straight onto the bed without getting undressed and instantly fallen into a state of oblivion bordering on a faint. She woke late, just before noon, and sat down at the dressing table to look at herself in the mirror.
It was a sight worth looking at. Polina Andreevna did not know how an incorporeal phantom had managed to knock her down from a distance of six or seven feet away, but the blow that had struck her temple and cheekbone had certainly been material in its effect: there was an immense dark crimson bruise beside her left eye, stretching upward and downward across almost half her face. Even the memory of the appalling mystical event paled beside her distress at the sight of her own disfigurement.
Mrs. Lisitsyna turned her undamaged profile toward the mirror and squinted sideways at it faintheartedly—it looked perfectly respectable. But then she turned back to look at her full face and groaned. If she looked at the left side, her face would probably look like an eggplant.
Such is the beauty of the flesh—dust and decay: a single heavy blow is enough to destroy it, Polina Andreevna said to herself, recalling her temporarily abandoned vocation. It was a correct thought, a praiseworthy thought, but it brought her no consolation.
The main problem was: How could she go outside looking like this? She couldn't possibly just stay in her room for a week, waiting for the bruise to disappear! She had to think of something.
With a heavy sigh and a guilty feeling, Lisitsyna opened her suitcase and took out a set of makeup—another complimentary gift from the Cook and Kantorovich travel agency, received at the same time as the handiwork bag already mentioned. Naturally, the pilgrim had not intended to use the makeup—unlike the bag, which was very useful. She had intended to make a present of it to some laywoman, but this was an emergency!
A fine nun I am, Polina Andreevna thought mournfully as she powdered the hideous mark. She felt envious of brunettes—they had thick, dark skin that healed quickly; but for the white skin of a redhead a bruise was an absolute catastrophe.
Even with the makeup it still looked awful. In debauched St. Petersburg or frivolous Moscow she could perhaps have gone out looking like that, especially if she hid behind a veil, but in pious Ararat she could not even think of it—they would probably stone her, like the loose woman in the Gospels.
What could she do? She couldn't go out wearing powder and she couldn't go out without it, displaying the bruise. And she couldn't afford to waste any time, either.
She thought very hard, and eventually she thought of something.
She put on a very simple black wool dress, then tied her pilgrim's head scarf around her head, pulling it tight right down to the corners of her eyes. She covered the visible part of the bruise with white powder. If you didn't look too closely, it was all right, almost unnoticeable.
Covering the cheek with her handkerchief, she slipped through to the exit, taking the yellow traveling bag with her—she couldn't risk leaving it in her room. Everyone knew what the staff in hotels were like, always poking their noses into everything and rummaging in people's things. God forbid that they should find the revolver or the minutes. It was not such a heavy burden—her arms could manage it.
Once out in the street the pilgrim lowered her eyes meekly and walked along like that until she reached the main square, where the day before she had noticed a shop selling monks’ garments.
For three rubles and seventy-five kopecks she bought a novice's outfit from the monk minding the shop: a skullcap, a moiré cassock, and a fabric belt. To avoid arousing any suspicion, she said that she was buying them as a donation to the monastery, but the shop monk was not at all surprised. Pilgrims often made gifts of vestments to the brethren— that was what the shop was for.
And now she had to embark on a new masquerade, even more indecent and blasphemous than the first. What else could she do?
But then again, walking about in the guise of a modest young monk promised a certain additional advantage that Polina Andreevna had only just thought of. She pondered this new idea while she searched for a suitable place to change her clothes, looking around as she walked along the streets where there were fewer passersby.
Perhaps as a consequence of the blow, or perhaps because she was upset about the disfigurement of her appearance, Mrs. Lisitsyna was in a strange state of nervous agitation that day. From the moment she left her guesthouse, she was haunted by a strange feeling that was hard to put into words, as if she were not alone, as if there were someone else there beside her, invisible, either watching her or following her. And this attention was clearly malevolent and hostile. Though she rebuked herself all the while for being such a superstitious and impressionable female, Polina Andreevna glanced around several times, but she did not notice anything unusual: nothing but some monks going about their business, someone standing beside a stone post reading a newspaper, someone else bending down to pick up the matches they had dropped. People in the street, doing perfectly normal things.
But after a while Lisitsyna forgot this disturbing feeling, because she found an excellent place to change her appearance, and what was more, it was only five minutes’ walk from the Immaculate Virgin. Standing on a corner at the waterfront was a closed and shuttered pavilion with a sign that read: HOLY WATER. AUTOMATIC DISPENSERS. Its façade overlooked the promenade, and its back wall faced a blank fence.
Polina Andreevna walked around to the back of the large wooden booth, ducked into the gap, and saw that she was in luck—the door was only secured with the very simplest of padlocks. After poking and prodding it for a while with a knitting needle (Oh Lord, forgive this transgression also!) the enterprising lady slipped inside.
There were bulky metal boxes with little taps standing along the walls, but the space in the center was empty. Light percolated through the gaps between the boards, and she could hear the voices of the public strolling along the waterfront. It really was an absolutely perfect spot.
Lisitsyna quickly pulled off her dress. She hesitated, wondering what to do about her drawers. She left them on—the cassock was long, they wouldn't be visible, and it would be warmer that way. This was not July, after all.
Her shoes were rather masculine, with blunt toes, as the latest fashion required, but they were still a bit too foppish for a novice. Polina Andreevna sprinkled them with dust and decided they would do. Women knew nothing about the peculiarities of monks’ garments, and monks were men—which meant they were not very observant of such details and would probably not notice anything.
She left the bag with her knitting hanging around her neck. What if she had to wait somewhere or spend hours in surveillance? Many of the monks consoled themselves by knitting, so it would not look suspicious, and the regular clickety-clack of the needles made it easier to think.
She stuck the little bag inside her cassock. Let it hang there.
Then she hid the traveling bag between two of the automatic dispensers, pulled her hair out from under her cap, tugged down the cassock, and wiped the powder off her face with her sleeve.
In short, she entered the holy water pavilion as a modest young lady and ten minutes later emerged as a skinny, redheaded young monk with no
thing unusual about him—unless, of course, you took note of the massive bruise on the left side of his face.
‘Nothing but Riddles
UP TO THIS point the actions of the female investigator had been more or less comprehensible, but now, if some stranger had decided to follow Lisitsyna's movements, he would have been thrown into a state of total bewilderment, since the pilgrims further behavior seemed to lack any logic whatsoever.
And at this point, in order to avoid any ambiguity, we shall be obliged once again to bring our heroine's name into conformity with her new appearance, as we have already done once. Otherwise it will be impossible to avoid ambivalent phrases such as “Polina Andreevna called into the brothers’ cells”—for it is well known that women are strictly forbidden to enter the monks’ inner chambers. And therefore, from this point on we shall not follow Sister Pelagia or the widow Lisitsyna, but a certain novice monk who, as we have already said, was behaving very strangely on that day.
For about two or two and a half hours, beginning at midday, the young monk could be seen in various parts of the town, within the confines of the monastery itself, and even—alas—in the aforementioned brothers’ cells. His lazy gait suggested that he was simply wandering about without anything particular to do, apparently out of pure boredom, stopping here for a moment and listening, stopping there for a moment and looking. Several times the idly wandering youth was stopped by senior monks, and once even by the peacekeepers, who asked him sternly who he was and how he had come by the bruise—had it been a drunken incident or some bout of fisticuffs? The youth humbly replied in a thin voice that his name was Pelagius, that he had come to Ararat from holy Valaam as a work of penance, and the bruise on his face had been given to him by the father cellarer for his carelessness. This explanation satisfied everyone, for the harsh manners of the father cellarer were well known and young monks who had been “taught a lesson”—some with bruises, some with bumps, some with a red, swollen ear—were a common sight on the streets and in the monastery. And so the young monk bowed and carried on along his way.
