by Boris Akunin
Polina Andreevna was glad for the holy elder, glad that now it would be easier for him to save his soul, but it was time to turn the conversation back to urgent matters. “Tell me, Father, what were you trying to tell me with your Latin riddle? That your new colleague is not Ilarii, but someone else who has gained admission here by deception?”
Israel was smiling brightly, still rapt in thoughts of his own imminent bliss. “What, my daughter? Ah, about Ilarii I don't know. After all, we don't show our faces to one another, and we are not allowed to talk. When necessary, we explain ourselves with signs. I saw the learned brother Ilarii once in the monastery, but that was a long time ago. I don't remember his figure or even how tall he was. So I don't know if it is he or not, but one thing I do know for certain: the new holy elder has not come here to save his soul. He does not carve rosary beads, and during the day he does not even put his nose outside his cell. I went in to beckon him to a session of joint prayer and meditation (we pray silently, of course). He was lying there, asleep. He just waved his hand at me, turned over on his side, and carried on sleeping. In the middle of the day!”
“But what does he do at night?” Lisitsyna asked quickly.
“I do not know. At night I am here, in my cell. The charter is very strict—it forbids us to go out.”
“But you have broken the vow of silence with me! Have you never gone out into the gallery at night?”
“Never,” the abbot replied sternly. “Not even once. And I will not. And I have a special reason for speaking so much to you …” He hesitated, then suddenly covered his face with his hands and fell silent.
Polina Andreevna waited for as long as her patience would allow and asked, “What special reason is that?”
“I wish to ask your forgiveness,” the holy elder answered faintly through his closed fingers.
“My forgiveness?”
“I shall never see another woman again …” He took his hands away from his face, and Polina Andreevna saw that his eyes were wet with tears. “The Lord has tested me and forgiven me—that is God's way. But I have sinned heinously against you, my sisters. How can I leave this world if I have not been forgiven by Woman? I will not relate all of my abominable deeds to you—that would be a long tale. Only the story that I have already mentioned, the story that weighs heaviest of all on my heart. The story with which my enlightenment began. Listen to it and tell me one thing—if a woman's soul can forgive me. That will be enough.”
The Heartbreaker's Confession
AND SO HE BEGAN.
“This is only one story, but there were two women. The first was no more than a little girl. A slim, fragile creature who barely even came up to my elbow. But girls like that are quite common there.
“I was just completing my round-the-world trip that had lasted four years. I had begun in Europe and I was finishing at the other end of the world, in Japan. I had seen a lot—I won't say ‘all sorts of different things’—‘all sorts of different women’ would be more accurate.
“In Nagasaki, and later in Yokohama, I saw plenty of their local geishas and djoros (that's what they call loose women). And just as I was about to sail on without anything in Japan having caught my fancy, I found myself in the house of a Japanese official and saw his daughter there. The way she looked at me with her narrow little eyes, as if I were some kind of animal, like a gorilla, piqued my unfailing sense of adventure. Now that would be interesting, I thought. I've never had anything quite like that.
“She had been raised very strictly, the samurai way; she was only half my size and about a quarter of my age. In her eyes I was a hairy monster, and I also lacked my most important weapon, language—there was absolutely no way at all that we could understand each other.
“Well, I stayed on in Tokyo and began visiting the official's home more and more often. We became friends. I talked politics, drank coffee with liqueur, and studied his daughter. She had clearly only been allowed to see guests very recently—she was very shy. How can I find the key to fit this little lacquer box? I wondered.
“Well, I managed to find one. I had plenty of experience, and more important, I knew the workings of women's hearts.
“I could not make myself pleasing to her in the usual way—I was too much unlike the men she was used to seeing. But that meant I could exploit the dissimilarity.
“Her mother once told me jokingly that her daughter used to compare me to a bear—I was so very big, with such big sideburns.
“Well, then, a bear it would be.
“I bought a live bear cub from some sailors in the port—a brown bear from Siberia—and brought him to her as a present. So that she would grow used to his hairiness. He was a fine little fellow, mischievous and affectionate. My Japanese girl played with him from morning till night and came to love him greatly: she stroked him and kissed him, and he licked her with his tongue. Excellent, I thought. She loves the bear, and she will love me too.
“And indeed, she began to look at the man who gave her the bear in a different way, with curiosity instead of apprehension. As if she were comparing me with her favorite. I deliberately began waddling as I walked, fluffing out my sideburns and speaking in a gruffer voice.
“And after that, things happened in the usual way. A young girl languishing in idleness as her body blossoms. She wants something new, untried, unusual. And here is an exotic foreigner. He shows her all sorts of interesting things, brought from all over the world. Postcards with views of Paris and St. Petersburg, the skyscrapers of Chicago. And most important, after the young bear's fur, she was no longer squeamish about touching me. She would take hold of my hand, or stroke my mustache—out of curiosity. And a young girl's curiosity is highly inflammable material.
“I won't tell you all the details—they are not interesting. The main problem, to put it in scientific terms, was for me to become a member of the same biological species as she, so that crossbreeding became possible. And once we were no longer a Japanese girl and a foreign bear, but an innocent virgin and an experienced man, everything followed the ordinary route that I had taken many times.
“Well then, when I sailed from Japan, the Japanese girl was with me—she herself had asked to come. I suppose her parents never even knew where their daughter had disappeared to.
“As far as Vladivostok my love for her remained strong. And afterward too, when we were traveling on the railway. But in the middle of Siberia her childish passion began to pall. I couldn't even talk to her about anything. She, on the contrary, only became all the more inflamed with love. I would wake up at night and she would not be asleep, but propped up on her elbow, just looking at me through her slit eyes. Women's love flares up more brightly than ever when they feel you beginning to grow cold—that is a well-known fact.
“As we came closer to St. Petersburg, I could no longer bear the sight of her and I racked my brains, wondering how I could get rid of her. Send her back to her parents? But they were no ordinary papa and maman— they were samurais. They might do away with the girl. I felt sorry for her. Pay her off? She wouldn't have taken the money, and she would never have left me in peace; she was too clinging. She didn't know how to do anything, except what I had taught her so assiduously in the ship's cabin and the railway compartment.
“That was the thought that gave rise to my decision. I had heard from one of our traveling companions in the train that while I had been away a new establishment had appeared in St. Petersburg, owned by a certain Madam Pozdnyaeva. A fashionable bordello with young ladies brought from many different countries: there were young Italian girls and Turks and Negroes and Annamites—anything you could want. It was very popular with the men of St. Petersburg.
“I paid a visit to Pozdnyaeva to make her acquaintance and make sure that the girls were well treated. The mistress of the house told me that she put part of the income in the bank for each of them, in a special account. The very next morning I handed my little girl over to her in person. And for a start I put a thousand rubles in the
bank in her name.
“But the Japanese girl never used the money. When she realized where I had brought her and that I was not going to take her back again, she threw herself out of the window and landed headfirst on the pavement. She floundered for a few moments, like a fish thrown up on a riverbank, and then lay still.
“When I heard about it, of course, I felt sad, but not excessively so, because by that time I was already obsessed with a new goal, the most unattainable of all.
“This goal was none other than Madam Pozdnyaeva herself, the owner of the establishment. When I held negotiations with her about the Japanese girl, she had made a great impression on me. She was no longer young, about forty, but she was smooth-skinned and took very strict care of herself. I could tell from her eyes that she had seen everything there was to see. She could see straight through any man and cared not a jot for any of them. Her heart was stone, her soul was ashes, and her mind was an arithmetical calculator.
“As I looked at this terrifying creature I gradually became enflamed. All sorts of women had loved me, but never one so cold and cruel. Or was she not capable of love at all? That only made it all the more enticing to rummage around in those ashes to find a coal that was not yet completely dead and blow on it gently and carefully, heating it into an all-consuming flame. If I could manage it, it would be a genuine labor of Hercules.
“I spent more than one month on the siege of that Troy. The first thing that was needed, I reasoned, was for her to see me in a different light from other men. For Madam Pozdnyaeva all men were divided into two categories: those from whom she could not profit, owing to their age, poverty, or ill health, and those who wished and were able to pay for debauchery. Men of the former category did not even exist for her, while she despised the latter and fleeced them mercilessly. As I later discovered, she even stooped to blackmail (there were all kinds of cunning devices in her establishment for spying on customers and photographing them).
“And so I had to occupy a position between two categories of male: someone from whom there was profit to be made, but who had no interest in venal love. And then again, women like that, who have been through hell and high water and achieved everything for themselves, are very susceptible to subtle flattery.
“I got into the habit of going to her den of vice almost every day. But I did not visit the young ladies; I sat with the madam and made clever, cynical conversation of a kind that she might enjoy. And every time I left her money—a generous amount, twice the usual charge.
“She was perplexed. She simply could not assign me to a definite category. Then she began to imagine that I was in love with her, and immediately conceived an even greater contempt for me than for her other clients. One day she laughed and said, ‘Why are you being so sloppy? I'm surprised at you. You don't seem like the shy type. And, God knows, I'm certainly no ingénue. If you want to get into my bed, then say so. You've paid out so much money that it would be too discourteous to refuse you.’ I thanked her gratefully, accepted the invitation, and we went to her bedroom.
“It was a strange assignation: each of us wanted to impress the other with our skill, and each of us was cold: she because she had burned out long ago; I because what I wanted from her was something different. Eventually, when she was worn out, she said: ‘I can't understand you.’ And that was the first step toward my victory.
“I didn't stop going to see her after that, but I didn't ask to be allowed into her bedroom, and she didn't invite me. She watched me closely, as if she were trying to find something that she had forgotten long ago.
“I began asking her a little about her past. Not as a grown woman, God forbid. About her childhood, her parents, and her friends at grammar school. I needed her to remember a different time, before her heart and her feelings had grown cold. At first Madam Pozdnyaeva replied curtly and unwillingly, but after a while she became more talkative, and all I had to do was listen. And one thing I certainly knew how to do was listen.
“So now I had overcome the second barrier and won her confidence, and that in itself was no small achievement.
“When she invited me into her boudoir for the second time, a few weeks later, she behaved quite differently, without any mechanical tricks. And at the end she suddenly burst into tears. She was terribly surprised herself—she said she hadn't been able to shed a single tear for thirteen years, and then suddenly this had happened.
“Never before had I known the kind of love that Pozdnyaeva gave to me—as if a dam had burst, and I was caught up in the current and swept away. It was a genuine miracle—to observe a dead soul coming back to life. As if springs of pure, clear water had suddenly broken through the sand of a parched desert, up through the cracked earth, and lush green plants had sprung up, putting out flowers of incredible beauty.
“She closed her bordello, distributed among the girls the money accumulated from her pandering, and set them all free to go their own way. And she herself changed beyond all recognition. She became younger and fresher and looked just a like a girl. Every morning she sang and laughed. And she cried a lot too, but without any bitterness—it was simply the tears that she hadn't shed in all those years coming out.
“And I loved her. I was absolutely overjoyed at what my efforts had achieved.
“I was happy for a month, two months.
“And then in the third month my happiness came to an end.
“One morning (she was still sleeping) I left the house, got into a fiacre, drove to the station, and took a train to Paris. I left her a note saying that the apartment was paid for until the end of the year, there was money in the casket, goodbye, and forgive me.
“They told me later that when she woke up and read the note, she dashed out of the house wearing nothing but her chemise, ran off along the street, and never came back to the apartment again.
“I returned from abroad six months later, when it was already winter. I rented a house and began living in my former manner, but something was happening inside me; the old familiar amusements no longer brought me any joy.
“Then one day I was riding through Ligovka on my way to a certain country villa and I saw her, Pozdnyaeva, lying in the ditch by the side of the road—dirty, louse-ridden, with gray hair and almost no teeth. She could not see me, because she was lying there blind drunk.
“That was the very moment when my invisible cup ran over. I began trembling, I broke out in a cold sweat all over my body, and I saw the pit of hell gaping open before me. I was terrified and my conscience was awoken.
“I ordered the tramp to be picked up and put up in a decent room. I went to see her and beg her forgiveness. But my former beloved had changed again. There was no love left in her—nothing but malice and greed. The flowering garden had withered, the miraculous spring had dried up. And I realized that the most evil of all deeds is not to destroy a living soul, but to resurrect a soul that is dead and then annihilate it utterly.
“I transferred all my fortune to the unfortunate woman's name, and I became a monk in order to piece the fragments of myself back together and purge myself of filth. And that is my story.
“And now tell me, my sister, is there any forgiveness for my transgressions or not?”
POLINA ANDREEVNA WAS so shaken by this story that for a while she said nothing.
“That is known only to God …” she said, avoiding looking at the repentant sinner.
“God will forgive me. I know. Perhaps he has even forgiven me already,” Israel said slowly. “But you tell me, as a woman, can you forgive me? Only tell the truth!”
She tried to avoid an answer: “What would my forgiveness mean? You have not done me any harm.”
“It would mean a great deal,” the abbot said firmly, as if speaking of something he had decided a long time ago. “If you forgive me, then they would have forgiven me.”
Polina Andreevna wanted to speak words of consolation to him, but she could not. That is, it would have cost her no effort to speak them, but she knew the holy elder wou
ld sense her insincerity, and that would only make things worse.
The hermit's face darkened when there was no answer.
“I knew it …” he said in a quiet voice, and put his hand on the seated woman's shoulder. “Get up. Go. Back to the world. You should not be here. I have another confession to make. I deliberately lured you here, to the hermitage. Not because of Theognost, and not because of Ilarii. That is all idle vanity—who killed whom, and why they killed them. The Lord will render unto each according to his deeds, and not a single deed, either good or evil, shall be left unrewarded. And I spoke those mysterious, enticing words to you because before I die I wanted to see a Woman one last time and ask for her forgiveness … I have asked and I have not received. And that is how it must be. Go.”
And so impatient was he for his guest to go away and leave him alone that he began pushing her toward the door.
Stepping out into the gallery, Lisitsyna heard the faint, repulsive scraping sound again.
“What is that?” she asked with a shudder. “Bats?”
Israel replied indifferently: “There are no bats here. And what happens in the cave at night, I do not know. It is the kind of place where anything might happen. After all, it contains a piece of the sphere of heaven.”
“What?” Polina Andreevna asked in amazement. “A piece of the sphere of heaven?”
The holy elder frowned, seeming annoyed that he had said something he should not have. “You are not supposed to know about that. Go now. And tell no one what you have seen here. But you won't, you are an intelligent woman. Only do not lose your way. Go right to reach the way out.”
The door slammed shut, and Polina Andreevna was left alone in total darkness.
