Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel

by Boris Akunin

  Pelagia quietly got up and went toward the door.

  There were two reasons for this. The first was that Sergei Sergeevich seemed gradually to be coming to grips with the local idiom. The second concerned the door itself, which was behaving in a most mysterious fashion—opening slightly, then closing again, although there was no draft at all.

  Turning her head as she slipped out into the dark hallway, the nun spotted a shadow in the corner, behind a trunk.

  She walked over and squatted down. “Don’t be afraid, come out.”

  A tousled head poked up from behind the trunk, and two wide-open eyes glinted in the darkness.

  “Why did you hide?” Pelagia asked the little simpleton affectionately. “Why were you listening?”

  The little girl straightened up to her full height and looked up at the seated nun. Surely she can’t really be a complete simpleton? Pelagia thought doubtfully, looking the little savage straight in the eyes.

  “Do you want to ask about something? Or ask for something? You explain, with signs, or any way you like. I’ll understand. And I won’t tell anyone.”

  Durka jabbed her finger against the holy sister’s chest, where the little copper cross was hanging.

  “You want me to swear?” Pelagia guessed. “I swear to you on Christ the Lord that I’ll never tell anyone anything.” And she readied herself for the difficult task of deciphering the imbecile’s grunts and gesticulations.

  The sound of footsteps came from inside the room—someone was coming toward the door.

  “Come to the mill,” the dumb girl suddenly said. Then she darted out of the hallway onto the porch like a little mouse.

  That very second—or perhaps the next—the door swung open to reveal Sergei Sergeevich. Pelagia had no time to wipe the look of astonishment off her face, but the investigator interpreted her raised eyebrows in his own fashion.

  “What a scoundrel, eh?” he said angrily. “That’s the secret of his immortality for you. The good shepherd takes good care of himself, and he puts others in his place. Now we know why the Foundlings on the steamship didn’t bother to accompany the body of their prophet. They knew, the scoundrels, that it wasn’t the prophet at all, but a substitute.”

  “And it was the treasury they shouted about most of all when the murder was discovered,” Pelagia recalled. “I should have noticed that at the time.”

  “Shall we sum up?” Dolinin suggested when they went out onto the porch. “The picture we have is as follows. Manuila entrusted the ‘treasury’ to his ‘younger brother’ Pyotr Shelukhin to carry. Obviously he expected that someone might come after the money. He didn’t want to risk his own precious person.”

  “But I think they weren’t after the money, they were after Manuila himself.”

  “Reasoning?” the investigator asked quickly, squinting at Pelagia.

  After the trick that Durka had just played, the nun was feeling rather distracted, and therefore failed to recall the oath that she had sworn not to get drawn into deductive reasoning about the case.

  “Well, after all, you told me yourself that there had already been an attempt on the prophet’s life. Did they steal any money that time?”

  “No, I don’t recall anything of the kind.”

  “There, you see—it’s Manuila they want. It wasn’t a razin at work on the steamer, and the murder was not committed by accident. This adventurer Manuila has annoyed someone very badly.”

  “Who?”

  Dolinin’s frown kept growing sterner and sterner, and as for Pelagia—why conceal the fact?—she found this intense attention from him flattering.

  “There are only a few possible explanations. In the first place …” she began, but then bit her tongue, having finally remembered her promise. And she became flustered. “No, no! I’m not going to talk about it. Don’t even try to persuade me. I swore an oath not to. You’re clever enough, you can work everything out for yourself.”

  Sergei Sergeevich laughed. “You can’t forbid the intellect to work, whether you swear to or not. Especially an intellect as sharp as yours. All right, if you think it over, you can expound your ‘possible explanations’ on the way back. There’s nothing else for us to do here. The prophet’s alive and kicking, so we’ll have to issue a denial to the newspapers. What fine publicity for Manuila! First he’s killed, then he rises from the dead again.”

  And he spat in annoyance. That is, he didn’t actually spit, of course, because he was a cultured man; he did it the symbolic Russian way, by exclaiming “Tphoo!”

  “No point in dithering about, we’ll set off back straightaway,” Dolinin declared.

  “With the night coming on?” Pelagia exclaimed in alarm, glancing around at Stroganovka in the moonlight. Which way was the mill from here?

  “Never mind, we won’t get lost. And we’ve wasted so much time here! I thought this was a case of state importance and it’s turned out to be a damp squib.”

  I think that must be where she’s hiding, the nun thought, spotting a square structure by the river. She even thought she could hear the mill wheel creaking.

  “I can’t just leave like that,” said the holy sister. “The elder doesn’t want to send to Staritsa for a priest. He says there are no horses to spare and they’d have to pay. So, now, is a man to be buried like a dog? I can’t actually read the funeral service—it’s not permitted—but at least I will read a prayer over his grave. It’s my duty. And don’t you distress yourself, my good sir. It would be far worse if you had not come here. You would have reported to your superiors that Manuila had been killed, and then it would have turned out that nothing of the sort had happened. Then you would have found yourself in an awkward situation.”

  “That’s true enough, of course,” Sergei Sergeevich growled, apparently seriously upset by the failure of the expedition. No doubt the ambitious reformer really had wanted to flaunt his success in front of the newspaper correspondents. “All right. You bury Shelukhin tomorrow morning. Only please make it early. Damn, how I hate to lose the time!”

  The first mention of the rooster

  HAVING WISHED THE investigator good night and told him that she would find her own lodging for the night, Pelagia hurried in the direction of the little river. She walked along the street, past the wattle fence, behind which the Stroganovka dogs, who were actually more like wolves, growled quietly. Outside the village boundary fence, in the meadow, the sound of water became louder. When the nun had almost reached the mill, a frail little figure detached itself from the log structure and came toward her. The girl ran up impatiently to the holy sister, grabbed hold of her hand with a tenacious, rough little paw, and asked: “Is he alive? Is he?”

  “Who?” asked Pelagia, astonished.

  “Emmanuel.”

  “You mean Manuila?”

  “Emmanuel,” Durka repeated. “His name’s Emmanuel.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know. He pointed to hisself so like”—the girl jabbed a finger against her own chest—“and he said ‘Emmanuel, Emmanuel.’ He said lots of all sorts too, only I didn’t understand then. I was too little and stupid.”

  It must have been the Russian name “Manuil,” Pelagia realized. And the folk version “Manuila” had appeared later, when the mysterious “Tartar” began preaching his message around the villages.

  “Your Manuil is alive, all right,” she reassured Durka. “Nothing has happened to him. You know what—why don’t you tell me where you found him?”

  “It weren’t me as found him, it were Belyanka.”

  And then Durka told Pelagia a quite incredible story, to which the nun listened very carefully indeed, right to the very end. She was also astounded by how coherently the supposed deaf-mute could speak—far more spryly and colorfully than the village elder.

  It had all started when Belyanka, an extremely cantankerous laying hen, escaped from the commune’s poultry house, which Durka kept watch over. The poultry house was on the far side of the little ri
ver, so the fugitive fowl had to be sought either in the low bushes or farther off, beside the cliffs.

  Durka had beaten through all the bushes, but failed to find Belyanka. The problem was that the laying hen belonged to the elder’s oldest son, Donka, a quarrelsome and sharp-tongued man, whom Durka was terribly afraid of.

  There was nothing else for it, so she went to look beside the cliffs. She shouted, and begged in chicken language, and wept, but all in vain.

  And so she came to Devil’s Rock, a place where she would never have wandered of her own free will, especially not alone.

  “Why?” asked Pelagia. “What sort of place is this Devil’s Rock?”

  “A very unclean place.”

  “Why is it unclean?”

  “Because of the gentleman.”

  And Durka told Pelagia that long, long ago, a visiting gentleman had disappeared in the area of Devil’s Rock. Her granny had told her about it, before she was paralyzed and lost the power of speech. And her granny had been told by her own grandfather.

  It might have been a hundred years earlier, or perhaps even earlier than that, but in any case a gentleman had come to Stroganovka. He was looking for a treasure—gold and precious stones. He had climbed all over the hills, in places the locals had never glanced into in their lives, because they had no reason to. He had dug up the earth and gone down into the “hollows,” that is, caves. He had gone into the Devil’s Rock hollow too, and taken a rooster with him.

  “What for?” the nun asked, bemused.

  “If as you lose the way in a hollow, you need to set a rooster free, and he’ll find the way out for sure.”

  But the rooster had not helped the gentleman. They had both disappeared, and neither the man nor the bird came back out of the cave. Then the bolder villagers had gone in to look for them. And they’d found the gentleman’s cloth cap and a tail feather from his rooster. That was all. The Devil had carried them away, because everyone knew that it was his rock.

  Durka had been terribly afraid to go into such a place, but she couldn’t go back without Belyanka.

  She walked longward of the cursed cliff, she plainted and trembled all over. Suddenly she thought she heard a rooster crowing. The sound was dull and muffled, as if it were coming from under the ground. She looked behind a large boulder and gasped. There, under a bush, was a gaping black hole, and that was where the crowing was coming from.

  Durka realized that this must be the gentleman’s cave. For a long time she couldn’t bring herself to go in. What was a cockerel doing in there? Could it really be the same one that the Devil had carried away? Perhaps the gentleman who had disappeared was there too? She was terribly afraid!

  She wanted to run, and get out of harm’s way, but suddenly she heard a familiar clucking. It was Belyanka! She was there, in the cave! Crossing herself (she couldn’t say a prayer, she was “tongueless”), she went in to get Belyanka.

  At first she couldn’t make anything out, it was so dark. Then she got a bit more used to it. She saw a white spot—that was Belyanka. She dashed toward it and saw there was a rooster there too: a lively one, he kept jumping up on the hen. Then suddenly she saw a man with a beard, wearing a long white shirt, lying on his side and snoring. If the man hadn’t been asleep, she’d have darted out of that place as fast as she could and never gone back. But why be afraid of a sleeping man? That is, she felt afraid, of course, for a little while, but when she looked closer, she could see he wasn’t frightening at all, and she woke him up and took him to the village, together with the rooster.

  The red-feathered bird became Durka’s, because the man from the cave told her: You take it. It turned out to be a fine rooster, far better than the ones in the village. Durka and her old granny let it cover other people’s chickens for five eggs a time, and that improved their lives a lot, and the rooster started a new breed of randy red roosters in Stroganovka. The first bird was himself pecked to death by the neighbors’ roosters a year later—he was very quarrelsome.

  PELAGIA HEARD THIS story out and then started asking about Manuil, what kind of man he was, how he behaved, whether he offended Durka in any way. Remembering why the peasants had driven out the wretched prophet, she couldn’t understand—if it was true—why Durka was so concerned for the “filthy beast.”

  The girl had nothing bad to say about the man who had supposedly attacked her—quite the opposite, in fact. When she spoke about him, her voice became dreamy, even affectionate. As if meeting the “wild Tartar” was the most important event in her pitiful little life.

  He was kind, Durka said. It was good to talk with him.

  “But how could the two of you talk?” Pelagia couldn’t resist asking. “You were tongueless, and so was he—they say he couldn’t speak at all.”

  To herself she thought: Or was he pretending to the peasants?

  “We talked,” Durka repeated stubbornly. “The way as Manuila spoke, you couldn’t understand a single word, but it was clear as day.”

  “But what did he tell you about?”

  “All sorts,” the girl replied, and looked up at the sky and the moon. There was a strange half-smile, not at all childish, playing on her face. “Still little, I was, a real fool. I wanted to beg him: ‘Don’t go away, live here with me and granny’ but all I said was meh, meh.”

  “When did you learn to talk?”

  “It was Emmanuel as cured me of the dumbness. He said, ‘Girl, you didn’t want to talk before, because you had no one to talk to and nothing to talk about. But you’ll start talking with me.’”

  “And he told you all this without words?” Pelagia asked doubtfully.

  Durka thought about that. “I don’t remember. He led me to the river and said I should get undressed. He started pouring water on top of my head and stroking my shoulders. It felt so sweet! And he kept saying magic spells. But Vanyatka the miller saw us and ran for the men. They came running and started thrashing Emmanuel, and dragging him over the ground by his hair and his legs! I started yelling: ‘Leave him alone! Leave him alone!’ I yelled in words, only no one heard—they were all yelling so loud as well. And I was so ’stounded that I could yell in words, I fainted and lay like that for a day, and another day. And when I woke up, they’d already thrown him out… I wanted to run after him, to the Holy Land. That’s where Emmanuel’s from.”

  “From the Holy Land? Why do you think that?”

  “Where else could someone like that come from?” Durka asked in surprise. “And he talked to me about it himself. Only I didn’t run off. Because he told me not to. I asked him about it earlier—‘Take me,’ I moaned, ‘take me.’ I was afraid he wouldn’t understand, nobody but granny had ever understood me before. But he understood. ‘It’s too soon,’ he said, ‘for you to go to the Holy Land. How will Granny manage without you? When the Lord sets you free, then come to me. I’ll be waiting.’

  It was only then, with hindsight, that Pelagia realized the girl was surely lying, or, to put it more gently, fantasizing. She had invented her own fairy tale and was comforting herself with it. But then what else did the poor thing have to take comfort in?

  Pelagia stroked Durka’s head. “Why don’t you say anything? In the village they think you’re dumb and half-witted, but just look how clever you are! Talk to the villagers, and they’ll start treating you differently.”

  “Who can I talk to?” Durka snorted. “And what about? I only talk with granny, quiet-like. Every evening. I tells her about Emmanuel, and she listens. She can’t answer, can’t speak, just lies there. When I was little, granny used to talk and talk to me and I was a fool, I could only bleat. Now it’s t’other way round. I talk, granny bleats. She’s poorly she’ll die soon. I’ll bury her, then I’ll be set free. And I’ll go to him, to Emmanuel. To the Holy Land. Only afore, I’ll grow up into a maid. What does he want with a little girl? I can wait a year or two. Just take a look at what I’ve got,” Durka said proudly, opening the front of her tattered little dress to show her small breasts th
at were just barely beginning to swell up: first one, then the other. “See! Won’t I be a maid soon?”

  “Yes, soon,” sighed Pelagia.

  Both of them fell silent, each wrapped in her own thoughts.

  “Listen,” said the nun, “could you show me that hollow? The one where you found Emmanuel?”

  “Why not? I’ll show you,” Durka agreed readily. “When the cocks crow twicely, come to the mill again. I’ll take you.”

  A shameful dream

  THERE WAS STILL a long time to go, probably five or six hours, until cockcrow, which, according to the law of nature, ought to herald the dawn, and so Pelagia had to make some kind of arrangements for her night’s lodging. She went back to the communal hut to ask the elder where she could spend the night.

  The windows of the hut were lit up, and the nun glanced in through one of them before entering. The elder was not in the room. Sergei Sergeevich was sitting alone at the rough plank table, and the other members of the expedition had stretched out on the benches along the walls.

  From this it was clear that the hut had been allocated to the investigator and his team for the night. That was right; where else could they be accommodated? There was no hotel to be found in Stroganovka.

  The holy sister stood there without moving for quite a long time, looking at Sergei Sergeevich. Ah, how the investigators face changed when he thought that no one could see him! Not a trace left of sarcasm or dry humor. Dolinin’s forehead was cut across by wrinkles of intense suffering, there were tragic folds at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes were gleaming with a suspicious brightness—could it possibly be from tears? Sergei Sergeevich suddenly lowered his forehead onto his crossed arms, and his shoulders began shaking.

  No words could express how sorry she felt for him. What terrible torment the man was carrying around inside him, and still he didn’t bend, he didn’t break. And the nun caught herself thinking how much she wanted to press the sufferer’s brown-haired head to her breast, stroke his tormented brow, and shake the tears from his eyelashes.