Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel

by Boris Akunin

  Having issued the instructions indicated above, the bishop began dressing and packing hastily for a journey. But Userdov, choosing a moment when Mitrofanii had withdrawn into the dressing room, gave rein to his irrepressible curiosity and snaffled the letter that had effected such a miraculous change in the bishop off the desk. Father Serafim was extremely interested in this note from a dead man, so interested, in fact, that he actually decided to make a copy for himself in his notebook. Absorbed in this occupation, the bishop’s secretary did not hear His Eminence, already wearing his traveling cassock and stockings but not yet his shoes, come back into the study.

  When Userdov realized that he had been discovered, his face contorted in a pale grimace of terror. He backed away from the bishop, who was silently advancing on him, and shook his head, but was unable to utter a single word.

  “Ah, so that’s it,” Mitrofanii drawled ominously. “Matiusha and I used to rack our brains wondering how all our secrets were known to our enemies, and all the time it was you, you Judas. It was you who reported about the boot print, and about Palestine. Who is your master? Well?”

  The bishop barked out that “Well?” so fiercely that the chandelier jingled, and the secretary went down on his knees with a thud. At that moment his remarkably handsome face was not at its best.

  “Tell me, you vile creature!”

  The secretary jabbed one finger up toward the ceiling without speaking.

  “Higher authorities? Out of careerist considerations? I know you want to be a bishop, that’s why you haven’t married. Who do you report to? The Okhranka? The Synod?”

  His Eminence grabbed the trembling Userdov by the scruff of the neck. The secretary squeezed his eyes shut and would certainly have given away his secret, but Mitrofanii opened his fingers.

  “Very well. Matiusha told me not to try to find out, so I won’t. He has the brains of a minister of state, he wouldn’t forbid me for no reason. And this is my final pastor’s blessing for you in parting.”

  He took a short swing—exactly as he used to do many years ago during the Junkers’ brawls—and smashed Father Serafim in the face, not in any merely symbolic sense, but in a most convincing manner, so that the secretary’s nose crunched and shifted sideways.

  The poor wretch tumbled backward onto the carpet, blood streaming from his face.

  He’ll be a bishop all right, Mitrofanii thought fleetingly as he walked toward the door. He definitely will But with a crooked nose.

  In the hallway a lay servant was waiting with a hastily packed suitcase. His Eminence crossed himself with broad sweeps of the hand in front of the icon hanging opposite the entrance door—an image of his favorite saint, the apostle, Judas Thaddeus, comforter of the despairing and patron of hopeless causes. He took his miter and wide-brimmed traveling hat and ran out into the courtyard where a team of four was already champing at the bit.

  It was less than half an hour since the letter had arrived.

  The bishop reads another letter and has two dreams

  TWO DAYS LATER, before boarding the steamship in Odessa, Mitrofanii sent off a telegram to the father archimandrite at the Orthodox Mission in Jerusalem, inquiring whether His Reverence had any knowledge of the whereabouts and health of the pilgrim Lisitsyna.

  The reply arrived in time to catch him. The archimandrite said that a pilgrim by that name had stayed at the hotel, but she had left eight days earlier for an unknown destination and had not since returned, although her things were still in her room.

  Mitrofanii ground his teeth, but forbade himself to despair.

  Throughout the five days of the voyage to Jaffa, he prayed. Never before, it seemed, had he devoted himself to this activity for such a long period of time, with almost no respite.

  The pilgrims crowded around the window of his cabin, gaping respectfully at the bishop bowing repeatedly to the floor. They even agreed among themselves not to pester the holy man with requests for blessings—let him bless all of them at once before they went ashore.

  Eight days after leaving Zavolzhsk, His Eminence was in the Orthodox Mission in Jerusalem. He went straight to the chancellery, to inquire whether his spiritual daughter had returned yet.

  Why, yes, they told him, the very day after we received Your Eminence’s inquiry. We sent another telegram to Odessa immediately, but obviously it missed you.

  “Thank you, Lord! Where is Pelagia?” Mitrofanii exclaimed, so relieved that his legs almost buckled under him. “Is she safe and well?”

  We can’t say, they replied. None of our people have actually seen her. But last Saturday the messenger boy from Mrs. Lisitsyna’s hotel arrived with this packet for Your Eminence. The next day the father archimandrite had sent a message to the guest, saying that Bishop Mitrofanii was concerned about her welfare, but Lisitsyna was not in her room. And since then they had not been able to find her in even once, despite trying many times.

  Realizing that there was nothing to be achieved here, the bishop, citing weariness after his long journey, withdrew to the chambers reserved for especially distinguished guests. Without even taking off his hat, he sat down at the table and opened the envelope with trembling fingers.

  He saw an entire stack of sheets of paper covered with familiar handwriting. In his agitation he dropped his pince-nez and broke the right lens. He read the letter through the crucifix of the cracks.

  To His Eminence Mitrofanii, light, strength and joy.

  I hope that you will never read this letter. Or do I really hope that you will? I do not know. But if you do read it, that will mean that everything was true, and that is absolutely impossible.

  I have begun badly and only confused you. Forgive me.

  And forgive me also for my deception, for exploiting your trust. You sent me on a distant pilgrimage, wishing to protect me from danger, but I concealed the reason why I chose the Holy Land of all possible places. I did not set out to Palestine for the sake of peace and quiet, but in order to see through to the end something that I had started. You spoke the truth when you said that I do not have the nun’s talent of praying to God for people. Of all Christ’s brides I am the most wayward. But I shall write of brides at the end, now is not the right moment.

  As you recall, they tried to kill me three times: once in Stroganovka and twice in Zavolzhsk. And when I thought about this, it became clear that such powerful killers could not possibly find me so abhorrent in my own right. There was no possible reason. So the reason did not lie in me. In what, then? Or in whom?

  How did it all begin? With the killing of a certain sham prophet; and the subsequent events were also connected in one way or another with the ill-famed Manuila. I did not understand what sort of man he was, although I had seen that some people wished to kill him, and others to protect him, and that the former were more powerful and sooner or later they would achieve their goal. As for my place in this business, I was like the unfortunate Durka—I had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow got in their way. So they decided to remove me, as one removes a stone from the road, in order not to stumble over it again. That was the only reason I could be of any interest to the enemies of Manuila.

  As you know, I have investigated murders on numerous occasions, but surely it is a hundred times more important to prevent a murder from happening? And if you think that this is within your power, surely it is a mortal sin to do nothing? If I have lied to you by default, it was only out of fear that if you knew the whole truth, you would never have let me go.

  And there was another reason, apart from saving Emmanuel (I prefer to call him that now). He and I are connected by the remarkable event that occurred in the cave, of which you already know. An event for which I was unable to find any explanation, and which I could not get out of my mind. Emmanuel had been in the same cave—indeed, according to the village people, that was where he came from. So I thought that perhaps he might explain this mystery to me.

  Two things were clear.

  In the first plac
e this prophet, or false prophet (that was not for me to judge), had to be sought in the Holy Land. He was either there already, or would arrive there sometime very soon—the “Foundlings” talked about that, and it was no accident that Shelukhin, the pseudo-Emmanuel, was on his way to Palestine.

  And, in the second place, Emmanuel’s enemies had to be sought among those who traveled on the steamer Sturgeon with us. (Let me say straightaway that this conclusion proved not to be entirely correct, but I only realized that after traveling around Judea, Samaria, Galilee, and Edom.)

  My list of suspects was assembled as follows:

  Who could the former gendarme Ratsevich have been working for? I wondered.

  The “Warsaw bandits” that Matvei Bentsionovich mentioned were excluded. Even the most fastidious of robbers would not have tried to eliminate me so ingeniously and persistently. And the idea that some mere preacher could have caused them such great inconvenience was even more unlikely.

  But the misanthropic lunatics who call themselves the Oprichniks of Christ might well see a preacher who led people away from the Orthodox faith into “Yiddishness” as a fierce and dangerous enemy.

  The same also applied to the opposite camp—the fanatical supporters of an insular Judaism, who regarded Emmanuel as an evil jester who mocked their faith.

  Also on the steamer was a group of Zionists, extremely determined young people who suspected Emmanuel of being connected with the Department of Security, the Okhranka. It is well known that the supporters of the idea of a Jewish state include some fanatics who are willing to go to extremes in order to achieve their goal as soon as possible.

  Subsequently, when I was already here in Palestine, I also developed another theory, but I will not acquaint you with it, in order not to confuse you, especially since, like the preceding ones, it proved to be incorrect.

  On the basis of my list of suspects, I devised a plan of action, and set about implementing it immediately on disembarkation from the ship. I was driven on by the fear that Emmanuel’s powerful enemies would find him first and I would be too late.

  First of all I went to Jerusalem …

  The bishop read about how Pelagia had tested and discarded her theories one by one, while at the same time constantly drawing closer to the restless prophet, who would simply not stay in one place.

  Something strange was happening to Mitrofanii. From the very beginning he had been in a state of extreme agitation, and with every page it grew more intense. The trembling of his hands grew ever more powerful, so that eventually he was obliged to lay the sheets of paper on the table and weigh them down with his spectacle case. The sweat was streaming down His Eminences face, but he did not notice it. He merely took off his hat absentmindedly and put it beside him. But when he accidentally knocked it onto the floor with his elbow, he did not notice that either.

  Eventually the nervous stress reached its extreme limit and was transformed into its opposite. The bishop’s head began spinning, and he felt an irresistible urge to sleep.

  Many years earlier, at the Battle of Balaclava, the future bishop, then a cavalry squadron commander, had seen the general commanding the Russian forces fall asleep at the observation point. The general was sitting at a folding table, concentrating intensely as he looked through a telescope and gave orders, and suddenly, at the very height of the battle, he nodded off—simply lowered his head onto his folded arms and fell asleep. Frightened adjutants went dashing across to him, but the chief of staff, an old and experienced soldier, said, “Leave him alone, it will soon pass.” And indeed, five minutes later the general woke up in good form and carried on directing the battle as if nothing at all had happened.

  The same thing happened to Mitrofanii now. The lines of writing unwound into a single long, knotty thread, and the thread led the bishop down into darkness. One moment he was reading, and the next his head drooped over the table, his right cheek sank down onto his folded elbows, and he instantly fell into a deep sleep.

  His Eminence had two dreams, one after the other.

  THE FIRST DREAM was a sweet one.

  Mitrofanii saw the Lord God before him in the shape of a radiant cloud, and the cloud spoke to him in a ringing voice: “What good to me are your somber prayers, bishop? What good are monasticism and monks to Me? They are mere foolishness and aggravation. Love each other, my people, husband love wife and wife love husband, and I shall ask no better prayer from you.”

  And immediately Mitrofanii found himself in a house. The house was on the shore of a lake and in the distance he could see mountains, blue at the bottom and white at the top. The sun was shining, there were heavy apples hanging on the branches of the trees in the garden, and a gentle woman’s voice was singing a lullaby. Mitrofanii looked around and saw a child’s bed, and Pelagia was sitting beside it, but not in her habit and wimple—she was wearing a morning dress, and her copper-colored hair was hanging loose down to her shoulders. Pelagia glanced at Mitrofanii and smiled affectionately, and he thought: All these years I have wasted. If only the Cloud had spoken to me earlier, when I was younger! But never mind, I am still strong, we will be happy for a long time yet.

  Then he turned over from his right cheek onto his left, and that started a quite different dream.

  It was as if he had woken up and continued reading his spiritual daughter’s letter, although in fact he had not woken up at all. At first he read with his eyes, and then instead of reading he seemed to be listening, and Pelagia herself took the place of the sheet of paper in front of him.

  “I am no longer among the living,” her voice whispered. “You will see me no more on the earth, because now I dwell in Eternal Life. Ah, how good everything is here! If only you, the living, knew this, you would not be afraid of death at all, you would look forward to death with joy as a child looks forward to Christmas or his birthday. God is nothing like the church’s teachings about Him, He is kind and understands absolutely everything. You foolish people pity us and weep for us, but we pity you. You suffer so very much, you are so afraid of everything.”

  Now the sleeper could not only hear Pelagia’s voice, but see her, too. She was surrounded with a radiant glow—not as bright as the God-Cloud, but a shimmering rainbow that was a delight to the eye. “What must I do?” Mitrofanii cried eagerly. “I want to come to you! If I must die, I will do so gladly, that is nothing. Only take me to you!” She laughed quietly, like a mother laughing at a little child’s babbling: “What a great hurry you are in. Live for as long as you are destined, and do not be afraid: I will wait. For after all, where I am there is no time.”

  These words comforted the bishop, and he woke.

  He rubbed his eyes and put on the pince-nez that had fallen off his nose.

  He carried on reading.

  The red rooster

  “WERE YOU THERE?” I asked Emmanuel, and was about to add “in that cave,” but just at that moment there was a rustling sound behind me. I turned and saw a man standing there. He was dressed as an Arab, and for a second I thought he was one of the local people who had happened to see us go down into the burial chamber. But the stranger’s round, thick-lipped face broke into a mocking smile and he said in perfect Russian: “Now, then, what have you got here, my little babes in the wood? Treasure? That’s for me, if you please. You won’t have any more use for it.”

  “What treasure?” I babbled, and suddenly noticed that he had something in his hand, something black, with a dull gleam.

  I realized that this was the very thing I had been so afraid of. I was too late. They had found him, and now they would kill him. Strangely enough, at that moment I didn’t think at all that they would kill me, I felt so annoyed with myself. All those days I had wasted, although I felt, I knew, that precious time was passing!

  Then the round-faced killer struck another blow at my self-esteem. “Thank you, Sister, you have a nose like a bloodhound. You led the hunter straight to the prey.” When he said that, I felt really terrible. So they had found Emmanuel t
hanks to me! I was to blame for everything!

  And worst of all, at that appalling moment I behaved shamefully, just like a woman: I burst into tears. I was completely crushed by the pain and shame of it all, I felt like the most pitiful creature in the entire world.

  “What, no treasure? That’s a pity. But I’m still glad to meet you like this. Extremely glad,” the villain joked. “I’d love to banter a bit more with you, but there’s a job to be done.” And he raised his gun, about to shoot, but Emmanuel suddenly pushed me aside and took a step toward the killer.

  “You earn money by killing people? Is that your trade?” he asked without a trace of anger or condemnation—his tone sounded more like curiosity or joyful amazement to me.

  “At your service,” said the round-faced man, bowing as if he were accepting a well-deserved compliment. He clearly felt completely in control of the situation and had no objection to deferring the execution of his evil intent for a little longer.