Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (13 page)

The village’s plain little houses were scattered across a broad meadow that must have been won from the Forest in an age long past. Two or three hundred years earlier, as the name of the village testified, the Stroganov family of merchants—the very same ones who conquered Siberia—had held land here. These old times were represented by a rectangle of rotten timber beams—the remnants of a small fortress—and several dozen pits, mementos of the salt factory that once existed here.

The peasants who lived in these parts were rough men with long beards, descendants of the Stroganovs’ wild ragamuffins, the wandering rabble that had been drawn from all over Russia to the free life here. The absence of any plowed land, the small, sentry-box windows of the huts, and the animal skins drying on wattle fences immediately made it clear that these settlers had not come from peaceful farming stock. The villagers of Stroganovka did not till the soil. They lived by harvesting the forest and scraping rock salt out of the long-exhausted pits. The salt was foul and gray, and only the peasants from the neighboring districts bought it, for a cheap price.

But beyond the pine trees, on the other side of a small, rapid river strewn with rocks, there were craggy cliffs—the first spurs of the Ural Mountains.

The village elder who talked things over with Dolinin was a morose old man who looked like a wood sprite, completely covered in gray hair with a greenish tinge to it. Present in the communal hut with the old man were two other men, also not young, who never spoke, but only gaped warily at the uninvited guests. If it were not for the district sergeant major, who happened to be godfather to one of the village elder’s children, probably no conversation would have taken place at all.

The most important thing, the reason why they had come, was established almost immediately. Glancing into the open wooden crate, the village elder crossed himself and said the body was definitely Petka Shelukhin, a native son of Stroganovka. He had left three years earlier, and since then no one there had seen any sign of him.

“Under what circumstances did he leave his place of residence?” Dolinin asked.

“How be that?” said the elder, gaping at him. He spoke in the local dialect, which was rather difficult to understand if you weren’t used to it. “What’s that’un say?”

“Well, why did he go?”

“He just went, thar’n all. Year gone as we wrote his house over to commune,” said the old man, gesturing around the room, which, it should be said, was absolutely wretched, the corners of its low ceiling full of gray cobwebs.

“‘Year gone’ means ‘last year,’” Pelagia translated. “They’ve turned Shelukhin’s house into their communal hut.”

“Thank you, but I’m not asking him about the hut. What sort of man was he, this Shelukhin? Why did he leave the village?”

“Runty little son of a bitch,” said the elder, pronouncing the ugly phrase distinctly, and making the nun wince. “Dawdling braghead. Gyphanded swiper. Hent more’n once.”

“Eh?” Dolinin asked Pelagia.

She explained: “A boaster and idler. He lied. And he had been caught stealing.”

“Sounds like our man,” Sergei Sergeevich remarked. “The habits match. What suddenly made Shelukhin leave these glorious parts? You’d better ask, Sister—this Methuselah and I don’t seem to understand each other too well.”

Pelagia asked. The elder exchanged glances with the taciturn peasants and answered that Petka “went off with the wild Tartar.”

“With whom?” Sergei Sergeevich and the nun asked in a single voice.

“There been this man as weren’t our’n. Come from yon, bain’t known where.”

“What’s this ‘from yon’?” Dolinin asked, glancing nervously at Pelagia. “And what does ‘bain’t’ mean?”

“Just wait, will you,” said Pelagia, impolitely brushing the investigator aside. “But tell me, Granddad, where did the Tartar come from?”

“No place. Yon Tartar, ’twere Durka as brung ’un.”

At this point even the nun began feeling lost.

“What?”

In the course of a long cross-examination abounding in every possible kind of misunderstanding, it was established that Durka was what they called a feeble-minded dumb girl who lived in Stroganovka.

The question of what Durka’s real name was provoked a quarrel among the natives. One man believed it was Steshka, another that it was Fimka. The elder was unable to say anything about the witless girl’s name, but he did inform them that she lived with her granny Bobrikha, who had been lying paralyzed for more than six years. Durka looked after the invalid as best she could, and the commune helped them out a little bit.

One day in spring, three years earlier, this Durka had brought an “awtogether wild” man, an outsider, from God only knew where.

“Why do you say he was wild?” Pelagia asked.

“That’s as he were, wild. Swinging ’un’s head all around and gawking, talking as sounded human, and no sense to it. ‘Hey fuani, hey fuani.’ Freak he was, such as begs on Christ by the churches in towns.”

“A freak? You mean he was a cripple?” put in Sergei Sergeevich, who was listening intently.

“No,” replied the nun. “Freak as in fool, a holy fool. Tell me, Granddad, how was this man dressed?”

“Not dressed at all, nigh on. No pants on him, nought but a sack, and it belted around with
Mass
string.”

“What sort of string is that, Sister?”

“Blass—
that means blue.”

Dolinin whistled.

“Well, that’s a fine turn all right. So it isn’t Manuila we’ve got in the coffin.
Quod erat demonstrandum
.”

“Wait, wait,” said Pelagia, turning back to the elder. “But why did you decide he was a Tartar?”

The old man squinted at the nun, but didn’t answer her directly—he ordered one of the men to do it: “You tell ’un, Donka, that’s low of my place.”

“We took ’un to bathhouse for to wash ’un, and his willy were lopped,” Donka explained. “Like yon Tartars.”

“What’s that?”

“That I understood,” Sergei Sergeevich put in. “The wild Tartar was circumcised. There’s no doubt about it—that was Manuila. He really is immortal, the scoundrel.”

The subsequent conversation yielded a few more details. For some reason Petka Shelukhin, the most idle, dishonest peasant in the whole of Stroganovka, had become attached to the “wild man,” let him live in his hut, and followed him around everywhere like his own brother. According to the elder, they really were alike—the same height, similar faces. Petka actually called the stranger his “elder brother,” and the stranger called his mentor “Shelukhai.”

“Naah, not Shelukhai. Sheluyak—that be how the Tartar called ’un,” Donka corrected the old man.

“That be it,” confirmed the second man. “Sheluyak. And Petka answered to ’un.”

The investigator ordered the girl who had brought the “Tartar” into the village to be called.

They brought her, but she was no help at all. Durka must have been about fourteen, but she was so small and stunted that she looked ten. She didn’t understand what they were asking—she only mumbled, raked her dirty fingers through her tangled hair, and sniffed. Eventually Dolinin gave up on her.

“So, you say Shelukhin became friends with this new arrival?” he asked, turning to the elder. “On what grounds?”

Pelagia heaved a sigh at Sergei Sergeevich’s sheer hopelessness and prepared to translate his question into the language of Stroganovka—in order to avoid a repetition of the conversation between the Prince of Denmark and the gravedigger: “Why, here in Denmark, sire.” And then, purely by chance, she happened to glance at Durka, who was huddling by the door. Now that the grown-ups had stopped paying attention to the little girl, her face had changed: her eyes were lit up by a bright spark and the expression of stupidity had disappeared. The girl was listening to the conversation, and very eagerly too!

“Go away! Go away!” the elder shouted at her. The girl reluctantly left the room, and the conversation about the “wild man” continued.

“How did the Tartar make friends with Petka?” Pelagia asked.

“Petka fibbed as the wild man told him about the Holy Land. And living in truth.”

“Why do you say he was lying?”

“Well, how could yon Tartar speak on the Holy Land, if he had none of our tongue?”

“You mean, he couldn’t talk at all?”

“Aha.”

One of the men (not Donka, but the other one) said, “Wussn’t him’n Durka grand, though, eh, Dad? Her mooing, him cooing. Hilarious. Remember Okhrim joking on’t? ‘Durka’s got herself a bridegroom,’ he says. ‘That’ll be a right family—Noddle and Noodle.” And he stroked his beard, which must have been considered the height of frivolity in Stroganovka, because the elder pulled the bright spark up short.

“Give over that grinning. Or has you forgot as what happened after?”

“What did happen afterward?” Dolinin immediately inquired.

The Stroganovka men glanced at one another. “We flung ’un Tartar out,” said the elder. “That’s what we done—gimma right threshing, stuck his head down the catch, and lashed him out of bounds.”

“What did they do?” Sergei Sergeevich asked, looking helplessly at the nun.

“Beat him within an inch of his life, ducked him in the cesspit, and drove him out of the village with their whips,” she explained.

“Ought to have beaten the filthy beast to death, we ought,” the elder commented sternly. “And ripped off that Tartar willy of his. That Durka, poor witless orphan, she runs around after him like a chicken, and he wants to befoul her. There be bastards in the world all right. Two days after, Durka lay sleepsick.”

Sergei Sergeevich frowned.

“And what did Shelukhin do?”

“Ran off into the forest after the Tartar. Moment as we set in beating the filthy beast, Petka come flailing at the lads, wouldn’t let them teach his ‘big brother’ a lesson. So we smashed Petya’s mug in too. Then when we flung the Tartar out into the forest, Petka tied up his bundle and went after. ‘He’ll die in the forest!’ he was yelling. ‘He’s a godly man!’ And we saw nowt of Petka again till today.”

“Tell me, Granddad, what direction did the Tartar go in when he left you? Toward sunset, sunrise, north, or midnight?” Dolinin asked.

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.