Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (14 page)

“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 river, 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 that 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.”