Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (18 page)

“Why didn’t he kill me in the forest?” asked Pelagia. “Nothing could have been simpler.”

“As I told you: a malicious obsession. He wasn’t interested in killing you as simply as possible. Permit me to affirm that these pathological personalities like to act out spectacular performances, such as entombing someone alive in a cave. And what’s more, he must have wanted to draw out the pleasure, to savor his power. Surely that is why he growled at you from behind the fir tree? He was toying with you, playing cat and mouse.”

The nun nodded in acknowledgment of the prosecutor’s sound reasoning. “But there is something else that worries me. I can’t stop thinking about it. Where was I when the landslide happened? Down in the cave, or up at the top? And when I was up at the top, how could I have seen something that happened earlier?”

Mitrofanii and Berdichevsky exchanged glances. The two of them had already discussed this strange detail of the nun’s story and reached a certain conclusion, which His Eminence now tried to put to Pelagia—naturally, in the most delicate manner possible:

“I believe, my daughter, that as a result of shock, reality and appearance became confused in your mind. Might it not be the case that this Wolf-Tail simply arose in your imagination, following the incident in the forest that had given you such a serious fright? Very well, very well,” Mitrofanii added hastily when he saw Pelagia’s agitated response to his words. “It is quite possible that the reason lies not in you, but in external circumstances. You said yourself that the air in the cave was special in some way, that it made you feel dizzy and set your ears ringing. Perhaps there is some natural gas produced in that place, one that induces a delusional state—I have read of such things happening. There are substances and emanations unknown to science, and their effects are imperceptible to the human sense organs. Do you remember what happened on the island of Canaan?”

Pelagia remembered very well. And she shuddered.

“This is how we are going to proceed,” Matvei Bentsionovich declared cheerfully, turning the conversation back from the chimerical to the real. “Let the criminal believe that he has succeeded in killing the nun and eliminating the only witness. In the meantime we shall seize him by this Achilles’ heel.” He tapped the drawing with one finger. “I have forwarded an inquiry to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kiev, to the forensic science analytical offices. They have fine card indexes there, on the most various subjects. We could well find our master cobbler before you know it. And through the cobbler, God willing, we’ll find the killer, too.”

“Don’t count too much on God,” said Mitrofanii, quenching his spiritual son’s optimism. “He has plenty of other things to worry about besides boot heels.”

The
Tractatus de speluncis

AND THEN THE ordinary daily round of life was restored, and Sister Pelagia had no time to think about mysterious caves. Her responsibilities as headmistress of the diocesan college were troublesome and fraught with agitations of all kinds. To be entirely truthful, a large part of these agitations derived from the headmistress herself. Having accepted as a work of penance the job of heading the school in which she had previously served as a teacher, Pelagia had undertaken a revolutionary change in the syllabus, for which she had come under attack both from above and below.

From above, the attacks came from His Eminence Mitrofanii, who did nothing to hinder the innovations but by no means approved of them and made caustic remarks, while also promising trouble from the Holy Synod. He even threatened that if his predictions came to pass he would not bother to defend the rebel, but surrender her to judgment and retribution.

You will defend me, Your Eminence, you will, you will have no choice
, Pelagia replied to this in her own mind, although outwardly she demonstrated imperturbable meekness.

The criticism from below caused her far more problems. That is, the holy sisters of the conventual calling, who were accustomed to acquiescence, did not even think of opposing the headmistress’s will, but Maria Vikentievna Svekolkina, a teacher employed under contract and a recent graduate of the pedagogical courses in St. Petersburg, was ablaze with the fervor of enlightenment and gave Pelagia no end of trouble.

At this point we should perhaps explain the essential nature of the reforms. The school had a four-year program, and pupils cannot be taught a great deal in that time. Pelagia had decided to retain only the four subjects without which, in her opinion, it was impossible to get by. Better fewer but better—that was the headmistress’s motto. With an aching heart, she excluded the natural sciences and geography from the curriculum as being unnecessary for children from poor families—in any case, when they finished their studies, they would forget all about the laws of physics and foreign capital cities. She made domestic science the central subject, devoting half of the lessons to it, and she also kept gymnastics, literature, and religious studies, which included singing.

Pelagia explained her choices as follows: How to run a household was the most important knowledge for future wives and mothers. Gymnastics (including swimming in summer and, during the cold season, exercises in the school hall and bracing dousings with cold water) was required for sound health and a good figure. Literature was essential for the development of exalted feelings and correct speech. And as for teaching the law of God through singing, it was easier for the children to come to know the Almighty through music.

In only a short time the school choir became famous throughout the province of Zavolzhie. On occasion Governor von Haggenau himself wiped away a tear of emotion as he listened to the female pupils (all wearing brown dresses and white headscarves) running through the strains of “My soul doth glorify the Lord” or “Dear to my heart” in their angelic voices.

Pelagia tried to demonstrate to the pedagogical graduate that any of the girls who developed an interest in further study could be sent to the municipal college at state expense or, if they proved very capable, even to the grammar school. The provincial budget included a special item for such cases. Svekolkina would not listen to her arguments and showered the headmistress with various terms of abuse, which sometimes reduced Pelagia to tears: a retrograde cleric, an obscurantist and servant of male despotism who dreamed of locking women into the prison of housekeeping.

Three days passed in dealing with work matters that had accumulated during her absence and battles with the progressive feminist. But even during this busy period it sometimes happened that Pelagia would suddenly forget herself in the very middle of performing some task or other and freeze on the spot, lost in reverie. Afterward, of course, she collected her thoughts and returned to her interrupted business with redoubled zeal.

On her very first free evening (it was the fourth day after her return from Stroganovka), the nun set out for the diocesan center. She had permission to go there at any time and make use of the bishop’s chambers as if they were her own home. And so she did.

She did not disturb His Eminence. She knew that he usually spent the hours before sleep writing his “Notes on a Life Lived.” This was an interest that the bishop had developed only recently, and he devoted himself to his writing with total abandon.

Mitrofanii had not conceived the idea of setting forth events from his own past out of idle vanity or egotism. “Life is passing,” he said; “how much longer do I have left? I could depart without having shared my accumulated riches. After all, the only genuine treasure a man has, which no one can take away from him, is his accumulated experience of life. If you are able to string words together, it is a great sin not to share your thoughts, mistakes, sufferings, and discoveries with humankind. For the majority it will probably mean nothing, but someone will read it and perhaps avoid disaster, or even save their own soul.”

The bishop would not let anyone read what he had written. He would not even allow his secretary near it, but wrote out the fair copy himself. He kept saying, “You can read it when I die.” But why would he be thinking of death, we ask, when he had such sound health and clarity of mind?

Pelagia slipped into the library and murmured a greeting to Father Userdov, who was copying something out of the theological texts for a future sermon. Of all things on earth, Father Serafim most loved preaching to the flock. He declaimed the most learned sentiments, with numerous quotations, at quite remarkable length. He prepared seriously taking a long time over it. The only problem was that no one wished to pay attention to his learning. On discovering that Userdov would be taking the day’s service, the parishioners considered it the wisest course to take themselves off to a different church, and poor Father Serafim had not infrequently found himself delivering his oration to an audience of deaf old women who had only come to church to smell the incense or to get warm.

Mitrofanii could not permit such an affront to the authority of the service of worship, but he did not wish to offend the assiduous preacher, and so in recent times he had only allowed him to give his orations in the diocesan church, in the bishop’s own conventional church, for the cloistered clergy and the servants, who could not go anywhere else.

Spotting Pelagia walking along the bookshelves, the secretary politely offered his help in searching for books. The nun thanked him but refused his offer. She knew that once this man attached himself, he would never leave her alone until he had wheedled everything out of her. And this was a delicate matter, none of Userdov’s business.

Father Serafim went back to scraping his feather pen over the paper. And then, as if in search of inspiration, he opened a pocket prayer book and stared into it. Pelagia bit her lip to stop herself laughing out loud. Once, purely by accident, she had seen what kind of prayer book this was. It had a little mirror mounted on the inside of the binding—Userdov had a very high opinion of his own comely features.

After sitting there for a while, the secretary eventually went out, but the holy sister was still walking from shelf to shelf, unable to find what she was looking for, either among the catholic literature or the canonical texts or the hagiography She even looked in the natural science cabinet, but she didn’t find it there either.

The door opened with a creak and Mitrofanii came in. He nodded absentmindedly to his spiritual daughter, then went across to a bookshelf, selected a volume, and started rustling through the pages. No doubt he needed a quotation or wanted to check something. It was perfectly clear that just at that moment the bishop was lost somewhere far away in years gone by. Pelagia moved closer and saw that His Eminence was leafing through Valuev’s
Diaries
.

She cleared her throat, but he didn’t look around. Then she pushed the
Ancient Hebrew-Russian Dictionary
off the table onto the floor. The massive volume weighed ten pounds, and the noise was so loud that Mitrofanii almost jumped out of his shoes. He turned, fluttering his eyelids.

“I’m sorry, Your Eminence,” the nun lilted, picking up the ponderous tome. “I caught it with my sleeve … But since you’ve already been distracted … There’s a book I can’t find. You remember, after that business on Canaan you told me you had a book on miraculous caves by some Latin author.”

“Still puzzling over your Devil’s Rock, are you?” Mitrofanii guessed. “There is a book about caves in the medieval literature section.” He went over to a large oak bookcase, ran his finger along the spines of the books, and pulled out an octavo with old calfskin binding.

“Only it’s not by a Latin author, but a German one,” the bishop said, stroking the faded gold embossing. “Adalbert the Beloved, one of the junior Rhein mystics. Here, study it, I must be going.” And he went out, without even asking what exactly it was that Pelagia hoped to find in the medieval treatise. Such is the authorial itch.

In fact the holy sister herself was not really sure what she was looking for. She opened the volume uncertainly and frowned at the Gothic script that was so hard to take in at first glance. She read the Latin title:
Tractatus de speluncis (A Treatise on Caves)
. Below it there was an epigraph:
Quibus dignis non erat mundus in solitudinibus errantes et montibus et speluncis et in cavernis terrae
(“Those of whom the entire world was unworthy have wandered through deserts and mountains, through the caves and the ravines of the earth”).

In the prologue and the first chapters, the author painstakingly listed all twenty-six mentions of caves in the Holy Writ, annotating each passage with extensive commentaries and pious thoughts. For instance, in his investigation of the First Book of Kings, Adalbert demonstrated true medieval naïveté in a detailed discussion of precisely which call of nature—the greater or the lesser—had led King Saul to enter the cave where David and his supporters were hiding. Citing other authors, and also his own experience, Adalbert convincingly demonstrated that the king must have gone into the cave to address the more substantial of his corporeal needs, since in relieving the less significant call of nature, a man is less distracted and does not produce
crattoritum et errantum
(“groans and internal rumblings”), and there could be no doubt that these were precisely what had prevented the victor from noticing David slicing off the bottom of his cloak.

Weary of the effort of making out the medieval Latin, Pelagia was already thinking of setting the meticulous researcher’s work aside. She absentmindedly turned a few more pages, and her gaze fell upon the heading
Kapitulum XXXVIII de Speluncis Peculiaribus tractans
(Chapter XXXVIII, Which Treats of Special Caves).