Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (19 page)

She began reading—and then she could not tear herself away.

And there are also caves that are called Special, they are concealed from man for as long as he is alive. These caves connect the fleshly world with the non-fleshly world, and every soul passes through them twice: when it enters into the flesh and when it leaves the flesh after death, only the unrighteous souls fall downward from the cave, into the fires of hell, and the righteous soar upward into the heavenly spheres. Special Caves, the number of which is one hundred and forty-four, are by God’s mercy scattered equally throughout the world, one every thousand leagues, so that the journey of the soul to the flesh and back might not be too lengthy, for there is nothing more painful than this transition.

The Special Cave nearest to our parts is located in the Land of Stier, close to Mount Eisengut, concerning which the Father Prior of the Blaugarten Abbey was informed by a worthy individual from the town of Innsbruck, who was either unable or unwilling to name the precise spot.

It sometimes happens, and not so rarely, that the Lord will summon some soul to His Judgment, but the Merciful Mother or a patron saint will intercede for the sinner, and the soul returns to the earth, but it retains a certain vague memory of its movement through the Special Cave. I also have once seen a man whose soul departed from the flesh but then returned. He was a knight who had formerly been in the service of the Landgrave of Hessen and went by the name of Gothard von Oberwald. This Gothard fell from his horse, struck his head against a stone, and was accounted dead, but the following day, being already placed in the coffin and his funeral service read, he suddenly opened his eyes and soon recovered completely. He told how his soul, being temporarily parted from his body, had squeezed through a narrow, dark underground place. But when a bright light began to shine at the end of this cave, an unknown power had pulled the distraught soul back to earth. The Father Prior of the Blaugarten Abbey, who was also present at the telling of this story, asked Gothard if anyone had prayed to the Holy Virgin or Saint Gothard of Hildesheim for him, and it eventuated that all the time when the knight was lying dead, his wife had prayed ceaselessly for his soul, for she loved this Gothard with all her heart.

In appearance Special Caves are indistinguishable from ordinary ones, and anyone who accidentally wanders into them, if he possesses a sensitive soul, will hear a heavenly ringing, but if his soul is insensitive, he will not hear anything and will experience an insuperable desire to leave that place as soon as possible and never return to it again.

When she read the words “heavenly ringing,” Pelagia felt a chilly shiver run down her spine. However, the most serious shock was still to come:

Woe unto him who shall find himself in a Special Cave at the hour of dawn if a red rooster shall crow nearby, for both the soul and the body of one who has heard this cockcrow is suspended in the space between worlds, where there is no passage of time
(in intermundis ubi non est aemanacio temporis)
and may disappear for all eternity or else be cast out in another time and even in another Special Cave.

The aforementioned worthy individual from Innsbruck told how a certain dealer in poultry, overtaken by bad weather, decided to spend the night in such a cave, unaware that it was Special. He had with him a cage in which there was a rooster and some chickens. And this man entered the cave on the evening of the day before the Day of the Resurrection of the Holy Virgin, but he emerged three months earlier on the Day of the Discovery of the Holy Cross and, moreover, from a different cave, located on land held by King James of Scotland, and he made his way home, begging for alms for exactly three months, so that he returned to his native parts on exactly the Day of the Resurrection of the Holy Virgin, and nobody believed him when he said that he had been in the kingdom of Scotland, although this dealer had the reputation of being an honest man.

And I have also heard tell of a certain hunter from Zealand by the name of Rip who heard a rooster crowing from an underground burrow, realized that a fox must have carried the rooster away, and went in to get the fox’s skin. He came back out only a very short time later, but when he went back to the village nobody recognized him, because he had been away for twenty years.

And a certain Ligurian merchant, on returning from the land of Cathay, told the noble gentleman Klaus von Weiler, who is well known to me (it was in the town of Lubeck, in the victualing house Under the Ship, in the presence of witnesses), that the people of Cathay had told him, the merchant, about a certain fisherman from the kingdom of Japan, which lies in the Ocean-Sea close to the land of the tsar Ioann. This fisherman, while gathering oysters, entered a sea cave at dawn, just as a red turtledove cried out, of the kind that announce the arrival of day in the country of Japan instead of cockerels, as a punishment for the local inhabitants not following the Christian faith, and this fisherman fell asleep for a short time, but it transpired that he had slept for all of eighty-eight years, and they would not admit him into his native village, because nobody there remembered him, and he wandered around various places, and those Chinese people had seen him themselves when they sailed to Japan for gold, of which there are immense amounts in that kingdom and it costs no more than silver or even copper.

And concerning the question of why the crowing of a red rooster produces such a remarkable effect on the soul, I have written in
Disputado ypothetica de rubri galli statu preelectu
(A Conjectural Discourse on the Select Nature of the Red Rooster) and so I shall not write again about that, but shall instead move on to

Chapter XXXIX, Which Treats of the Cultivation in
Caves of Edible Mushrooms

Let it be said that on reading about the red rooster, Pelagia leaped off her chair and read to the end of the chapter standing up, such was the degree of her excitement. Running on through sheer inertia to read of mushrooms as well, she soon realized that there was no mention of Special Caves in this chapter. She leafed through the volume carefully all the way to the end, hoping to come across some further mention of the “Conjectural Discourse,” but failed to find anything. Then she furiously slammed the book shut and went dashing to His Eminences study.

Mitrofanii looked around in amazement. Never before had his spiritual daughter burst in on him at this hour of sacred solitude, and without even knocking.

“Your Eminence … the ‘Discourse on the Red Rooster’?” the nun blurted out.

The bishop took a moment to come down to earth from his exalted thoughts. “Eh?” he asked rather inelegantly.

“The treatise on the red rooster, written by that same Adalbert, where is it?” Pelagia asked impatiently.

“On what rooster?” the bishop asked, overcome by even greater astonishment. “What is wrong with you, my daughter? Do you have a fever?”

When he understood what the nun was seeking, he explained that apart from the
Treatise on Caves
, no other works by Adalbert the Beloved had survived to our times. The monastery in which the mystic lived and died had been burned by the soldiers of Count Nassau during the religious wars. This composition was the only to survive, and that was owing to a fortunate coincidence—the manuscript had been at the binder’s. This was the first time Mitrofanii had heard that Adalbert had produced a work about the rooster.

“In the fifteenth century it was fashionable to ascribe marvelous properties to various animals,” His Eminence went on to say. “Some of the scholars of those times were obsessed by the idea of duality. In other words, that the Lord created everything in pairs: man and woman, black and white, sun and moon, heat and cold. They tried to find a pairing for the human race in the animal kingdom—some kind of beast chosen and marked out by the Lord on a level with man. Some proposed the ants for this role, some the dolphins, and some the unicorn. Judging from the title of the work, Adalbert was an apologist for the chosen status of roosters, but why red ones in particular, God alone knows. The proposal of ants is understandable enough, as an anthill really does resemble human society. The reason for dolphins is clear, too—they are intelligent. The medieval authors had never actually seen a unicorn, so they could imagine anything they liked about them. But what is the point of a rooster? A quarrelsome, stupid bird that does nothing but jump on hens and screech?

“Ah, but no,” continued the bishop, raising one finger. “Roosters have been regarded in a special light since ancient times, during the pre-Christian period. And this attitude is particularly common everywhere the species
Gallus domesticus
, the domestic cock, is to be found. To the Chinese, for instance, it embodies the principle of
yang
, that is, courage, benevolence, dignity, and fidelity. And a rooster with red feathers is also a symbol of the sun. If we turn our gaze to a completely different corner of the planet, to the ancient Celts, for them a red rooster was an embodiment of the gods of the Underground. In Greco-Roman culture a rooster is a harbinger of renewal. And in general, in a majority of mythologies this bird is linked with the gods of the dawn, light, the fire of heaven—in other words, with the inception of new life. The rooster drives out the night and the darkness, fear, and blindness that accompany it.”

Improvised lectures of this kind, sometimes given on the most unlikely of pretexts, were a favorite hobbyhorse of Mitrofanii’s, and Pelagia listened to them every time with great interest, but never before had she listened as avidly as she did now.

“Let us take Christianity,” His Eminence continued. “In our religion the feathered creature that interests you also holds a special status. The rooster is a symbol of light. He greets the rising of the Christ-Sun who puts the powers of darkness to flight. At the festival of Easter, when we remember the Passion of Christ, the rooster signifies the Resurrection. Are you aware that the Cross, now the generally accepted symbol of Christianity, appeared only relatively recently, in the mid-fifth century? Until that time, Christians used other symbols, very frequently a rooster, which is an image of the Son of God Who came to awaken mankind. Nor should we forget the prophecy of the wise Ecclesiastes: ‘And man shall rise at the crowing of the cock, and the daughters of song shall be silent’—that is to say, it is a cockerel that shall announce the Judgment Day to men.”

The longer Pelagia listened to Mitrofanii’s learned speechifying, the more thoughtful her expression became, so that by the end her gaze seemed to have turned entirely inward, and when the bishop finished, the nun did not ask any more questions. She bowed to thank him for his instruction, apologized for distracting His Eminence from his writing, and took her leave until the following day.

The lair of the Cyclops

THE HOLY SISTER was intending to leave the episcopal center the same way she had entered—not by the long way through the yard and the main gates, but by the short way, through the garden gate, to which she had a key of her own.

The lights in the windows of the communal block had already been extinguished and not even the lamp beside the front porch was burning, but there was a bright crescent moon shining in the sky and it was a clear night. There was a smell of young foliage in the air, and the fountain could be heard gurgling in the avenue of apple trees, and in response, the mood of intense concentration that had held the nun in its tight grip began to ease slightly.

The bishop’s garden was regarded as one of the sights of the town and was maintained in exemplary condition. The snow-white pathways, covered with a special fine-grained sand, were swept several times a day, and so Pelagia had the feeling that she was walking across the Milky Way, not over the ground. She even felt ashamed to leave the trail of her own tracks on this image of beauty and tried to keep to the very edge.

Suddenly she saw footprints ahead of her, right in the very center of the snow-white strip. Someone had walked this way very recently, after the late evening sweeping.

Who could it have been, Pelagia thought absentmindedly, her thoughts still occupied with caves and red roosters. Not many people were permitted to stroll in the garden, especially at a late hour. Father Userdov? No, the cleric’s stride would be far shorter, for it was restricted by a cassock, Pelagia deduced. She adjusted the spectacles on her nose, still thinking her own thoughts, but at the same time looking at the tracks, which led toward the garden gate.

Suddenly the holy sister gasped and went down on all fours, almost pressing her nose against the surface of the ground. Then she gasped again, more loudly. Square toes! That outline of the heel! And if you looked closer, you could see three rhomboids!

The nun’s heart leaped in her chest. He had been here! Recently! Perhaps even only a moment ago! He had left through the little gate.

She jumped up and dashed back toward the building, but immediately turned back again. Before she could wake up the servants, he would be gone! And there would not be any tracks on the street, with its surface of cobblestones. What if he was still close by, and she could follow him?

Gathering up the hem of her habit, Pelagia dashed forward—not along the tracks, but beside, in order not to trample them. She didn’t stop to think what this sudden appearance of Wolf-Tail in the episcopal center might mean.