Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (2 page)

That was how it was done: first take a good look around, get the feel of things, and then, closer to the mooring, do the job, neat and clean. And the most important thing was to sniff out the “dashers.” They were bound to be hanging about, they’d been waiting for the shipping season too. Horses of altogether a different color from Muffin, they were. They didn’t often do any jobs onboard; in their trade there was no point. The only thing the dashers did on the water was select their goose; they plucked and fleeced him later, onshore.

Well, let them, it’s no skin off our nose; the only trouble is that the dashers don’t wander around with a Finnish knife clutched in their teeth, they blend in well, and you could make a mistake. Vasya Rybinsky, a well-respected
razin
, went and lifted a gold watch off a certain estate manager, and the manager turned out not to be a manager at all—he was a dasher, from the Kazan set. They found Vasya afterward and, of course, they busted his head for him, even though it wasn’t Vasya’s fault. That’s the way it is with the dashers—they simply can’t bear for anyone to filch anything from them. And they can’t show their faces in their own crowd again until they’ve got even, for the shame of it.

Muffin started with the boat deck. There were deck passengers there, mostly poor, but in the first place, a chicken pecks one grain at a time, and in the second place, it was in Muffin’s nature to leave the daintiest morsels to last. He ate his food the same way. For instance, if it was buckwheat with crackling, then first he would gather the grain together with his spoon and for the time being arrange the fatty bacon prettily around the edge of his plate. If it was cabbage soup with a marrowbone, he would first sup the broth, next gobble up the cabbage and carrot, then scrape up the meat, and only after that suck the marrow out of the bone.

Anyway, he gave the boat deck a thorough working over, from poop to waist to forecastle. Muffin knew all the shipboard words and fine details better than any sailor, because the sailor doesn’t love the steamer. Hard-drinking soul that he is, he can’t wait to get back ashore and into the tavern, but for a
razin
everything on a ship is useful, everything is interesting.

Sitting huddled together in the bow were people journeying to the Lord’s Sepulchre, about twenty men and women, each with a knotty stick—a pilgrim’s staff—proudly displayed beside himself or herself. The pilgrims were eating bread with salt, washing it down with hot water from tin kettles, and glancing haughtily at the other travelers.

Now, don’t you go putting on such airs
, Muffin told them, speaking to himself.
There’s others more pious than you. They say some pilgrims don’t make their way to Palestine on steamships—they use their own two feet. And once they reach the border of the Promised Land, they crawl the rest of the way on their knees. Now that’s real holiness for you
.

But he left the godly travelers alone and moved on. What could you get from them anyway? Of course, each of them had five rubles tucked away, and getting it was an absolute cinch, but you had to be completely shameless to do that. And a man couldn’t live without a conscience, even in the thieving trade. Maybe you needed it even more in the thieving trade than in any other—otherwise you could go to the devil completely.

Muffin had long ago drawn up a rule for himself, so he could keep his peace of mind: if you can see someone’s a good person or in misfortune, don’t take anything from him, even if his wallet is sticking out and just begging to be pinched. It doesn’t make sense. You might end up thirty rubles richer, or even three hundred, but you’d lose your self-respect. Muffin had seen plenty of thieves who had lowered themselves like that. Human garbage who had sold their souls for crumpled banknotes. Is the price of self-respect three hundred rubles? You’ve got to be joking! There probably isn’t enough money in the entire world for that.

He hung around some German emigrants, eyeing them keenly. This group had to be on their way to Argentina—that was the fashion among the Germans now. Supposedly they were given as much land as they wanted there, and not taken for soldiers. Your German was like your Yid, he didn’t like to serve our tsar. And they’d taken deck tickets, the cheapskates. The sausage-eaters had plenty of money, but they were too tightfisted.

Muffin sat down under a lifeboat and listened to the German conversation for a while, but it just made him spit. They spoke just like they were deliberately playing the fool:
Guk-mal-di-da
.

One of them, with a red face, finished smoking his pipe and put it down on the deck, real close. Well, Muffin couldn’t resist it and he picked up the nice little thing right away, didn’t put it off. It was foggy now, but who knew how things would turn out later?

He inspected the pipe (porcelain, with little figures—a real sight for sore eyes) and stuck it in his swag bag, a small canvas sack with a string for hanging it over his shoulder.

A good start.

Sitting farther on were some Dukhobors, reading a godly book out loud. Muffin left them alone. He knew they were traveling to Canada. Quiet people, they never gave offense to anyone, they suffered for the truth. The writer Count Tolstoy was for them. Muffin had read one of his books—“How much land does a man need?” It was funny, about what fools the peasants were.

All right then, Dukhobors, sail on, and God be with you.

From the waist deck all the way to the poop deck it was nothing but Yids, but they weren’t in a crowd, either, they were in separate groups. That was no surprise to Muffin. He knew what this nation was like, always squabbling with one another.

It was the same as with the Russians: the ones most highly regarded were the ones sailing to Palestine. Muffin stood there for a while and listened to a “Palestinian” Yid boasting to an “American” one: “No offense intended,” he said, “but we’re traveling for the sake of our souls, not our bellies.” And the one going to America swallowed it, he didn’t try to talk back at all, just hung his head.

Muffin took a folding ruler, a tailor’s rule that is, out of the Palestinian’s pocket. It wasn’t a really fat prize, but he could give it to the widow Glasha, she sewed skirts for women, and she’d say thank you. He took the Americans watch. A rubbish watch it was too, brass, worth maybe a ruble and a half.

He stashed the loot in his sack and slipped into a little group of young lads with sidelocks, some of them gabbling away in their own tongue but most of them talking Russian. All skinny, with sharp Adam’s apples and squeaky voices. They were making a din because a rabbi, a Yiddish priest, had come up from the cabin deck to see them and they’d gone dashing over to him.

The rabbi was distinguished-looking, in a cap with fur trim and a jacket right down to his knees. A huge, long, gray beard and sidelocks like another two beards, and thick eyebrows like another two tiny little beards. The little Yids had crowded around him and were complaining. Muffin was there in a flash—the more crowded it got, the easier it made things for him.

“Rabbi, you told us we would go sailing like Noah’s chosen ones on the ark! But this is some kind of
hoishek!”
a freckle-faced little Jew squeaked. “There’s everyone you can think of here! Never mind the
Amerikaners
, there are godless
apikoireses
too, Zionists, and goys eating pig fat”—he meant the Germans, Muffin guessed—“and even—pah!—goys pretending to be Jews!”

“Yes, yes, the Foundlings! And they say their prophet himself is with them! The one you said such terrible things about!” said the others, taking up the theme.

“Manuila?” The rabbi’s eyes flashed. “He’s here? That tail of Satan! You listen to me! Don’t go anywhere near him! Or the Foundlings either!”

One of the complainers leaned down to an ear overgrown with fine gray hairs and whispered, but not exactly quietly—Muffin could hear every word: “And they say
they’re
here. The Oprichniks of Christ.” The words were uttered in a fearful, hissing whisper, and all the others immediately fell silent. “They want to kill us! Rabbi, they won’t let us get away alive! We ought to have stayed at home!”

Muffin had read about the Oprichniks of Christ in the newspaper. Everybody knew that in some cities, where the people didn’t have enough to keep them busy, they went rushing off to beat the Jews at the slightest excuse. Why not beat them and rob them, if the authorities permit it? But in addition to the usual plunderers, a while ago the so-called Oprichniks had appeared, serious people who had sworn to give the Yids and their sympathizers no quarter. And supposedly they had already killed someone—some barrister and a student. Never mind the barrister, they were all shameless hucksters, but what did they have against the student? He must have had a father and mother too. Anyway all that business was a long way off. On the Mother River, praise be to Thee, O Lord, there weren’t any Oprichniks, and there had never been any pogroms.

While the little Yids kicked up their din, Muffin went through the pockets of one-two-three, but all the gelt he got for his pains was a five-kopeck piece and a twenty-kopeck coin.

The Jewish priest listened and listened, then suddenly stamped his foot. “Silence!”

It went quiet. The distinguished-looking old man jerked his spectacles off his nose and stuck them in his pocket (the frames glinted—could they be gold?). He took a fat little book bound in leather out of another pocket and opened it. He cackled something menacing in his own language, and then repeated it in Russian—clearly there were some Yids there who didn’t understand much of their own talk.

“And the Lord said unto Moses: ‘How long shall this wicked company murmur against Me? The murmurs of the sons of Israel, which they do murmur against Me, I do hear. Say unto them: I live, and all you who have murmured against me shall not enter into the land on which I have sworn to settle you.’ Have you heeded what was said by Moses, ye of little faith?” With his white beard and one finger raised in the air, the rabbi himself looked like Moses in a picture that Muffin had seen in the Bible.

They all bowed. Muffin also leaned over and stuck his arm between the two standing in front of him. His arm was special, with almost no bones at all, it worked on cartilage. It could bend all manner of ways, and when necessary it even stretched out much farther than was humanly possible. With this remarkable arm of his, Muffin reached as far as the rabbi’s pocket, hooked out the spectacles with the end of his little finger, and squatted down on his haunches. Then he just slipped back into the fog.

He tested the spectacles with his tooth. Sweet Lord, they were gold!

And the Jewish priest rumbled on behind the bent backs: “If I don’t banish anyone who grumbles and is fainthearted, my name’s not Aron Shefarevich! Take a look at yourselves, you shriveled tapeworms! What would the Oprichniks want with you? Who has any interest in you?”

Muffin didn’t bother to listen to any more—he went while the going was good.

The fog had turned so thick you could barely even see the railings. The
razin
started slipping along them.

“Ood-ooo!”
came the deafening hoot from above. So the deckhouse was here.

And when the steamer finished hooting, strange words were borne to Muffin’s ears. Up ahead someone was singing:

Breath to my lips she did provide,
And then upon her flaming torch did breathe,
And in that moment’s madness did divide
Into the Here and There the whole world’s breadth
She left—and all was cold around …

“Stop that howling, Coliseum,” another voice interrupted, a sharp, mocking voice. “Try strengthening those muscles of yours instead. What did I give you that rubber ball for?”

There was a breath of wind from the left bank, and as the shroud of white thinned, Muffin saw an entire assembly under the stairway of the wheelhouse: young lads sitting there, about twenty of them, and two girls with them as well.

It was an odd sort of group, not the kind you saw very often. Among the young men there were many with spectacles and curly hair, and some with big noses—they looked like young Jews too, but at the same time they didn’t. They were far too jolly, with smiles that reached back to their ears. One was a bit older, with broad shoulders, a singlet under his open blouse, and a pipe clenched in his teeth. He had to be a seagoing man, with that beard and no mustache—that was the way sailors shaved, so as not to singe themselves with the embers in their pipe.

The girls were even odder. Or rather, not girls—young ladies. The first was slim, with white skin and huge eyes that took up half her face, but for some reason the little fool had cut her hair short like a boy’s. And it was grand hair, too—thick, with a golden shimmer to it. The second was short and round, and the way she was dressed was a real fright: on her head she had a white canvas cap with a narrow brim, instead of a skirt she was wearing a pair of green shorts, so that her legs were all open to view, and on her feet she had white socks and flimsy sandals with leather straps.

Muffin blinked his eyes at this unusual sight. Well, did you ever! You could see her ankles, and her fat thighs, covered in goose pimples from the cold.

And it wasn’t just the legs he found interesting.