Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (27 page)

“Is that why you threw that gentleman out?”

“It’s written all over his ugly mug that he’s a kike. I tell you, I’ve got an eye for it. They can burn me at the stake, but I won’t stand for any blasphemy!”

Pelagia assumed an expression of total sympathy with such self-sacrificing determination, but aloud she remarked:

“However, our church does welcome new converts, including those from the Jewish faith …”

“Not the church, not the church, but the fools in the church! They’ll weep for it some day, but it will be too late. Letting a black sheep into a flock of white ones is either plain stupidity or the prompting of the Devil.”

The priest went on to elucidate this not entirely clear allegory: “There are white sheep, which graze on the slopes of heaven, close to the gaze of the Lord God. And there are black sheep, whose pastures are the lowlands of the earth, where the thorns and the tares grow. The white sheep are the Christians, the black ones are the Jews. Let the Yids eat their prickles, just as long as they don’t try to join our flock and spoil the whiteness of the fleece. It was said at the Sixth Ecumenical Council: go not to a Jew for healing, do not wash with him in the bathhouse, do not take him for your friend. And we are God’s sheepdogs—the reason we exist is to make sure that God’s flock doesn’t mingle with the mangy sheep. If a sheep from another flock creeps across to our pasture, we sink our fangs in its legs and give it a good hiding, to teach the rest of them a lesson.”

“And what if it’s the other way around?” Pelagia asked with an innocent air. “If someone wants to move from the white flock to the black one? There are some people who reject Christianity and accept Judaism. For instance, I’ve heard talk about the sect of the Foundlings …”

“Traitors to Christ!” Father Agapit thundered. “And that leader of theirs, Manuila, is a devil sent from the depths of hell to kill the Son of Man for a second time! That Manuila ought to be set in the ground with an aspen stake stuck through him!”

Polina Andreevna’s voice became even quieter and more velvety. “Father, I’ve also heard that this bad man supposedly set out to come to the Holy Land.”

“He’s here, here! He has come to mock and sneer at the Sepulchre of Our Lord. He was seen at Easter, confusing the pilgrims with his blandishments, and he seduced some! Even the Jews wanted to stone him, even they were nauseated by him! He ran off and hid, the snake. Oh, I wish the brothers would come here!”

“Do you have brothers?” the pilgrim asked naïvely.

Agapit smiled menacingly. “Yes, I do. And many of them. Not blood brothers—soul brothers. Knights of the Orthodox faith, God’s defenders. Have you heard of the Oprichniks of Christ?”

Polina Andreevna smiled, as if the priest had said something extremely agreeable. “Yes, I read about those people in the newspapers. Some said good things about them, and others said bad things. They called them bandits and thugs.”

“Lies from the Yids and Yid-lovers! Ah, if only you knew, my daughter, how cruelly I am oppressed here! It’s all fine and well for our lads in Russia—it’s our own earth, it warms them from below, and they have the faithful brotherhood at their side. We are strong there. But to be alone in foreign parts is a hard and bitter lot.”

This confession agitated the tenderhearted pilgrim terribly.

“What?” she exclaimed in concern. “Do you really not have any fellow thinkers here in the Holy Land? Then who will protect the white sheep from the black? Where are these Oprichniks of yours?”

“They’re where they ought to be, in Mother Russia. In Moscow, Kiev, Poltava, Zhitomir.”

“In Zhitomir?” Polina Andreevna asked, very interested.

“Yes, the Zhitomir group are faithful knights, militant. They give the Yids no quarter, and they keep an even keener eye on the Yid-lovers. If that Manuila started stirring things up in Zhitomir, or that weasel-face I just flung out of here dared to threaten me, a member of the clergy, their souls would soon be parting company with their bodies!”

The memory of the recent confrontation roused Father Agapit’s temper again. “He’ll complain about me to the archimandrite! And won’t that tyrant be only too delighted! Our Reverence is possessed by the demon of universal tolerance—I’m like a bone stuck in his throat. They’ll drive me out of here, Sister,” the zealot of pure faith complained bitterly. “I don’t suit them, I’m too intransigent. The next time you come to confess, I won’t be here.”

“So you’re entirely alone here?” Polina Andreevna murmured in disappointment and then added, apparently to herself: “Oh, that’s no good, no good at all.”

“What’s no good?” the priest asked in surprise.

At this point the pilgrim wiped all trace of sweetness from her face and gazed fixedly at Father Agapit, feeling as she did so a quite unchristian desire to say something unpleasant to this horrible man—something that would cut him to the quick.

It’s all right, I can do that
, she thought, giving way to temptation.
If I were in my habit, it would be wicked, but in a dress it’s permissible
.

“You wouldn’t happen to have Jewish blood yourself, would you?” Polina Andreevna asked.

“What?”

“You, know, Father, at the university I attended lectures on anthropology. I can tell you for certain that your mother, or perhaps your grandmother, sinned with a Jew. Take a look in the mirror. Your eyes are close-set—an obviously Semitic feature. Your nose is gristly, and your hair has a certain curl to it, the ears are typical, too, and—most important of all—the shape of the skull is absolutely brachycephalic.”

“Absolutely
what
?
”
Father Agapit exclaimed in horror, clutching at his head (which, to be quite precise, was more of the dolichocephalic type).

“No, I don’t think so,” said Pelagia, shaking her head. “I don’t want to risk confessing to a Jew. I think I’ll go and stand in Father Iannuarii’s line.” And she walked out of the tent, feeling very pleased with herself.

AS IT HAPPENED, there was one other pilgrim waiting outside the tent: a peasant in a large felt cap, with a thick beard that grew almost right up to his eyes. “You’d better go to the other priests,” Mrs. Lisitsyna advised him. “Father Agapit is not feeling well.”

The peasant didn’t reply, in fact he turned away—evidently he didn’t want to defile himself by looking at a woman just before confession.

But when the female pilgrim set off, he actually looked around and watched her walk away. And he purred quietly to himself: “Come on now, come on now …”

Something gets into Berdichevsky

MATVEI BENTSIONOVICH WAS quite unrecognizable, he was such a changed man—or so said all his subordinates, and his acquaintances, and his family. What had happened to that customary mild manner, that way of becoming embarrassed so easily over the slightest trifle? That habit of looking to one side when he spoke to you? Of mumbling and peppering his speech with parasitical phrases, all sorts of “you knows,” “with your permissions,” and “to tell the truths”? And finally, that laughable habit of grabbing hold of his long nose when he was in the slightest difficulty and twisting it as if it were a screw or a bolt?

Berdichevsky’s thick-lipped and rather weak mouth was now permanently set in a tight line, his brown
eyes
had acquired the gleam of molten steel and turned partly orange, and his speech had acquired briskness and brevity. In short, this most agreeable and cultured of men had been transformed into the perfect public prosecutor.

The first to experience the transformation undergone by the state counselor were his subordinates. On the morning following Sister Pelagia’s evacuation, their boss had arrived at work at first light, stationed himself in the doorway, watch in hand, and severely rebuked every individual who turned up at the office later than the prescribed time, which had hitherto been regarded by everyone, including the district public prosecutor himself, as a rather arbitrary abstraction. Then one by one Matvei Bentsionovich had summoned the employees attached to the investigative section and given each of them an assignment, one that in itself seemed perfectly clear but was rather vague as far as the overall goal was concerned. Previously the public prosecutor had been in the habit of gathering everyone together and holding forth at length about the strategy and overall picture of an investigation, but this time no explanations were given, the implication being: be so good as to do as you are ordered and not to discuss the matter. The officials had left their chief’s office with intent, sullen expressions, responded to their colleagues’ importunate questions with a dismissive wave of the hand—no time, no time—and rushed off to carry out their instructions. The public prosecutor’s office, hitherto the least busy of the province’s public departments owing to the low level of criminal activity in Zavolzhie, instantly became like the divisional headquarters of some army at the height of maneuvers: the officials no longer crept about like flies, but scuttled around like cockroaches, the doors no longer closed with a discreet “click-click,” but with a deafening crash, and there was now almost always an impatient line for the telegraph apparatus.

The next victim of Berdichevsky’s newly acquired ferocity was the governor himself, Anton Antonovich von Haggenau. Following the public prosecutor’s sudden transformation, he completely stopped visiting the Nobles’ Club, where he had formerly delighted in spending an hour or two analyzing games of chess; but he did not dare to neglect the traditional Tuesday game of whist with the baron. He sat there, unusually taciturn, glancing all the time at his watch. However, when he was playing as His Excellency’s partner against the head of the chamber of commerce, the governor committed a blunder by covering the public prosecutor’s queen with a king. The old Matvei Bentsionovich would simply have said, “Never mind, it’s my fault for confusing you,” but this unrecognizable individual dashed his cards down on the table and called Anton Antonovich a “muddle-head.” The governor fluttered his white Teutonic eyelashes and looked around plaintively at his wife, Ludmila Platonovna.

She had already heard the alarming rumors from the public prosecutor’s office, and so now she decided she would waste no more time, but must call on the prosecutor’s wife, Marya Gavrilovna, straightaway.

She paid the visit and inquired cautiously, over coffee, if Matvei Bentsionovich was well and whether his character might not be adversely affected by the approach of his fortieth birthday, a frontier that many men find very difficult to cross.

He had changed, the public prosecutor’s wife complained. Something seemed to have got into her Motya—he had become irritable, he hardly ate a thing, and he ground his teeth in his sleep. Marya Gavrilovna immediately moved on to issues of more immediate concern: her Kiriusha had chronic diarrhea, and Sonechka was coming down with something, God grant that it wasn’t measles.

“When my Antosha reached forty, he went a bit odd as well,” said Ludmila Platonovna, returning to the subject of husbands. “He gave up smoking his pipe and started rubbing tincture of garlic into his bald patch. But after a year he settled down and moved on to the next stage of life. And everything will be all right for you too, my darling. You just treat him gently, with understanding.”

After her visitor had left, Marya Gavrilovna thought for another ten minutes or so about the sudden misfortune that her husband had suffered. Eventually she decided to bake his favorite poppy-seed roll and leave the rest to the will of the Almighty.

IN THE ENTIRE town of Zavolzhsk, Mitrofanii was the only one who knew the true reason for the public prosecutor’s tense and preoccupied state of mind. Bearing in mind the episode of the boot print that almost cost Pelagia her life, and also the ubiquitous presence of their unknown enemy, they had agreed between them to maintain the strictest possible secrecy.

The disappearance of the headmistress of the diocesan school was explained by medical reasons: the holy sister had supposedly caught a chill in the kidneys from her insane habit of swimming in icy water and been urgently dispatched to the Caucasus to take the waters. The progressive ideologue Svekolkina was running riot in the school, tormenting the poor little girls with decimals and equilateral triangles.

Late in the evening Matvei Bentsionovich would call on Mitrofanii and report in detail about all the measures that had been taken, following which they would open the atlas of the world and try to work out where Pelagia was just at the moment—for some reason this gave both of them inexpressible pleasure. For instance, the bishop would say, “She must be sailing past Kerch. You can see both shorelines there, the Crimea and the Caucasus. And beyond the bay the waves are different, real sea waves.” Or, “She’s sailing across the Sea of Marmora. The sun’s hot there—she’s probably broken out in freckles.” And the bishop and the public prosecutor would smile dreamily, one of them gazing into the corner of the room, and the other looking up at the ceiling.