Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (29 page)

“I beg your pardon for this lecture, Your Eminence, I have only given it in order to paint the full picture. And even more importantly—to justify my decision.”

“Are you going to go to Zhitomir?” the bishop asked with a shrewd glance.

“Yes. I want to take a look at the staff captain’s creditors.”

Mitrofanii thought for a little while and nodded in approval.

“Well, that makes sense. But didn’t you say there were two possible explanations?”

The state counselor brightened up at that. He evidently liked the second explanation much more than the first.

“We know that the pale of settlement, which includes the Volynsk Province, provides the stage for every kind of anti-Semitic organization, including the most extreme of all, the so-called Oprichniks of Christ. These Jew-haters are not content with pogroms, they will even resort to political assassinations. The Oprichniks must hate the prophet Manuila even more than they hate those who were born Jews—after all, in their terms he is a traitor to the faith and the nation, for he lures Russians away from Orthodoxy into Yiddishness. So I wondered whether it was the Oprichniks who had bought Ratsevich out of jail. What if they had decided to make use of a man whose life the Jews had destroyed?”

“Well, now, that’s very possible,” Mitrofanii admitted.

“But then it turns out that I have to go to Zhitomir in any case. Whether we proceed on the first explanation or the second one, that is where I must look for the trail.”

“It is dangerous, though,” said the bishop, alarmed. “If your reasoning is correct, then these are desperate people—both the first group and the second. If they discover why you have come visiting, they will kill you too.”

“How can they find out?” Matvei Bentsionovich asked with a cunning smile. “They’re not expecting me and they don’t know me. And it’s not me we should be thinking about, Your Eminence, but
her
.”

The bishop exclaimed plaintively, “Ah, how I envy you, Matiusha! You are going to
do
something. And I can’t even help in any way. Except by praying.”

“Except?” the public prosecutor echoed, shaking his head in mock reproach. “Such belittling of the power of prayer, and from the lips of a prince of the church!”

Matvei Bentsionovich stood to be blessed. He was about to kiss the bishop’s hand, but instead he found himself embraced around the shoulders and pressed so tightly against the prelate’s broad chest that he could scarcely breathe.

EVIDENTLY BERDICHEVSKY REALLY had undergone some fundamental internal change. As he prepared to go to Zhitomir, he did not feel in the least concerned about the dangers, whereas the former Matvei Bentsionovich, with his overactive imagination, had frequently quailed in the face of trials of courage that were quite insignificant or sometimes even laughable, such as making a speech at the club or a trivial visit to the dentist.

Not fear, but feverish impatience and an inexplicable feeling that time was wasting—these were the feelings by which the public prosecutor of Zavolzhsk was possessed as he said good-bye to the members of his family.

He mechanically repeated the sign of the cross over all thirteen children (the five youngest were asleep, since the hour was already late) and kissed his wife perfunctorily.

But then the stern Marya Gavrilovna suddenly did something very odd. She flung her plump arms around Berdichevsky’s neck and said in a quiet little voice: “Matiushka, take care now. You know without you my life means nothing.”

Matvei Bentsionovich was taken aback. In the first place, he had no idea that his wife had any suspicions of that kind. And in the second place, Marya Gavrilovna had always been very sparing when it came to pouring out her soul—in fact, you might say she had never had any use for it.

The public prosecutor blushed and turned awkwardly, then half walked, half ran out into the street, where the official carriage was waiting.

A
Yiddishe kop
, or “the White-Haired Angel”

THE CLOSER HE came to Zhitomir, the stronger the strange feeling became. As if Matvei Bentsionovich had got stuck on rails from which it was impossible to turn off or to turn back until you reached the final destination, which was not for you to choose and whose name you did not even know.

And in addition, here and there along this route that Matvei Bentsionovich was taking for the first time in his life and on which he found himself by pure chance, there were signposts that seemed intended especially for him. As if Providence did not entirely trust the state counselors intellectual abilities and felt it necessary to send him signals: that’s right, this is your path, have no doubt.

To begin with, the train on which Berdichevsky traveled from Nizhni Novgorod brought him to the town of Berdichev, where he had to change for the narrow-gauge line to Zhitomir.

And when Matvei Bentsionovich arrived in the capital of the province of Volynsk, it turned out that both of the institutions in which he was interested—the prison committee and the police department—were located on Great Berdichevsky Street.

By this time the public prosecutor was completely in the grip of the mystical feeling that he was not
going
anywhere, but
being sent
, and so he kept his ears pricked and his eyes wide open to make quite sure that he would not, God forbid, miss some important sign.

And what do you think happened?

At the railway station he happened by chance to overhear a conversation between two Jewish businessmen. They were complaining about how hard it had become to live in the town and what a disaster it was when the chief of police was a Jew-baiter. Until that moment Berdichevsky had been intending to direct his steps in the first instance to the prison committee, for which purpose he had come equipped with a letter from the chancellery of the governor of Zavolzhsk, but now he made a change to his initial plan: the Jew-baiting police chief was where he had to begin.

He took a room in the finest hotel, the Bristol, where there was a “Mixe-Geneste” telephone gleaming on the counter, with a directory of all the numbers in the town—only one page long—proudly displayed alongside it.

A porter with plump lips and a dripping nose carried the new arrival’s suitcase up to the counter, where the pompous receptionist sat in state, a gold chain trailed across his belly.

“Just arrived on the train, Naum Solomonovich,” the porter with a cold announced, speaking though his nose. “I was there in a flash, just like that. Come and stay with us at the Bristol, I told him.”

“Well done, Kolya,” the receptionist praised him.

His keen glance took in Matvei Bentsionovich’s good-quality coat and rested for a moment on his face. Then he smiled sweetly.

But Berdichevsky was looking at the telephone. The state counselor perceived even this attribute of progress as a sign from on high. There it was, the police chief’s number: “No. 3-05, Court Counselor Gvozdikov, Sem. Lik.” “Sem.” was Semyon, but what exactly “Lik.” stood for was not clear.

Nonetheless, he twirled the handle and asked the young woman to connect him. He was acting on inspiration, not logic. He stated his name, position, and rank and agreed on a time to meet, and then put the phone down feeling very pleased with himself—the Zhitomir investigation seemed to be getting off to a lively start.

But then Berdichevsky suffered an unexpected blow.

The receptionist, who had already opened the guest book and even dipped the pen in the inkwell, said respectfully: “Welcome, Your Excellency. What an honor for our establishment. How good to see that a Jew is a man of importance.”

The doorman who was loitering close by (looking precisely as a doorman is supposed to, dressed in livery and with a full beard, but also wearing long sidelocks), added in Yiddish:
“Af alie yiden gesucht!”
(“May all Jews do as well!”)

“What makes you think that I am a Jew?” Berdichevsky asked, stupefied.

The receptionist smiled. “Glory be to God, this isn’t the first year I’ve spent looking at people.”

“Ah, general, of course, anyone could tell just by looking at you
—a yiddishe kop!”
^*
the doorman added.

Matvei Bentsionovich cursed his own lack of caution. That very day every Jew in Zhitomir would know about the intriguing new arrival, and naturally, things would be exaggerated. He had already become a “general” and “Your Excellency,” and before evening he would probably be transformed into a minister. “Porter!” the public prosecutor called to the man with the runny nose. “Take my suitcase and call a cab!”

“Ai-ai-ai, have you forgotten something?” the receptionist inquired, flustered.

“Yes, I’m going back to the station,” Berdichevsky snapped, already on his way out.

And he heard the receptionist remark loudly in Yiddish to the doorman with the sidelocks: “These baptized Jews are even worse than the goys.”

The doorman replied in Hebrew, quoting the terrible words of the prophet Isaiah, which Matvei Bentsionovich had often heard in his childhood from his own father: “Death unto all apostates and sinners, and those who have abandoned the Lord shall be annihilated.”

His mood was completely spoiled.

•   •   •

ON THE CENTRAL thoroughfare, Kiev Street, the alarmed public prosecutor stopped in at a
salon de beauté
and bought the patented American hair dye “White-Haired Angel.”

He found another hotel—the Versailles (which was not at all like Versailles)—and walked into the lobby with his hat down over his eyes and his coat collar turned up.

Once in his room he stood at the sink and began transforming himself into a white-haired angel—and he did not forget his eyebrows.

Ah, he ought to have thought of it sooner! This place was the pale of settlement, not God’s own city of Zavolzhsk, where they didn’t know how to tell a person’s nationality from his face so smartly.

The result surpassed all expectations. Matvei Bentsionovich had been a little concerned about his flagrantly non-Slavonic nose, but his newfound blondness even dealt with that; what had been a massive Jewish hook now seemed a haughty bowsprit, with an aquiline, even thoroughbred profile to it.

Surveying his transformed features in the mirror, the state counselor discerned in them all the signs of aristocratic degeneracy, including even the mournful hollows below the cheekbones and the crooked chin. But then, what was so surprising about that? Every Jew, even the most feeble specimen, had a family tree so long that the Romanovs and the Haps-burgs could well envy it.

To complete his battle paint before he set off on the warpath, Berdichevsky changed into his formal short caftan, with the bright stars of a fifth-rank nobleman gleaming on its shoulder-tabs (the Jew-baiting police chief was only a “court counselor,” that is, a nobleman of the seventh rank).

He peered at himself from the right and the left and felt perfectly satisfied.

As one nobleman to another

“BUT PERMIT ME to inquire, Mr. Berdichevsky, what interest do you, a public prosecutor from a distant province, have in information concerning the Zhitomir branch of the Oprichniks of Christ?” Semyon Likurgovich Gvozdikov asked in a quiet voice. The police chief was a flabby gentleman with puffy cheeks and an unhealthy yellow tinge to the circles under his eyes.

Matvei Bentsionovich disliked absolutely everything about this reply: the fact that it had been uttered following a lengthy silence, that it was an answer phrased as a question, and—worst of all—the intonation with which the police chief had pronounced that dubious surname.

“What was that you called me?” the visitor asked with a frown. “Ber-di-chev-sky? Do I look like some Jewish shopkeeper from Berdichev?
Berg-Dichevsky”
he rapped out, raising one eyebrow as if he were setting an invisible monocle in his eye socket. “When my great-grandfather married my great-grandmother, the sole surviving heir of the Dichevskys, it was decided to combine the two family crests, so that the ancient line should not die out.”

Horror glinted in the court counselor’s eyes and his plump little face flushed bright red. Gvozdikov’s torment at his own blunder was so great that he even sat at attention in his chair.

“My God, in the name of… A thousand apologies … I misheard you on the telephone. You know, the connection is terrible!”

In order to accentuate the effect, one more blow was required. And therefore Matvei Bentsionovich dismissed the laughable misunderstanding with a casual wave of his hand, lowered his voice confidentially, and leaned forward. “Tell me—‘Gvozdikov’—is that a noble name?”

The police chief turned an even deeper crimson. “No, I actually come from the merchant class. As yet I have only earned a personal title …”

The public prosecutor pretended to hesitate, as if he were wondering whether he ought to continue this conversation with such a lowly born individual. He sighed and chose the magnanimous course: “Never mind. God willing, your service will earn you a hereditary title. The edifice of the Russian state is founded on us nobles. The sovereign himself”—he pointed to a portrait, of a size which compensated for its quality of execution—“is ultimately only the leading member of the nobility. It was our forebears who elected Mikhail Romanov tsar. We bear responsibility. Do you agree?”