Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (58 page)

She went back out into the street and said to Salakh, “Let’s go down that way. We’ll wait.”

He led the horses down to the road, where a gap that had formed in a tumbledown wall was overhung by the thick branches of trees, so that the cart could only be spotted if you knew where it was.

Salakh asked in a whisper, “Who we wait for, eh?”

She did not answer, merely waved her hand for him to be quiet.

Strangely enough, during those minutes of waiting, Pelagia did not have the slightest doubt that Emmanuel would come. But this did not lessen her agitation; on the contrary, it intensified it.

The nun’s lips moved as she silently recited a prayer: “How beloved is Thy dwelling-place, Lord of power! My soul hungers and thirsts to see the courts of the Lord, my heart and my flesh delight in the living God …” The act of prayer arose of its own accord, without any involvement of her reason. She reached the words “For one day in Your courts is better than thousands” before she realized that she was reciting the prayer for the transition from the earthly life to the Eternal Dwelling.

The realization set her trembling. Why had her soul suddenly thrown up the psalm that was prescribed for those standing on the threshold of eternity?

But before Pelagia could recite another, less frightening prayer, a man wearing a long robe and carrying a staff turned off the road into the steep little street.

That was all the nun had time to make out, because the next instant, the moon was hidden behind a small cloud and it went completely dark.

The wayfarer walked by very close, only about five paces away, but the nun still could not tell if he was the one she was waiting for.

She watched him to see if he would turn in to the garden.

He did.

So it
was
him!

And then the moon escaped from its brief imprisonment and Pelagia was able to see the tangled shoulder-length hair and the white robe with a dark belt.

“It is he!” she exclaimed aloud and was about to go rushing after the man who had gone into the park when something absolutely unexpected happened.

Someone grabbed hold of her hand and swung her sharply back around.

Pelagia and Salakh had been so absorbed in watching the back of the man with the staff that they hadn’t noticed someone else creeping up on them.

The man’s appearance was terrifying. A fierce face with flat features and a beard, broad shoulders, the butt of a carbine sticking up from behind his back. He had an Arab scarf wound around his head.

The stranger held Salakh by the scruff of the neck with one hand and gripped Pelagia’s elbow with the other.

“Who are you people?” he hissed in Russian. “Why are you hiding? Are you plotting something against
him?.”

As if he had only just noticed that she was a woman, he released her elbow, but he seized the Palestinian by the collar with both hands, so fiercely that he almost lifted him off the ground.

“Russians, we Russians,” Salakh babbled, terrified.

“And what if you are Russians!” the terrifying man growled. “All sorts of people want to kill
him—
Russians too! Why are you here? Were you lying in wait for
him?
. Tell me the truth, or …”

He brandished a massive fist and the poor Palestinian squeezed his eyes tight shut. The mighty hero easily held him suspended with just one huge hand.

Recovering from the initial shock, Pelagia said quickly: “Yes, we were waiting for Emmanuel. I need to talk to him, I have some important news for him. And you … who are you? Are you one of the Foundlings?”

“The Foundlings are busy saving their own souls,” the bearded man said with gentle derision. “But I have to save
him
. Never mind about my soul… just as long as
he
is alive. And who are you?”

“Sister Pelagia, a nun.”

The reaction to this seemingly inoffensive introduction was unexpected. The stranger flung Salakh to the ground and grabbed hold of the nun’s neck.

“A nun! A black raven! Was it him, that walking skeleton, who sent you? It was him, him, who else! Tell me, or I’ll rip your throat out!”

Pelagia watched numbly as the blade of a knife glittered in front of her face.

“Who is ‘he’?” the half-strangled woman asked, struggling to understand what was going on.

“Don’t give me that, you snake! I mean him, the one in charge of all you black-robed vermin! You all spy for him, all you weasels work for him.”

The one in charge of the black-robed vermin—the head of the order of clergy?

“You mean Chief Procurator Pobedin?”

“Aha!” the bearded man cried triumphantly. “You confessed! Lie down!” he said, kicking Salakh, who was attempting to sit up. “I saved Manuila from the old vampire once, and I’ll save him again!” His broad mouth spread out into a crooked-toothed smile. “I expect Kistyantin Petrovich hasn’t forgotten the servant of God Trofim Dubenko?”

“Who?” Pelagia asked hoarsely.

“What, didn’t he tell you how he falsely accused the holy man of stealing and clapped him in jail? And he put me there to guard him. All those years I served Kistyantin Petrovich like a dog on a chain! And I’d have died as a dog, if I hadn’t risen to the dignity of a human being! ‘Trofimushka,’ he says to me, ‘keep an eye on this thief and troublemaker, he’s a dangerous man. I don’t trust the police guards. Watch him in the station until tomorrow, don’t let him do any talking to anyone, and in the morning I’ll get a warrant to move him to the Schlisselburg Fortress.”

Pelagia remembered Sergei Sergeevichs story about the gold clock stolen from the Chief Procurator. So this was what really had happened! There never was any theft, and Konstantin Petrovich had not magnanimously released the alleged thief—quite the opposite, in fact. The highly intelligent Chief Procurator had perceived some serious danger for himself in the wandering prophet. He had begun by locking him in a cell in a police station and setting his underling to guard him, and then taken measures to shut him away him more securely—Pobedin’s resources in this regard were well known.

“You didn’t allow Emmanuel to talk to the other guards, but you talked to him yourself, didn’t you?” the holy sister said, more as a statement than a question. “Please let go of me, I’m not your enemy.”

“Yes, I spoke to him. In all my life nobody had ever spoken to me like that. Kistyantin Petrovich is a great master at the tongue-wagging, but everything he says against Manuila is a load of chaff.”

Trofim Dubenko’s fingers were still around the nun’s throat, but they were squeezing less tightly now, and the hand holding the knife had been lowered.

“And you took the prisoner out of the police cell? But how did you manage that?”

“Simple. At night they only had one man in uniform sitting at the door. I gave him a tap on the back of the neck with my fist and that was that. And then I said to Manuila: I’ll go with you to the end of the earth, because you can’t take care of yourself. You’ll get yourself killed on your own, but you have to live for a long time and talk to people. Only he didn’t take me. No need, he said, and I’m not supposed to. I have to go alone. And don’t you be afraid for me, he says—God will take care of me. Well, he didn’t want to take me, so I didn’t try to force him. I didn’t go with him, I went
after
him. Wherever he goes, I go. God might protect him and He might not, but Trofim Dubenko certainly won’t let him come to any harm. Months and months I’ve been following Manuila. Across Mother Russia, right across the wide ocean, across the Holy Land. He’s one of God’s fools, there’s no suspicion in him. Would you believe I’ve followed him almost halfway around the world, and he doesn’t realize it? Just don’t let him see you, that’s the whole secret of it. Do you know how he walks? He never looks back. Just walks on, waving his stick. Doesn’t even look down at his feet. Just straight ahead or up at the sky. And he likes to turn his head to the sides as well, that’s true. Like I said, a holy fool.” Manuila’s bodyguard spoke in a voice full of tenderness and admiration, and Pelagia suddenly remembered the “miracle of the Lord” that Malke had told her about.

“Tell me, was it you who killed the Bedouin bandit in the Mountains of Judea?”

“The one with the sword? That was me. Look, I’ve got a carbine. I swapped for it in the city of Jaffa, I had this engraved watch that Kistyantin Petrovich gave me for serving him so well. A curse on that service and on that skeleton and his lousy watch. The bandit was nothing special. Manuila calls down disaster on himself almost every day. If it wasn’t for Trofim Dubenko, bad people would have buried him in the ground a long time ago.” The bearded man suddenly stopped short with his boasting and said: “Ah, you’re a cunning one, you are! Hah, you loosened my tongue. Haven’t spoken our language for a long time, so I couldn’t stop myself. Tell me: Are you from Pobedin or not?” He flourished the knife again.

“No, I’m here on my own account. And I wish Emmanuel… Manuila no harm. On the contrary, I want to warn him.”

Trofim Dubenko looked at her intently. He said: “Come on, then.”

And he ran his massive paws all over her, searching to see if she had a concealed weapon. Pelagia held her hands up and endured it.

“All right,” he said. “Go. Only on your own. Your friend can stay here. But there’s one condition: not a word about me. Or else he’ll send me away, and he can’t be left without someone to look after him.”

“I promise,” the nun said with a nod.

FOR A MINUTE or so the garden again seemed to be empty. Pelagia walked from one end of it to the other, gazing around her without seeing anyone. But when she stopped in bewilderment, she heard a voice from the very center of the garden, asking something in a language she did not know. Then at last she made out the figure sitting in the grass by the old well.

“What?” the nun asked with a shudder.

“Are you Wussian?” the voice asked, with a childlike lisp on the letter
r
. “I asked what you’re wooking for? Or who?”

“What are you doing there?” she babbled.

The man was sitting absolutely still on the ground, bathed in the white moonlight. It was his stillness that had kept her from noticing him, although she had passed very close to him.

Approaching him hesitantly, Pelagia saw a thin face with wide-open eyes, a clumpy beard (it seemed to be streaked with gray), a protruding Adam’s apple, and a pair of eyebrows that seemed to be permanently raised in readiness for joyful amazement. The prophet’s hair had been cut in the Russian peasant style, but a long time ago, at least six months, so that the hair now hung almost down to his shoulders.

“I’m waiting,” Manuila-Emmanuel replied. “The moon’s not quite in the middle of the sky yet. That’s called ‘at its zenith.’ I have to wait a wit-tle bit.”

“And … what will happen when the moon is at its zenith?”

“I’ll get up and go that way.” He pointed to the far corner of the garden.

“But there’s a fence over there.”

The prophet glanced around, as if someone might overhear them, and whispered conspiratorially: “I made a hole in it. When I was here earwier. One pwank opens, and then you can go up the hill thwough the monastewy.”

“But why don’t you go by the street? It goes up the hill too,” said Pelagia, also lowering her voice.

He sighed. “I know. I twied, it doesn’t work. Pwobably evwything has to be exactly like it was then. But the main thing is the full moon, of course. I compwetewy forgot about it, but now I’ve wemembewed, Passover awways used to be at full moon, onwy now the Jews have got evewything confused.”

“What have they got confused?” Pelagia asked, wrinkling up her forehead as she tried to make sense of his words. “Why do you need the full moon?”

“I can see you came here to speak to me,” Emmanuel said unexpectedly. “Speak.”

Pelagia started. How did he know?

But the prophet got to his feet, proving to be a whole head taller than the nun, and looked into her face. There were sparks of moonlight glittering in his eyes.

“You want to warn me about something,” he said, screwing up his eyes as if he was reading aloud in the dark and had to strain to see.

“What?”

“You’ve been wooking for me for a wong time because you want to warn me about something bad. It would be intewesting to talk to you. But it’s alweady time for me to go. Come with me, if you wike. We can talk on the way.”

He beckoned to her and set off toward the fence.

One of the planks really was secured only by a single nail at the top. Emmanuel swung it aside and squeezed through the narrow gap. Feeling strangely numb, Pelagia did the same.

Moving uphill, they walked through the dark courtyard of some monastery, then out through a wicket gate into a side street.

There were Arab shanties on both sides, without a single light burning in any of them. Once, at a bend, the nun glanced back and found herself facing the Temple Hill, crowned by the round cap of the Mosque of Omar. In the moonlight, Jerusalem looked as dead as the Jewish cemetery across from it.