Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (61 page)

In the morning His Eminence felt unwell. He gasped for breath and clutched at his heart. They were frightened that he might suffer the same fate as his favorite godson: a ruptured cardiac muscle. His secretary, Father Userdov, went running to consult the vicar on whether they ought to administer the last sacraments, but that evening a letter arrived from the steamer, and when Mitrofanii read it he stopped panting for breath, sat up in the bed, and put his feet down on the floor.

He read it again. And then again.

The crooked scrawl on the envelope, full of mistakes, said: “To Bishop Mitrofanii, Citty of Zavolsk in Zavolzhie provins, urjent, for him to reed and no one els.”

Inside there was a crumpled sheet of paper with Berdichevsky’s handwriting on it: “48-36, send this note by post, at the extra-urgent rate, to: His Eminence Bishop Mitrofanii, Zavolzhsk, Zavolzhie Province, for personal delivery.” What the meaning of this mysterious missive could be, why it was traced out in capital letters, and what the figures “48-36” meant, Mitrofanii did not understand, but it was clear that the message was of extreme importance and might possibly contain the key to the disaster in St. Petersburg.

The bishop studied the uninformative note so intently that he didn’t immediately realize that he should turn the sheet of paper over.

When he did, there was the actual message, not written in capitals but in feverish, higgledy-piggledy running script:

The letters are jumping about, I’m writing this in a cab. It’s a good thing it’s raining—I’ve put up the top and no one can see. Pelagia is in danger. Save her. I know who the culprit is, but you must not know, and do not try to find out. Go to her and take her as far away as possible, to the ends of the earth. I myself will not be able to do any more. They are following me and of course they will keep following me. Let them. I have thought up an excellent maneuver—“The Berdichevsky Étude”—to sacrifice one piece in the hope of saving a hopeless game. I do not ask anything for my family. I know you will not abandon them. Good-bye. Your son Matvei.

This time one reading was enough for the bishop. He did not construct any hypotheses or try to analyze the meaning of this cryptic letter, but accepted it as a clear and direct instruction to act. The former cavalry officer awoke within His Eminence: when the bugle is sounding charge and the saber slashing has begun, there is no time to think—you have to follow your instincts and the wild rush of your blood.

The bishop’s weakness had disappeared as if by magic. He leaped off the bed and roared for the lay servants and his secretary.

A minute later the Episcopal Residence had been transformed into a newly active volcano. One servant was already galloping off to the quayside to book a steam launch to Nizhni. Another was running pell-mell to the telegraph office to book a railway ticket from Nizhni to Odessa and a cabin in a fast maritime steamship. A third had been dispatched to the governor with a hastily written note in which Mitrofanii informed him that he had been called away urgently and the vicar would conduct Berdichevsky’s funeral. God only knew what His Excellency and the whole of Zavolzhsk society would think, but that did not concern His Excellency in the least.

Having issued the instructions indicated above, the bishop began dressing and packing hastily for a journey. But Userdov, choosing a moment when Mitrofanii had withdrawn into the dressing room, gave rein to his irrepressible curiosity and snaffled the letter that had effected such a miraculous change in the bishop off the desk. Father Serafim was extremely interested in this note from a dead man, so interested, in fact, that he actually decided to make a copy for himself in his notebook. Absorbed in this occupation, the bishop’s secretary did not hear His Eminence, already wearing his traveling cassock and stockings but not yet his shoes, come back into the study.

When Userdov realized that he had been discovered, his face contorted in a pale grimace of terror. He backed away from the bishop, who was silently advancing on him, and shook his head, but was unable to utter a single word.

“Ah, so that’s it,” Mitrofanii drawled ominously. “Matiusha and I used to rack our brains wondering how all our secrets were known to our enemies, and all the time it was you, you Judas. It was you who reported about the boot print, and about Palestine. Who is your master? Well?”

The bishop barked out that “Well?” so fiercely that the chandelier jingled, and the secretary went down on his knees with a thud. At that moment his remarkably handsome face was not at its best.

“Tell me, you vile creature!”

The secretary jabbed one finger up toward the ceiling without speaking.

“Higher authorities? Out of careerist considerations? I know you want to be a bishop, that’s why you haven’t married. Who do you report to? The Okhranka? The Synod?”

His Eminence grabbed the trembling Userdov by the scruff of the neck. The secretary squeezed his eyes shut and would certainly have given away his secret, but Mitrofanii opened his fingers.

“Very well. Matiusha told me not to try to find out, so I won’t. He has the brains of a minister of state, he wouldn’t forbid me for no reason. And this is my final pastor’s blessing for you in parting.”

He took a short swing—exactly as he used to do many years ago during the Junkers’ brawls—and smashed Father Serafim in the face, not in any merely symbolic sense, but in a most convincing manner, so that the secretary’s nose crunched and shifted sideways.

The poor wretch tumbled backward onto the carpet, blood streaming from his face.

He’ll be a bishop all right
, Mitrofanii thought fleetingly as he walked toward the door.
He definitely will But with a crooked nose
.

In the hallway a lay servant was waiting with a hastily packed suitcase. His Eminence crossed himself with broad sweeps of the hand in front of the icon hanging opposite the entrance door—an image of his favorite saint, the apostle, Judas Thaddeus, comforter of the despairing and patron of hopeless causes. He took his miter and wide-brimmed traveling hat and ran out into the courtyard where a team of four was already champing at the bit.

It was less than half an hour since the letter had arrived.

The bishop reads another letter and has two dreams

TWO DAYS LATER, before boarding the steamship in Odessa, Mitrofanii sent off a telegram to the father archimandrite at the Orthodox Mission in Jerusalem, inquiring whether His Reverence had any knowledge of the whereabouts and health of the pilgrim Lisitsyna.

The reply arrived in time to catch him. The archimandrite said that a pilgrim by that name had stayed at the hotel, but she had left eight days earlier for an unknown destination and had not since returned, although her things were still in her room.

Mitrofanii ground his teeth, but forbade himself to despair.

Throughout the five days of the voyage to Jaffa, he prayed. Never before, it seemed, had he devoted himself to this activity for such a long period of time, with almost no respite.

The pilgrims crowded around the window of his cabin, gaping respectfully at the bishop bowing repeatedly to the floor. They even agreed among themselves not to pester the holy man with requests for blessings—let him bless all of them at once before they went ashore.

Eight days after leaving Zavolzhsk, His Eminence was in the Orthodox Mission in Jerusalem. He went straight to the chancellery, to inquire whether his spiritual daughter had returned yet.

Why, yes, they told him, the very day after we received Your Eminence’s inquiry. We sent another telegram to Odessa immediately, but obviously it missed you.

“Thank you, Lord! Where is Pelagia?” Mitrofanii exclaimed, so relieved that his legs almost buckled under him. “Is she safe and well?”

We can’t say, they replied. None of our people have actually seen her. But last Saturday the messenger boy from Mrs. Lisitsyna’s hotel arrived with this packet for Your Eminence. The next day the father archimandrite had sent a message to the guest, saying that Bishop Mitrofanii was concerned about her welfare, but Lisitsyna was not in her room. And since then they had not been able to find her in even once, despite trying many times.

Realizing that there was nothing to be achieved here, the bishop, citing weariness after his long journey, withdrew to the chambers reserved for especially distinguished guests. Without even taking off his hat, he sat down at the table and opened the envelope with trembling fingers.

He saw an entire stack of sheets of paper covered with familiar handwriting. In his agitation he dropped his pince-nez and broke the right lens. He read the letter through the crucifix of the cracks.

To His Eminence Mitrofanii, light, strength and joy.

I hope that you will never read this letter. Or do I really hope that you will? I do not know. But if you do read it, that will mean that everything was true, and that is absolutely impossible.

I have begun badly and only confused you. Forgive me.

And forgive me also for my deception, for exploiting your trust. You sent me on a distant pilgrimage, wishing to protect me from danger, but I concealed the reason why I chose the Holy Land of all possible places. I did not set out to Palestine for the sake of peace and quiet, but in order to see through to the end something that I had started. You spoke the truth when you said that I do not have the nun’s talent of praying to God for people. Of all Christ’s brides I am the most wayward. But I shall write of brides at the end, now is not the right moment.

As you recall, they tried to kill me three times: once in Stroganovka and twice in Zavolzhsk. And when I thought about this, it became clear that such powerful killers could not possibly find me so abhorrent in my own right. There was no possible reason. So the reason did not lie in me. In what, then? Or in whom?

How did it all begin? With the killing of a certain sham prophet; and the subsequent events were also connected in one way or another with the ill-famed Manuila. I did not understand what sort of man he was, although I had seen that some people wished to kill him, and others to protect him, and that the former were more powerful and sooner or later they would achieve their goal. As for my place in this business, I was like the unfortunate Durka—I had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time and somehow got in their way. So they decided to remove me, as one removes a stone from the road, in order not to stumble over it again. That was the only reason I could be of any interest to the enemies of Manuila.

As you know, I have investigated murders on numerous occasions, but surely it is a hundred times more important to prevent a murder from happening? And if you think that this is within your power, surely it is a mortal sin to do nothing? If I have lied to you by default, it was only out of fear that if you knew the whole truth, you would never have let me go.

And there was another reason, apart from saving Emmanuel (I prefer to call him that now). He and I are connected by the remarkable event that occurred in the cave, of which you already know. An event for which I was unable to find any explanation, and which I could not get out of my mind. Emmanuel had been in the same cave—indeed, according to the village people,
that was where he came from
. So I thought that perhaps he might explain this mystery to me.

Two things were clear.

In the first place this prophet, or false prophet (that was not for me to judge), had to be sought in the Holy Land. He was either there already, or would arrive there sometime very soon—the “Foundlings” talked about that, and it was no accident that Shelukhin, the pseudo-Emmanuel, was on his way to Palestine.

And, in the second place, Emmanuel’s enemies had to be sought among those who traveled on the steamer
Sturgeon
with us. (Let me say straightaway that this conclusion proved not to be entirely correct, but I only realized that after traveling around Judea, Samaria, Galilee, and Edom.)

My list of suspects was assembled as follows:

Who could the former gendarme Ratsevich have been working for? I wondered.

The “Warsaw bandits” that Matvei Bentsionovich mentioned were excluded. Even the most fastidious of robbers would not have tried to eliminate me so ingeniously and persistently. And the idea that some mere preacher could have caused them such great inconvenience was even more unlikely.

But the misanthropic lunatics who call themselves the Oprichniks of Christ might well see a preacher who led people away from the Orthodox faith into “Yiddishness” as a fierce and dangerous enemy.

The same also applied to the opposite camp—the fanatical supporters of an insular Judaism, who regarded Emmanuel as an evil jester who mocked their faith.

Also on the steamer was a group of Zionists, extremely determined young people who suspected Emmanuel of being connected with the Department of Security, the Okhranka. It is well known that the supporters of the idea of a Jewish state include some fanatics who are willing to go to extremes in order to achieve their goal as soon as possible.