Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (2 page)

His Grace the Bishop of Zavolzhsk was born into a family of courtly nobles and graduated from the Corps of Pages, from where he moved to the Horse Guards (that was back in the reign of Nikolai Pavlovich). He led the life usual for a young man of his circle, and if he was distinguished in any way from his peers, it was perhaps only by a tendency to philosophize, but then that is not such a very rare thing among educated and sensitive youths. In his regiment the “philosopher” was considered a good comrade and an excellent cavalryman, his superiors liked him and they promoted him, so that by the age of thirty he would certainly have risen to the rank of colonel had the Crimean campaign not intervened. God only knows what insights were revealed to the future Bishop of Zavolzhsk during his first taste of active combat, a cavalry skirmish near Balaclava, but after recovering from his saber wound, he had no wish to take a weapon into his hand ever again. He retired from the army, said his farewells to his family, and soon thereafter was serving his novitiate in one of the country’s most isolated monasteries. Even now, however, especially when Mitrofanii conducted the service in the cathedral on the occasion of one of the twelve great feasts or took the chair at a meeting of the consistory, it was easy to imagine how he used to command his lancers in his booming voice: “Squadron, sabers at the ready! At a trot, forward!”

An extraordinary man will make his mark in any field of endeavor, and Mitrofanii did not languish in the obscurity of remote monastic life for long. Just as he had previously become the youngest squadron commander in the entire light cavalry, so now it fell to him to become the youngest Orthodox bishop. Initially appointed to be suffragan bishop here in Zavolzhsk, and then as the pastor of the province, he demonstrated so much wisdom and zeal that he was soon summoned to the capital to take up a high position in the church. There were many who predicted that in the none too distant future Mitrofanii would don the black veil of a metropolitan, but he astonished everyone by once again turning off the beaten track and requesting out of the blue to be allowed to return to us in the back of beyond, and, following long attempts to dissuade him, to the joy of us Zavolzhians he was released with a blessing, never again to abandon his modest see, so remote from the capital.

And what does it matter if it is remote? It is a well-known fact that the farther one travels from the capital, the nearer one approaches to God. And our exalted and far-seeing capital will reach out a thousand miles should such an idea ever come into its head.

It was indeed due to precisely such an idea that His Grace was not sleeping on this night, but attending drearily and without pleasure to the endless crescendos of the cicadas. The capital’s idea possessed a face and a name, it was called Synodical Inspector Bubentsov, and as he pondered how to deal with this gentleman, the reverend bishop turned for the hundredth time from one side to the other on his soft duck-down mattress, groaning and sighing and occasionally gasping.

The bed in the bishop’s bedchamber was special, an old four-poster from Empress Elizabeth’s time, with a canopy representing a starry sky. During the period of Mitrofanii’s aforementioned enthusiasm for asceticism, he slept quite contentedly on either straw or bare boards until he came to the conclusion that to mortify the flesh was pointless folly and that was not why the Lord had molded it in His own image and likeness, nor was it appropriate for the arch-pastor to make a show of himself to the clergy in his care, compelling them to adopt a self-tormenting severity for which some do not feel any spiritual inclination—nor indeed are they obliged to do so according to the statute of the church. As he reached his years of maturity, His Grace inclined more and more to the opinion that genuine trials are sent down to us not in the realm of the physiological but in the realm of the spiritual, and the scourging of the body by no means always leads to the salvation of the soul. Therefore the bishop’s chambers were furnished no worse than the governor’s house, the board set in the refectory was incomparably superior, and the orchard of apple trees was the finest in all the town, with arbors, rotundas, and even a fountain. It was peaceful and shady there, inclining one to thought, and so let the detractors whisper among themselves—one can never silence malicious gossip.

So the way to deal with this perfidious inspector Bubentsov is this, the reverend bishop concluded. The first thing is to write to Konstantin Petrovich in St. Petersburg about all the tricks that his trusted nuncio gets up to and the disaster that the church could suffer as a result of them. The chief procurator was a man of intelligence; it was possible that he might heed the warning. But action should not be limited to a letter; Mitrofanii must also summon the governor’s wife, Ludmila Platonovna, for a talk, to shame her and stir her conscience. She was a good, honest woman. She must be brought to her senses.

And then everything would be put to rights. The matter could hardly be simpler.

But even now that his heart felt eased, sleep still would not come, and the problem did not lie in the round-faced moon, or even in the cicadas.

Knowing his own character as he did and being in the habit of analyzing the workings of its mechanism in detail, down to the last nut and bolt, Mitrofanii set about trying to identify the worm that was gnawing at him and preventing his reason from shrouding itself in the veil of sleep. What was the cause?

Could it possibly be his recent conversation with a giddy young novice from a noble family who had been denied permission to take the veil? The reverend bishop had not beaten about the bush; he had blurted out his opinion without equivocation: “My daughter, what you need is not the Sweet Bridegroom of Heaven—that is merely your delusion. What you need is a perfectly ordinary bridegroom, a state official or, even better, an officer. With a mustache.” He ought not to have put it like that, of course. There had been hysterics, followed by a long, exhausting argument. But never mind that, it was unimportant. What else was there?

He had been obliged to take a disagreeable decision concerning the steward at the Monastery of the Epiphany. For riotous drunken behavior and the lecherous visiting of indecorous women, the offender had been condemned to dismissal from the cloister and returned to his original lay status. Now the scribbling would begin, with letters to His Grace himself and to the synod. But this too was an ordinary matter; the root cause of his alarm did not lie here.

Mitrofanii thought a little more, groping about inside himself, as he used to do in childhood, to see if he was getting “warm” or “cold,” and suddenly he realized: It was the letter from his great aunt, the general’s widow, Tatishcheva, that was apparently the spot where the worm was gnawing. He was surprised, but his heart immediately confirmed it—he was “hot,” he had hit the mark. It seemed like a piece of stupid nonsense, but he could feel the cat’s claws scraping at his soul. Perhaps he should get it and read it again?

He sat up in the bed, lit a candle, and put on his pince-nez. Now, where was that letter? Ah, there it was, on the side table.

“My dear Mishenka,” the old lady Marya Afanasievna wrote, out of ancient habit still addressing her relative by his long-forgotten secular name, “I hope you are well. Has that cursed gout of yours eased? Are you applying cabbage leaves to it, as I told you to do? The late Apollon Nikolaevich always used to say that—” There then followed a long and verbose description of the wonderworking properties of homegrown cabbage, and His Grace’s glance began slipping impatiently along the even lines of old-fashioned handwriting. His eyes stumbled over a disagreeable name. “Vladimir Lvovich Bubentsov has visited me again. What terrible lies they have told about him, saying that he is a scoundrel and very nearly a murderer. He is a fine young man, and I liked him. Direct, with no snobbish pretensions to him, and he knows about dogs, too. Did you know that he is apparently related to me through the Strekhinin line? In her second marriage my grandmother Adelaida Sekandrovna—” No, that was not it, farther on.

Aha, here it was: “But this is all by the way and it has only been written because in the weakness of my heart I have been putting off coming to the point. The moment I gather myself and steel my spirit to it, the tears start flooding down my cheeks again, and my hand shakes, and I get a cold, tight feeling in my chest. I have a special reason for writing to you, Mishenka. I have suffered a great misfortune of such a kind that only you will understand, but I should not wonder if others will poke fun at me and say that the old fool has gone totally cuckoo. I wanted to come to see you myself, but I do not have the strength, although the journey is not really so very long. I lie flat on my back and do nothing but cry. You know how many years, how much effort, and how much money I have invested in order to complete the work to which Apollon Nikolaevich devoted his life.” (At this point the reverend bishop shook his head, because he took a skeptical view of the work to which his deceased uncle had devoted his life.) “Learn then, my friend, what villainy has been committed here at my Drozdovka. Some enemy of mine, and it must be someone who is close to me, put poison into Zagulyai’s and Zakidai’s food. Zakidai is younger; I saved him with emetic stone of antimony and nursed him back to health. But my little Zagulyai passed away. All night long he suffered, tossing and turning, weeping human tears and gazing at me so mournfully, as if to say: Save me, mother, you are my only hope. But I did not save him. In the early morning he gave a pitiful cry, fell over on his side, and gave up the ghost. I fell down in a dead faint and they tell me I spent three hours like that until the doctor arrived from the town. And now I am lying here weak and exhausted, and most of all frightened. It is a conspiracy, Mishenka, a villainous conspiracy. Someone is trying to do away with my little children, and me, an old woman, along with them. In the name of God Almighty I implore you, come. Not to bring me priestly consolation—that is not what I need—but to investigate. Everybody says you have the gift of seeing straight through any villain and unraveling any criminal’s cunning trickery. And what villainy could possibly be worse than this? You must come save me. And I shall adore you eternally and leave you a generous bequest for the cathedral, or some monastery, or the poor orphans, if you like.” At the very end of her letter his aunt switched from a familial tone to an official and respectful one: “Commending myself to your fatherly attention and pastoral prayers and imploring Your Grace’s blessing, I remain your Eminence’s most devoted servant, Marya Tatishcheva.”

At this point we ought perhaps to offer some explanation concerning the gift about which the general Tatishchev’s widow wrote, and which might appear not entirely becoming to a churchman of bishop’s rank. Be that as it may, reckoned among the reverend bishop’s more sublime merits was the precious talent, one very rarely encountered, for unraveling all sorts of baffling mysteries, especially those of a criminal complexion. One might even say that Mitrofanii had a genuine passion for mental gymnastics of this sort, and on more than one occasion the police authorities, even those from neighboring provinces, had respectfully requested his advice in some confusing investigation. The Bishop of Zavolzhsk secretly took great pride in this reputation of his, but not without certain pangs of conscience—first, because this pride undoubtedly deserved to be categorized as idle vanity, and, second, for another reason known only to himself and a certain other individual, which we will therefore pass over in silence.

The previous evening, on first reading the letter, His Grace had found his aunt’s request—to go dashing to her estate and investigate the circumstances of Zagulyai’s death—somewhat amusing. And even now, having reread the letter, he thought: Nonsense, it’s just an old woman’s fancies. She’ll spend a day or two in bed and then get up.

He snuffed out the candle and lay down, but his heart still felt uneasy. He tried to pray for his aunt’s recovery. It is well known that prayers at night ascend to God’s ears more easily. Saint Ioann Zlatoust writes that the Lord’s gracious mercy is aroused most powerfully by nocturnal prayers, “when you make the time of rest for many the time of your lament.”

But his prayer had no soul, it was no more than an idle parroting of words, and the reverend bishop did not acknowledge prayers of that kind. He had never even imposed penances of prayer on anyone, regarding it as sacrilege. Prayer was not prayer at all if it merely passed through the lips without touching the heart.

Very well, Pelagia can go, Mitrofanii decided. Let her find out what happened to that thrice damned Zagulyai.

Immediately he felt easier, and the cicadas’ polyphonic chirping no longer chafed his weary soul but lulled it instead, and the moon no longer stung his eyes but seemed to bathe his face with warm milk. Mitrofanii closed his eyes and the wrinkles on his stern face relaxed. He slept.