Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog (25 page)

Lisitsyna smiled and her lively brown eyes flashed, but she said nothing.

“Do not be angry,
Pauline,
when I say that such a double portrait would demonstrate to everyone in the most eloquent fashion possible what a crime it is when women decide to shut themselves away from the world. Your sister Pelagia is a little gray mouse, but you are a fiery lioness. She is like the pale moon, but you are the blinding sun. The nose, the eyebrows, the eyes all have the same form, but the two of you could never be confused. I suppose that she is much older than you?”

“Is that a compliment or an attempt to establish my age?” Lisitsyna said with a laugh, exposing her even white teeth and striking Arkadii Sergeevich jokingly on the hand with her black ostrich-feather fan. “And don’t you dare abuse Pelagia in my presence. We see each other so rarely! I came to see her once ages ago, and they had sent her off to some remote monastery.”

She fluttered her weapon of retribution, fanning air onto her naked shoulders with their charming sprinkling of bright-orange freckles. She tossed her luxuriant ginger coiffure and screwed up her eyes as she peered at the clock.

“Are you short-sighted?” asked the observant Poggio. “It is twenty minutes past eight.”

“Short-sightedness runs in our family,” Polina Andreevna confessed with a disarming smile. “And I’m too embarrassed to wear spectacles.”

“Even spectacles could hardly spoil you,” Arkadii Sergeevich assured her gallantly. “So, how about a portrait?”

“Not for anything. You’ll only go and show it in an exhibition.” Lisitsyna began speaking in a conspiratorial whisper. “What kind of surprise is it that you have in there? I bet it’s something indecent, isn’t it?”

Poggio gave a slightly forced smile and said nothing. The ginger-haired charmer gazed up at him, puckering her round forehead inquisitively, as if she were trying to solve some kind of riddle.

Ah, but why attempt to bamboozle the reader any longer, especially since he has already guessed everything for himself?

The woman standing before the nervous artist (wearing a low-cut velvet evening dress and white gloves up to the elbow, her face framed by those whimsically coiled copper-red locks) was not Polina Andreevna Lisitsyna at all, but…

That is to say, it is not exactly that she was not Polina Andreevna Lisitsyna, for at one time she really had been called precisely that, but then she had changed her first name, dropped her family name, and become simply Pelagia.

In order to understand how this incredible and even blasphemous transformation of a nun into a society lady had come about, we shall be obliged to go back two weeks in time, to those final lingering days of summer, when barges were sailing upstream along the River with watermelons from Astrakhan and Tsaritsyn, and bishop Mitrofanii had only just held his distressing “council at Fili.”

“THIS IS DANGEROUS both for me and the governor. But that is not the worst thing, and not by a long way. Today our entire way of life is under threat. As a shepherd of the church I cannot just sit here while a ravenous beast devours my flock. I am in open view, my hands are tied, Bubentsov’s spies are swarming all around me, I cannot tell who to trust. They have already reported that I was in conference with Anton Antonovich and Matvei yesterday, I know that quite certainly. Without you, Pelagia, I shall not be able to cope. Help me. We will try to extinguish the blaze from both sides. As we did last year, when you and I traveled to Kazan to look for the Icon of the Afon Virgin after it was stolen.”

With that His Grace concluded his speech. Mitrofanii and his spiritual daughter were strolling together along the pathways of the bishop’s garden, although the day was overcast and there was a fine rain sprinkling down from the sky. This was what things had come to—His Grace was afraid to hold a secret conversation in his very own chambers. There were too many stealthy ears listening.

“So I have to play Polina again?” sighed the nun. “We vowed that it was going to be the last time. I don’t say that because I am afraid that I shall be exposed and expelled from the order. I actually enjoy this playacting. That is what I am afraid of. Worldly temptation. These masquerades make my heart beat faster. And that is a sin.”

“The sin is not your concern,” Mitrofanii said severely. “I set the work of penance and I bear the responsibility for it. The goal is a good one and the means, while not entirely legitimate, are not dishonorable. Go to Sister Emilia and tell her that I am sending you to the Efimiev Monastery. And then take the steamer as far as Egoriev, assume the appearance required, and be sure to be back here again the day after tomorrow. I shall introduce you to the houses that Bubentsov visits—the homes of Count Gavriil Alexandrovich, and the governor and his wife, and the others. After that, you know what to do. Here, take this.” He handed Pelagia a large leather purse. “You will order some dresses from Leblanc, buy various perfumes and lipsticks and such—whatever is necessary. And have that ginger mop styled into a proper coiffure, like in Kazan, with those little curls. Well, go now, and God be with you.”

PELAGIA—OR RATHER, not Pelagia, but the young Moscow widow Polina Andreevna Lisitsyna—took lodgings with the colonel’s wife Grabbe, an old friend of Mitrofanii’s. The old woman knew nothing at all about the masquerade, but she gave her guest a warm welcome and made her comfortable, and everything would have been quite wonderful, if only the kind-hearted Antonina Ivanovna had not got it into her head that she ought to find this dear, unhappy lady a husband as quickly as possible.

This caused the female conspirator numerous awkward moments. Almost every day the colonel’s widow invited young and not-so-young gentlemen with the status of bachelor or widower to tea, and to the extreme embarrassment of Polina Andreevna (let us, after all, refer to her in that manner) almost all of them displayed a most lively interest in her white skin, bright eyes, and “bronze-helmet” coiffure: smoothly parted at the top and wavy down the back of the head, with three pendant coils at each side. Things even reached the stage of rivalry. For instance, the engineer Surkov, a very good man, would come to visit with a huge bunch of chrysanthemums, but then the grammar-school inspector Poluectov would show up with an entire basketful, and the former would spend the entire evening feeling envious of the latter.

Sister Emilia, who had been a bride three times before she took the veil and therefore regarded herself as a great expert in the area of male habits, taught that men pay attention of a certain kind (that was what she said: “attention of a certain kind”) not to all women, but only to those who give them some kind of sign, sometimes even unintentionally. A glance, perhaps, or a sudden blush, or some kind of imperceptible odor to which men’s noses are particularly sensitive. The meaning of this sign is: I am accessible, you may approach me. And as proof of this, Emilia, who was, among other things, a teacher of natural science, would adduce examples from the life of animals, for some reason most often dogs. Christina, Olympiada, Ambrosia, and Apollinaria would listen with bated breath, because they had left the world before they had a chance to become acquainted with male habits at all. Pelagia listened sadly, because from her experience in the role of Mrs. Lisitsyna, it was perfectly obvious that she gave signs of her own accessibility, she most certainly did. Either a glance or a blush or that thrice-cursed treacherous odor. And most disagreeable of all was the fact that the nun felt as much at home in the role of the flippant Mrs. Lisitsyna as a fish in water, and her customary clumsiness somehow completely evaporated. Her manner became assured, her movements graceful, and even her hips began to behave in the most treacherous manner as she walked along, so that some men even turned to look. After each reincarnation it required the performance of several thousand bows and the reading of a hundred prayers to the Virgin Mary to restore her to a state of blessed calm.

So far it seemed that on this occasion Pelagia had taken the burden of sin on her soul almost completely in vain. In two weeks of following a virtually uninterrupted round of private parties, dinners, and balls she had succeeded in discovering very little. Bubentsov did not visit Naina Georgievna’s house, nor did she visit him. If they were meeting anywhere, then it was in secret. That, though, was unlikely, if one took into account Princess Telianova’s daily demonstrations in front of the wing of the hotel. Once, when she and the postmistress called at Vladimir Lvovich’s apartment, she had seen an envelope on the table with the letters NT written at the bottom in a crooked hand, but the envelope was lying there unopened, and apparently not for the first day.

Mrs. Lisitsyna’s efforts in the matter of the Zyt case had been somewhat more successful.

A curious circumstance had emerged from a conversation with the pathologist Wiesel, one of the soft-hearted Antonina Ivanovna’s protégés. Apparently Bubentsov had brought back from the sinister clearing, which was presumed to be the bloodthirsty Shishiga’s site of worship, certain samples of soil impregnated with some fluid similar to blood, and the task of analyzing this trophy had fallen to Wiesel. Laboratory tests had shown that it was indeed blood, but not human—it had come from a moose. This was reported to Chief of Police Lagrange. However, this important piece of news had not been brought to the attention of the newspapers and the public.

The gendarmes captain Prishibyakin, commandeered from St. Petersburg to assist the Extraordinary Commission, had breathed hotly into her ear and tickled her with his pomaded mustache as he told her in secret about shrunken human heads that had supposedly been found at the Zyt shaman’s house, and promised to show them to Polina Andreevna if she would visit him at the hotel. Lisitsyna believed him and went—and what do you think? Prishibyakin didn’t show her any shrunken heads at all, but instead popped a champagne cork and tried to press his embraces on her. She had been obliged to strike him in the groin with her elbow as if by accident, following which the inventive captain had become pale and taciturn—he merely groaned and gazed at his guest with an air of suffering as she flitted out of the door.

She had more luck with the investigator Borisenko, also from the Extraordinary Commission. During a ball at the Nobles’ Club, in a flagrant attempt to impress the inquisitive beauty, he had complained that the arrested Zyts were stubborn and would not give candid testimony, and the ones who did say anything about Shishiga and the sacrifices kept getting confused all the time and losing the thread, so that afterward the minutes had to be corrected and written out again.

This was all noteworthy, but insufficient for the Zavolzhsk party to be able to launch a decisive counterattack against the Petersburg invasion. That was why Polina Andreevna attached such importance to the opening of the photographic exhibition: It highlighted the Drozdovka connection once again, and this time it seemed as if something might become clear. Was not this the mysterious threat with which Arkadii Sergeevich had sought to frighten Naina Georgievna? And then again, Bubentsov would be there. Taking everything together, Polina Andreevna absolutely had to get her hands on an invitation to the
vernissage,
and she had eventually succeeded in this by dint of immense ingenuity and unflagging persistence.

On the eve of the longingly anticipated soirée, Mrs. Lisitsyna had experienced serious difficulties in connection with an instruction given in the invitation: “Ladies in open dresses.” Even at the balls, Polina Lisitsyna had made her appearance with her shoulders, breasts, and back covered by a filmy gauze, which the local ladies of fashion had taken for the latest Moscow chic and had already ordered the same for themselves from Leblanc. However, to ignore the hostess’s strict instruction would have seemed an affront, all the more noticeable because, as far as she could tell, the visitor from Moscow was almost the only lady to have been honored with an invitation to the
vernissage
from Olympiada Savelievna. To provoke the displeasure of Bubentsov’s main confidante and female ally would be unwise, to say the least.

Poor Pelagia sat in front of the dressing-table mirror in her room for almost half a day, pulling the low neck on the shameless velvet dress almost right up to her chin, then once again lowering the light fabric to the limit prescribed by Monsieur Leblanc.

It should be noted that the décolleté really did not look bad at all, for by the autumn her freckles had almost completely disappeared at the front, but they had clambered up onto her shoulders—evidently as a consequence of her swimming lessons—and, in Polina Andreevna’s opinion, they lent these two elements of her anatomy a likeness to two golden oranges. Everybody was bound to stare.

It was terrible, but she had no choice.

THE LITTLE BRONZE bell tinkled—someone had come into the entrance from the street—and Lisitsyna saw Arkadii Sergeevich raise himself up high on tiptoes and crane his neck.

It was Vladimir Lvovich and his inseparable Patroclus, Spasyonny, who had arrived. Polina Andreevna noted the expression of disappointment that distorted the artist’s mouth, and then turned with everyone else to face the new arrivals.

Bubentsov nodded curtly to the guests, not feeling any necessity to apologize for his lateness. He shook their hostess’s hand, detaining her long pale fingers for just a moment, and Olympiada Savelievna immediately flushed and became radiant.

“Well, now everybody’s here!” she exclaimed happily. “All right, then, Arkadii Sergeevich—Open sesame?” And she pointed to the closed door of the salon.