Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog

by Boris Akunin

  At this point the reverend bishop began feeling completely silly, and he cast an awkward sideways glance at his listener. She was moving her lips silently as she counted her stitches, showing no sign of astonishment.

  “Well, anyway, here, read this letter. It came yesterday. If you tell me that the old woman is raving, that she has lost her mind, I’ll write something to reassure her, and that will be the end of the matter.”

  Mitrofanii took the letter out of the sleeve of his cassock and handed it to Pelagia.

  The sister pressed her spectacles up against the bridge of her nose with one finger and began reading. Having read the letter, she asked in alarm: “Who could have wanted to poison the dogs? And why?”

  Reassured by the serious tone of her question, His Grace immediately stopped feeling embarrassed.

  “That is the very point—why? Just consider. Marya Afanasievna is a rich old woman and she has no shortage of heirs. Her children have died, but she has a grandson and granddaughter—the prince and princess Telianov. In addition there are countless distant relatives, some hangers-on, all sorts of friends. She is a kind woman, but foolish. And she has one tyrannical habit—almost every week she summons the attorney from the town and changes her will. If she gets angry with someone, she disinherits them; if she feels pleased with someone, she increases their share. So this is what I was thinking, Pelagia: We need to check who benefited from the last time she changed her will. Or, on the contrary, who she was angry with and threatened to cut off. I cannot see any point to this barbaric poisoning of the dogs unless someone was doing it in order to send the old woman to her grave. You see how ill she has become because of this dog. And if both of them had died, they would have had to bury Marya Afanasievna there and then. What do you make of my suppositions?” the bishop asked his perceptive pupil anxiously. “They do not seem too unlikely?”

  “Your suspicion is reasonable and highly probable; no other reason comes to mind,” the novice nun said approvingly, adding, however: “But of course, someone really needs to visit the scene. Some other reason might perhaps come to light. Is your aunt’s fortune very large?”

  “It is. A large estate, maintained in exemplary order. Forests, meadows, mills, flax meadows, fields of top-grade oats. And capital as well, securities in the bank. I should not be surprised if altogether she had a million.”

  “And do you know her heirs, Your Grace? It requires a very low individual to undertake something of this kind. Killing someone outright would hardly be a more grievous sin.”

  “You are judging from the standpoint of God, and you are right to do so. But man’s laws are very far removed from those of God. Kill someone outright, and the police will attempt to discover who did it and why. Do things that way and you end up serving hard labor. But from the human viewpoint, poisoning dogs is no great sin, and from the legal standpoint it is none at all, even though it is a surer way of killing the old woman than a knife or a bullet.”

  Pelagia threw her hands up in the air and her knitting went flying to the floor.

  “It is a great sin in the human sense, very great! Even if your Marya Afanasievna were the devil incarnate and someone she had offended wished to settle accounts with her, what could these innocent creatures be guilty of? A dog is a trusting creature, affectionate, so generously endowed by God with faithfulness and the gift of love that it would do people no harm to learn from it. I believe, Your Grace, that it is even worse to kill a dog than a man.”

  “Now, just you stop that pagan talk!” the bishop cried. “I do not wish to hear any more of that. Comparing a living soul with a dumb creature!”

  “What does it matter that it is dumb,” the stubborn nun persisted. “Have you ever looked into a dog’s eyes? Even your own Zhuk, who is chained at your gate? You should try it. Zhuk’s eyes have more feeling and life in them than your precious Userdov’s dull saucers!”

  The bishop was on the point of opening his mouth to vent his righteous anger, but he stopped himself. In recent times he had been waging a struggle against the sin of wrath of the heart, and occasionally he was victorious.

  “I have no time to waste looking into the eyes of yard dogs,” the bishop said in a stiff, dignified tone of voice. “Leave Userdov alone; he is thorough and conscientious, and as for his soul being buried so deep—that is his character. And I shall not argue with you, especially over the obvious. Tell me one thing: Will you do as I ask?”

  “I will, father,” the nun said with a bow.

  “Then this is your task. Go to Drozdovka this very day. Give Marya Afanasievna my blessing and the letter that I shall give you. Reassure the old woman. And most important of all, find out what is going on there. If you uncover malicious intent—nip it in the bud. But I do not need to tell you; you know what to do. And do not return until you have resolved this business.”

  “Your Grace,” Pelagia began anxiously. “On Saturday I have lessons in the school.”

  “Well, you can come back for the lessons and then return to Drozdovka. That is all, off you go. But first, approach me and I will give you my blessing.”

  BEFORE SISTER PELAGIA sets out for the estate of the widow Tatishcheva, we need to offer certain explanations concerning the local geography, without which anyone who has never been to Zavolzhsk will find it a little difficult to believe everything that occurred subsequently, or even to understand how it possibly could have occurred.

  The central character in this tale is the River, the greatest and most glorious not only in Russia, but in the whole of Europe. The provincial capital is built on its left bank, atop a steep ravine. Here the flow of the waters is restricted by cliffs on both sides, and therefore the current that is so famous for its stately grandeur temporarily abandons its placid humor, absentmindedly and unhurriedly accelerating to a gallop, its waves foaming into white crests and swirling in dark whirlpools as it maintains its centuries-old siege of the sheer cliff at Zavolzhsk, undercutting the high precipice with its insidious thrusts. About five miles farther downstream the steep slope of the left bank gradually starts to level out until it is eventually replaced by sandy shoals, so that the River, now allowed greater freedom, breathes more easily after its enforced sprint and expands to a width of almost a mile.

  But this respite is merely temporary—at the very point where Drozdovka stands, the obstinate bank rears sharply upward once again; the manor house and the garden are elevated high above the watery expanse, and the view presented to the eye from that spot is rightly regarded as the most beautiful in the entire district.

  And so Sister Pelagia’s route lay in a southerly direction, out through the Kazan Gates and onto the Astrakhan highway, which extends along the River, obediently following all its capricious curves and never departing from it by more than five miles.

  Before she left her little room in the episcopal see, referred to in convent fashion as a cell, Pelagia followed her old superstitious habit of opening the Gospels and setting her finger on a line at random. On this occasion the work of penance she had been set was not frightening, one might even call it trivial, but this was the young nun’s normal ritual. However, the line of text that she hit on (from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians) was clearly not fortuitous, for it contained either an admonition or a warning: “Beware of dogs and beware of evildoers.”

  Apparently it was a warning, because as she was leaving the town, after she had already walked past the turnpike, Pelagia was granted a sign that was unambiguously menacing. Glancing around and seeing that no one seemed to be nearby, the novice took a little mirror out from the same waist bag in which she kept her knitting and began examining her nose to see whether the brazen freckles had faded at all after being treated with the dandelion milk. And then there was a sudden rustling in the bushes beside the road as two women emerged, having left the highway for some unknown reason. Sister Pelagia tried to hide her hand behind her back, but was so clumsy that she dropped the mirror. When she picked it up she saw the bad omen: two cra
cks set in a cross, and everyone knows what that sign means. It bodes nothing good.

  In defiance of convent rules, Pelagia took bad omens seriously, not out of ignorance, but because she had been convinced by numerous instances that people had had good reason for identifying and enumerating them over the centuries. She did what is required in such a case—scooped up a handful of earth, threw it over her left shoulder, crossed herself (which she never did idly), recited a prayer to the Holy Trinity, and went on her way.

  She did not wish to think of alarming matters (and in any case, she had no reason to do so). She had in prospect a small but nonetheless rather intriguing adventure, and so the nun’s mood, briefly clouded by the mirror’s demise, was rapidly restored, especially since this was one of those magical summer days when the mature sun turns the air as gold as honey, the sky is high and the earth is wide and everything is filled with bounteous life and sweet languor. But what point is there in description, since after all, everyone knows what a fine August day looks like when the month has only recently passed its midpoint.

  For the first mile Pelagia was lucky—a little old peasant gave her a seat in his wagon. The roads in our province are new and even, so riding over them feels as smooth as gliding across ice, and Pelagia rode on soft straw in perfect comfort as far as the turn from the Astrakhan highway toward Drozdovka.

  But here, right beside a fork in the road, there was another omen, this time so bad that a worse one could not possibly be imagined. After she got down from the cart and thanked the old man, Pelagia spotted a small group of people off to one side, crowding around a dray and looking at something on it without speaking. Her innate curiosity would not permit the sister simply to walk past an event like this, and she went over to see what this wonder might be. Squeezing her way among the peasant men and wandering pilgrims, she peered shortsightedly through her spectacles: a perfectly ordinary accident on the road—the axle had broken. But for some reason a district police officer was loitering beside the dray, and two police constables were grunting as they mounted a wheel on a freshly cut and roughly trimmed young oak tree. The officer was an acquaintance of hers, Captain Nerushailo from the nearby Chernoyarsk district, and there was something long lying on the dray, covered with a tarpaulin.

  “What is it, Pakhom Sergeevich, has someone drowned?” asked Pelagia after she said hello, and to be on the safe side she made the sign of the cross over the tarpaulin.

  “No, mother, something more terrible than that,” the officer replied with a mysterious air, mopping at his crimson bald patch with a handkerchief. “The River’s cast up two corpses. With no heads. A man and a young boy. Lying there side by side on the sand, they were. What a thing to happen! There’ll be an investigation all right and proper. I’m just taking them to the provincial center so they can be identified. Though the devil only knows how. I beg your pardon, that just slipped out.”

  Pelagia shrugged the devil off her shoulder so that he would not stick to her and crossed herself now, not the dead men.

  “They’re not ours,” someone said in the crowd. “There’s never been any such murdering around these parts.”

  “That’s right,” someone else agreed. “They must have floated down from Nizhny; there’s plenty of brigands up there.”

  This opinion was greeted with universal approbation, because the Zavolzhians are not over-fond of the Nizhnegrodians, regarding them as thieving, good-for-nothing folk.

  “Your Honor, why don’t you show us what they look like? We might recognize them,” asked a bearded man in a good knee-length coat—a respectable-looking man who was clearly not simply curious to gape at the dead bodies.

  Many others supported this request and though the women gasped, that was mostly for appearances’ sake.

  The police officer put on his peaked cap, thought for a moment, and acceded to the request.

  “Very well, I will show you. What if you really—”

  Pakhom Sergeevich pulled back the cover and Pelagia immediately turned away, because the corpses were completely naked, and it was not decent for a nun to look at such things. All she had time to see was that the left arm of the large, hairy body ended in a stump of raw meat where the wrist should have been.

  “Oh, dear Lord, the boy’s only a little mite,” one of the women keened. “My Afonka’s just the same.”

  Pelagia did not look any more after that, because a work of penance is a work of penance, and she strode off along the country road toward Drozdovka.

  The air was getting rather muggy, and there were bright shimmers rippling up from the ground, as happens on a hot day before rain. Pelagia quickened her stride, glancing up every now and then at the sky, where a round, tightly stuffed storm cloud was swelling rapidly as it rolled along. Ahead of her she could see the railings of the park, and the green roof of the manor house rising up above the trees, but she still had a fair distance to cover to reach it. Sister Pelagia felt herself being overcome by an unworthy feeling—envy. “Now, that is really serious business,” she thought, remembering the consequential air with which Pakhom Sergeevich had pronounced the appetizing word “investigation.”

  Some people had fearful mysteries to untangle, and others had to investigate how an old woman’s slack-lipped darling had died. A fine work of penance His Grace had given her!

  CHAPTER 2

  Storm Clouds Over Zavolzhsk

  LET US LEAVE Sister Pelagia to continue on her way toward the gates of the Drozdovka park under a rapidly darkening sky while we digress briefly to explain certain mysteries of our provincial politics and also to introduce the individuals who are destined to play a key role in this somber and tangled tale.

  As we have already said, the province of Zavolzhie is extensive, but it is located far from the seat of central government, and in recent times it had been, if not entirely abandoned to its own devices, then at least very little honored by attention from higher spheres. There was nothing that these spheres desired in Zavolzhie—for the province is nothing but forests and rivers and lakes and, in particular, a great many swamps, such huge ones that during the Time of Troubles an entire Polish wagon train perished somewhere in the quagmires around here when it was sent by the Pretender in search of the magical Golden Stone.

  It is a back-of-beyond sort of place, fit for wolves and bears—and in some ways the local inhabitants themselves are not unlike bears, no less sluggish and shaggy. The lively Novgorodians and shrewd Kostromians have invented a stupid saying: “The Zavolzhians are born with lazy bones.” Well, indeed, the Zavolzhians are not fond of fuss and bustle, they are none too quick on the uptake, and they will probably never invent the perpetuum mobile. And yet who can tell? Several years ago in the village of Rychalovka, just a hundred and twenty miles from Zavolzhsk, there was a sexton who invented a hoist for getting up the bell tower. He was tired, you see, of running up and down eighty steep steps every day. He fixed a chair on long trace lines, stuck on some cogs and pinions and little levers, and what do you know? He could soar up into the heavens in just two minutes. His Grace himself came to take a look at this great wonder. He marveled, nodded his head, took a ride on the miracle chair, and then another one, and then he ordered the entire construction to be dismantled, because a church bell should be rung with humility, with reverent puffing and panting, and apart from that it was an unnecessary temptation to young boys. Mitrofanii sent the sexton to Moscow to study mechanics and sent another, with less supple wits, to replace him as sexton. But this glimmer of native genius is the exception rather than the rule. Let us admit quite frankly that as a group the Zavolzhians are slow-witted and suspicious of anything new.