Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk

by Boris Akunin

  The holy fathers of New Ararat exchanged glances and said nothing in reply to this opinion, but Polina Andreevna shook her head. She knew that in talking of religion, the bishop often expressed ideas that might be regarded as freethinking or even heretical. This was perfectly safe among his close companions. But in front of these dogmatists? They would report him, they would complain.

  But Mitrofanii had not yet finished his commentary.

  “And I must reproach Your Reverence yet again. I have heard that you pay excessive attention to earthly rulers when they visit you. I have been told that last year, when the young grand duchesses were brought here on pilgrimage, you laid a carpet runner to each holy site, and your choir performed an entire concert for the visitors. For underage girls! And why did you go in person to bless the governor-general's dacha in Si-neozersk, and even take a wonder-working icon with you?”

  “For the sake of a matter pleasing to God,” Vitalii explained passionately. “For on earth we live in the body and walk on the ground! Because I obliged their imperial highnesses, the monastery received a plot of land for a church from the court department in St. Petersburg. And in his gratitude the governor-general sent us a nine-ton bronze bell. This was not done for me, the sinful Vitalii, but for the church!”

  “Oh, I fear that our church will have to pay a great price for its close embrace of temporal power,” the bishop said, sighing. “And perhaps that time is already none too distant. Well, all right,” he said and paused briefly, then suddenly smiled. “I have only just arrived and already I am arguing—that does not seem very friendly. Father Vitalii, I would like to look around your famous island. I have been dreaming of it for a long time.”

  The archimandrite inclined his head respectfully. “I had been wondering how I could have provoked Your Grace's anger, and why you never favor Ararat with a visit. If you had informed us beforehand, we would have prepared a worthy reception for you. But as things are, please do not judge us too harshly.”

  “That does not matter—I am no great lover of ostentation,” the bishop said good-naturedly, pretending not to have noticed the hidden reproach in the father superior's words. “I wish to see everything, just as it is on an ordinary day. And I shall begin straightaway.”

  “But will you not dine?” the father cellarer asked in alarm. “Our Blue Lake fish, pies, preserves, honey cakes?”

  “Thank you, but my doctor forbids it.” Mitrofanii struck himself on the left side of the chest and stood up. “I drink broth and eat plain gruel, and I am well fed.”

  “Well then, I am willing to accompany you wherever you wish,” said Vitalii. He got to his feet, followed by the others. “The carriage is ready and waiting.”

  The bishop said in an affectionate tone, “I am well aware of how very busy Your Reverence is. Do not waste your time on idle respect for rank—it is not flattering to me, and not pleasant for you.”

  The archimandrite frowned. “Then I shall assign Father Siluan or Father Triadii to Your Grace. You cannot go with no guide at all.”

  “They are not needed either. I have not come here for an inspection, as you no doubt must have thought. I have long dreamed of simply spending time here, like an ordinary pilgrim. A simple visit, not in my role as your superior.”

  The bishops voice sounded sincere, but Vitalii frowned even more intensely—he did not trust the simplicity of Mitrofanii s intentions. He believed that the bishop wished to look around the territory of the monastery without anyone to prompt his thoughts or spy on him. And he was right.

  It was only then that His Grace looked at Polina Andreevna.

  “This lady, Mrs…. Lisitsyna will go with me. She is an old acquaintance of mine. Polina Andreevna, do not refuse to keep an old man company.” The glance he shot at her from under his thick eyebrows was so intense that Lisitsyna immediately jumped to her feet. “We can talk about the old days, you can tell me how life has been treating you, and we can compare our impressions of the holy monastery.”

  The tone in which this was said was ominous, or at least it seemed so to Polina Andreevna.

  “Very well, Father,” she muttered, lowering her eyes.

  The father superior stared hard at her with an expression of profound suspicion. He laughed darkly and asked, “And what of the crocodile, Mother? Is it not bothering you anymore?”

  Lisitsyna said nothing and merely hung her head even lower.

  THEY DROVE OUT of the gates in the same carriage that had brought Polina Andreevna from the guesthouse. As yet nothing had been said. In her agitated state, the criminal did not know how to begin; whether she should repent or try to justify herself, or talk about the progress she had made. Mitrofanii deliberately remained silent, to impress on her the seriousness of the situation.

  He looked out the window at the tidy streets of Ararat, clicking his tongue approvingly. When he began to speak it was so unexpected that Mrs. Lisitsyna actually started. “Well now, this crocodile—what is that? Yet another piece of mischief?”

  “I am at fault, Father. I deceived His Reverence,” Polina Andreevna confessed humbly.

  “Indeed you are at fault, my little Pelagiushka. And that's not all you have been up to.”

  This was it, it had begun. She sighed repentantly and lowered her eyes.

  Mitrofanii bent down his fingers one at a time as he counted off all her guilty acts: “You broke an oath given to your spiritual father when he was sick and almost at death's door.”

  “I did not swear!” she said quickly.

  “Don't play games with words. You understood my unspoken request not to go to Ararat perfectly well; you nodded your head and kissed my hand. Is that not an oath, you perfidious snake?”

  “I am a snake, verily, a snake,” Polina Andreevna agreed.

  “You have arrayed yourself in forbidden dress and brought disgrace on the vocation of a nun. Your neck is uncovered—pah, the sight is shameful.”

  Lisitsyna quickly covered her neck with her head scarf, but attempted nonetheless to refute this point of the accusation. “There were times when you gave your blessing for me to do such things.”

  “But this time not only did I not give my blessing, I explicitly forbade it,” Mitrofanii snapped. “Is that not so?”

  “It is …”

  “I thought of reporting you to the police. And it was quite inexcusable of me not to do so. You stole money from your own pastor! You could not possibly fall any lower than that! You should be sent to do hard labor—that's where thieves belong.”

  Polina Andreevna did not object—there was no point.

  “And if I did not report you, a fugitive nun and bandit, as wanted by the police throughout the empire—with your red hair and freckles, they would have found you soon enough—then it was only out of gratitude for curing me.”

  “For what?” Lisitsyna asked in amazement, thinking that she had misheard.

  “As soon as I heard from Sister Christina that you had gone away somewhere, allegedly at my request, I realized what your intentions were and my health immediately took a turn for the better. I felt ashamed, Pelagiushka,” the bishop said quietly, and it was suddenly clear that he was not angry at all. “I felt ashamed of my weakness. What was I doing lying in bed like a sniveling old woman, with doctors feeding me decoctions by the spoonful? I had abandoned my poor children in their misfortune, shrugged off my burden onto a woman's shoulders. And I began to feel so ashamed that a day later I started sitting up; on the fourth day I started walking; on the fifth I took a little drive around the town in a carriage; and on the eighth I packed for the journey here—to see you. Professor Schmidt, who came from Peter to look after me, says that he has never in his life seen such a rapid recovery from a ruptured cardiac muscle. The professor went back to the capital feeling very proud of himself—now people will pay him more money for his visits and consultations. But it was you, not he, who cured me.”

  Polina Andreevna sobbed and kissed His Grace's thin white hand. He kissed the parting
of her hair.

  “Whew, what powerful perfume you're wearing,” the bishop growled, no longer pretending to be angry. “All right, tell me about our case.”

  Lisitsyna took out a letter and handed it to him. “It would be best if you read this. All the most important things are in it. I have been adding to it every evening. That will be briefer and clearer than telling you myself. Or would you prefer me to tell you?”

  Mitrofanii put on his pince-nez. “Let me read it. If there's anything I don't understand, I'll ask.”

  With all the additions that had been made to it in the course of an entire week, the letter was long, very nearly ten pages. In places the words were blurred where they had gotten damp.

  The carriage stopped. The monk driving them removed his cowl and asked, “Where would you like to go? We are out of the town already.”

  “To Dr. Korovin's clinic,” Polina Andreevna said in a low voice, in order not to disturb the bishop at his reading.

  They drove on.

  Her heart was wrung as she examined the changes brought about in the bishop's appearance by his illness. Oh, he had risen from his bed too soon—if only that did not provoke another disaster! But, on the other hand, lying there doing nothing would have been even worse for him.

  At one point His Grace cried out as if in pain. She guessed that he had just read the part about Alyosha Lentochkin.

  At last the bishop laid the sheets of paper aside and fell into a morose reverie. He did not ask her any questions—she must have presented everything clearly.

  He muttered, “And there was I, like a useless old man, swallowing pills and learning how to walk … Oh, I am ashamed.”

  Polina Andreevna was impatient to talk about the case. “Your Grace, I cannot get the holy elder Israel's mysterious words out of my mind. What they add up to—”

  “Wait a while with your riddles,” said Mitrofanii, holding up his hand. “We'll talk about that later. First the most important thing: I want to see Matiusha. Is he in a bad way?”

  “Very bad.”

  The Final Day: The Middle

  “VERY BAD,” DR. KOROVIN confirmed. “Every day it is harder to get through to him. The entroposis is progressing. From one day to the next the patient becomes more feeble and passive. The nocturnal hallucinations have stopped, but I see that as a turn for the worse, rather than the better: the psyche no longer has any need for stimulation. Berdichevsky has lost the ability to experience even powerful feelings, like fear, and the instinct of self-preservation has grown weak. Yesterday I carried out an experiment: I ordered him not to be taken any food until he asked for it. He never asked. He spent the entire day without eating anything. He has begun to forget who people are if he has not seen them since the day before. The only person who has been able to involve him in coherent conversation is his housemate, Lampier, but he is also a rather unusual individual and no master of eloquent speech—Polina Andreevna has seen him, she knows. All my experience suggests that from now on things will only get worse. If you wish, you can take the patient away, but even in the most fashionable Swiss clinic, even if he is with Schwanger himself, the result will be the same. Alas, in such cases modern psychiatry is powerless.”

  The three of them—the doctor, the bishop, and Lisitsyna—entered cottage number seven together. They looked into the bedroom and saw two empty beds—one of them, Berdichevsky's, disheveled, the other neatly made up.

  They walked into the laboratory. Despite the fine day, the curtains were closed and the light was not on. It was quiet.

  There was the balding top of Matvei Bentsionovich's head protruding above the back of an armchair. In former times it had always been concealed by a slick of precisely combed hair, but now it was exposed and defenseless. The sick man did not turn around at the sound of footsteps.

  “But where's Lampier?” Polina Andreevna asked in a whisper.

  Korovin did not bother to lower his voice. “I have no idea. Whenever I come, he's not here. I suppose it must be several days since I last saw him. Our Sergei Nikolaevich is an independent character. He must have discovered some new emanation and gotten carried away with his ‘field experiments’—that's one of his special terms.”

  The bishop stopped by the door and looked at the back of his spiritual son's head, blinking very rapidly.

  “Matvei Bentsionovich!” Mrs. Lisitsyna called.

  “Speak louder,” Donat Savvich advised her. “He only responds to powerful stimuli now.”

  She shouted at the top of her voice: “Matvei Bentsionovich! Look who I've brought to see you!”

  Polina Andreevna had just a faint hope that when Berdichevsky saw his beloved mentor he would rouse himself and come back to life.

  The assistant public prosecutor looked around, searching for the source of the sound. He found it. But he only looked at the woman and paid no attention at all to her companions.

  “Yes?” he asked slowly. “What do you want, madam?”

  “He used to ask about you all the time!” she whispered despairingly to Mitrofanii. “And now he's not even looking … Where's Mr. Lampier?” she asked cautiously, moving closer to the seated man.

  He answered in a dull, indifferent voice: “Under the ground.”

  “You see,” Korovin said with a shrug. “He only reacts to the intonation and the grammar of a question, with a nonsensical response. It is a new stage in the development of his psychological illness.”

  The bishop took a step forward, decisively moving the doctor to one side.

  “Let me see him. Physical damage to the brain is definitely a matter for medicine, but a diseased soul—a soul, as they used to say in the old days, that has been possessed by the devil—that, doctor, falls into my department.” He raised his voice imperiously and said, “I tell you what, why don't you leave Mr. Berdichevsky and me alone together? And don't come back until I call you. If I don't call you for a week, then stay away for a week. Nobody must come, not a single person. Do you understand?”

  Donat Savvich laughed. “Oh, Bishop, this is not your domain, believe me. You can't drive this demon out with prayers and holy water. And I won't allow any medieval nonsense in my clinic.”

  “You won't allow it?” the bishop said, screwing up his eyes as he looked around at the doctor. “But you allow sick people to wander around among the healthy? Just what sort of muddle have you created here in Ararat? There's no way of telling which members of the public are sane. In the world we live in, it's hard enough to tell which of the people around you are mad and which aren't, but here on your island there is nothing but temptation and confusion. It's enough to make a sane man have doubts about himself. Why don't you just do as you are told? Or I'll forbid you to keep your institution on church land.”

  Korovin did not dare to carry on arguing. He shrugged and spread his hands, as if to say, Do as you wish. Then he turned and walked out.

  “Come along, Matiusha.”

  The bishop took the sick man gently by the hand and led him out of the dark laboratory into the bedroom.

  “Don't you come with us, Pelagia. I'll call when you can come.”

  “All right, Father, I'll wait in the laboratory,” Lisitsyna replied with a bow.

  The bishop sat Berdichevsky down on the bed and moved up a chair for himself. They sat in silence for a while. Mitrofanii looked at Matvei Bentsionovich, who looked at the wall.

  “Matvei, do you really not recognize me?” His Grace could not help asking.

  It was only then that Berdichevsky turned his eyes to look at him. He blinked several times and asked uncertainly, “Are you a cleric then? You have an icon hanging on your chest. Your face seems familiar. I must have seen you in a dream.”

  “Touch me. I am not a dream. Are you not glad to see me?”

  Matvei Bentsionovich obediently touched his visitor's sleeve and replied politely. “Of course I am, very glad.”

  He looked at the bishop again and suddenly began to cry—quietly, without any sound, but with c
opious tears.

  Mitrofanii was glad to see a demonstration of feeling, even of this kind. He began stroking the wretched man's head, repeating over and over again, “Cry, cry—tears wash the poison out of the soul.”

  But Berdichevsky apparently intended to cry for a long time. His tears kept streaming down in a way that was oddly monotonous. And the way he cried was strange too, like the endless drizzle of autumn. His Grace's handkerchief was completely soaked through from wiping his spiritual son's face, and it was a very big handkerchief indeed.

  The bishop frowned. “Well now, you've had a cry and that will do. I've brought you some good news, very good news.”

  Matvei Bentsionovich batted his eyelids obediently and his eyes immediately dried up. “It's good to have good news,” he remarked.

  Mitrofanii waited for a question, but it did not come. Then he declared solemnly, “Your promotion to the next rank has arrived. Congratulations. You have been waiting for a long time. You are now a state counselor.”

  “I can't be a state counselor,” Berdichevsky said in a thoughtful voice, wrinkling up his brow. “Madmen can't be state officials of the fifth level—it is forbidden by law.”

  “Oh, yes, they can,” said the bishop, trying to joke. “I know officials of the fourth rank and even, Lord help us, the third, who ought to be in an asylum.”