by Boris Akunin
“You do?” asked Matvei Bentsionovich, slightly surprised. “And yet the articles of the state service absolutely forbid it.”
Again they sat in silence for a while.
“But that is still not my most important news,” said the bishop. He slapped Berdichevsky on the knee—the assistant public prosecutor started and winced tearfully. “You have a son, a fine baby boy! He is healthy, and Masha is well too.”
“It's very good when everybody is well,” Matvei Bentsionovich said with a nod. “Without health nothing brings any happiness—neither fame nor riches.”
“We've even chosen the name already. We thought for a long, long time and decided to call him …” Mitrofanii paused. “Akakii. So he'll be Akakii Matveevich. Doesn't that have a fine ring to it?”
Berdichevsky approved the name as well.
Silence descended again. This time they said nothing for about half an hour at least. It was clear that Berdichevsky did not find the silence irksome. He hardly even moved and just looked straight ahead. Once or twice, when Mitrofanii stirred, he looked at him and smiled benevolently.
Unsure of how to break through this blank wall, the bishop began a conversation about Berdichevsky's family—he had brought some photographs from Zavolzhsk for this purpose. Matvei Bentsionovich looked at the photographs with polite interest. He looked at his own wife and said, “A pretty smile, only rather stern.” And he liked the children too. “You have charming little ones, Father,” he said. “And so many of them. I didn't know that individuals of the monastic vocation were allowed to have children. It's a shame that I cannot have any children, because I am mad. The law forbids those who are mad from entering into marriage, and if someone has already done so, then the marriage is declared null and void. I think that I used to be married too. There's something I can rem—”
At this point there was a cautious knock and Polina Andreevna's freckled face appeared around the door—at just the wrong moment. The bishop waved one hand at his spiritual daughter: Go away, don't interfere—and the door closed. But the critical moment had been lost, and instead of exploring his memories, Berdichevsky became distracted by a cockroach that was crawling slowly across his bedside cabinet.
The minutes passed, and the hours. The day began growing dark and then faded away completely. No one knocked at the door again or dared to disturb the bishop and his insane charge.
“All right then,” said Mitrofanii, getting up with a quiet groan. “I'm feeling a bit tired. I'm going to settle down for the night. Your physicist is not here anyway, and if he turns up, the doctor can put him somewhere else.” He lay down on the second bed and stretched out his numb legs.
For the first time Matvei Bentsionovich showed signs of concern. He switched on the lamp and turned to his recumbent visitor. “You're not supposed to sleep here,” he said nervously. “This place is for madmen, and you are sane.”
Mitrofanii yawned and crossed his mouth so that the evil spirit would not fly into it. “What kind of madman are you? You don't howl or roll around on the floor.”
“I don't roll around on the floor, but I howl sometimes,” Berdichevsky confessed. “When I feel very afraid.”
“Well, I'm going to be with you.” His Grace's voice was serene. “From now on, Matiusha, I am never going to leave you. We shall always be together. Because you are my spiritual son and because I love you. Do you know what love is?”
“No,” replied Matvei Bentsionovich, “I don't know anything now.”
“Love means always being together. Especially when the one you love is suffering.”
“You can't stay here! Why can't you understand? You're a bishop!”
Aha! Mitrofanii clenched his fists in the semidarkness. He has remembered! Come on then, come on!
“That's all the same to me, Matiusha. I'm going to stay with you. And you won't be afraid anymore, because two people together are never afraid. We can both be madmen together, you and me. Dr. Korovin will take me in—it's an interesting case for him: a provincial prelate who has gone barmy.”
“No!” Berdichevsky said suddenly. “Two people can't go mad together!”
This also seemed a good sign to the bishop—previously Matvei Bentsionovich had agreed with everything. Mitrofanii sat up on the bed and hung his legs over the edge. He began speaking, looking his former investigator straight in the eye: “But I, Matvei, do not think that you have gone mad. You've just gone a little crazy. It happens to very clever people. Very clever people often want to squeeze the whole world into their heads. But it won't all fit in. It's God's world. It has a lot of corners, and some of them are very sharp. They poke out through your head, they squeeze your brain, they hurt you.”
Matvei Bentsionovich pressed his hands to his temples and complained: “Yes, they do squeeze. Do you know how badly it hurts sometimes?”
“But of course it hurts. If you clever people can't fit something inside your head, you start to get frightened of your own brain and you go out of your mind. But there is nowhere else for you to go, because apart from his mind a man can have only one other support—faith. Matvei, no matter how often you repeat ‘I believe, Oh Lord,’ you still won't really believe. Faith is a gift from God that is not given to everyone, and it is ten times more difficult for clever people to attain it. And so it turns out that you have gone out of your mind but not arrived at faith, and that is all there is to your madness. Well, I cannot give you faith—that is not in my power. But I will try to lead you back into your mind. So that you can fit God's world between your ears again.”
Berdichevsky listened suspiciously, but very attentively.
“You haven't forgotten how to read, have you? Here, read what another clever person writes, someone even cleverer than you. Read about the coffin, about the bullet, about Basilisk on stilts.”
The bishop took Sister Pelagia's letter out of his sleeve and held it out to the other man. Berdichevsky took it and moved it closer to the lamp. At first he read slowly, to himself, moving his lips laboriously at the same time. On the third page he shuddered, stopped moving his lips, and began batting his eyelids. He turned to the next page and began ruffling up his hair nervously.
Mitrofanii watched hopefully and also moved his lips—he was praying.
When he reached the end of the letter, Matvei Bentsionovich rubbed his eyes furiously. He shuffled the pages in the reverse direction and began reading them again. His fingers reached up to seize the tip of his long nose—in his former life this had been a habit of the assistant public prosecutor's that he indulged at moments of stress.
Suddenly he jerked bodily, put down the letter, and swung around to face the bishop.
“What do you mean—Akakii’? My son—Akakii? What sort of name is that? And Masha agreed?”
The bishop made the sign of the cross, whispered a prayer of gratitude, and pressed his lips fervently against his precious panagia. He began speaking in a light, happy voice: “I lied, Matveiushka. I wanted to shake you up. Masha hasn't given birth yet—she's still carrying the child.”
Matvei Bentsionovich frowned. “And was it a lie about the state counselor?”
At the sound of peals of laughter mingled with breathless panting and sobbing coming from the bedroom, the door opened without a knock, but it was not Mrs. Lisitsyna who looked in; it was Dr. Korovin and his assistant, both wearing white coats—they must have just gotten back from their rounds. They stared in fright at the crimson-faced bishop wiping away his tears and their tousle-headed patient.
“I had never imagined, dear colleague, that entropic schizophrenia was infectious,” Donat Savvich muttered.
His assistant exclaimed, “That, my dear colleague, is a genuine discovery!”
When he had finished laughing and wiped away the tears, Mitrofanii told the confused assistant public prosecutor, “I didn't lie about the new title—that would have been an unforgivable sin. So congratulations, Your Honor.”
Donat Savvich took one look at the expression on his
patient's face and dashed toward him.
“Permit me, if you will.” He squatted down by the bed, took Matvei Bentsionovich's pulse with one hand, and began pulling his eyelids up with the other. “What miracle is this! What did you do to him, Bishop? Hey, Mr. Berdichevsky! This way! Look at me!”
“Why are you shouting like that, Doctor?” the new state counselor asked, frowning and moving away. “I don't believe I'm deaf. And by the way, I've been meaning to tell you for a long time: you are mistaken if you believe that the patients don't hear those ‘asides’ of yours when you and the doctors, nurses, or visitors are talking to each other. You're not on a stage in a theater.”
Korovin's jaw dropped, which looked rather strange in combination with the mask of supercilious self-confidence that the doctor had firmly adopted as his own.
“Donat Savvich, do you serve supper here?” His Grace asked. “I haven't had a bite since this morning. How about you, Matvei, aren't you hungry?”
Berdichevsky replied rather uncertainly, but without a trace of his former dreariness: “I suppose something to eat would be quite nice. But where is Mrs. Lisitsyna? I don't remember very clearly what happened here, but she visited me—I didn't dream it, did I?”
“Supper later! Afterward!” Korovin shouted in great agitation. “You must tell me immediately what exactly you remember about the events of the last two weeks! Every last detail! And you, dear colleague, take down every word in shorthand! This is of great importance for science!
And you, Your Grace, you must reveal your method of treatment to me. You employed shock, didn't you? But of what kind exactly?”
“Oh, no,” Mitrofanii snapped. “First supper. And send for Pela … for Polina Andreevna. Where has she disappeared to?”
“Mrs. Lisitsyna went away,” Donat Savvich replied absentmindedly and began shaking his head again. “No, I have definitely never heard or read about anything like it! Not even in the Jahrbuch für Psychopatholo-gie und Psychotherapie.”
“Where did she go to? When?”
“When it was still light. She asked to be taken to her hotel. She wanted to tell you something, but you would not let her in. Oh, yes. Before that she wrote something in my study. And she asked me to give you an envelope and a bag of some kind. I have the envelope here—I put it in my pocket. But which one? And the bag is outside the door, in the hall.”
Without waiting to be asked, the assistant carried in the bag, which was large and made of oilcloth, but obviously not heavy.
While Donat Savvich was patting all of the numerous pockets of his white doctor's coat and frock coat, the bishop looked into the bag.
He took out a pair of tall rubber boots, an electric torch of unusual design (screened with sheets of tin to produce a small aperture), and a piece of black cloth rolled into a bundle. When he unrolled it, it proved to be a cassock with a cowl, the edges of which had been crudely sewn together with coarse thread. There was a slit in the chest, so that it could be thrown back over the head of the person wearing it, and there were two holes in it for the eyes. Puzzled, Mitrofanii stuck his finger first into one hole and then the other.
“Well, Doctor, have you found the letter? Give it to me.”
He put on his pince-nez and muttered as he opened the sealed envelope, “We've been doing nothing all day but reading letters from a certain individual… Look at that scrawl—like a chicken writing with its claw. She was clearly in a great hurry.”
Another Letter
I came dashing to you but realized it was not the right time. I have important news, but your business is a hundred times more important. May God assist you to return Matvei Bentsionovich's lost reason to him. If you succeed, then you are a genuine magician and miracle worker.
Forgive me for not waiting and for acting willfully once again, but I do not know how long your cure will take. You said it could be a whole week, and it is quite definitely not possible to wait that long. Indeed, I believe I cannot wait at all, for God alone knows what is on this man's mind.
I am writing in haste, but nonetheless I shall try not to deviate from the correct order of exposition.
While I was waiting for you and trembling for the outcome of your difficult (perhaps even impossible?) task, I could not think what to do with myself. I began wandering around the house— at first the laboratory, and then the other rooms, which, of course, was improper on my part, but I could not get out of my head what Donat Savvich had said about not having seen Lampier for several days. Of course, the patients in the clinic are free to come and go, but even so it is rather strange. And at the same time I realized that in concentrating too much on Father Israel and Outskirts Island, I had almost completely neglected the clinic—that is, the theory that the criminal might be one of its inhabitants, whereas when I recall the night when the Black Monk attacked me, my attention is directed to precisely that line of inquiry.
In the first place, who could have known about the stilts belonging to the patient who is obsessed with cleanliness and where they could be found? Only someone well informed on the habits of the clinic's residents and the arrangement of the buildings.
In the second place, who could have known where exactly Matvei Bentsionovich was being kept, so that they could frighten him at night? The answer is the same.
And the third thing: Yet again, only someone involved with the clinic could have repeatedly visited Lentochkin in the conservatory without hindrance (it is clear from what Alexei Stepanovich told me that the Black Monk used to appear to him), and then killed the poor boy and carried away the body.
That is, to be absolutely precise, an outsider could have done this—after all, I was able to get into the conservatory without anyone noticing—but it would have been easier for one of the inmates.
I began to worry that something might have happened to the physicist. What if he had seen something he should not have seen and now he was also lying on the bottom of the lake? I recalled disjointed statements by Lampier in which he had spoken passionately about a mystical emanation of death and some terrible danger.
And so I decided to look into the cloakroom to see if his outer clothing was there, after first asking an attendant what Mr. Lampier usually wore. Apparently it was always the same: a black beret, a checked cloak with a hood, galoshes, and, without exception, a large umbrella, no matter what the weather.
Imagine my alarm when I discovered all of these items together in the cloakroom! I squatted down to take a closer look at the galoshes—sometimes dried lumps of mud can tell you a great deal: how long it is since the person was last outside, what kind of soil they walked across, and so forth. And then my eye was caught by the oilcloth bag, squeezed into a dark recess behind the galosh stand.
If you have not yet had time to look inside the bag, then do so now. There you will find a full set of material evidence: the Black Monk's cassock; boots suitable for “walking on water;” a special torch with its beam directed sideways and upward. As you no doubt recall, I had suspected something of the kind.
For a moment I thought the things had been left there deliberately, that the criminal had planted them. But then I measured Lampier's galosh against the sole of a rubber boot and saw that they were the same size. The physicist has small feet, almost like a woman's, so there could be no mistake about it. It was as if my eyes had suddenly been opened. Everything fitted perfectly!
Well, of course, the Black Monk is Lampier, the insane physicist. There is not really anyone else it could be. I ought to have guessed a lot sooner.
I suspect that what happened was this.
Obsessed by a maniacal idea about some “emanation of death” supposedly emitted by Outskirts Island, Lampier decided to scare everyone away from the “accursed” place. We know that frequently it is only madmen's basic ideas that are insane, while in putting them into practice they are capable of truly miraculous skill and cunning.
First the physicist invented the trick with “Basilisk” walking on water—the bench hidden under
the water, the cowl, the cunning torch, the sepulchral voice telling the frightened witness: “Go and tell everyone. This place shall be cursed,” and other things in the same vein. This device was effective, but not effective enough.
Then Lampier moved his performance onto dry land and even committed an act of undiluted villainy in the death of the buoy keeper's wife and then of the buoy keeper himself. Insanity of this kind is prone to grow worse, impelling the maniac to ever more monstrous actions.
I have already described to you how the attacks on Alyosha, Felix Stanislavovich, and Matvei Bentsionovich were carried out. I am sure that is precisely how everything happened.
However, Lampier was afraid that Lentochkin or Berdichevsky might recover from their terrible shock and remember some detail or other that could lead back to the criminal. And so he continued to frighten them even in the clinic.
Lentochkin was in a truly pitiful state—it did not require much to deal with him. But Lampier paid especial attention to Berdichevsky, who had retained the rudiments of memory and coherence. He arranged for Matvei Bentsionovich to be moved into his cottage, where “Basilisk's” victim would be under constant surveillance by the Black Monk himself. Nothing could have been easier for the physicist than to frighten Berdichevsky at night. All he had to do was go outside, get up on the stilts, and knock on the second-floor window.
And I also remembered that when I stole into Matvei Ben-tsionovich's bedroom, Lampier s bed was empty. I thought that he was working in the laboratory, but in fact he was outside, dressed as Basilisk and preparing for another performance. When I surprised him by suddenly climbing out through the window and jumping down to the ground, he had no choice but to stun me with a blow from a wooden stilt.
This is what I wanted to tell you when I dared to glance into the room. You drove me away, and you were right to do so. It has worked out for the best.
I began thinking again. Where had Lampier gone? And why had he not taken his outer clothing? He had not been seen for several days—did that perhaps mean since the very night that Alexei Stepanovich was killed?