by Boris Akunin
And on the way his behavior had been emphatically distant. He had not joked or entered into conversation, limiting himself to the most essential civility. Sergei Sergeevich was like a changed man.
At first the nun was perplexed and alarmed that she might have offended him in some unknown fashion, but then she resigned herself to the investigators gloominess and attributed it to a hypochondriacal temperament.
On the first leg of their journey, while they were traveling by barge—first along a tributary of the River, then along a tributary of the tributary—Dolinin kept looking through his notebook and writing letters or reports. Pelagia did not pester him. She knitted a waistcoat of dog’s hair for Mitrofanii, read the book she had brought for the journey, Lives of the Female Saints of Modern Times, or simply gazed at the riverbanks drifting past. But when she moved from the barge to the wagon, the first two of these occupations were rendered impossible by the jolting, and the third was rendered meaningless by the restricted view: whichever way you looked, there was nothing but trees.
For the first half day after they entered the forest, Sergei Sergeevich behaved in the same way, maintaining his distance. Every now and then, it’s true, he turned around in his saddle and looked back, as if he were checking that the nun was still there and had not disappeared from the driving box.
During the halt for lunch, Pelagia approached the crudely knocked-together crate in which the murdered man lay and began whispering a prayer. She thought: What is the significance of the tragic event known as “sudden death,” when a man is parted from his soul in the very prime of life, with no preparation or warning? Why would the Lord want this? Could it really just be as an example and a lesson to others? But what, then, of the one who has died? Is it worthy of a man to be no more than an edifying example for others?
She became so engrossed in her meditations that she did not hear the footsteps, and she started at the sound of Dolinin’s voice speaking right beside her ear.
As if nothing untoward had happened, as if the two and a half days of silence had never been, the investigator asked: “Well now, Sister, what do you think about the whole thing?”
“About what?”
“You understand me very well.” Sergei Sergeevichs face quivered in an impatient nervous tic. “You must surely have constructed your own picture of the crime. Who, how, to what end. You are a perceptive woman, with a keen intelligence and superb intuition. The help you gave me at the preliminary stage of the investigation was invaluable. So don’t stop halfway. Tell me. Hypotheses, surmises, the most fantastic assumptions—I shall be grateful for everything.”
If the question had been posed earlier, before the tearful interview with Mitrofanii and not now, then Pelagia would definitely have shared all of her reasoning with Sergei Sergeevich. However, the conversation with the bishop and the promise she had given had worked a decisive change in the nun’s attitude. Having frankly admitted to herself that the most important factors in her agreement to make the journey to Stroganovka had been reckless vanity and sinful curiosity, the nun had strictly forbidden herself to think about where Glass-Eye had got to, whether he had killed the “prophet,” and if so why—out of hatred or greed or other motives.
She answered the investigator meekly, with her eyes lowered. “I have not even thought about it. It is none of my concern. No doubt you must have formed the impression that I think of myself as a detective in a nun’s habit. I assure you, sir, that that is not the case. Is it seemly for a nun to meddle in worldly affairs, especially of such a sinful nature? If I said too much on that day, it was owing to my shock at the sight of the dead body. You, sir, have your job to do, and I have mine. May God assist you, and I shall pray for the success of your efforts.”
He gave her a keen, searching look. Then suddenly he smiled—a bright, friendly smile—and said, “That’s a shame. We could have made our deductions together. And it is even more of a shame, my little Sister, that you do not work in the detective department. We don’t have many women agents, but every one of them is worth ten men. With your abilities you would be worth a hundred. Very well, I’ll leave you in peace. I believe you were saying a prayer?”
He walked away to the campfire, and from that moment his behavior changed, he became the old Sergei Sergeevich—an intelligent conversation partner whose mildly sardonic manner made the time pass faster and more pleasantly.
Now Dolinin preferred to ride beside the wagon rather than up ahead. Sometimes he drove the Zytyak off the box and took the reins himself. There were times when he even dismounted and walked, leading the horse by the reins. Once he actually suggested that Pelagia should ride on the horse, but she refused, citing her calling as a nun, although she wanted very much to sit in the saddle like a man, the way she used to do in times long before, press her knees against the horses strong, hot flanks, half stand in the stirrups and go flying across the soft, squelchy ground …
The nun found Sergei Sergeevichs sardonic tone impressive rather than irritating, because it was absolutely free of the cynicism that was so widespread in the educated sectors of society. She sensed that not only was he a man with convictions and ideals, but also—something altogether amazing for the present times—a man of profound faith, untainted by superstition.
In the presence of their dismal cargo, the conversation at first centered on the victim, and the nun learned certain details of the sinful life of the “fisher of souls” from Dolinin.
The latter-day messiah had apparently only begun preaching quite recently—two years earlier, in fact—although he had managed to make his way on foot around almost half the provinces in the country and had acquired a substantial number of followers, for the most part of the very lowest social standing. No crowds of Foundlings had gathered, no mass demonstrations had been organized, yet even so they had drawn a great deal of attention to themselves with their white and blue robes and their emphatic rejection of Christianity, together with the Orthodox Church. At the same time, as is usually the case with perturbers of souls who have risen up out of the darkest depths of the people, the meaning of Manuila’s preaching was obscure and resistant to logical exposition. Vague imprecations against Sunday, priests, icons, the chiming of bells, military service, and the eating of pork, and an incomprehensible glorification of Jewishness (although Manuila, if he really had come from a remote corner of the province of Zavolzhie, could not possibly have seen any actual Jews there), together with all sorts of other nonsense.
Eventually, as Dolinin related, the wandering preacher had come to the attention of Chief Procurator Pobedin, whose professional duty included keeping a watchful eye on heresy of all kinds. The high official had summoned the uncouth peasant and engaged him in spiritual discussion. (“Konstantin Petrovich loves spiritual combat with heretics, simply for the sake of his own inevitable victory,” Dolinin laughed as he narrated this incident in a comical tone, but without the slightest trace of acrimony.) And Manuila, always ready to take his chance, had waited until the Chief Procurator turned toward an image of the Savior in order to cross himself, and then pinched a gold and diamond clock—a present to Pobedin from the sovereign himself—off the desk. He had been caught in the act and led away to the police station. Konstantin Petrovich, however, had taken pity on the vagabond and set him free to go on his way. “They didn’t even have time to photograph him or take physical measurements for a bertillonage, and that would have made my job so much easier now!” Dolinin sighed regretfully before concluding: “It would have been better if he hadn’t let him go in his misguided generosity. Manuila would be in the lockup now, and still alive.”
“A sad story,” said Pelagia, when she had heard it all. “And the saddest thing of all is that the Orthodox religion, supposedly our natural faith, fails to give many Russian people spiritual comfort. There is something lacking in it for the simple heart. Or perhaps just the opposite, there is some kind of impurity in it, something untruthful—otherwise people would not abandon our church for all sorts
of absurd heresies.”
“There is nothing lacking. Our faith has everything,” Dolinin snapped with an unshakable certainty that Pelagia had not expected from this skeptic. For some reason the nun’s words had agitated the investigator. He hesitated for a moment and then blushed as he said, “Let me tell you … a little story about a certain man …” He pulled off his pince-nez and rubbed the bridge of his nose agitatedly. “Well, never mind ‘a certain man’—the story is about me. You’re intelligent, you will guess in any case. You, Sister, are only the second individual in the entire world to whom I have told it… I don’t know why … No, that’s not true, I do know. But I won’t say, it’s not important. I feel I want to, that’s all.”
Something was happening to Sergei Sergeevich, he was growing more and more agitated. Pelagia was familiar with this condition in people: someone carries inside himself something that is burning his very soul, he bears it for as long as he can, sometimes for years, and then all of a sudden he simply pours out his great pain to a person he just happens to meet, some chance traveling companion. It has to be a chance acquaintance, that is the whole point.
“It’s an ordinary story, banal in fact,” Dolinin began with a crooked grin. “There are plenty of stories like it all around. It’s not really a tragedy, more a brief scenario for a dirty joke about a cuckolded husband and an unfaithful wife … A certain man (whom you see here before you, but I’d better use the third person, it’s more proper that way) had a young and lovely wife. Of course, he adored her, he was happy and he assumed that she was happy too, that they would live together until the end of their lives and, as they say, die on the same day. No, I won’t make a meal of it, it’s well-worn material… And then suddenly—a bolt from the blue. He looked in her handbag for some unimportant trifle … No, I’d better be precise, because that will emphasize the banal and comical nature of the event … The poor fool wanted her powder compact, to conceal a pimple, since he had an important court appearance coming up and he had this pimple on his nose, you understand, it was embarrassing. In other words, in those days I used to think that a statement at a trial was a very important thing,” said Sergei Sergeevich, abandoning his third-person narrative after all. “Until the moment when I found the note in that handbag. A note of the most explicit character imaginable.”
Pelagia gasped. “I told you, this is an extremely banal story,” Dolinin said, smiling fiercely.
“No, no, it’s not banal!” the nun exclaimed. “It is the very worst of misfortunes! And as for its happening frequently, death itself is no rarity but no one calls it banal. When the one person who means the whole world betrays you, it is even worse than if he had died … No. I have said something sinful. It is not worse—it is not.”
Pelagia turned pale and shook her head sharply twice, as if driving away some memory or vision, but Sergei Sergeevich was not looking at her and seemed not even to have heard her objection. He continued his interrupted story. “I went dashing to her to demand an explanation, but instead of asking my forgiveness or at least lying, she said: ‘I love him, I have for a long time, I love him more than life itself. I couldn’t bring myself to tell you, because I respect you and feel sorry for you, but since it has turned out like this … ’ It turned out to be an old acquaintance of ours, a family friend and a frequent visitor to the house … Rich, good-looking, and an ‘Excellency’ to boot. Anyway, to keep it short, she moved in with him. I completely lost my head. To hell with the job and the important trials, if the world’s collapsing around me … I would never have thought I was capable of imploring abjectly, sobbing and all the rest. But I was, I was perfectly capable! Only it was all in vain. My wife is a kind creature, she is compassionate; when I sobbed, she shed tears with me. I went down on my knees, and she immediately plumped down on hers too. There we were crawling about in front of each other. ‘Forgive me’—‘No, you forgive me!’ et cetera, et cetera. But for all her compassionate feelings she’s a resolute lady. She won’t be shifted when it comes to anything important—I already knew that about her. And I respected her for it. Of course, she wouldn’t be shifted this time either, I was simply tormenting her and myself pointlessly And one day she took advantage of my miserable sniveling”—at this point a note of undisguised bitterness appeared in Dolinin’s voice for the first time—“and she asked me to let her have our son. And I did. I was hoping to impress her with my nobility and self-sacrifice. I did impress her. But even so she didn’t come back to me … And that was when I wrote the famous project, the project of reform. With a secret, almost insane purpose in mind. I contravened all the rules of subordination, adopted a highly insolent tone. I thought, if they throw me out of my job, let them, it’s all the same to me. But what if I rise high, make a career? After all, these ideas are far from stupid, they are ideas of national importance, the product of long experience … At first I was removed from my post, but I didn’t flinch, I even felt a certain satisfaction. Well, then, that’s the way it’s going to be, I thought. You see, at that time I conceived a certain plan.”
“What plan?” Pelagia asked, guessing from his tone of voice that this plan would be something very wicked.
“A most excellent one,” Dolinin chuckled. “Actually quite unique in its own way. The point is that the happy lovers had set the date for a wedding. Well, of course, not an entirely legitimate one, because there couldn’t be any marriage, but nonetheless something in the nature of a wedding feast. After all, morals in the capital are different from in the provinces, even a wedding with someone else’s wife is no great rarity there. ‘Civil marriage’ is what they call it. They had planned for everything on a grand scale. In the modern style, with no hypocrisy. If there’s to be a feast, let the whole world come. Meaning that true love is higher than human laws and scandal. And I pretended that I had reconciled myself to the inevitable. Several well-wishers had long been trying to persuade me to ‘take a broader view of things,’ and so I did.” Sergei Sergeevich gave a dry laugh, more like a cough. “I made myself out to be such a gentle lamb, such a Tolstoyan, that I was even—believe it or not—honored with an invitation to this festival of love, along with the other members of the select company. That was when the plan came to me … First I thought I would follow the example of the inhabitants of the Land of the Rising Sun, by slitting my belly open with a knife in public and spilling my insides straight onto the wedding table—help yourselves to that, so to speak. But then I thought of something even better.”
Pelagia gaped at him and put her hand over her mouth. Dolinin continued implacably with his agonizing tale: “I’ll arrive, I thought, with a bouquet of flowers and a bottle of her very favorite white wine, the one I could previously only afford to buy twice a year—on her saint’s day and on our wedding anniversary. At the very height of the feasting, I was going to request the floor, saying that I wished to make a toast. Of course, everyone would prick up their ears and fix their eyes on me. How poignant: the abandoned husband congratulating the young couple. Some would be touched, others would grin maliciously to themselves. And I would make a speech, a very short one. I would say: ‘Love is a force that conquers all. May its smile always shine on you as mine does now.’ I would open the bottle, fill a goblet to the very brim, raise it above my head, and hold it there for a while—that was to be specially for my son, who, of course, would also be present at the feast. So that he would remember everything clearly. And then I would pour the contents of the goblet here.” Dolinin jabbed one finger against his forehead. “Only my bottle would contain not wine, but sulfuric acid.”
Pelagia cried out, but once again Sergei Sergeevich appeared not to hear. “Not long before that I had been investigating a case—a crime of passion. A certain street woman splashed acid in her pimp’s face out of jealousy. I saw his corpse in the morgue: the skin had all come off, the lips were completely eaten away, and the bare teeth were set in an evil grin … So my idea was to show the young couple exactly the same ‘smile of all-conquering love.’ I w
asn’t afraid of the pain, I even yearned for the gratification of it. Only that kind of pain could possibly compare with the fire that had been consuming me from the inside all those months … I would have expired on the spot, of course, because the shock is too much for the heart when a large area of the skin is burned away. And then let them carry on with their lives and revel in their happiness. Let them dream at night… And let my son remember for the rest of his life … That is the broad outline of the plan that took shape in my head.”
“And what prevented you from putting it into effect?” the nun asked in a whisper.
This time Dolinin heard her, and nodded. “On the very eve of the red-letter day, I suddenly received a summons to the very pinnacle of power. A miracle had occurred; somewhere up on high, individuals capable of thinking like statesmen had been found. They treated me kindly, exalted me, gave a new meaning to my life. And I, of course, still not being right in the head, took this as a sign. Here was the chance to prove to my wife that I was a great man, bigger than her little nobleman. I was going to have a position, and wealth, and power. I was going to exceed him in every respect. Then she would be sorry, and she would repent. Of course, she would never have repented of anything, because she is not that kind of woman, but as I told you—I was not in my right mind.”
After saying nothing for a while, Sergei Sergeevich went on to conclude his story in an entirely different tone of voice, without any trace of bitterness. “That, however, was not the meaning of the sign at all. A certain individual explained it to me later—it doesn’t matter who, you don’t know him. He said: ‘God took pity on you. He took pity on you and saved your soul.’ As simple as that. God took pity on me. And when I understood that, I began to believe. With no sophistry or speculation. I simply began to believe, that’s all. And my real life began from that moment.”