Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel

by Boris Akunin

  “Verily, that is the truth!” Pelagia exclaimed, and then, surrendering to an unaccountable impulse, she blurted out: “You know what, let me tell you about myself too …”

  But the investigator tugged on his reins, halting his bay, and the wagon rolled on.

  The nun jumped down to the ground and walked back to Dolinin—no longer in order to tell him about herself (she realized that Sergei Sergeevich was in no mood for other peoples intimate outpourings just at the moment), but in order to finish saying the most important thing of all:

  “God saved your life and your soul. And He will not limit Himself to these mercies. Time will pass, the wound will heal, and you will stop feeling angry with your former wife. Understand—she is not to blame. She is simply not the one whom the Lord intended for you. And perhaps you will still meet your true match.”

  Dolinin’s smile seemed derisive, but there was no sarcasm in it.

  “No, begging your pardon, I’ve had enough. Unless perhaps I should meet someone else like you? But I suspect there is no one else in the world like you, and unfortunately there is no way in the world to marry a nun.”

  He lashed at the horse with his heels and galloped off to the head of the caravan, leaving Pelagia in a state of total confusion.

  Forest horrors

  FOR A LONG time after that the holy sister rode on in silence. God only knows where the nun’s thoughts were straying, but her expression was strange—both sad and dreamy at the same time. Pelagia smiled several times, and the tears ran down her cheeks and she wiped them away, unawares, with her open hand.

  And then suddenly the mood was gone, her thoughts were scattered. Pelagia did not immediately understand what was hindering and distracting her. Then she realized: it was the same sensation again. She could quite distinctly feel someone’s intent gaze on her neck and the back of her head.

  It was not the first time this had happened. Only a short time before, during the afternoon stop, it had been exactly the same: Pelagia had swung around sharply and seen—actually seen—a branch sway at the far edge of the clearing.

  This time, too, the nun could not restrain herself, and she looked around. She clutched at her heart: there was a large gray bird sitting on a fir tree and staring at the nun with round yellow eyes. The holy sister laughed quietly. Lord, Lord, an eagle-owl! Nothing but an eagle-owl …

  But that evening when they set up camp for the night, something happened that she could not laugh away.

  While the men were building the huts and collecting brushwood, the nun walked off to answer the call of nature. In her shyness of the men, she went quite a long way; since the twilight had not fully condensed into darkness, she wouldn’t get lost.

  Suddenly she caught the faint odor of smoke from somewhere, not from the clearing, but from the opposite direction. Immediately she remembered stories about forest fires. The great Forest burned only rarely; the swamps rescued it. But once it began to blaze, there was no escape for anything or anyone from the fiery inferno.

  Drawing the smoke in through her nose, Pelagia walked toward the suspicious smell. Up ahead there really was a flickering light. Perhaps it was touchwood?

  When she was already very close to the light, she heard a sudden crack. The sound was not really all that loud, but it was clearly made by some living thing, and the nun froze.

  Something moved behind the fir tree.

  Not something—someone!

  Frozen in fear, the nun noticed something swaying rhythmically. On looking more closely, she saw that it was a tail—a wolf’s tail! And the most incredible thing was that the tail was not dangling close to the ground, but quite high up, as if the beast were sitting on a branch!

  Pelagia made the sign of the cross and began walking backward, muttering, “God is our refuge and our strength …”

  From out of the twilight there came a low growling with a strange sound like someone smacking his lips, not so much ferocious as—or so it seemed to the poor nun—sneering.

  Recovering her wits, she turned and ran back as fast as her legs would carry her.

  She ran so hard that she stumbled over a tree stump, fell down, tore her habit, and didn’t even notice: she jumped up right away and set off even faster.

  She ran out into the clearing as white as a sheet, with her lower lip bitten between her teeth in terror.

  “What is it? A bear?” said Dolinin, snatching his revolver out of its holster as he dashed toward her. The policemen reached for their rifles.

  “No … no,” Pelagia babbled, grasping at the air with her lips. “It’s nothing.”

  The sight of her traveling companions sitting having a peaceful smoke around the campfire made her feel ashamed. A wolf sitting on a branch, and smacking his lips, too? You could imagine seeing anything in the Forest.

  “Come on now, come on,” Sergei Sergeevich said in a quiet voice, leading her aside. “You’re not a timid sort of woman, but right now you look absolutely terrible. What’s happened?”

  “There’s a wolf there … a strange one … it’s like it’s sitting in a tree. And there’s a little light shining… I remembered about Struk. You know, the Forest monster,” Pelagia admitted, somehow managing to force a smile.

  But Dolinin did not smile. He looked over his shoulder into the blue evening thickets.

  “Well, then, let’s go and see if it is Struk or not. Will you show me?”

  He went ahead, lighting the way with a torch. He walked confidently, without trying to hide, the branches crunching loudly under his feet, and her fear shrank and released her.

  “Over there,” said the nun, pointing as she led the investigator up to the terrible spot. “That’s it, the fir tree.”

  Sergei Sergeevich parted the prickly green branches intrepidly and leaned over.

  “A twig, broken,” he said. “Someone stepped on it, and only just recently. A pity about the moss, or there would be tracks.”

  “He … it growled,” Pelagia said. “And it was mocking somehow, not like an animal. And the most important thing—the tail was at this level, here.” She went up on tiptoe to point. “Honest to God! But the light disappeared. And it doesn’t smell of smoke anymore …”

  She suddenly felt ashamed of talking such rubbish. But even at this point Dolinin did not think of making fun of her. He sniffed at the air.

  “No, no, there’s still a slight smell… You know, Mademoiselle, I am a man of a rational inclinations, I subscribe to a scientific view of the world. But I am by no means of the opinion that science knows all the secrets of the earth, let alone those of the heavens. It would be naïve to assume that the nature of things is exhausted by the laws of physics and chemistry. Only very limited people can be materialists. You’re not a materialist, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you so surprised? Well, you got a fright, that’s understandable, but what is there to be surprised at? You can see for yourself what kind of place this is.” He gestured around at the gloom in which the Forest had swathed itself with the approach of night. “Where should evil spirits dwell, if not in deep waters and forest thickets?”

  “Are you joking?” Pelagia asked in a quiet voice.

  Sergei Sergeevich sighed.

  “Tell me, nun, do God and angels exist?”

  “Yes.”

  “That means the Devil and his cohorts do too. That is the only possible logical conclusion. If white exists, then black must exist, too,” the astonishing investigator snapped. “All right, let’s go and have some tea.”

  The wild Tartar

  THEY REACHED STROGANOVKA early in the evening of the fourth day.

  The village’s plain little houses were scattered across a broad meadow that must have been won from the Forest in an age long past. Two or three hundred years earlier, as the name of the village testified, the Stroganov family of merchants—the very same ones who conquered Siberia—had held land here. These old times were represented by a rectangle of rotten timber beams—t
he remnants of a small fortress—and several dozen pits, mementos of the salt factory that once existed here.

  The peasants who lived in these parts were rough men with long beards, descendants of the Stroganovs’ wild ragamuffins, the wandering rabble that had been drawn from all over Russia to the free life here. The absence of any plowed land, the small, sentry-box windows of the huts, and the animal skins drying on wattle fences immediately made it clear that these settlers had not come from peaceful farming stock. The villagers of Stroganovka did not till the soil. They lived by harvesting the forest and scraping rock salt out of the long-exhausted pits. The salt was foul and gray, and only the peasants from the neighboring districts bought it, for a cheap price.

  But beyond the pine trees, on the other side of a small, rapid river strewn with rocks, there were craggy cliffs—the first spurs of the Ural Mountains.

  The village elder who talked things over with Dolinin was a morose old man who looked like a wood sprite, completely covered in gray hair with a greenish tinge to it. Present in the communal hut with the old man were two other men, also not young, who never spoke, but only gaped warily at the uninvited guests. If it were not for the district sergeant major, who happened to be godfather to one of the village elder’s children, probably no conversation would have taken place at all.

  The most important thing, the reason why they had come, was established almost immediately. Glancing into the open wooden crate, the village elder crossed himself and said the body was definitely Petka Shelukhin, a native son of Stroganovka. He had left three years earlier, and since then no one there had seen any sign of him.

  “Under what circumstances did he leave his place of residence?” Dolinin asked.

  “How be that?” said the elder, gaping at him. He spoke in the local dialect, which was rather difficult to understand if you weren’t used to it. “What’s that’un say?”

  “Well, why did he go?”

  “He just went, thar’n all. Year gone as we wrote his house over to commune,” said the old man, gesturing around the room, which, it should be said, was absolutely wretched, the corners of its low ceiling full of gray cobwebs.

  “‘Year gone’ means ‘last year,’” Pelagia translated. “They’ve turned Shelukhin’s house into their communal hut.”

  “Thank you, but I’m not asking him about the hut. What sort of man was he, this Shelukhin? Why did he leave the village?”

  “Runty little son of a bitch,” said the elder, pronouncing the ugly phrase distinctly, and making the nun wince. “Dawdling braghead. Gyphanded swiper. Hent more’n once.”

  “Eh?” Dolinin asked Pelagia.

  She explained: “A boaster and idler. He lied. And he had been caught stealing.”

  “Sounds like our man,” Sergei Sergeevich remarked. “The habits match. What suddenly made Shelukhin leave these glorious parts? You’d better ask, Sister—this Methuselah and I don’t seem to understand each other too well.”

  Pelagia asked. The elder exchanged glances with the taciturn peasants and answered that Petka “went off with the wild Tartar.”

  “With whom?” Sergei Sergeevich and the nun asked in a single voice.

  “There been this man as weren’t our’n. Come from yon, bain’t known where.”

  “What’s this ‘from yon’?” Dolinin asked, glancing nervously at Pelagia. “And what does ‘bain’t’ mean?”

  “Just wait, will you,” said Pelagia, impolitely brushing the investigator aside. “But tell me, Granddad, where did the Tartar come from?”

  “No place. Yon Tartar, ’twere Durka as brung ’un.”

  At this point even the nun began feeling lost.

  “What?”

  In the course of a long cross-examination abounding in every possible kind of misunderstanding, it was established that Durka was what they called a feeble-minded dumb girl who lived in Stroganovka.

  The question of what Durka’s real name was provoked a quarrel among the natives. One man believed it was Steshka, another that it was Fimka. The elder was unable to say anything about the witless girl’s name, but he did inform them that she lived with her granny Bobrikha, who had been lying paralyzed for more than six years. Durka looked after the invalid as best she could, and the commune helped them out a little bit.

  One day in spring, three years earlier, this Durka had brought an “awtogether wild” man, an outsider, from God only knew where.

  “Why do you say he was wild?” Pelagia asked.

  “That’s as he were, wild. Swinging ’un’s head all around and gawking, talking as sounded human, and no sense to it. ‘Hey fuani, hey fuani.’ Freak he was, such as begs on Christ by the churches in towns.”

  “A freak? You mean he was a cripple?” put in Sergei Sergeevich, who was listening intently.

  “No,” replied the nun. “Freak as in fool, a holy fool. Tell me, Granddad, how was this man dressed?”

  “Not dressed at all, nigh on. No pants on him, nought but a sack, and it belted around with Mass string.”

  “What sort of string is that, Sister?”

  “Blass—that means blue.”

  Dolinin whistled.

  “Well, that’s a fine turn all right. So it isn’t Manuila we’ve got in the coffin. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  “Wait, wait,” said Pelagia, turning back to the elder. “But why did you decide he was a Tartar?”

  The old man squinted at the nun, but didn’t answer her directly—he ordered one of the men to do it: “You tell ’un, Donka, that’s low of my place.”

  “We took ’un to bathhouse for to wash ’un, and his willy were lopped,” Donka explained. “Like yon Tartars.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That I understood,” Sergei Sergeevich put in. “The wild Tartar was circumcised. There’s no doubt about it—that was Manuila. He really is immortal, the scoundrel.”

  The subsequent conversation yielded a few more details. For some reason Petka Shelukhin, the most idle, dishonest peasant in the whole of Stroganovka, had become attached to the “wild man,” let him live in his hut, and followed him around everywhere like his own brother. According to the elder, they really were alike—the same height, similar faces. Petka actually called the stranger his “elder brother,” and the stranger called his mentor “Shelukhai.”

  “Naah, not Shelukhai. Sheluyak—that be how the Tartar called ’un,” Donka corrected the old man.

  “That be it,” confirmed the second man. “Sheluyak. And Petka answered to ’un.”

  The investigator ordered the girl who had brought the “Tartar” into the village to be called.

  They brought her, but she was no help at all. Durka must have been about fourteen, but she was so small and stunted that she looked ten. She didn’t understand what they were asking—she only mumbled, raked her dirty fingers through her tangled hair, and sniffed. Eventually Dolinin gave up on her.

  “So, you say Shelukhin became friends with this new arrival?” he asked, turning to the elder. “On what grounds?”

  Pelagia heaved a sigh at Sergei Sergeevich’s sheer hopelessness and prepared to translate his question into the language of Stroganovka—in order to avoid a repetition of the conversation between the Prince of Denmark and the gravedigger: “Why, here in Denmark, sire.” And then, purely by chance, she happened to glance at Durka, who was huddling by the door. Now that the grown-ups had stopped paying attention to the little girl, her face had changed: her eyes were lit up by a bright spark and the expression of stupidity had disappeared. The girl was listening to the conversation, and very eagerly too!

  “Go away! Go away!” the elder shouted at her. The girl reluctantly left the room, and the conversation about the “wild man” continued.

  “How did the Tartar make friends with Petka?” Pelagia asked.

  “Petka fibbed as the wild man told him about the Holy Land. And living in truth.”

  “Why do you say he was lying?”

  “Well, how could yon Tartar spe
ak on the Holy Land, if he had none of our tongue?”

  “You mean, he couldn’t talk at all?”

  “Aha.”

  One of the men (not Donka, but the other one) said, “Wussn’t him’n Durka grand, though, eh, Dad? Her mooing, him cooing. Hilarious. Remember Okhrim joking on’t? ‘Durka’s got herself a bridegroom,’ he says. ‘That’ll be a right family—Noddle and Noodle.” And he stroked his beard, which must have been considered the height of frivolity in Stroganovka, because the elder pulled the bright spark up short.

  “Give over that grinning. Or has you forgot as what happened after?”

  “What did happen afterward?” Dolinin immediately inquired.

  The Stroganovka men glanced at one another. “We flung ’un Tartar out,” said the elder. “That’s what we done—gimma right threshing, stuck his head down the catch, and lashed him out of bounds.”

  “What did they do?” Sergei Sergeevich asked, looking helplessly at the nun.

  “Beat him within an inch of his life, ducked him in the cesspit, and drove him out of the village with their whips,” she explained.

  “Ought to have beaten the filthy beast to death, we ought,” the elder commented sternly. “And ripped off that Tartar willy of his. That Durka, poor witless orphan, she runs around after him like a chicken, and he wants to befoul her. There be bastards in the world all right. Two days after, Durka lay sleepsick.”

  Sergei Sergeevich frowned.

  “And what did Shelukhin do?”

  “Ran off into the forest after the Tartar. Moment as we set in beating the filthy beast, Petka come flailing at the lads, wouldn’t let them teach his ‘big brother’ a lesson. So we smashed Petya’s mug in too. Then when we flung the Tartar out into the forest, Petka tied up his bundle and went after. ‘He’ll die in the forest!’ he was yelling. ‘He’s a godly man!’ And we saw nowt of Petka again till today.”

  “Tell me, Granddad, what direction did the Tartar go in when he left you? Toward sunset, sunrise, north, or midnight?” Dolinin asked.