Sisters of the Cross

by Alexei Remizov

  “We must find Verochka,” Marakulin suddenly thought. “We must take her with us so that somewhere in Paris she shall achieve her heart’s desire, either to become a great actress and have her revenge on Anisim, or let it be that the peace of God would descend upon her, that her desire for vengeance should be assuaged, and that she should simply forgive him.”

  As soon as he had said this, they all agreed that they must take Verochka with them as well.

  “But I’ve met Verochka,” said Vera Nikolaevna. “You were in Moscow at the time. I was walking home along Gorokhovaia Street one evening, and she came running toward me. It was incredibly cold. A blizzard had started, and she was just wearing a light summer jacket, and over her hair a thin white scarf. ‘Verochka,’ I called to her. She stopped and looked, and looked at me in such a strange way. She was trembling all over. ‘Verochka,’ I say, ‘let’s go and have some tea. Come along to our flat.’ But she just straightened her scarf, trembling all over, and shook her head like this. We were on Semionovsky Bridge, and it was incredibly cold. A blizzard had started.”

  The letter to Plotnikov was written that same evening and sent to Moscow the next morning by registered post. Marakulin had faith that the money would come. He believed in Plotnikov’s thousand rubles, just as Plotnikov believed in Marakulin.

  In the meantime Adoniia Ivoilovna had set off on her pilgrimage. She set out for Jerusalem, where the incense is never extinguished and perpetual candles burn. There she will wash herself in the River Jordan and rub herself down with weeping grass, and her sorrows, afflictions, and tears will fall away from her, like the bark from a pine tree; she will grasp the meaning of Parasha’s ships, and no longer will the earth give way and collapse on her husband’s grave in the Smolensk cemetery.

  As she was free in the evenings, Akumovna was telling fortunes. It came out that they could all expect great change and a journey. For Marakulin, besides that, there would be grass and pine trees as there had been just before his journey to Moscow, only the pines were right up close and not along the sides—it was Vera Nikolaevna who had them showing in the cards along the sides.

  “A happy journey,” whispered Akumovna.

  “We are going to Paris, Akumovna, to the heart of Europe!”

  Sergei Aleksandrovich gave a wink: “Should we not take Akumovna with us? Would Akumovna agree to go abroad with us, to Paris?”

  “Well, I will go. I haven’t breathed fresh air for nine years, and I shall breathe in a bit of fresh air.” Akumovna did not need any persuasion; she would willingly have gone with Sergei Aleksandrovich, not just to Paris—she would have followed him on foot to the end of the world.

  “That’s fine then. We shall leave God’s servant Kuzmovna to guard the apartment and—farewell to Russia. We must shake off all worldly cares.” Then, no longer able to contain himself, and feeling a flood of his own feelings and hopes for Russia’s success in conquering the very heart of Europe, Sergei Aleksandrovich began to swing his feet around from side to side, like a cock flapping its wings.

  “We must pick up Verushka at the same time. She will come to grief otherwise, the shameless girl,” said Akumovna, her thoughts going back to her Vera, who had perished long ago in the Burkov flats.

  “We’ll take your Verushka as well, and we shall all be abroad together.”

  With great affection Akumovna was laying out the cards to tell Sergei Aleksandrovich’s future.

  Akumovna suddenly remembered: “Now our priest at Turii Rog was a good sort, and a great one for repentance, our Father Arseny. Just before he died, he stood up and asked: ‘Are the horses ready?’ ‘What horses do you mean, Father?’ ‘Well, you see,’ says he, ‘I’ve just married a young couple, and they’ve invited me to go abroad to their wedding feast.’ With that he died.”

  “A priest will always die a priest,” said Sergei Aleksandrovich, as he followed the cards.

  Marakulin felt a shudder within him as though something had broken, but his hopes came to life again and put things right. All his hopes were based on Plotnikov, and he could think about nothing else. His hopes were his strength.

  May arrived, and white tents went up in front of the Belgian Society factory. They brought bricks and sand into the yard and began to repair the house. In the evenings a balailaika would strum its heart out—there was an abundance of these poor un-Russian blessings in the Burkov yard and, settling themselves on the windowsills and wearied by the winter, people stuck their rumpled heads out of the windows in the hope, most likely, of catching some warmth from the May sunshine.

  But there was no reply from Plotnikov. And a terrible anxiety crept into Marakulin’s heart, only he was afraid to admit this to himself and said nothing to anyone else. The reply would come—it had to come! They should be—and they would be—abroad, in the city of great people, in the heart of Europe—in Paris.

  There, somewhere in Paris, Anna Stepanovna would find her proper place on earth, her heart would be uplifted, and she would smile in a quite different way, and there, somewhere in Paris, Vera Nikolaevna would recover and receive her leaving certificate, and there, somewhere in Paris, Vasily Aleksandrovich would climb onto the trapeze once again and perform wonders, and there, somewhere in Paris, as Sergei Aleksandrovich danced to win the heart of Europe, Marakulin would find his lost happiness, and he would seek out Verochka, and there, somewhere in Paris, Verochka would become a great actress, and the peace of God would descend upon her, and there, when Akumovna, like a rolling stone, had made her way to Paris, her father’s curse would be lifted from her, and she would breathe in the fresh air that she had not breathed for nine years, and she would no longer have to fight her way through to the tsar, nor would she have to drink an infusion of horse manure—and there, somewhere in Paris, her Vera would also not die, the one who had perished so long ago in the Burkov flats.

  Faith had vanquished every doubt, dispersed every anxiety through its strength and certitude. Marakulin believed in Plotnikov’s thousand rubles, just as Plotnikov believed in Marakulin.

  There was only a week left now before the date fixed for Sergei Aleksandrovich to go abroad. It was decided that he would go on ahead with the theater company and write from somewhere in Paris, and by that time they would have received the money, and nearly everyone from Burkov House would move straight from the Fontanka to Paris.

  When finally it arrived, that week—full of expectation and anxiety and swinging between faith and doubt—decided everything in its own way.

  Anna Stepanovna’s exams came to an end, and the mysterious uniform fund—or the travel expenses, or the removal costs (they were called different things by different people)—must have finally arrived. But such money, as it turned out, could only be given once to any individual teacher, and, of course, Ledniova deprived her of her job; seemingly, Anna Stepanovna found things difficult at the High School and she had various shortcomings, like wearing a jacket with an open neck—quite improper—and the way she had of smiling, which embarrassed the teacher of religion, the priest Aristovulov—also quite improper. The rumor would go around that in Miss Ledniova’s model school a woman teacher was seducing the priest—and that was quite out of order! Put briefly, if one person wants to defame another for any reason of his own, then he will try his hardest to do so—that’s the way people are. Of course, the open-necked jacket and Father Aristovulov, the object of Anna Stepanovna’s seduction, all that was lost in favorite deliberations about good deeds in general, the decline in morals, immorality, the cause of the younger generation that must be upheld, and one’s own sacrifices; the headmistress Ledniova herself gave lessons for free in her own school, and as well as that she was providing sustenance for twenty teachers! And everyone was well acquainted with her, the headmistress Ledniova, the whole of Petersburg knew her, and General Kholmogorov’s wife herself was her friend.

  So it all came to an end simply for Anna Stepanovna, very simply, and she went on her way, smiling. You felt sick at heart at the sight o
f her smile. She had gone on her way from Leshchov to Ledniova, and would go from Ledniova to Petrova, and then to some sister of Ledniova’s, until she stopped smiling.

  And finally there came the reply from Plotnikov, so long awaited, so impatiently expected. Through his bank, Plotnikov had transferred to Marakulin the sum of twenty-five rubles. And off went Sergei Aleksandrovich with his theater to Paris, to conquer the heart of Europe through Russian art. Just before he left, he rented a country cottage somewhere in Finland and persuaded Vera Nikolaevna and Anna Stepanovna to settle there along with Vasily Aleksandrovich, who still required considerable care and attention. He mustn’t feel lonely without heels and with nothing but his stick. Led by the “slave” Kuzmovna, Vera Nikolaevna, Anna Stepanovna, and Vasily Aleksandrovich the clown departed for Tur-Kilia instead of Paris. Marakulin and Akumovna were left in Burkov House to spend the summer there.

  “I shall go to the tsar himself; as before God, I shall place my hands together and tell him everything. I shall go to the tsar himself—naked; as before God, I shall place my hands together and tell him everything.” But Marakulin had no words left to argue with Akumovna. He did not even repeat the final words with which she would leave this life—retribution and reward to all people: no one should be blamed. Somehow everything in him had fallen silent and become deaf to everything.

  One person has to betray in order—through treachery—to open up his soul and become his real self in the world. Another person has to kill in order—through killing—to open up his soul and at least die as himself. He needed somehow to write out a payment slip and give it to the wrong person in order to open up his soul and become his real self in the world, and not just any old Marakulin, but Marakulin Piotr Alekseevich—and see, and hear, and feel.

  But he could not stand a life with no purpose, just seeing, hearing, and feeling, and he asked for some relief from that. He imagined the general’s wife to himself, the carefree, sin-free, and immortal louse, and he found for himself her absolute entitlement, in the hope of retrieving that extraordinary joy of his, which he had lost.

  And now on his path, so straight and even, where even the last shadow and trace of hope were vanishing, the dark evil forces of oncoming despair had already begun their work, quiet and clinging like little worms, gnawing away and untethering him from life, eating away at the strong pivot and foundation of his existence.

  From morning to evening Marakulin would pace the city of Petersburg from one end to the other, from gate to gate, from high road to high road, on and on like a mouse in a mousetrap. He had lying in his pocket the crisp, new banknote from Plotnikov, the twenty-five rubles, just as once he had carried the new silk handkerchief he had received from Dunia cross-stitched with his initials, and he forgot about the crisp, new banknote from Plotnikov, just as he had once forgotten about Dunia’s silk, scented handkerchief.

  At the same time, it is extraordinary how tenacious man is of life: he can be thrown about and beaten, yet he will still go strutting on, unconcerned, like a cock that has been killed and is walking about even without its head, as if swaggering and looking for grain, though headless. Marakulin had found an activity, found a way of unburdening himself; he had made a discovery, and this discovery was not a whit less important than that drunken idea of Plotnikov’s to use flies as a source of motive power.

  All you have to do is to step out onto the street and then, quite independently of your will, you will fall under the power of that special law of the street, and it will no longer depend on you how you walk and how you hold yourself, but that will be governed by some wave or current of the street into which you have stepped. You may get into one wave and it’s as though everyone is laughing at you, making faces at you, snorting at you—that’s the women—while the men purse their lips into a round shape like a bobbin, as though they are about to whistle; then another wave may roll you along—it looks completely different: the men have brutish faces, frowning and surly, you seldom meet a woman, and if you do chance on one, then she’ll be by herself, going along, laughing and seeing nobody, as though she was blind, laughing to herself; next there comes a broad wave of people—all women and, seemingly, you could not find eyes and smiles that were as spiteful; their eyes cut through you, and their smiles look as though they were pouring scalding water over one another, spiteful wives; and now here comes another wave of people, ordinary people who walk in a bunch, energetically, and in their midst not children, but monstrous dwarfs, emaciated, with their flaccid arms dangling like whips and huge heads sloping forward, out of proportion to their size; and there are many other different waves of people, even a wave that will sweep you away, if you get mixed up in it—you will be driven along, everyone will be running, both people and horses, old men, children and old women, both trams and motor cars.

  Once he had made this discovery for himself, Marakulin clutched at it with dogged persistence, as he used to do with reports for the director. In any case, he was already like a dead man; they had buried him, after all. He remembered the words of Glotov, the cashier Aleksandr Ivanovich, the words that he had once uttered in the theater: “And you know, Petrusha, we had written you off long ago.” Yes, they had buried him long since, and he, as a dead man, as a corpse, as someone not of this world, could follow easily, simply, and impartially the movements of those who were alive and still of this world. So now he was going to test himself, test out his discovery.

  But what was the point of checking and what sense was there in his discovery? Who would need it, and for what purpose? For the pleasure of whom, whether dead or alive, whether of this world or of the next? This was a question that he did not ask; it was not his concern—everything in him had fallen silent and gone dead. There was simply no purpose in it, just as a cock continues to swagger after its throat has been cut.

  However, he was wrong, and there was no time to do any checking.

  Walking along Nevsky Prospekt that night, Marakulin met Verochka. It happened like this: at the watchtower by the Duma the police were rounding up suspects and, as usual, there were hundreds of women tastelessly overdressed, rushing along, clutching at passersby and pleading for them to escort them just a little way. One woman in particular caught Marakulin’s eye. Just as absurdly as the others, she was jumping backward and forward from pavement into roadway and back from roadway onto pavement, only she was all dressed in dark clothes. She had managed to avoid the policeman and was making her way toward Anichkov Bridge. In this lonely, dark woman completely dressed in dark clothes—dress, hat, gloves and all—Marakulin had recognized Verochka. And suddenly remembering the crisp, new Plotnikov banknote and crushing it in his hand—he was no longer a beggar—he ran to catch up with her. But at Anichkov Bridge Verochka mingled with a crowd of people coming toward her and disappeared.

  “Verochka!” he called, sweeping his eyes from the Nevsky to the Fontanka and back again. “Verochka!” And something dark and cold enveloped his heart like a snake.

  The next morning the first thing he thought of and firmly decided to do was that in the evening he must, come what may, go to Nevsky Prospekt and look out for Verochka. During the day he stayed at home. It was the seventh Thursday after Easter, the last Thursday before Trinity Sunday, and Akumovna was particularly keen to do some fortune-telling. According to her, the cards on that Thursday would tell the whole truth unfailingly, as would any dream dreamt on that day.

  Two strolling musicians came into the Burkov flats, one with an accordion, the other with a tambourine. The accordion was played by a tall, swarthy man—a locksmith, perhaps, or a plumber. The little girl striking the tambourine was dressed in a sailor’s shirt and cap; she must have been about twelve years old, it was difficult to say exactly, and she had only one leg. She supported herself on a stick and held the tambourine on her bent knee.

  The little girl sang along to the accordion.

  She was singing some sort of factory song, a mixture of verses like “I will sink to the bottom of the sea…I will
fly up above the clouds…” and lines from gypsy songs about various sleigh rides, burning eyes, and tender tears. Then suddenly her voice burst into one of the oldest of Russian songs. She formed the words purely, and you could hear everything clearly, every word. But words were not the most important thing. The girl sang in a resonant alto deep from the chest, striking the rhythm on her tambourine. The song was infused with the endless expanses of the steppes and the vastness of the sea, and the tambourine struck against her knee like a sinking heart.

  The musicians found themselves surrounded by the children, who had abandoned their wild games and doings and formed a circle around the players. They had fallen silent and were unable to tear their eyes away from the one-legged girl, just as once they had looked at the cat Murka, when she was rolling about on the stones in agony. And the girl went on singing. The dark-skinned Persian masseur from the public baths was always where the children were, and he settled down at the same time, rolling the whites of his eyes. And the girl went on singing.

  The girl was singing in a resonant alto deep from the chest, striking the rhythm on her tambourine. The song was infused with the endless expanses of the steppes and the vastness of the sea, and the tambourine struck against her knee like a sinking heart.

  The children were moving in ever closer to the one-legged girl, as though they did not want to let her go. The crowd of children closed her off completely, so that she was no longer visible, and it seemed as though the earth was singing, the steppe was singing, the sea was singing—the broad, free expanse, the heart of the earth. Everyone was afraid that at any moment the song might come to an end, the girl would stop singing and go away. No one wanted her to leave.