Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (32 page)

“A-ah!” Polina Andreevna gasped in fright, clutching at her heart. There, swaying gently right in front of her nose, was a human leg—entirely naked, emaciated, as white as sour cream in the wan glow of the moon. And there, only a few inches away, not in the light but in the shadow, was a second leg dangling in the air.

“Oh Lord, Oh Lord …” Mrs. Lisitsyna exclaimed and began crossing herself, but she was afraid to look up—she already knew what she would see: a hanged man, with his eyes bulging, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, and his neck stretched.

Gathering her courage, she cautiously touched one of the legs to see if it was already cold. The leg suddenly jerked away and Polina Andreevna heard someone giggling above her head. She gave an even more piercing howl than before and leapt back.

There was Alyosha Lentochkin, not hanging, but sitting on the spreading branch of some unfamiliar tree, and placidly swinging his legs. His face was flooded with moonlight, but Polina Andreevna could scarcely recognize the former Cherubino, he had become so thin. His limp hair was dank and matted, his cheeks had lost their childish plumpness, and his collarbones and ribs stuck out like the spokes of a taut umbrella.

Mrs. Lisitsyna hastily averted the gaze that had involuntarily slipped below the permissible limit, but then immediately reproached herself for her false modesty: this was not a man she saw before her, but an unfortunate, starving creature. No longer the boisterous puppy who had once snapped at the heels of the condescending Father Mitrofanii, but more like an abandoned wolf cub—hungry, sick, and mangy.

“That tickles,” said Alexei Stepanovich, and he giggled again.

“Come down, Alyoshenka, get off there,” she told him. Previously she had always addressed Lentochkin formally, by his first name and patronymic. But it would have been strange to stand on ceremony with a boy who was mentally ill, and naked as well.

“Come on, now,” said Polina Andreevna, holding out both hands to him. “It's me, Sister Pelagia. Surely you recognize me?”

In former times Alexei Stepanovich and His Grace's spiritual daughter had greatly disliked each other. On a few occasions the insolent youth had attempted to play spiteful tricks on the nun, but had been rebuffed with unexpected firmness, after which he had pretended not to take any notice of her. But this was no time to be thinking of old jealousies and settling stupid scores from the past. Polina Andreevna's heart was breaking out of sheer pity.

“Here, look what I've brought you,” she said gently, as if she were talking to a little child, and she began taking food out of the handiwork bag hanging around her neck: tartlets, canapés, and patties mignon, all cunningly stolen from her plate during supper. Apparently Dr. Korovin's guest did not possess such a gigantic appetite after all.

The naked faun sniffed the air greedily and jumped down to the ground. But he lost his balance, swayed, and fell.

He is terribly weak, Polina Andreevna thought with a sigh as she put her arm around the boy's shoulders. “Here, take it, eat.”

Alexei Stepanovich did not have to be asked twice. He grabbed two small patties at once and greedily stuffed them into his mouth, then reached out for more before he had even finished chewing.

One more week, two at most, and he will die, Lisitsyna remembered the doctor saying, and she bit her lip to avoid bursting into tears.

What good had it done for her to demonstrate such miraculous ingenuity to get here? How could she help? And it was clear that Lentochkin could not assist her in the investigation either.

“Be patient, my poor boy,” she said over and over again, stroking his tangled hair. “If this is the Devil's work, God is stronger anyway. And if it is a cunning plot by evil people, I will unravel it. I
will
save you. I promise!”

The madman could hardly have understood the meaning of these words, but her quiet, gentle tone of voice found an echo somewhere in his lost soul. Alyosha suddenly pressed his head against his comforter's breast and asked in a quiet voice, “Will you come back again? Do come. Or else he'll take me soon. Will you come?”

Polina Andreevna nodded without speaking. She could not speak— the tears she was struggling to hold back were choking her.

Not until she had left the conservatory's glass walls behind, as she walked into the pine grove, did she finally surrender to her feelings. She sat down on the ground and wept for all of them at once: for Lentochkin with his mind destroyed; for Matvei Bentsionovich with his spirit extinguished; for Lagrange, driven to suicide; and for His Grace Mitrofanii, whose heart had given way under the strain. She wept for a long time, perhaps half an hour, perhaps even an hour, but still she could not calm herself.

The moon had already ascended to the center of the vault of heaven; somewhere in the forest an eagle-owl had begun hooting; the lights in the windows of the clinic's cottages had all gone out, one by one; and still the disguised nun shed her bitter tears.

The unknown enemy was fearsome—he struck with a sure aim, and every blow inflicted a terrible, irreparable loss. The valiant forces of the Bishop of Zavolzhsk, defender of Good and persecutor of Evil, had been shattered, and the general himself lay in his bed, brought low by a grave illness that could yet prove fatal. Of all Mitrofanii's warriors only she was left, a weak and defenseless woman. The entire burden of responsibility now lay on her shoulders, and she had nowhere to retreat.

But this terrifying thought did not set the tears flooding from Mrs. Lisitsyna's eyes even faster, as it ought to have done. Instead, by some strange paradox, her tears suddenly dried up.

She put away her soaked handkerchief, stood up, and walked on through the bushes.

Night in the Abode of Woe

IT WAS EASIER to find her way through the grounds now: Polina Andreevna already had a clearer idea of the clinic's geography, and the moon was shining brightly high in the sky Her courage now recovered, the solitary warrior noted in passing the surprising mildness of the island's “microclimate,” which produced an abundance of clear, warm nights like this, even in November, and then directed her steps in the first instance toward the house of the clinic's owner.

But the windows in the white mansion with its decorative colonnade were all dark—the doctor was already asleep. Lisitsyna stood there for a while and listened without hearing anything of interest, and then walked on.

Now her path lay in the direction of cottage number three, the dwelling of the insane artist. Yoshihin was not sleeping: his little house was still brightly lit and she glimpsed a shadow flitting to and fro across one glowing rectangular window. Polina Andreevna walked around two sides of the house in order to look in from the opposite side. She glanced in.

Konon Petrovich was running rapidly along the wall, painting in the final specks of moonlight dotted across the ground in the panel
Evening.
The picture had reached the stage of absolute completeness and its perfection rivaled, or perhaps even surpassed, the magic of a real evening. But Mrs. Lisitsyna was only interested in the section of the canvas where the artist had depicted the elongated black silhouette with spider's legs. Polina Andreevna gazed at it for quite a long time, as if she were trying to solve some abstruse puzzle.

Then Yoshihin stuck his brush in his belt and climbed up onto the scaffolding standing in the center of the room. The secret observer pressed her cheek and nose against the glass in order to see what the artist would do up there. She realized that having finished
Evening
, Konon Petrovich had moved straight on to finish
Night
without taking even a moments break.

Lisitsyna shook her head and stopped watching.

The next point of call on her planned itinerary was the neighboring cottage, number seven, where the physicist Lampier lived with his houseguest. They were not sleeping either—all the windows on the ground floor were lit up. Polina Andreevna remembered that the bedroom was on the left of the door and the laboratory on the right. Matvei Bentsionovich must be in the bedroom.

She took hold of the windowsill with both hands, braced one foot against the narrow step in the wall, and looked inside.

She saw two beds. One was made up, but empty. A lamp was lit beside the other and there was a man half-sitting, half-lying in it on a tall heap of fluffed pillows, nervously turning his head first to the left, then to the right. Berdichevsky!

The spy craned her neck to see if Lampier was in the room, and the catch of her hood clinked against the glass—the sound was barely audible, but even so Matvei Bentsionovich started and turned to face the window. The assistant public prosecutor's face contorted in a grimace of horror. His lower jaw twitched convulsively, as if he were about to scream, but then his eyes rolled upward and his head slumped back onto the pillow. He had fainted.

Oh, how awful! Polina Andreevna even cried out in her frustration. Why, of course: when he saw the black figure with a hood lowered over its face in the window, the poor patient had imagined that Basilisk had appeared to him again. She had to correct Matvei Bentsionovich's mistake, no matter what the risk.

No longer trying to hide, she pressed herself against the glass, to make sure that the physicist was not in the room, and then took action. The main window, naturally, was latched, but the small window at the top was slightly open, and that was enough for the teacher of gymnastics. As quick as a flash, Lisitsyna dropped the cumbersome cloak on the ground and climbed in through the narrow opening, demonstrating quite an astonishing flexibility. She braced her fingers against the windowsill, performed a remarkable somersault through the air (her skirt inflated into a rather unseemly bell shape, but there was no one there to see it), and landed nimbly on the floor, making hardly any noise at all. Polina Andreevna waited for the sound of footsteps in the corridor—but no, everything was all right. The physicist must be too preoccupied with his strange experiments.

She moved a chair closer to the bed and cautiously stroked the sunken cheeks, the yellow forehead, and the eyelids—closed as if in mourning—of the man lying there. She moistened her handkerchief with water from a glass standing on the bedside cabinet and massaged the sick man's temples. Berdichevsky's eyelids trembled.

“Matvei Bentsionovich, it's me, Pelagia,” the woman whispered, leaning right down to his ear.

The man opened his eyes, saw the freckled face with its wide, anxious eyes, and smiled. “Sister … What a lovely dream … And is the bishop here?” Berdichevsky turned his head, evidently hoping to see Father Mitrofanii as well, and was disappointed when he didn't.

“It's terrible when I don't sleep,” he complained. “I wish I could never wake up at all.”

“Not waking up at all would be going too far,” said Polina Andreevna, still stroking the poor man's face. “But right now it would be good for you to sleep for a while. Close your eyes and take deep breaths. Perhaps you will dream of His Grace.”

Matvei Bentsionovich obediently closed his eyes tight and began breathing deeply—he obviously wanted very badly to dream of the bishop.

Perhaps things are not all that bad after all, Polina Andreevna thought, trying to console herself. If you tell him your name, he recognizes you. And he remembers His Grace.

Mrs. Lisitsyna glanced at the door and then looked in the bedside cabinet. Nothing out of the ordinary: handkerchiefs, a few blank sheets of paper, a wallet. And in the wallet some money and a photograph of his wife.

But under the bed she discovered a traveling bag of yellow pigskin. Beside the catch there was a small bronze plate with a monogram: “F. S. Lagrange.” And inside the bag she found the items that Berdichevsky had gathered for the investigation: the minutes of the inspection of the suicide's body, Alexei Stepanovich's letters to the bishop, a revolver wrapped in a piece of cloth (Polina Andreevna shook her head—that was fine work by Korovin, not even bothering to check a patient's belongings), and another two items of unknown origin: a long glove with a hole in it and a dirty cambric handkerchief.

Mrs. Lisitsyna decided to take the traveling bag with her—what good was it to Berdichevsky now? She looked around to see if there was anything else useful in the room and saw a thick notebook lying on the cabinet beside Lampier's bed. After a moment's hesitation, she picked it up, carried it across to the lamp, and began leafing through it.

Alas, it was quite impossible to understand a thing from all those formulae, graphs, and abbreviations. And the physicist's handwriting was no more comprehensible than his way of speaking. Polina Andreevna gave a sigh of disappointment and turned to the front page. With an effort, she could just make out the epigraph that was written there:

Measure everything that can be measured, render what cannot be measured measurable.

G. Galilei

But it was time to call a halt.

The uninvited guest put the notebook back in its place and climbed back through the small window, first throwing the traveling bag out, and then squeezing through herself.

The distance to the ground was greater than to the floor of the room, but once again the somersault was a great success. The flexible young lady landed in a comfortable squatting position, straightened up, and shook her head: after the light in the bedroom, the darkness of the night seemed impenetrable, and by a stroke of bad luck the moon had hidden behind a cloud.