Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk (48 page)

“Good Lord! Your Grace!” the assistant public prosecutor exclaimed. “Four o'clock in the morning! And Polina Andreevna, Pelagia, still isn't back! Could something have happened …”

He choked and stopped without finishing his question when he saw the sudden change in Mitrofanii's face as it contorted into a grimace of alarm and guilt.

Pushing aside the fascinating notebook, the bishop abruptly gathered up his cassock and dashed out of the basement and up the stairs with his shoes clattering.

The Cave

WHEN POLINA ANDREEVNA called in to the Immaculate Virgin on her way from the clinic, to collect the things she needed for her expedition, there was an unpleasant surprise waiting for her in her room.

The precautionary measures taken to protect Lagrange's dangerous legacy from curious members of the staff had failed. While in the vestibule Lisitsyna noticed the attendant on duty looking at her in a rather strange way—with either suspicion or fear. And when in her room she glanced into the traveling bag, she discovered that someone had been rummaging in it: the glove with the bullet hole was not lying in the same way as before, and the revolver was also wrapped rather differently in the drawers.

Never mind, Polina Andreevna told herself. She might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb. If she got away with her nocturnal expedition, then the matter of the gun could be managed somehow. The bishop would smooth things over.

But she could deal with it even more simply than that. When she was changing in the pavilion, she could take the revolver out of the traveling bag and hide it there, and if the monastery's peacekeepers came calling, she could tell them the half-witted maid had imagined it. Come now, what would a pilgrim want with a gun?

In any case, one way or another she had to take the traveling bag with her.

She put several candles and some matches into it. What else did she need? Nothing, really.

She sat down for a moment before her journey and crossed herself. Then she set off into the gathering twilight.

She had to wait a long time on the waterfront by the pavilion. It had been a clear, windless evening and there were so many people still out strolling that she simply had no chance to slip in behind the little wooden structure without attracting attention to herself.

Polina Andreevna walked to and fro, huddled up in her long cloak, burning with impatience, but still there were as many people in the street as ever. A group of elderly women had stopped right in front of the pavilion and launched into a discussion of the provincial prelate's arrival—a colossal event by the standards of New Ararat. Numerous suppositions and surmises were voiced, and it was clear that the pilgrims’ animated discussion would continue for a long time yet.

Do I really need to change? Polina Andreevna suddenly thought. A novice and a woman were prohibited alike from visiting Outskirts Island. And she would be held doubly responsible for the masquerade. For a woman to dress up in a monk's robes was not simply blasphemous—it was probably a criminal offense as well.

And so she abandoned her wait and went as she was, in her woman's clothes and carrying the traveling bag.

It was a bright, moonlit night and Lisitsyna found Brother Kleopa's boat very quickly. She looked along the Canaan shoreline—all was quiet, not a single soul. As she embarked, she whispered a prayer and then started pulling on the oars.

Outskirts Island came drifting toward her out of the darkness, round and overgrown with pine trees that made it look like a prickly hedgehog. The keel of the boat scraped repulsively on the bottom and the prow nudged into the gravel. Polina Andreevna sat there and listened. The only sounds were the splashing of the oars and the sleepy rustling of the pine needles.

She weighed the boat's mooring rope down with a heavy stone and set off to walk around the island, moving in a gentle upward spiral. If it were not for the moon, she would have been unlikely to find the hermitage: a small, dark door of oak surrounded by an uneven border of moss-covered stones.

The little door was set straight into the slope on the side facing toward the lake, not Canaan—the side on which the sun rose in the morning.

Mrs. Lisitsyna was anything but timid, but she had to summon up her courage before she took hold of the bronze ring.

She pulled on it gently, prepared to discover that the hermitage was bolted shut for the night. But no, the door yielded easily. And indeed, who was there to lock the door against her?

The creak was not loud, but in the absolute silence it sounded so clear that the sacrilegious trespasser shivered. But she only paused for a brief moment before tugging on the ring again.

Inside the door there was darkness. Not like the darkness outside, permeated with a silvery glow, but genuine pitch darkness that smelled of something musty and something else very specific—either wax or mice or old wood. Or perhaps it was simply the dust that had accumulated over the centuries?

When the spy stepped forward and closed the door behind her, God's world seemed to disappear, swallowed up by the gloom and the silence, leaving nothing but the strange smell as a reminder of itself.

Polina Andreevna stood there and sniffed, waiting a while for her eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. But they did not—evidently no light at all penetrated into this place, not even the tiniest amount.

She took the matches out of the traveling bag, struck one, and lit a candle.

A wide gallery led into the depths of the hill, its high vaulted ceiling lost in darkness. Its walls were uneven and a vague white color—lined with blocks of limestone, or perhaps shell rock. Mrs. Lisitsyna raised her candle higher and screamed.

And with good reason. These were no blocks of stone, but dead bodies laid one on top of another in a stack taller than the height of a man. Not skeletons, but remains desiccated with age, mummies with tautly stretched skin, sunken eyelids and mouths, their hands folded devoutly on their chests. When she saw the bony fingers of the uppermost body, with its long, curved nails, Polina Andreevna gave a quiet gasp. How frightening!

She wanted to get past the terrible place as quickly as possible—no matter where she might come to. The rows of the dead stretched on and on—there were hundreds and hundreds of them. The ones lying closest to the entrance were almost naked, barely covered by scraps of rotted clothing, obviously the most ancient burials. After them the walls gradually grew darker as the hermits’ robes were better preserved. But the cowls that had covered the faces of the holy elders in life had all been slit open, and Mrs. Lisitsyna was struck by the incredible similarity between all of these dead heads: with smooth craniums, no eyebrows, no mustache, no beard, not even any eyelashes, the pious hermits were as alike as brothers. And this discovery suddenly dissipated the fear that had been driving Polina Andreevna to turn and run as fast as her legs could carry her away from this kingdom of death.

It was not a kingdom of death at all, she told herself, but the gateway to Heaven. Something like a cloakroom, where pure souls left their outer clothing before entering into their bright dwelling. There were the clothes, no longer needed. Lying there and decaying.

But in fact they were not even decaying very fast, the intrepid investigator told herself. All these bodies had not belonged to ordinary people, but to holy elders. And therefore their remains were incorruptible. There should have been a stench of dead flesh and decay, but if anything had decayed here, then it was Time itself. That was what the smell was: the decay of Time.

She walked on between the walls of heaped-up bodies, no longer afraid of anything. And then the remains came to an end. Polina Andreevna saw a bare stone wall on her left, and on her right the row of bodies was incomplete, with only three bodies lying one on top of the other.

Leaning down over the top body, she saw that this man had died recently. A bald head gleamed between the folds of the slit cowl: the hairless, wrinkled face seemed to be sleeping, not dead.

The holy elder Theognost. It was a week since he had passed on, and there was no smell of decay at all. Or could the composition of the air be different here, in the cave? Polina Andreevna decisively dismissed this last thought as sacrilegious and undoubtedly prompted by the Eternal Doubter and Enemy of Man. He was a holy elder—that was why he was not decaying.

The gallery led on farther, into the pitch darkness and up a gentle incline. And from up ahead, out of the very heart of the hill, she suddenly heard a faint sound, alarming and terribly unpleasant, as if somewhere in the distance someone was scraping an iron claw across a sheet of glass.

Mrs. Lisitsyna shuddered. She took a few steps forward, and the sound disappeared. Had she imagined it?

No, a moment later the claw set about its scraping once again. Her heart skipped a beat: bats! Oh Lord, give me strength and protect me from stupid womanish fears. What was wrong with bats? There was nothing dangerous about them. And it wasn't true that they sucked blood—that was just a childish fantasy.

She halted in indecision, peering into the ominous darkness, and then suddenly took several quick steps forward: the gallery continued onward, but at this point she could see the vague outlines of three doors in its walls: two on the right, one on the left. There was a thin strip of light under the door on the left.

The hermits’ cells!

Her timid fear of loathsome flying creatures was immediately forgotten. She had no time for such nonsense when there in front of her was the goal for which she had risked all these horrors!

Lisitsyna crept up to the door with the light seeping from under it. Just like the outer door, it had no bolt, but its hinges were well oiled, and when Polina Andreevna pulled it gently toward her it did not creak or squeak.

She had to blow out her candle.

Pressing her eye to the narrow crack, she saw a crude table, illuminated by an oil lamp, and a man leaning over a book (she heard the rustle of a page being turned). The man was sitting with his back to her and his head was as perfectly smooth and shiny as the head of a pawn on a chessboard.

Lisitsyna opened the door a bit farther to get a better look at the cell—only the tiniest little bit, but this time it betrayed her and squeaked.

The chair scraped on the floor and the sitter swung around sharply. Against the light she could not see his face, but there was a double white border on the front of his cassock, the sign of the rank of abbot. The holy elder Israel!

Polina Andreevna panicked and slammed the door, which was stupid. She was suddenly left in pitch darkness, and in her fright she even forgot in which direction the exit lay. But how could she run anyway when she could not see a thing?

She froze there in the absolute blackness, where there was nothing but that stealthy, harrowing scraping sound: kshi-ik, kshi-ik, kshi-ik. Any moment now she would feel a webbed wing brush against her cheek!

But she was only left standing there for a few seconds. The door opened, lighting up the gallery. The abbot of the hermitage was standing in the doorway, holding a lamp. His cranium was as naked as the deceased Theognost's had been, and he also had no beard or mustache—but at least he had eyebrows and eyelashes, or the sight would have been absolutely terrifying. Set at the center of his naked face was a large, thoroughbred nose, above a plump-lipped mouth. And Polina recognized the piercing gaze of those black eyes, even though she had only seen them through the holes in a cowl.

The holy elder shook his bald head and spoke in a familiar voice— low and slightly husky. “So you did come. You guessed the riddle. You are a brave one.” He did not seem very surprised at the appearance of an uninvited guest in the hermitage in the middle of the night.

But that was not why Polina Andreevna was taken aback.

“Holy father, do you talk?” she gasped.

“Not with them,” said Israel, nodding toward the doors on the other side of the gallery. “But to myself, when I am alone. Come in. It is not permitted to be in the Approach at night.”

“Where? The Approach? The Approach to what?” Mrs. Lisitsyna looked farther along the gallery. “And why is it not permitted?”

Israel did not answer the first question. To the second he replied, “The charter forbids it. From sunset until dawn, we must be in our cells, devoting ourselves to reading, prayer, and sleep. Come in.”

He moved aside and she stepped into the cell, a narrow chamber cut into the rock, its only furnishings a table, a chair, and a pallet lying in the corner. A dark icon hung on the wall, with a flickering icon lamp, and in another corner stood a small stove, with its chimney running straight into the low ceiling, where there was also a dark slit, no doubt an air duct.

So this is how salvation is attained, Lisitsyna thought mournfully as she surveyed the squalid dwelling. This is the place where prayers are offered for the whole of mankind.

The hermit looked at his nocturnal visitor in a strange manner, as if he were waiting for something or perhaps wished to make sure of something. His gaze was so intense that it made Polina Andreevna shudder.

“Lovely …” the holy father said in a barely audible voice. “Beautiful. Even better than beautiful—full of life. And there is nothing, nothing at all.” He crossed himself with sweeping movements and declared in a different, joyful voice: “Saved! Delivered! The Lord has freed me!”