Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (20 page)

The footprints turned off the main avenue onto a side path that seemed to lead, not to the gate, but into a distant, deserted corner of the garden.

The holy sister halted for a moment, trying to understand the meaning of this maneuver. And she guessed it: the villain could not have a key, so he would have to climb over the fence. She started running even faster. The path was narrower here, hemmed in on both sides by tall bushes casting shadows that made the tracks invisible, but on the other hand, there was nowhere to turn off.

Here was the end of the garden already. The little plank shed, where they put the boxes of apples in autumn, and behind it the fence. She had to run up to it, stick her head between the railings, and take a cautious peep to see if there was a dark figure receding into the night. And if there was, she had to climb over on to the other side and follow it. Even if it turned out to be someone entirely innocent, at least she would be able to find out who had made his boots. And then she …

Pelagia had just drawn level with the shed. Her peripheral vision detected a black crack—the door was slightly open—and the thought flashed briefly though her mind that this was an oversight.

But then the door suddenly swung wide open. A long arm reached out of the darkness, a hand seized the holy sister by the collar and snatched her into the little building, and the bolt clanged home.

Stunned by the shock of it and blinded by the sudden darkness, Pelagia cried out, but a broad, rough hand immediately squeezed her mouth shut. “Well, hello, my little steamship dame,” a voice said in the darkness.

She realized instantly who it was. Not even from the voice, which she had heard only once, but from that offensive word “dame.” Glass-Eye (alias Wolf-Tail—Berdichevsky had been right) paused, apparently savoring his captives distress.

The darkness no longer seemed impenetrable to her. The shed had deliberately been built flimsily, with cracks in the walls, so that the apples could breathe, and the moonlight came in through the gaps. The first thing Pelagia made out was a pair of eyes glittering, but glittering differently. It was hard to tell which of them was real and which was false.

“I’ve been running after you so long, it would be a shame to polish you off right away,” the appalling man said. “So you can have another minute to live, okay? On one condition: if you so much as squeak, you’re on your way into a coffin with pretty tassels.”

“We’re not allowed,” the nun replied, her voice muffled by the hand.

“What’s not allowed?” asked Glass-Eye, taking his hand away.

“A coffin with tassels. Nuns aren’t allowed to have them,” she explained, thinking of only one thing: to keep saying anything at all, any nonsense, as long as it postponed the inevitable for a moment or two.

Not in order to escape—what escape could there possibly be here?—but in order to prepare her soul for the great mystery and recite the words of her final prayer in her own mind.

“You’re joking. Good girl!” the killer said approvingly “And you have a lively brain. If only it was a bit dimmer, you’d have lived longer. Have you seen this gadget?”

He took an object out of his pocket. It bobbled about strangely in his hand, and when Pelagia looked closer, she saw it was a weight on a spring.

“My invention,” Glass-Eye boasted. “It can strike from a good six feet away, and it’s very accurate.”

He moved his hand ever so slightly, the spring straightened out, something whistled through the air, and a clay jug on a shelf, no doubt used by the gardener for his drink, shattered into smithereens. The weight returned to the hand that had thrown it.

“How did you get out of the cave? A really slick dame, no two ways about it. And you sketched the sole of my boot. And now I’ve caught you with that sole, like a gudgeon on a rod.” He laughed quietly and triumphantly.

The most terrible thing was that the nun could not see his face, and she didn’t remember it properly from the first time.
So this is what death is like
, Pelagia thought with a shudder. Faceless, laughing quietly.

“How … how did you know that I sketched the boot print?” the nun whispered.

He chuckled again. “Aren’t you the curious one! You’ll find out everything soon enough. Up there.” He pointed one finger up at the ceiling.

“Where?” she asked, puzzled.

His merriment redoubled at that. “Where, where? In the next world. Where all earthly secrets are revealed.”

“Why do you want to kill me?” the nun asked meekly. “What have I done to offend you?”

“Not you—your brains.” The frivolous killer tapped her on the forehead. “So I’m going to smash them out in a moment. It will be interesting to see what that dish looks like—scrambled brains.”

Pelagia glanced involuntarily at the shelf where the shards of the jug lay. Spotting this movement, Glass-Eye was overwhelmed by a fit of giggles—the way the girls in Pelagia’s classes used to giggle when one of them got the stupid, ticklish laugh bug and infected the entire class.

The nun fitfully pressed her hands to her chest. Something pricked her palm.

A knitting needle! As usual, the holy sister’s knitting bag was hanging around her neck. A knitting needle might not seem like much of a weapon, but what if there was no other to be had? And those two steel rods had already saved their mistress in situations no less desperate than the present one.

Pelagia jerked the bag off her neck and grabbed tight hold of it.

“What’s that you have there, a prayer book? Oh, no, we’re not going to pray, that’s boring. Good-bye, dame.”

He stepped back, and in order to get a good swing—or perhaps in order to savor his victim’s terror—he brandished the weight in a circle through the air.

But Pelagia didn’t wait for the second circle: with a sickening squeal, she thrust the two needles straight through the cloth of the bag into the murderer’s only eye. At the final moment she suddenly felt frightened: What if she hadn’t remembered which eye was the natural one?

However, to judge from the wild howling, her blow had struck home as intended.

The howl turned into a frightful groan. The killer grabbed his face in his hands and immediately pulled them away again. Pelagia staggered back—it was a terrible sight, the satin bag dangling and swaying there in front of that human face. She dashed to the door and tugged hard on the bolt, but she couldn’t open it—it was rusty and she wasn’t strong enough.

The wounded man pulled the bag off his face and cast it aside, and a dark mass trickled down his cheek. He gathered it in his hand and started stuffing it back into the socket.

Pelagia squeezed her eyes shut.

“Bitch!” the blinded man roared. “Viper! I’ll kill you anyway!” He swung his arm back, and the nun barely managed to squat down in time. The weight flew over her head with a terrifying whistle.

And then the throwing began in earnest in that narrow space. Glass-Eye swung his arm about, striking to the right and the left. The weight cut through the air, smashed empty wooden boxes on the shelves, crashed into the walls with a crunch, snapped the handle of a garden fork in half.

The nun dashed into one corner, then another, squatting down. Once the killer squatted down too and tried to strike her legs, but Pelagia managed to jump up in time.

It was all like some monstrous game of tag or cat-and-mouse.

And the nun also recalled the scene with Odysseus in the cave of Polyphemus: “The eyeball burst, the eye splashed out with a hiss. The cannibal howled wildly and the cave resounded with his howls.”

This Cyclops wailed and sobbed and howled incomprehensibly, but Pelagia, short of breath from all her darting and jumping, still tried to make him see reason. “Calm down! You need a doctor!” But in so doing she only gave away her position. Each exhortation was followed by a blow more accurate than the one before.

Then the nun squatted down on her haunches and fell silent.

Glass-Eye kept on throwing his weight across the shed for a moment, until he realized that his opponent had changed tactics. He, too, froze, and listened.

He was standing only two paces away, and the nun pressed her hand to her left breast, afraid that the beating of her heart would betray her.

“You’ll croak anyway, you’ll croak,” the blind man hissed. “I’ll finish you without the weight, with my bare hands.”

And he really did put his weapon away in his pocket, stretch out his great paws, and start turning around in circles.

This was bad. If he got the idea of squatting down, it would all be over.

Pelagia jerked the spectacles off her nose and flung them into the corner. The killer swung around rapaciously and dashed toward the sound. Pelagia flew to the door and threw her full weight on the bolt: thank God, it opened. Leaping out into the garden, she saw there was another bolt on the outside of the door and quickly shot it home.

And then she went dashing toward the main building, shouting at the top of her voice, “Over here! Over here! Help!”

Behind her, she could hear banging and crashing as Glass-Eye struggled with the locked door.

On resistance to evil, the motherland, and truth

BY THE TIME all the monks had come running and grasped the meaning of the nun’s fitful shouts, then argued over whether they should go into the garden themselves or call the police, precious minutes had been lost. It would have taken even longer if the bishop himself had not come out to see what all the fuss and bother was about. Grasping the essential points in a few moments, he took hold of Pelagia by the shoulders and asked only one question: “Are you all right?” When she nodded, he set off into the garden with broad strides. He did not run, because unseemly commotion is incompatible with the station of a bishop, and yet the servants running after him could hardly keep up.

The door of the garden shed was still bolted—Glass-Eye could not have escaped. But there was no sound from inside. The monks and servants timidly surrounded the rough wooden structure.

“Sir?” Userdov called in a trembling voice. “Are you there? It would be best if you abandoned your thoughts of violence and surrendered yourself into the hands of justice.”

Mitrofanii took hold of Father Serafim by the shoulder, moved him aside, and pulled back the bolt with no hesitation.

He stepped inside.

Pelagia kept her mouth shut tight. She absolutely must not call out—God forbid, the bishop might look around, and to turn away from a wounded, deadly beast would be madness.

The bishop stood in the doorway for a few seconds. He shook his head and made the sign of the cross. Then the others rushed into the hut, jostling one another aside. They gasped and they too crossed themselves. Pelagia went up on tiptoe to glance over the shoulder of the brother purser.

In a rectangle of bluish moonlight she could see Glass-Eye sitting in the corner, slumped against the wall. His hands clutched the broken handle of the garden fork, the sharp points of which the suicide had thrust into his own throat, with such force that the prongs had passed straight through and stuck into the wood.

THAT NIGHT, WHILE the district public prosecutor and the police were carrying out their various duties (the blazing lanterns and torches made the garden as bright as day), Pelagia suffered a belated hysterical reaction, which, fortunately, no one apart from His Eminence observed.

“What terrible wickedness I have committed to save my own life!” the holy sister lamented, wringing her hands. “I forgot who I am! I behaved like an ordinary woman in fear of her life. But I am a nun! I did not follow the law of Christ, which tells us not to resist evil and to turn the other cheek, but the law of Moses! An eye for an eye! I shall never touch any knitting again in my life!”

Mitrofanii decided that this fit of self-castigation would best be calmed by a pretense of severity, and he addressed his spiritual daughter strictly: “And what if you are a nun! There are different kinds of monks, too. There are warrior-monks. Take Oslyabya and Peresvet, who fought for the motherland and the truth with weapons in their hands!”

“But are ‘for the motherland’ and ‘for the truth really the same thing?” Pelagia objected, her teeth chattering. “Every nation has its own motherland, but the truth is the same for all people everywhere. What is so good about your Peresvet? Of course, for the principality of Moscow and for Russians, he is a hero, but Christ did not ascend the Cross for the principality of Moscow or for one single nation, but for the whole of mankind. The Tartar Chelibei, whom Peresvet slew, also had a living soul. A servant of God must never take up a weapon, even if he is facing certain death. Ah, my lord, imagine how terribly afraid a man who has already lost one eye must be of losing the only one he has! He must have had nightmares about going completely blind … But in my cruelty it seemed a small thing to take away his sight, and I even locked the door from the outside so that he couldn’t get away. Where could he have gone, now that he was blind? I can imagine how the poor man groped at the walls, looking for a way out, and couldn’t find it… If he had, perhaps he would not have damned his immortal soul. Surely I am right?”

Seeing her in such torment, Mitrofanii abandoned severity and took the nun by the hand. “No, you are not right, you are not! Evil must be resisted. I disagree with Count Tolstoy about that and about his interpretation of Christ’s teaching. Life is the overcoming of Evil and the struggle with Evil, not capitulation to villains. You are like David, who defeated Goliath, or Saint George of Cappadocia, who slew the fiery dragon. And I admire you even more than these heroes, because you are a weak woman. Your knitting needle is a far more courageous weapon than David’s sling or George’s lance.”