Sister Pelagia and the Red Cockerel (25 page)

“I am Russian.”

“Ahh,” the unshaven man drawled. “Then you should go to that man over there.”

Polina Andreevna glanced in the direction indicated and cried out in joy at the sight of a respectable-looking gentleman in dark glasses sitting on a folding chair under a large canvas parasol. In one hand he was holding a placard bearing a message in delightfully familiar decorative Slavonic script:

THE IMPERIAL PALESTINE SOCIETY. TRAVEL TICKETS AND ADVICE
FOR THOSE TRAVELING TO THE SEPULCHRE OF OUR LORD.

Pelagia dashed toward him as if he were her own brother.

“Tell me, how can I get to Jerusalem?” she asked, setting down her bags.

“There are various ways,” the representative of the venerable society responded solemnly. “One can go by railroad for three rubles and fifty kopecks: in only four hours, one is at the gates of the Old City. Today’s train has already gone; tomorrow’s departs at three in the afternoon. Or one can go on an eight-seater diligence, for one ruble and seventy-five kopecks. It departs tomorrow at noon, and one arrives in the Holy City that night.”

The pilgrim hesitated. Travel across the Holy Land in a diligence? Or, even worse, on the railway? It wasn’t right somehow. As if you were going to Kazan or Samara on some kind of business trip.

Her glance fell on a group of Russian pilgrims gathered at the edge of the square. They knelt down for a while, kissing the dusty roadway, then moved forward, swinging their staffs energetically. But not all of them got to their feet. Two little peasants tied broad birch-bark sandals to their knees and shuffled off, rustling smartly up the incline of the street.

“They’re going to scramble all the way to Jerusalem like that,” the society’s representative said with a sigh. “Have you thought which ticket you would like?”

“Probably for the diligence,” Polina Andreevna replied uncertainly, thinking that a journey by steam locomotive would finally destroy her feeling of reverence, which had already been thoroughly undermined by the appearance of the port of Jaffa.

At that precise moment someone tugged on her skirt. Looking around, she saw a rather pleasant-looking man with a swarthy complexion. He was wearing a long Arab shirt, and a polished watch chain dangled from his broad belt. This native gentleman smiled with a bright flash of white teeth and whispered: “Why diligence? Diligence not good. I have hantur. You know hantur? Like carriage, tent on top. You ride like Sultan Abdul-Hamid. Horses—ai-ai, such horses. Arab, you know Arab horses? Where you want, we stop, you look, you pray I show you everything, tell you everything. Five rubles.”

“How do you know Russian?” Pelagia asked, also whispering for some reason.

“My wife Russian. Clever, beautiful, like all Russians. I also have Russian faith. My name Salakh.”

“Is Salakh really a Christian name?”

“Is most Christian name.”

To prove his point the Arab crossed himself with three fingers in the Russian style and mumbled rapidly: “Ourfathwhoartneaven.”

This was a miraculous sign! To meet an Orthodox Christian only a few minutes after arriving in the Holy Land, and one who was a Russian-speaking Palestinian! How many useful things she could learn from him! And then, riding in your own carriage, with good horses, was not like traveling in a public diligence.

“Let’s go!” Polina Andreevna exclaimed, although the kind navigator on the steamer had warned her most strictly that in Palestine it was not usual to accept the price offered, the custom was to haggle for a long time over everything. What point was there in bargaining over an extra ruble when you were on your way to the Most Holy City of Jerusalem?

“We go tomorrow.” Salakh picked up his future passenger’s suitcase and gestured with his other hand for her to follow him. “Today can’t go. Too late to get there before night, and night bad—bandits. We go walk now, you spend night at good place, my aunt’s house. One ruble, only one ruble. And in morning we fly like bird. Arab horses.”

Pelagia could hardly keep up with her long-legged guide as he led her through a maze of narrow lanes that climbed ever higher.

“So your wife is Russian?”

Salakh nodded.

“Natasha. Her name Marusya. We live Jerusalem.”

“What?” she asked in surprise. “Is she Natasha or Marusya?”

“My Natasha called Marusya,” the native gentleman replied mysteriously, at which point the conversation came to a sudden end, because the ascent of the humpbacked little street had left the lady pilgrim quite out of breath.

THE “GOOD PLACE” to which Polina Andreevna’s guide had brought her proved to be a wattle-and-daub house, in which the guest was allotted a bare room with absolutely no furniture. Salakh took his leave of her, explaining that there were no men in the house, and therefore he could not spend the night there—he said he would call for her the following morning. The traveler had to sleep on a thin, narrow mattress and wash in a basin, and the part of a water closet was played by a copper receptacle very similar to Aladdin’s lamp.

Spiritual reverence, being a fragile and ephemeral substance, failed to survive these annoying inconveniences—it shriveled away, leaving behind a mere sprinkling of ash, like an old firebrand in a dead campfire. The nun tried to read the Bible in order to rekindle the magical spark, but she was unsuccessful. No doubt her worldly attire was the problem. It was far easier to maintain a thrill of beatific trepidation in a nun’s habit.

And when she glanced into the mirror while she was washing, she was really upset. Would you believe it! Freckles had sprung up on the bridge of her nose and her cheeks—a distressing circumstance for any woman, but altogether unseemly for an individual of the spiritual calling. And she thought they had been obliterated completely through the use of camomile milk and honey masks!

The desert of all deserts

ALL NIGHT LONG the unfortunate Mrs. Lisitsyna tossed about on her hard bed, and early in the morning, following a perfunctory wash, she took up a position beside the gate in anticipation of the imminent arrival of her driver.

An hour went by, then a second, and a third. Still no Salakh. The sun began to scorch, and Polina Andreevna could positively feel those accursed freckles growing darker and denser.

The appearance of the local Orthodox gentleman no longer seemed like a “miraculous sign,” more like some kind of cunning trick devised by the Evil One to postpone the pilgrim’s arrival in the City of God.

While the nun wondered whether to keep waiting or go back to the port, the noon hour passed, which meant that the Jerusalem diligence had already departed.

Afraid that she might also miss the three o’clock train, Pelagia at long last set off in the direction of the sea, but she halted at the very first crossroads. Which way should she turn, to the right or the left?

And at that precise moment there appeared from around the corner a ramshackle cart with immense wheels, a piece of faded canvas hung over it as protection against the sun. The deceiver Salakh was perched at the front, lazily flicking his whip across the backs of two bony little horses.

“My hantur,” he said, proudly indicating his disgraceful vehicle. “My horses.”

“Arabian?” asked Polina Andreevna, unable to resist the temptation of sarcasm as she resentfully recalled the previous day’s dreams of slim-legged thoroughbreds who would carry her over the mountains and through the valleys to the most important city in all of God’s world.

“Naturally, Arab,” the swindler confirmed, tying on her suitcase. “All horses here Arab. Apart from Jewish ones. Jewish a little better.”

But that was not the sum total of Salakh’s villainy.

The cart turned into the center of Jaffa and stopped in front of the Hotel Europe (apparently there was such an institution here—there had been absolutely no need to spend the night on the floor!). Mrs. Lisitsyna had to move over so that an American couple, husband and wife, could take their places on the bench. They turned out not to be pilgrims, but tourists, traveling through the Holy Land equipped with every state-of-the-art convenience that Cook’s travel agency could offer. The bountiful baggage of these citizens of the New World was piled onto a dirty, undernourished camel.

“I paid five rubles!” Polina Andreevna hissed at Salakh. “It’s not fair!”

“Plenty of space, more fun together,” the native son of Palestine replied blithely, attaching the bridle of his humpbacked trailer to the back of his rattling junk heap. “Mister, missus, we go Jerusalem!”

“Gorgeous!” the “missus” exclaimed in response to this announcement, and the caravan set off.

To register her protest, the nun pretended not to understand English, and she covered her face with her scarf, but the Americans had no great need of conversation partners. They were full of energy, they were exuberant and delighted by everything, they clicked away with their little cameras, and their lips pronounced the word “gorgeous” at least twice a minute.

When the cart reached an open space bisected by a main highway that ran off and away over the horizon, the tourists (evidently following advice from Cook’s) put on green spectacles, which was a far from stupid thing to do, as Polina Andreevna soon realized. First, the glasses cut out the dazzling brilliance of the sun, and second, the color of the lenses must surely have compensated for the total lack of green tones in the landscape.

On all sides there was nothing but rocks and dust. This was the same valley in which Jesus Navin proclaimed, as he pursued the forces of the five Kings of Canaan, “Halt, sun, above Gavaon, and the moon above the valley of Aialon!”—and the sun stood in the midst of the sky, and hastened not to the west for another day.

The tourists demanded a halt at the dried-up stream where David slew Goliath. The husband picked up a stone and goggled ferociously: his wife chuckled as she trained the Kodak on him.

Vehicles of both European and Asiatic appearance rolled past them, horsemen rode by, and pilgrims walked by on foot, almost all of them Russian and looking strangely out of place in this desert landscape. Polina Andreevna thought dejectedly that Salakh’s “Arabian steeds” moved no faster than these stout peasant walkers.

Several pilgrims gathered at the stream in hopes of finding water. They raked over the dry gravel, but didn’t find a single drop. Pelagia overheard a scrap of their conversation:

“One of ours, from Vyazma, was blessed last year too. On his way back from Jerusalem, he was, and the bandits attacked him, stabbed him dead. Granted the mercy of surrendering his soul to God in the Holy Land, he was.”

“There’s good fortune for you,” the listeners said enviously, and they moved on.

In the distance, hills came into view—the Mountains of Judea. When she spotted the ruins of a fortress that looked as if it must have been built by the Crusaders, the nun shook her head. Why had people been fighting over this wretched, barren land for so many centuries? And was it really worth so much bloodshed?

No doubt in biblical times this plain was not at all like this: rivers of milk and honey flowed through it, there were green fields and plowed fields on every side. But now this was a cursed, desolate place. As the prophet Ezekiel said: “And I shall make the land a desert of deserts, and its proud might shall cease and the mountains of Israel shall be empty so that none shall pass by, and they shall know that I am the Lord, when I make the land the desert of deserts for all their abominations which they have committed.”

And Pelagia’s head was filled with thoughts that were quite clearly heretical and inappropriate for a pilgrim. Why was the Old Testament God so cruel? Why was He concerned with only one thing—whether the Jews worshipped Him with sufficient fervor? Was it really so important? And why did He change so miraculously in the New Testament? Or was this already a new God, and not the One Who admonished Jacob and Moses?

She crossed herself, driving away the blasphemous ideas. In order to distract herself, she began listening to Salakh’s banter, which rattled on almost without pause. Since his Russian passenger’s response to every attempt to strike up a conversation was an austere silence, the driver chose the American couple as his conversation partners. He could express himself just as well in English as in Russian—that is, with mistakes, but briskly and fluently.

Evidently believing that Pelagia did not understand this language, the sly rogue declared that his wife was an American, “beautiful and clever, like all American women.” Polina Andreevna snorted, but she restrained herself.

While they were crossing the Valley of Aialon, Salakh continually railed at the Jews for giving the local inhabitants no peace, either in ancient times or now. And he also claimed that the Palestinians had always been here and they were the direct descendants of the biblical Canaanites, who had lived here perfectly happily until a dastardly, cruel tribe that others did not even regard as human had appeared out of the desert. Their Book ordered them to show no mercy to the Canaanites and to exterminate them completely. And so they had exterminated them in ancient times and were still doing it even now.

Pelagia found all this quite interesting. The newspapers wrote that the indigenous population of Palestine was galled by the influx of Jews, who were settling in the Promised Land in ever greater numbers, and that the wild Arabs were plundering and oppressing the peaceful settlers. It was interesting to hear the opposite point of view.