Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk Read Free Page A

brought pear-water.” The beginnings of these utterances were taken from the book of Genesis, where Isaac addresses his son Esau, and the final words were added to express what was urgently needed. The boatman remembered what had been said and conveyed it word for word to the father steward and the father cellarer, and they tried to penetrate its meaning—sometimes unsuccessfully. Take, for instance, the aforementioned “pear-water.” They say that one day the hermitage's abbot indicated one of the other monks with his staff and declared darkly, “All his innards poured forth.” The senior monks leafed through the Holy Writ for a long time and eventually found these strange words in the Acts of the Apostles, in the passage describing the suicide of the contemptible Judas, and were greatly alarmed, thinking that the ascetic must have committed the very worst of mortal sins and laid hands on himself. For three days they tolled the bells, observed the strictest possible fast, and offered up prayers to be purged of the pollution of sin, but then it turned out that the venerable monk had simply suffered a bout of diarrhea and the abbot had been asking for him to be sent some pear liquor.
When the senior hermit told the boatman, “Today dost Thou release Thy servant,” it meant that one of the hermits had been admitted into the presence of the Lord, and then someone would be chosen from the queue to fill the vacancy. Sometimes the fateful words were not spoken by the abbot, but by one of the other two unspeaking brothers. In that way the monastery learned that the former elder had been summoned to his Bright Dwelling in Heaven and henceforth the hermitage had a new steward.
On one occasion, about a hundred years ago, a bear that had swum from the farthest islands fell on one of the ascetics and began tearing the unfortunate soul's flesh. He began crying out, “Brothers! Brothers!” The other two came running up and drove the beast away with their staffs, but after that they refused to live with the man who had broken the vow of silence and sent him away to the monastery, as a result of which the exile fell into a mournful state and soon died, without ever opening his mouth again, but whether he was admitted into the Radiant Sight of the Lord or is now dwelling among the sinful souls, no one can say.
What else can be said about the hermits? They wore black vestments that took the form of a coarsely woven sack, belted around with string. The cowl that the ascetics wore was narrow and pulled down over the entire face, with the edges sewn together in a sign of their total isolation from worldly vanity. Two holes were made in this pointed hood for the eyes. If the pilgrims praying on the shore of Canaan happened to see one of the holy ascetics on the little island (which happened extremely rarely and was regarded as an exceptional piece of luck), the sight that met their observant eyes was of a black sack meandering slowly between the mossy boulders as if it were not a man at all, but some kind of disembodied shadow.
And now that we have told you everything about New Ararat and the hermitage and Saint Basilisk, it is time to return to the courthouse archive room, where His Grace Mitrofanii has already begun interrogating the New Ararat monk Antipa.
“SOMETHING'S NOT RIGHT over in the hermitage—our people have been saying so for a long time.” (These were the words with which Brother Antipa began his incredible story after he had calmed down somewhat, thanks to the slapping and the tea.) “At Transfiguration, when it was nearly night, Agapii the novice went out onto the spit to wash the senior brothers’ underwear. Suddenly he saw something that looked like a kind of shadow on the water near Outskirts Island. Well, what does a shadow mean—you can see all sorts of things when it's getting dark. Agapii just crossed himself and carried on rinsing out the smalls. But then he thought he heard a quiet sound above the water. He