Special Assignments (27 page)

That's what they were saying today at the Sukharev Market.

That is about me, I am the werewolf who is prowling their city. It's funny. My kind don't simply appear in a place, they are sent to bring terrible or joyful news. And I have been sent to you, citizens of Moscow, with joyful news.

Ugly city and ugly people, I will make you beautiful. Not all of you, please forgive me - that would be too much. But many, many.

I love you, with all your hideous abominations and deformities. I only wish you well. I have enough love for all of you. I see Beauty under lice-ridden clothes, under the scabs on an unwashed body, under rashes and eruptions. I am your saviour and your salvatrix. I am your brother and sister, father and mother, husband and wife. I am a woman and I am a man. I am an androgyne, that most beautiful ancestor of humanity, who possessed the characteristics of both sexes. Then the androgynes were divided into two halves, male and female, and people appeared - unhappy, remote from perfection, suffering from loneliness.

I am your missing half. Nothing prevents me from reuniting with those of you whom I choose.

The Lord has given me intelligence, cunning, foresight and invulnerability. Stupid, crude, dull, grey people tried to catch the androgyne in London without even attempting to understand the meaning of the messages he sent to the world.

At first these pitiful attempts amused me. Then a bitter taste rose in my throat.

Perhaps my own land will receive the prophet, I thought. Irrational and mystical Russia, which has still not lost true faith, lured me to itself with its eunuch
skoptsy
sect, its schismatics, its self-immolations and its ascetics - and it seems to have deceived me. Now the same stupid, crude kind of people, devoid of imagination, are trying to catch the Decorator in Moscow. It amuses me; at night I shudder and shake in silent laughter. No one sees these fits of merriment, and if they did, no doubt they would think there was something wrong with me. Well certainly, if everyone who is not like them is mad; but in that case Christ is also mad, and all the holy saints, and all the insane geniuses of whom they are so proud.

In the daytime I am not different in any way from all the ugly, pitiful people with all their vain concerns. I am a virtuoso of mimicry; they could never guess that I am from a different race.

How can they disdain God's gift - their own bodies? My duty and my calling is to teach them a little about Beauty. I make the ugly beautiful. I do not touch those who are beautiful. They are not an offence against the image of God.

Life is a thrilling, jolly game. Cat and mouse, hide and seek. I hide and I seek. One-two-three-four-five, ready or not, I'm coming. If you're not hiding, it's not my fault.

CHAPTER
4

Tortoise, Setter, Lioness, Hare

Holy Week Wednesday,
5
April, afternoon

Anisii told Palasha to dress Sonya up in her holiday clothes. His sister, a full-grown adult but mentally retarded, was delighted and began gurgling in joy. For her, the poor imbecile, going on any trip was an event, wherever it was to, and she was particularly fond of visiting the 'dot' (in Sonya's language that meant 'doctor'). They talked to her patiently for a long time there; they always gave her a sweet or a spice cake; they put a cold metal thing against her chest and pressed her tummy so that it tickled and gazed into her mouth - and Sonya was happy to help by opening it wide enough for them to see everything inside.

They called a cabbie they knew, Nazar Stepanich. As always, at first Sonya was a little bit afraid of the calm horse Mukha, who snorted with her nostrils and jangled her harness, squinting with her bloody eyes at the fat, ungainly woman swaddled in shawls.

They drove from Granatny Lane to the Lefortovo district. Usually they went to a closer place, to Dr Maxim Khristoforich on Rozhdestvenka Street, to the Mutual Assistance Society; but this time they had to make the journey right across the city.

They had to drive around Trubnaya Street - it was completely flooded. When would the sunshine ever come and dry the ground out? Moscow looked dour and untidy. The houses were grey, the roads were dirty, the people all seemed to be wrapped in rags and hunched up against the wind. But Sonya seemed to like it. Every now and then she nudged her brother in the side with her elbow - 'Nisii, Nisii' - and pointed at the rooks in a tree, a water wagon, a drunken apprentice. But she prevented him from thinking. And he had a lot to think about - the severed ear, which the chief was dealing with in person, and his own difficult task.

The Emperor Alexander Society's Assuage My Sorrows Hospital, for the treatment of psychiatric, nervous and paralytic illnesses, was located on Hospital Square, beyond the River Yauza. He knew that Stenich was working as a male nurse with Dr Rozenfeld in department five, where they treated the most violent and hopeless cases.

After paying five roubles at the desk, Anisii took his sister to Rozenfeld. He began telling the doctor in detail about what had been happening with Sonya recently: she had begun to wake up crying in the night and twice she had pushed Palasha away, which had never happened before, and she had suddenly got into the habit of toying with a little mirror and staring into it for hours with her little piggy eyes.

It took a long time to tell the doctor everything. A man in a white coat came into the surgery twice. The first time he brought some boiled syringes, then he took the prescription for making up some tincture or other. The doctor spoke to him politely. So he had to be Stenich. Exhausted and pale, with immense eyes, he had grown his straight hair long, but he shaved his beard and moustache, which gave his face an almost medieval look.

Leaving his sister with the doctor to be examined, Anisii went out into the corridor and glanced in through a half-open door with the inscription 'Treatment Room'. Stenich had his back to him and was mixing up some green stuff in a small bottle. What could Anisii see from the back? Stooped shoulders, a white coat, patches on the back of his boots.

The Chief had taught him that the key to success lay in the first phrase of a conversation. If you could get the conversation going smoothly, then the door would open; you'd find out anything you wanted from the other person. The trick was to make sure you identified their type correctly. There weren't all that many types - according to Erast Petrovich there were exactly sixteen, and there was an approach for each of them.

Oh, if only he didn't get it wrong. He hadn't really mastered this tricky science completely yet. From what they knew about Stenich, and also from visual observation, he was a 'tortoise': an unsociable, suspicious type turned in on himself, living in a state of interminable internal monologue.

If that was right, then the correct approach was 'to show your belly' - that is, to demonstrate that you are defenceless and not dangerous and then, without even the slightest pause, to make a 'breach': to pierce through all the protective layers of alienation and caution, to take the other person by surprise, only without frightening him, God forbid, by being aggressive, or putting him off. You had to interest him, send a signal that seemed to say: You and I are berries from the same field, we speak the same language.

Tulipov mentally crossed himself and had a go. 'That was a good look you gave my idiot sister in the surgery just now. I liked it. It showed interest, but without pity. The doctor's just the opposite: he pities her all right, but he's not really all that interested in looking at her. Only the mentally ill don't need pity; they can be happier than we are. That's an interesting subject, all right: a being that looks like us, but is really quite different. And sometimes something might be revealed to an idiot that is a sealed book to us. I expect you think that too, don't you? I could see it in your eyes. You ought to be the doctor, not this Rozenfeld. Are you a student?'

Stenich turned round and blinked. He looked a little taken aback by the breach, but in the right kind of way, without feeling frightened or getting his back up. He answered curtly in the way a tortoise was supposed to: 'I used to be.'

The approach had been chosen correctly. Now that the key was in the lock, according to the teachings of the Chief, he should grab it immediately and turn it until it clicked. There was a subtle point here: with a tortoise you had to avoid being too familiar, you mustn't narrow the distance between you, or he'd immediately withdraw into his shell.

'Not a political, are you?' asked Anisii, pretending to be disappointed. 'Then I'm a very poor reader of faces: I took you for a man with imagination; I wanted to ask you about my idiot sister ... These socialists are no good as psychiatrists - they're too carried away with the good of society, but they couldn't give a damn for the individual members of society, especially for imbeciles like my Sonya. Pardon my frankness, I'm a man who likes to speak directly. Goodbye, I'd better go and have a talk with Rozenfeld.'

He turned sharply to go away, in the appropriate manner for a 'setter' (outspoken, impetuous, with sharply defined likes and dislikes) - the ideal match for a tortoise.

'As you wish,' said the male nurse, stung to the quick. 'Only I've never concerned myself with the good of society, and I was excluded from the faculty for something quite different.'

Aha!' Tulipov exclaimed, raising one finger triumphantly. 'The eye! The eye, it never deceives! I was right about you after all. You live according to your own judgement and follow your own road. It doesn't matter that you're only a medical assistant; I take no notice of titles. Give me a keen, lively man who doesn't judge things by the common standard. I've despaired of taking Sonya round the doctors. All of them just sing the same old tune: oligophrenia, the extreme stage, a hopeless case. But I sense that inside her soul is alive, it can be awakened. Will you not give me a consultation?'

'I'm not a medical assistant either,' Stenich replied, apparently touched by this stranger's frankness (and his flattery, of course -a man likes to be flattered). 'It's true that Mr Rozenfeld does use me as a medical assistant, but officially I'm only a male nurse. And I work without pay, as a volunteer. To make amends for my sins.'

Ah, so that's it, thought Anisii. That's where the glum look came from, and the resignation. I'll have to adjust my line of approach.

Speaking in the most serious voice he could muster, he said: 'You have chosen a good path for the exculpation of your sins. Far better than lighting candles in a church or beating your forehead against the church porch. May God grant you quick relief.'

'I don't want it quickly!' Stenich cried with unexpected ardour, and his eyes, which had been dull, were instantly aglow with fire and passion. 'Let it be hard, let it be long! That will be the best way, the right way! I... I don't talk with people often, I'm very reserved. And I'm used to being alone. But there's something in you that encourages frank talking. I feel like talking ... Otherwise, I'm on my own all the time; my mind could go again soon.'

Anisii was truly amazed by the results of his chief's method! The key had fitted the lock, and fitted it so well that the door had swung open of its own accord. He didn't need to do anything else, just listen and agree with everything.

The pause unsettled the male nurse. 'Perhaps you don't have any time?' His voice trembled. 'I know you have problems of your own; you can't have time for other people's confessions...'

A man with troubles of his own will understand another person's troubles better,' Anisii said jesuitically. 'What is eating at your soul? You can tell me. We're strangers; we don't even know each other's name. We'll have a talk and go our separate ways. What sin do you have on your soul?'

For just a moment Anisii dreamed of him dropping to his knees, bursting into sobs and saying: 'Forgive me, you good man, I am cursed, I bear the weight of bloody sin, I disembowel women with a scalpel.' And that would be it, case closed, and Tulipov would be rewarded by his superiors and, best of all, there'd be a word of praise from the Chief.

But no, Stenich didn't drop to his knees and he said something quite different: 'Pride. All my life I've been tormented by it. I took this job, this heavy, dirty work, in order to conquer it. I clean up the foul mess from the mad patients; no job is too disgusting for me. Humiliation and resignation - that's the best medicine for pride.'

'So you were excluded from the university for pride?' Anisii said, unable to conceal his disappointment.

What? Ah, from the university. No, that was something different ... I'll tell you - why not? - in order to humble my pride.' The male nurse blushed violently, turning bright red all the way up to the parting in his hair. 'I used to have another sin, a serious one: voluptuousness. I've overcome it now. Life has helped me. But in my young years I was depraved - not so much out of sensuality as out of curiosity. It's even viler, out of curiosity, don't you think?'

Anisii didn't know how to answer that, but it would be interesting to hear about the sin. What if there was a thread leading from this voluptuousness to the murder?

'I don't see any sin at all in sensuality' he said aloud. 'Sin is when you hurt your neighbour. But who's hurt by a bit of sensuality, provided of course there's no violence involved?'

Stenich just shook his head. Ah, you're still young, sir. Have you not heard of the Sadist Circle? How could you? - you probably hadn't even finished grammar school then. It was exactly seven years ago this April ... But in Moscow not many people know about the case. The rumours spread in medical circles, all right, but not much leaks out of them; it's a matter of
esprit de corps,
sticking together, a common front. Mind you, they threw me out...'

What was that, the saddler's circle?' asked Anisii, pretending to be stupid but remembering that Stenich had been excluded for 'immoral behaviour'.