Sister Pelagia and the White Bulldog: A Mystery

CHAPTER 1 The Death of Zagulyai

. . . but i should tell you that, come the apple festival of Transfiguration Day, when the sky begins to change from summer to autumn, it is the usual thing for our town to be overrun by an absolute plague of cicadas, so that by night, much as you might wish to sleep, you never can, what with all that interminable trilling on all sides, and the stars hanging down low over your head, and especially with the moon dangling just above the tops of the bell towers, for all the world like one of our renowned "smetana" apples, the kind that the local merchants supply to the royal court and even take to shows in Europe. If someone should ever happen to glance down at Zavolzhsk from those heavenly spheres out of which the lamps of the night pour forth their bright rays, then the picture presented to that fortunate person's eyes would surely be one of some enchanted kingdom: the River sparkling lazily, the roofs glittering, the gas lamps flickering in the streets, and, hovering over all the shimmer and glimmer of this multifarious radiance, the tremulous silvery chiming of the cicada choir.

But let us return to the reverend Mitrofanii. Our passing reference to nature was made purely and simply to explain why on such a night even the most ordinary of men, far less burdened with cares than the bishop of the province, would find sleep hard to come by. It is hardly surprising that ill-wishers, of whom every man has some, even this worthy pastor being no exception, should claim that it is not our governor, Anton Antonovich von Haggenau, but His Grace who is the true ruler of this extensive region.

Extensive indeed the region may be, but densely populated it is not. The only genuine town it can really be said to possess is Zavolzhsk, and the others, including the district centers, are more like overgrown villages with a few stone administrative buildings clustered around a single square, a small cathedral, and a hundred or two little log houses with tin roofs of the kind that since time immemorial have for some reason always been painted green in these parts.

And, God knows, even the provincial capital is no Babylon--at the time we are describing, its entire population amounted to twenty-three thousand five hundred eleven individuals of both sexes. Although, of course, during the week following Transfiguration, if no one was to die, the number of inhabitants was expected to increase by two souls, because the wife of the manager of the provincial chancelry, Shtops, and the tradesman's wife, Safulina, were near their time, and the general opinion was that the latter was already overdue.

The custom of maintaining a strict accounting of the population had only been introduced recently, under the current administration, and then only in the towns. How many folk there may be making a living out in the forests and the swamps is something known only to God--go try counting them! The dense, impenetrable thickets extend for hundred of miles from the River all the way to the Ural Mountains, with schismatic monastic communities and salt factories buried among them, and along the banks of the dark, deep rivers that, for the most part, have no names at all, dwells the Zyt tribe, a quiet and submissive people of Ugrian blood.

The only mention of the ancient life of our obscure province is contained in the Nizhny-Novgorod Miscellany, a chronicle from the fifteenth century. It speaks of a Novgorodian visitor by the name of Ropsha who was captured by "the wild, bare-bellied pagans" in the green forests and lost his head in a sacrifice to the stone idol Shishiga, and as the chronicler for some reason finds it necessary to explain, "this Ropsha did perish and give up the ghost and was buried without a head."