Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk by Boris Akunin

Author:Boris Akunin [Akunin, Boris]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 978-0-307-49101-5
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-08-23T16:00:00+00:00

‘Warm, Warmer, Hot

BEFORE SHE SET out to visit Dr. Korovin, Lisitsyna had called in at her hotel, where she had exchanged her light talma for a long black cloak with a hood—evidently in anticipation of the coolness of evening. However, even though the sun was not bright, in the course of the day it had warmed the air quite well, and there was no need to put on the cloak for a walk around the grounds of the clinic. Polina Andreevna limited herself to throwing a scarf across her shoulders, and Korovin went just as he was, in his waistcoat and frock coat.

Cottage number three stood on the very edge of the pine-forested hill that Korovin rented from the monastery. With its smoothly plastered white walls, the cottage did not strike Polina Andreevna as being in any way remarkable, especially in comparison with the other cottages, many of which were quite astounding in their quaint whimsicality.

“All the magic here is inside,” Donat Savvich explained. “Yoshihin is not concerned about what his dwelling looks like from the outside, and anyway, as I told you, he never comes out.”

They walked in without knocking. It became clear why a little later: the artist would not have heard them anyway, and if he had heard, he would not have answered.

Polina saw that the cottage consisted of one room with five large windows—one in each wall and another in the ceiling. There was no furniture at all to be seen in the studio: Yoshihin probably ate and slept right there on the floor.

However, before the visitor could take a good look at the contents of the room, her attention was captured by the walls and the ceiling of this peculiar dwelling. All the internal surfaces, apart from the floor and the windows, were covered with canvas, almost all of which had been painted with oil paints. The ceiling was a painting of the night sky, so precise and convincing that if it were not for the square of glass through which clouds tinted pink by the sunset could be seen, it would have been very easy to fall into the error of imagining that there was no roof at all. One of the walls, the north-facing one, depicted a pine grove; another, facing east, showed a shallow slope leading down to a small river and a farm; on the western-facing wall there was a meadow and two cottages standing side by side; and on the southern-facing one there were bushes. It was not hard to see that the artist had reproduced the views outside his windows with astounding precision. But the scenes in Yoshi-hin's landscapes had turned out far richer, with more palpable space, so the originals that could be seen outside looked like pale copies of the paintings.

“In his present period he is passionately enthusiastic about landscapes,” Donat Savvich explained in a low voice, indicating the artist, who was standing by the east-facing wall with his back to his visitors and working away intently with a little brush without even bothering to glance around.

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