Unkown - "Codex Junius 11"

William Shakespeare - "All's Well That Ends Well"

Chester A. Arthur - "State of the Union Addresses of Chester A. Arthur"

Robert Louis Stevenson - "Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson"

Yama (The Pit)

A >> Alexandra Kuprin >> Yama (The Pit)




They are drinking coffee in the room of the proprietress. The
company consists of five people. The proprietress herself, in
whose name the house is registered, is Anna Markovna. She is about
sixty. She is very small of stature, but dumpy: she may be
visualized by imagining, from the bottom up, three soft,
gelatinous globes--large, medium and small, pressed into each
other without any interstices; this--her skirt, torso and head.
Strange, her eyes are a faded blue, girlish, even childish, but
the mouth is that of an old person, with a moist lower lip of a
raspberry colour, impotently hanging down. Her husband--Isaiah
Savvich--is also small, a grayish, quiet, silent little old man.
He is under his wife's thumb; he was doorkeeper in this very house
even at the time when Anna Markovna served here as housekeeper. In
order to be useful in some way, he has learned, through self-
instruction, to play the fiddle, and now at night plays dance
tunes, as well as a funeral march for shopmen far gone on a spree
and craving some maudlin tears.

Then, there are the two housekeepers--senior and junior. The
senior is Emma Edwardovna. She is a tall, full woman of forty-six,
with chestnut hair, and a fat goitre of three chins. Her eyes are
encircled with black rings of hemorrhoidal origin. The face
broadens out like a pear from the forehead down to the cheeks, and
is of an earthen colour; the eyes are small, black; the nose
humped, the lips sternly pursed; the expression of the face calmly
authoritative. It is no mystery to anyone in the house that in a
year or two Anna Markovna will go into retirement, and sell her
the establishment with all its rights and furnishings, when she
will receive part in cash, and part on terms--by promissory note.
Because of this the girls honour her equally with the proprietress
and fear her somewhat. Those who fall into error she beats with
her own hands, beats cruelly, coolly, and calculatingly, without
changing the calm expression of her face. Among the girls there is
always a favourite of hers, whom she tortures with her exacting
love and fantastic jealousy. And this is far harder than her
beatings.

The other one is called Zociya. She has just struggled out of the
ranks of the common girls. The girls, as yet, call her
impersonally, flatteringly and familiarly, "little housekeeper."
She is spare, spry, just a trifle squinting, with a rosy
complexion, and hair dressed in a little curly pompadour; she
adores actors--preferably stout comedians. Toward Emma Edwardovna
she is ingratiating.

The fifth person, finally, is the local district inspector,
Kerbesh. This is an athletic man; he is kind of bald, has a red
beard like a fan, vividly blue slumbrous eyes, and a thin,
slightly hoarse, pleasant voice. Everybody knows that he formerly
served in the secret service division and was the terror of
crooks, thanks to his terrible physical strength and cruelty in
interrogations.

He has several shady transactions on his conscience. The whole
town knows that two years back he married a rich old woman of
seventy, and that last year he strangled her; however, he was
somehow successful in hushing up this affair. But for that matter,
the remaining four have also seen a thing or two in their
chequered life. But, just as the bretteurs of old felt no twinges
of conscience at the recollection of their victims, even so do
these people regard the dark and bloody things in their past, as
the unavoidable little unpleasantness of their professions.

They are drinking coffee with rich, boiled cream--the inspector
with Benedictine. But he, strictly speaking, is not drinking, but
merely conveying the impression that he is doing it to oblige.

"Well, what is it to be, Phoma Phornich?" asks the proprietress
searchingly. "This business isn't worth an empty eggshell, now...
Why, you have only to say a word..."

Kerbesh slowly draws in half a wine-glass of liqueur, works the
oily, strong, pungent liquid slightly with his tongue over the
roof of his mouth, swallows it, chases it down, without hurrying,
with coffee, and then passes the ring finger of his left hand over
his moustaches, to the right and left.

"Think it over for yourself, Madam Shoibes," he says, looking down
at the table, spreading out his hands and screwing up his eyes.
"Think of the risk to which I'm exposed! The girl through means of
deception was enticed into this... what-you-may-call-it... well,
in a word, into a house of ill-fame, to express it in lofty style.
Now the parents are searching for her through the police. Ve-ery
well. She gets into one place after another, from the fifth into
the tenth... Finally the trail is picked up with you, and most
important of all--think of it!--in my district! What can I do?"

"Mr. Kerbesh, but she is of age," says the proprietress.

"They are of age," confirms Isaiah Savvich. "They gave an
acknowledgment, that it was of their own will..."

Emma Edwardovna pronounces in a bass, with cool accurance:

"Honest to God, she's the same here as an own daughter."

"But that's not what I am talking about," the inspector frowns in
vexation. "Just consider my position... Why, this is duty. Lord,
there's no end of unpleasantnesses without that!"

The proprietress suddenly arises, shuffles in her slippers to the
door, and says, winking to the inspector with a sleepy,
expressionless eye of faded blue:

"Mr. Kerbesh, I would ask you to have a look at our alterations.
We want to enlarge the place a bit."

"A-ah! With pleasure..."

After ten minutes both return, without looking at each other.
Kerbesh's hand is crunching a brand-new hundred rouble note in his
pocket. The conversation about the seduced girl is not renewed.
The inspector, hastily finishing his Benedictine, complains of the
present decline in manners.

"I have a son, now, a schoolboy--Paul. He comes to me, the
scoundrel, and declares: 'Papa, the pupils swear at me, because
you are a policeman, and because you serve on Yamskaya, and
because you take bribes from brothels.' Well, tell me, for God's
sake, Madam Shoibes, if that isn't effrontery?"

"Ai, ai, ai! ... And what bribes can there be? Now with me..."

"I say to him: 'Go, you good-for-nothing, and let the principal
know, that there should be no more of this, otherwise papa will
inform on all of you to the governor.' And what do you think? He
comes to me and says: 'I am no longer a son to you--seek another
son for yourself.' What an argument! Well, I gave him enough to
last till the first of the month! Oho-ho! Now he doesn't want to
speak with me. Well, I'll show him yet!"

"Ah, you don't have to tell us," sighs Anna Markovna, letting her
lower, raspberry-coloured lip hang down and with a mist coming
over her faded eyes. "We keep our Birdie--she is in Fleisher's
high school--we purposely keep her in town, in a respectable
family. You. understand, it is awkward, after all. And all of a
sudden she brings such words and expressions from the high school
that I just simply turned all red."

"Honest to God, Annochka turned all red," confirms Isaiah Savvich.

"You'll turn red, all right!" warmly agrees the inspector. "Yes,
yes, yes, I understand you fully. But, my God, where are we going!
Where are we only going? I ask you, what are these revolutionaries
and all these various students, or... what-you-may-call-'ems? ...
trying to attain? And let them put the blame on none but
themselves. Corruption is everywhere, morality is falling, there
is no respect for parents. They ought to be shot."

"Well, now, the day before yesterday we had a case," Zociya mixes
in bustlingly. "A certain guest came, a stout man..."

"Drop it!" Emma Edwardovna, who was listening to the inspector,
piously nodding with her head bowed to one side, cuts her short in
the jargon of the brothels. "You'd better go and see about
breakfast for the young ladies."

"And not a single person can be relied upon," continues the
proprietress grumblingly. "Not a servant but what she's a stiff, a
faker. And all the girls ever think about is their lovers. Just
so's they may have their own pleasure. But about their duties they
don't even think."

There is an awkward silence. Some one knocks on the door. A thin,
feminine voice speaks on the other side of the door:

"Housekeeper, dear, take the money and be kind enough to give me
the stamps. Pete's gone."

The inspector gets up and adjusts his sabre.

"Well, it's time I was going to work. Best regards, Anna Markovna.
Best wishes, Isaiah Savvich."

"Perhaps you'll have one more little glass for a stirrup cup?" the
nearly blind Isaiah Savvich thrusts himself over the table.

"Tha-ank you. I can't. Full to the gills. Honoured, I'm sure! ..."

"Thanks for your company. Drop in some time."

"Always glad to be your guest, sir. Au revoir!"

But in the doorway he stops for a minute and says significantly:

"But still, my advice to you is--you'd better pass this girl on to
some place or other in good time. Of course, it's your affair, but
as a good friend of yours I give you warning."

He goes away. When his steps are abating on the stairs and the
front door bangs to behind him, Emma Edwardovna snorts through her
nose and says contemptuously:

"Stool-pigeon! He wants to take money both here and there..."

Little by little they all crawl apart out of the room. It is dark
in the house. It smells sweetly of the half-withered sedge. Quiet
reigns.





CHAPTER III.


Until dinner, which is served at six in the evening, the time
drags endlessly long and with intolerable monotony. And, in
general, this daily interval is the heaviest and emptiest in the
life of the house. It remotely resembles in its moods those
slothful, empty hours which are lived through during the great
holidays in scholastic institutes and other private institutions
for females, when all the friends have dispersed, when there is
much leisure and much indolence, and a radiant, agreeable tedium
reigns the whole day. In only their petticoats and white shifts,
with bare arms, sometimes barefooted, the women aimlessly ramble
from room to room, all of them unwashed, uncombed; lazily strike
the keys of the old pianoforte with the index finger, lazily lay
out cards to tell their fortune, lazily exchange curses, and with
a languishing irritation await the evening.

Liubka, after breakfast, had carried out the leavings of bread and
the cuttings of ham to Amour, but the dog had soon palled upon
her. Together with Niura she had bought some barberry bon-bons and
sunflower seeds, and now both are standing behind the fence
separating the house from the street, gnawing the seeds, the
shells of which remain on their chins and bosoms, and speculate
indifferently about those who pass on the street: about the lamp-
lighter, pouring kerosene into the street lamps, about the
policeman with the daily registry book under his arm, about the
housekeeper from somebody else's establishment, running across the
road to the general store.

Niura is a small girl, with goggle-eyes of blue; she has white,
flaxen hair and little blue veins on her temples. In her face
there is something stolid and innocent, reminiscent of a white
sugar lamb on a Paschal cake. She is lively, bustling, curious,
puts her nose into everything, agrees with everybody, is the first
to know the news, and, when she speaks, she speaks so much and so
rapidly that spray flies out of her mouth and bubbles
effervescence on the red lips, as in children.

Opposite, out of the dram-shop, a servant pops out for a minute--a
curly, besotted young fellow with a cast in his eye--and runs into
the neighbouring public house.

"Prokhor Ivanovich, oh Prokhor Ivanovich," shouts Niura, "don't
you want some?--I'll treat you to some sunflower seeds!"

"Come on in and pay us a visit," Liubka chimes in.

Niura snorts and adds through the laughter which suffocates her:

"Warm your feet for a while!"

But the front door opens; in it appears the formidable and stern
figure of the senior housekeeper.

"Pfui! [Footnote: A German exclamation of disgust or contempt,
corresponding to the English fie.--Trans.] What sort of indecency
is this!" she cries commandingly. "How many times must it be
repeated to you, that you must not jump out on the street during
the day, and also--pfui!--only in your underwear. I can't
understand how you have no conscience yourselves. Decent girls,
who respect themselves, must not demean themselves that way in
public. It seems, thank God, that you are not in an establishment
catering to soldiers, but in a respectable house. Not in Little
Yamskaya."

The girls return into the house, get into the kitchen, and for a
long time sit there on tabourets, contemplating the angry cook
Prascoviya, swinging their legs and silently gnawing the sunflower
seeds.

In the room of Little Manka, who is also called Manka the
Scandaliste and Little White Manka, a whole party has gathered.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, she and another girl--Zoe, a tall
handsome girl, with arched eyebrows, with grey, somewhat bulging
eyes, with the most typical, white, kind face of the Russian
prostitute--are playing at cards, playing at "sixty-six." Little
Manka's closest friend, Jennie, is lying behind their backs on the
bed, prone on her back, reading a tattered book, The Queen's
Necklace, the work of Monsieur Dumas, and smoking. In the entire
establishment she is the only lover of reading and reads
intoxicatingly and without discrimination. But, contrary to
expectation, the forced reading of novels of adventure has not at
all made her sentimental and has not vitiated her imagination.
Above all, she likes in novels a long intrigue, cunningly thought
out and deftly disentangled; magnificent duels, before which the
viscount unties the laces of his shoes to signify that he does not
intend to retreat even a step from his position,[Footnote:
Probably a sly dig at Gautier's Captain Fracasse.-Trans.] and
after which the marquis, having spitted the count through,
apologizes for having made an opening in his splendid new
waistcoat; purses, filled to the full with gold, carelessly strewn
to the left and right by the chief heroes; the love adventures and
witticisms of Henry IV--in a word, all this spiced heroism, in
gold and lace, of the past centuries of French history. In
everyday life, on the contrary, she is sober of mind, jeering,
practical and cynically malicious. In her relation to the other
girls of the establishment she occupies the same place that in
private educational institutions is accorded to the first strong
man, the man spending a second year in the same grade, the first
beauty in the class--tyrannizing and adored. She is a tall, thin
brunette, with beautiful hazel eyes, a small proud mouth, a little
moustache on the upper lip and with a swarthy, unhealthy pink on
her cheeks.

Without letting the cigarette out of her mouth and screwing up her
eyes from the smoke, all she does is to turn the pages constantly
with a moistened finger. Her legs are bare to the knees; the
enormous balls of the feet are of the most vulgar form; below the
big toes stand out pointed, ugly, irregular tumours.

Here also, with her legs crossed, slightly bent, with some sewing,
sits Tamara--a quiet, easy-going, pretty girl, slightly reddish,
with that dark and shining tint of hair which is to be found on
the back of a fox in winter. Her real name is Glycera, or Lukeria,
as the common folk say it. But it is already an ancient usage of
the houses of ill-fame to replace the uncouth names of the
Matrenas, Agathas, Cyclitinias with sonorous, preferably exotic
names. Tamara had at one time been a nun, or, perhaps, merely a
novice in a convent, and to this day there have been preserved on
her face timidity and a pale puffiness--a modest and sly
expression, which is peculiar to young nuns. She holds herself
aloof in the house, does not chum with any one, does not initiate
any one into her past life. But in her case there must have been
many more adventures besides having been a nun: there is something
mysterious, taciturn and criminal in her unhurried speech, in the
evasive glance of her deep and dark-gold eyes from under the long,
lowered eyelashes, in her manners, her sly smiles and intonations
of a modest but wanton would-be saint. There was one occurrence
when the girls, with well-nigh reverent awe, heard that Tamara
could talk fluently in French and German. She has within her some
sort of an inner, restrained power. Notwithstanding her outward
meekness and complaisance, all in the establishment treat her with
respect and circumspection--the proprietress, and her mates, and
both housekeepers, and even the doorkeeper, that veritable sultan
of the house of ill-fame, that general terror and hero.

"I've covered it," says Zoe and turns over the trump which had
been lying under the pack, wrong side up. "I'm going with forty,
going with an ace of spades--a ten-spot, Mannechka, if you please.
I'm through. Fifty-seven, eleven, sixty-eight. How much have you?"

"Thirty," says Manka in an offended tone, pouting her lips; "oh,
it's all very well for you--you remember all the plays. Deal ...
Well, what's after that, Tamarochka?" she turns to her friend.
"You talk on--I'm listening."

Zoe shuffles the old, black, greasy cards, allows Manya to cut,
then deals, having first spat upon her fingers.

Tamara in the meanwhile is narrating to Manya in a quiet voice,
without dropping her sewing.

"We embroidered with gold, in flat embroidery--altar covers,
palls, bishops' vestments... With little grasses, with flowers,
little crosses. In winter, you'd be sitting near a casement; the
panes are small, with gratings, there isn't much light, it smells
of lamp oil, incense, cypress; you mustn't talk--the mother
superior was strict. Some one from weariness would begin droning a
pre-Lenten first verse of a hymn ... 'When I consider thy heavens
...' We sang fine, beautifully, and it was such a quiet life, and
the smell was so fine; you could see the flaky snow out the
windows--well, now, just like in a dream..."

Jennie puts the tattered novel down on her stomach, throws the
cigarette over Zoe's head, and says mockingly:

"We know all about your quiet life. You chucked the infants into
toilets. The Evil One is always snooping around your holy places."

"I call forty. I had forty-six. Finished!" Little Manka exclaims
excitedly and claps her palms. "I open with three."

Tamara, smiling at Jennie's words, answers with a scarcely
perceptible smile, which barely distends her lips, but makes
little, sly, ambiguous depressions at their corners, altogether as
with Monna Lisa in the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.

"Lay folk say a lot of things about nuns ... Well, even if there
had been sin once in a while ..."

"If you don't sin--you don't repent," Zoe puts in seriously, and
wets her finger in her mouth.

"You sit and sew, the gold eddies before your eyes, while from
standing in the morning at prayer your back just aches, and your
legs ache. And at evening there is service again. You knock at the
door of the mother superior's cell: 'Through prayers of Thy
saints, oh Lord, our Father, have mercy upon us.' And the mother
superior would answer from the cell, in a little bass-like 'A-men.'"

Jennie looks at her intently for some time, shakes her head and
says with great significance:

"You're a queer girl, Tamara. Here I'm looking at you and
wondering. Well, now, I can understand how these fools, on the
manner of Sonka, play at love. That's what they're fools for. But
you, it seems, have been roasted on all sorts of embers, have been
washed in all sorts of lye, and yet you allow yourself foolishness
of that sort. What are you embroidering that shirt for?"

Tamara, without haste, with a pin refastens the fabric more
conveniently on her knee, smooths the seam down with the thimble,
and speaks, without raising the narrowed eyes, her head bent just
a trifle to one side:

"One's got to be doing something. It's wearisome just so. I don't
play at cards, and I don't like them."

Jennie continues to shake her head.

"No, you're a queer girl, really you are. You always have more
from the guests than all of us get. You fool, instead of saving
money, what do you spend it on? You buy perfumes at seven roubles
the bottle. Who needs it? And now you have bought fifteen roubles'
worth of silk. Isn't this for your Senka, now?"

"Of course, for Sennechka."

"What a treasure you've found, to be sure! A miserable thief. He
rides up to this establishment like some general. How is it he
doesn't beat you yet? The thieves--they like that. And he plucks
you, have no fear?"

"More than I want to, I won't give," meekly answers Tamara and
bites the thread in two.

"Now that is just what I wonder at. With your mind, your beauty, I
would put such rings-around-a-rosie about a guest like that, that
he'd take me and set me up. I'd have horses of my own, and
diamonds."

"Everyone to his tastes, Jennechka. You too, now, are a very
pretty and darling girl, and your character is so independent and
brave, and yet you and I have gotten stuck in Anna Markovna's."

Jennie flares up and answers with unsimulated bitterness:

"Yes! Why not! All things come your way! ...You have all the very
best guests. You do what you want with them, but with me it's
always either old men or suckling babies. I have no luck. The ones
are snotty, the others have yellow around the mouth. More than
anything else, now, I dislike the little boys. He comes, the
little varmint; he's cowardly, he hurries, he trembles, but having
done the business, he doesn't know what to do with his eyes for
shame. He's all squirming from disgust. I just feel like giving
him one in the snout. Before giving you the rouble, he holds it in
his pocket in his fist, and that rouble's all hot, even sweaty.
The milksop! His mother gives him a ten kopeck piece for a French
roll with sausage, but he's economized out of that for a wench. I
had one little cadet in the last few days. So just on purpose, to
spite him, I say: 'Here, my dearie, here's a little caramel for
you on your way; when you're going back to your corps, you'll suck
on it.' So at first he got offended, but afterwards took it. Later
I looked from the stoop, on purpose; just as soon as he walked
out, he looked around, and right away into his mouth with the
caramel. The little swine!"

"But with old men it's still worse," says Little Manka in a tender
voice, and slyly looks at Zoe. "What do you think, Zoinka?"

Zoe, who had already finished playing, and was just about to yawn,
now cannot in any way give rein to her yawns. She does not know
whether she wants to be angry or to laugh. She has a steady
visitor, some little old man in a high station, with perverted
erotic habits. The entire establishment makes fun of his visits to
her.

Zoe at last succeeds in yawning.

"To the devil's dam with all of you," she says, with her voice
hoarse after the yawn; "may he be damned, the old anathema!"

"But still, the worst of all," Jennie continues to discourse,
"worse than your director, Zoinka, worse than my cadet, the worst
of all--are your lovers. What can there be joyous in this: he
comes drunk, poses, makes sport of you, wants to pretend there's
something in him--only nothing comes of it all. Wha-at a lad-die,
to be sure! The scummiest of the scum, dirty, beaten-up, stinking,
his whole body in scars, there's only one glory about him: the
silk shirt which Tamarka will embroider for him. He curses one's
mother, the son of a bitch, always aching for a fight. Ugh! No!"
she suddenly exclaimed in a merry provoking voice, "The one I love
truly and surely, for ever and ever, is my Mannechka, Manka the
white, little Manka, my Manka-Scandalistochka."

And unexpectedly, having embraced Manya by the shoulders and
bosom, she drew her toward herself, threw her down on the bed, and
began to kiss deeply and vigorously her hair, eyes, lips. Manka
with difficulty tore herself away from her, with dishevelled,
bright, fine, downy hair, all rosy from the resistance, and with
eyes downcast and moist from shame and laughter.

"Leave off, Jennechka, leave off. Well, now, what are you doing?
Let me go!"

Little Manya is the meekest and quietest girl in the entire
establishment. She is kind, yielding, can never refuse anybody's
request, and involuntarily everybody treats her with great
gentleness. She blushes over every trifle, and at such time
becomes especially attractive, as only very tender blondes with a
sensitive skin can be attractive. But it is sufficient for her to
drink three or four glasses of Liqueur Benedictine, of which she
is very fond, for her to become unrecognizable and to create
brawls, such, that there is always required the intervention of
the housekeepers, the porter, at times even the police. It is
nothing for her to hit a guest in the face or to throw in his face
a glass filled with wine, to overturn the lamp, to curse out the
proprietress, Jennie treats her with some strange, tender
patronage and rough adoration.

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