Yama, Aleksandr Kuprin [grave mercy TXT] 📗

a strangely cumbersome impression, somewhat like that of a horse led into a room; a Chinaman in a blue blouse, white stockings, and with a queue; a negro from a cabaret, in a tuxedo coat and checked pantaloons, with a flower in his buttonhole, and with starched linen, which, to the amazement of the girls, not only did not soil from the black skin, but appeared still more dazzlingly white.

These rare people fomented the satiated imagination of the prostitutes, excited their exhausted sensuality and professional curiosity, and all of them, almost enamoured, would dog their steps, jealous and bickering with one another.

There was one incident when Simeon had let into the room an elderly man, dressed like a bourgeois. There was nothing exceptional about him; he had a stern, thin face, with bony, evil-looking cheekbones, protruding like tumours, a low forehead, a beard like a wedge, bushy eyebrows, one eye perceptibly higher than the other. Having entered, he raised his fingers, folded for the sign of the cross, to his forehead, but having searched the corners with his eyes and finding no image, he did not in the least grow confused, put down his hand, and at once with a businesslike air walked up to the fattest girl in the establishment⁠—Kitty.

“Let’s go!” he commanded curtly, and with determination nodded his head in the direction of the door.

During the entire period of her absence the omniscious Simeon, with a mysterious, and even somewhat proud air, managed to inform Niura, at that time his mistress, while she, in a whisper, with horror in her rounded eyes, told her mates, in secret, that the name of the bourgeois was Dyadchenko, and that last fall he had volunteered, owing to the absence of the hangman, to carry out the execution of eleven rioters, and with his own hands had hung them in two mornings. And⁠—monstrous as it may be⁠—at that hour there was not in the establishment a single girl who did not feel envy toward the fat Kitty, and did not experience a painful, keen, vertiginous curiosity. When Dyadchenko was leaving half an hour later with his sedate and stern air, all the women speechlessly, with their mouths gaping, escorted him to the street door and afterwards watched him from the windows as he walked along the street. Then they rushed into the room of the dressing Kitty and overwhelmed her with interrogations. They looked with a new feeling, almost with astonishment, at her bare, red, thick arms, at the bed, still crumpled, at the old, greasy, banknote, which Kitty showed them, having taken it out of her stocking. Kitty could tell them nothing. “A man like any man, like all men,” she said with a calm incomprehension; but when she found out who her visitor had been, she suddenly burst into tears, without herself knowing why.

This man, the outcast of outcasts, fallen as low as the fancy of man can picture, this voluntary headsman, had treated her without rudeness, but with such absence of even a hint at endearment, with such disdain and wooden indifference, as no human being is treated; not even a dog or a horse, and not even an umbrella, overcoat or hat, but like some dirty, unclean object, for which a momentary, unavoidable need arises, but which, at the passing of its needfulness, becomes foreign, useless, and disgusting. The entire horror of this thought the fat Kate could not embrace with her brain of a fattened turkey hen, and because of that cried⁠—as it seemed even to her⁠—without cause and reason.

There were also other happenings, which stirred up the turbid, foul life of these poor, sick, silly, unfortunate women. There were cases of savage, unbridled jealousy with pistol shots and poisoning; occasionally, very rarely, a tender, flaming and pure love would blossom out upon this dung; occasionally the women even abandoned an establishment with the help of the loved man, but almost always came back. Two or three times it happened that a woman from a brothel would suddenly prove pregnant⁠—and this always seemed, on the face of it, laughable and disgraceful, but touching in the profundity of the event.

And no matter what may have happened, every evening brought with it such an irritating, strained, spicy expectation of adventures that every other life, after that in a house of ill-fame, would have seemed flat and humdrum to these lazy women of no will power.

V

There did take place, however, in the house of Anna Markovna, one strange episode, with a workaday beginning, and an enigmatic, sinister ending, incomprehensible to the minds of Yama.

One evening in winter⁠—about six, say⁠—someone rang the bell of the front entrance.

Simeon the doorkeeper, having glanced through the peeper,5 noticed a feminine figure standing on the front landing, and, having opened the door the least wee bit, asked:

“Who d’you want?”

“The proprietress.”

“And what for?”

“On business. I want to join on.”

“Wait a while⁠—I’ll tell her.”

He closed the door and went to Emma Edwardovna.

The housekeeper at first questioned him in detail as to what sort of lady it was, what her face was like, and her dress; whether the newcomer did not look like a spy in the pay of the police, etc. Then she said:

“Very well⁠—bring her here, and you yourself, in case anything should happen, stay behind the portière and listen. If I need you, I’ll call out.”

The lady came. The housekeeper, with her quick, all-seeing eye, looked her over in a second. One could see at once that this was no professional. She was dressed in a caracul sacque and a black silk dress. There were absolutely no traces or makeup on her face. She was of no great stature, but graceful and well put together. Her face, clever and handsome, was one of those which always remain pale, with a pleasant, subdued yellow tint. The eyes were glisteningly blue, their gaze frequently on the qui vive.

“About twenty, probably,” reflected Emma Edwardovna, and asked:

“Your age, Madame?”

“Twenty-six.”

“However, you look youngish,