Short Fiction, Aleksandr Kuprin [the speed reading book txt] 📗

indented line of the low, bald mountains that surround the bay.

It seems that the summer guests have already been forgotten, as though they had never been there. Two or three rainy days, and the last vestige of their recent presence will be washed away from the streets. The whole senseless summer, passed in absurd haste, with its evening concerts, its dust raised by the women’s skirts, its pitiful flirtations and discussions of political subjects, now seems like a faraway, long-forgotten dream. The whole interest of the fishing town is concentrated upon the fish and their coming.

In the coffeehouses of Ivan Yuryich and Ivan Adamovich, the fishermen form into companies for their future work, while others play dominos. Captains are chosen here, too. The conversation in every corner of the room is concerned with the one subject of shares, fishing-nets, hooks, the possible catch, the mackerel, the flounder, the sturgeon, and other fish caught here. And at nine o’clock the whole town is plunged into profound slumber.

Nowhere in the whole of Russia, and I have travelled much through its width and length⁠—nowhere have I experienced the sensation of such deep, complete, and perfect silence as in Balaklava.

Sometimes I would go out on the balcony and feel immediately swallowed up by the darkness and the silence. The sky is black, the water in the bay is black, the mountains are black. The water is so thick, so heavy, and so calm that the stars reflected in it do not twinkle or break. Not a single human sound interrupts this silence. Now and then, perhaps once a minute, you can hear a tiny wavelet splash upon a rock. But this lonely, melodious sound only deepens, only accentuates the silence. You can hear the blood coursing through the veins in your ears. A rope holding a boat squeaks somewhere. And again everything is silent. You feel that the night and the silence are plunged in one black embrace.

I gaze to the left, where the narrow neck of the bay hemmed in by two mountains, disappears. A long, low mountain lies there, crowned by some ancient ruins. If you look at it attentively it will appear to you like a gigantic monster of the fairytale who lies with his breast on the shore of the bay and, thrusting his dark head with its upstanding ears deep into the water, greedily drinks it, unable to satiate his thirst.

At the very spot where the monster ought to have an eye burns a little red speck that represents the light of the customhouse. I know this light well, for I have passed it a hundred times, touching the lantern with my hand. But in the strange silence and the deep blackness of this autumn night I seem to see more and more distinctly the back and the head of the ancient monster, and I feel that its sly and wicked eye is watching me intently with a feeling of concealed hatred.

Suddenly I recall that verse from Homer in which Odysseus sees bloodthirsty Laestrygonians in a small, narrow-necked Black Sea bay. I also think of the enterprising, supple, handsome Genoese who erected their colossal fortifications upon the brow of this mountain. And in my mind rises the picture of a stormy winter night when a whole English squadron, headed by the haughty flagship, the Black Prince, was dashed to bits against the bosom of the old monster. The Black Prince is now lying on the bottom of the sea, not far away from the spot where I am standing, with its bars of gold still within its hold, that had carried down with it hundreds of human lives.

The old monster in its half-slumber gazes at me with its sharp little red eye. It appears to me like an old, old, forgotten divinity, which dreams its thousand-year-old dreams amidst this black silence. And I feel a strange disquiet.

The slow, lazy footsteps of the night-watchman are heard at a distance, and I distinguish clearly not only every sound of his heavy, iron-shod fisherman’s boots beating against the stones of the sidewalk, but also the shuffling of his heels at every second step. The sounds are so distinct amidst this silence that it seems to me as though I were walking together with him, although I am certain that he is more than a verst away from me. But now he has turned aside into some dark alley, or, perhaps, has sat down on a bench somewhere: his footsteps are heard no more. Everything is silent. Everything is dark.

II The Mackerel

The autumn is coming fast. The water becomes colder and colder. Just now one can catch only small fish with dragnets, those large vases of netting which are thrown to the bottom from the boat. But suddenly a rumor is set afloat that Yura Paratino had rigged his boat and had sent it to the spot where his mackerel-nets were placed, between the Capes of Aya and Laspi.

Of course, Yura Paratino is not the Emperor of Germany, or a famous bass, or a fashionable writer, or a singer of gypsy songs, but when I think of the importance and respect that attach to his name along the whole shore of the Black Sea, I always recall his friendship with pleasure and pride.

Yura Paratino is a tall, strong Greek of about forty, with an appearance of having been steeped in brine and tar. He has a bull-neck, a dark complexion, black, curly hair, mustaches, a clean-shaven, square chin, with an indentation in the middle that reminds one of animals⁠—a chin that bespeaks enormous willpower and great cruelty⁠—and thin lips that indicate great energy, all the more so because the corners of his mouth are turned downward. There isn’t a single fisherman on the whole shore more skilful, clever, powerful, and courageous than Yura Paratino. No one could outdo Yura when it came to drinking, and yet he had never been seen drunk. No one had ever been