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

O dear, simple men, stout hearts, naive, primitive souls, strong bodies, swept by the salt-sea breezes, sinewy hands, sharp eyes, that have so often looked into the face of death, into its very pupils!

Bora has been blowing for three days. Bora⁠—also called the northeaster⁠—is a mysterious, fierce wind, born somewhere in the bald, peeled-off mountains near Novorossiysk, which swoops down upon the round bay and sets the entire Black Sea rolling heavily. Its violence is so great that it upsets loaded freightcars on the railways, uproots telegraph-posts, shatters freshly laid brick walls, and throws down solitary pedestrians. In the middle of the past century several warships, caught by the northeaster, found refuge against it in the Novorossiysk Bay: under full steam they strove against the wind, but could not advance an inch; then they cast double anchors, yet the gale tore them from the anchors, dragged them into the bay, and dashed them to splinters on the rocks near the shore.

This wind is terrible because of its unexpectedness: it is impossible to foresee it⁠—it is the most capricious of winds on the most capricious of seas.

Old fishermen say that the safest way of getting away from it is to “slip away into the open sea.” And there have been times when bora carried away some small bark or pale-blue Turkish felucca ornamented with silver stars, across the entire Black Sea, to the Anatolian coast, three hundred and fifty versts away.

Bora has been blowing for three days. It is the time of the new moon. The birth-throes of the moon are, as usual, painful. Experienced fishermen have given up all hope of setting out to sea, and have dragged their boats as far away from the shore as they could.

The desperate Fyodor from Oleiz alone, who for many days had been burning candles before the image of St. Nicholas, the miracle-worker, decided to put to sea in order to gather in his sturgeon line. With his gang, consisting entirely of Tartars, he set out three times, and each time, cursing and blaspheming, making no more than one-tenth of a sea knot an hour, he was forced to row back. Each time, in a fury which only a seaman can understand, he tore off the image of his saint nailed to the prow, hurled it to the bottom of the boat, trampled it under foot, and cursed fiercely, while the crew with their hats and hands baled out the water which dashed madly over the sides of the boats.

Meanwhile, the old, sly Balaklava Laestrygonians sat in the coffeehouses, rolled cigarettes, sipped strong thick coffee, played dominos, complained of the weather, and, revelling in the cozy warmth and in the light thrown by the hanging lamps, they recalled ancient, legendary tales inherited from fathers and grandfathers, of how, in such and such a year, the surf was so many hundred yards high and the spray reached to the very base of the half-ruined Genoese fortress.

In the meantime, a bark from Foros was lost at sea. It belonged to a band of eight flaxen-haired Ivans, who had come all the way from the interior of Russia to try their luck on the Black Sea. In the coffeehouse no one worried about them or pitied them. People smacked their lips over their liquor, laughed, and contented themselves with saying contemptuously: “The fools! In such weather! Oh, well, they’re only Russians.” On a dark, roaring night, in the hour preceding the dawn, all those poor Ivans from Ilmen Lake or from the Volga went to the bottom, like stones, with their horse-leather boots reaching to the waist, with their leather jackets and yellow-painted waterproof cloaks.

It was altogether different when Vanya Andrutzaki, in spite of all the warnings and persuasions of the old men, put to sea just before the bora set in. The Lord alone knows why he did it, most probably out of boyish bravado, goaded by his youthful impetuosity and ambition and also by wine. Perhaps some red-lipped, black-eyed Greek girl was gazing at him that moment.

He set sail⁠—the gale even then was quite strong⁠—and vanished from sight. The boat dashed out of the bay with the swiftness of a fine prize-horse; for five minutes the white sail flashed on the blue of the deep, and then it became impossible to distinguish it from the white froth that leaped from wave to wave.

Only three days later he returned home.⁠ ⁠…

Three days and three nights without food or sleep, in a tiny cockleshell amidst a furious sea⁠—with no coast in sight, no sail, no beckoning lighthouse, no steamer’s smoke on the horizon! But once back from his journey, Vanya forgot all about it, as though nothing had happened to him, as though he had taken a ride in a mail-coach to Sebastopol and bought a box of cigarettes there.

There were, however, several details which I squeezed with great difficulty out of Vanya’s memory. For instance, at the end of the second night Yura Lipiadi was overcome by some sort of hysteric fit: all of a sudden he broke out weeping and laughing, and would surely have jumped overboard had not Vanya hit him on the head with an oar. There was also a moment when the crew, frightened by the furious speed of the boat, wanted to lower the sails, and it must have cost Vanya tremendous effort to curb the will of these five men and subjugate them to his own in the very face of death. I also learned that the oarsmen worked so furiously that blood gushed from under their fingernails. But all this was related to me in fragments, reluctantly, incidentally. Yes, in those days of feverish, tense struggle with death, many things were said and done which the crew of the bark will never relate to anyone, not for the whole world!

During those three days and three nights no one at Balaklava closed his eyes except fat Petalidi, the owner of the hotel “Paris.” Young