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

it flew at the spectators’ heads. To hurl the end from the steamer adroitly, and to catch it as skilfully, is, as everybody knows, the first requirement of sea chic. Young Apostolidi, without removing his cigarette from his mouth, caught the end of the rope with an air as if he were doing it for the hundredth time that day, and carelessly to all appearances, but firmly, he wound it around one of the two cast-iron cannon which, from time immemorial, have been standing on the embankment, dug upright in the ground.

A boat pulled off from the steamer. Three Italians leaped ashore and busied themselves with ropes. One of them wore a cloth biretta, the other, a cap with a straight quadrangular visor, the third had on a nondescript knitted cap. They were all small, robust, alert, and wiry, like monkeys. Unceremoniously they shoved the crowd with their shoulders, babbled something in their rapid, musical, tender Genoese dialect, and exchanged remarks with the men on the steamer. And all the time their big, black eyes smiled kindly and pleasantly, and their white, young teeth flashed from their sunburnt faces.

“Bona sera.⁠ ⁠… Italiano.⁠ ⁠… Marinaro!” said Kolya approvingly.

“Oh! Bona sera, signore!” answered the Italians gayly in a chorus.

The anchor chain rumbled and screamed. Something inside the steamer began to gurgle and hiss. The lights went out in the lanterns. In half an hour the Italian sailors were sent ashore.

The Italians, short, swarthy, and young, proved to be sociable and gay fellows. Full of light, charming ease, they made overtures that evening to the fishermen in the beer-halls and rathskellers. But the local people met them dryly and with reserve. They wanted, probably, to show these strangers that the visit of a foreign vessel was no rarity to them, that such things happened daily, and that, therefore, there was no reason for undue excitement or joy. Was it the voice of their local patriotism that spoke in them?

And⁠—oh! it was an unseemly trick that they played that evening on the good, gay, trusting Italians, when the latter pointed at bread, wine, cheese, and other objects and asked the Russian words for them, blandly showing their magnificent teeth. Such were the words which the fishermen taught their guests, that later on, whenever the Genoese tried to make themselves understood in Russian in the stores or on the marketplace, the salesmen roared with laughter and the women fled, covering up their faces in shame. That same evening the rumor spread all over the town with the speed of an electric message (the Lord knows how) that the Italians had come for the express purpose of raising the sunken frigate The Black Prince with its cargo of gold, and that the work was going to last the entire winter.

III

No one at Balaklava believed in the success of this undertaking. In the first place, of course, a mysterious spell lay on the sea treasure. Hoary, white old men, all bent with age, said that attempts to get the English gold from the bottom had already been made: Englishmen and also some fabulous Americans had come, wasted heaps of money, and had left Balaklava with empty hands. What, indeed, could such people as Englishmen or Americans do if the legendary Balaklava heroes of yore had failed here? Naturally, in those days the weather, the catch, the longboats, the sails, and the people were quite different from the small fry of today. In former days there lived the mythical Spiro. He was able to dive to any depth and stay under water a quarter of an hour. This very Spiro, holding between his feet a stone three pounds in weight, went down to the bottom, to a depth of a hundred yards, where the remnants of the sunken squadron had found their grave. And Spiro saw everything: the ship, the gold, but he could not take anything⁠ ⁠… it will not let you.

“Sashka the Messenger ought to try,” one of the listeners would remark slyly. “He is our best diver.”

Everybody laughed, and loudest of all⁠—displaying his beautiful, proud mouth⁠—laughed Sashka Argiridi, alias Sashka the Messenger.

This worthy⁠—a superb, blue-eyed man, with a hard classic profile⁠—is the greatest lazybones, cheat, and buffoon on the entire Crimean seacoast. He was nicknamed “the Messenger” because sometimes, at the very height of the summer season, he would sew a pair of gold stripes on the band of his cap and would seat himself on a chair in the street very near to the hotel. And if some giddy tourists had the misfortune of addressing a question to the self-styled commissionaire, no earthly power could save them from becoming Sashka’s victims. He would drag them over hills, through courtyards, vineyards, cemeteries, and regale them with all kinds of impossible stories. He would run into somebody’s courtyard, break into pieces a fragment of an old pot, and then coax the tourists into buying the potsherds⁠—the remnants, he would swear, of an ancient Greek vase dating to the time before Christ. At other times he would hold up in front of their noses an ordinary, thin, oval-shaped, and grooved pebble which the fishermen use as plummets for their nets, trying to persuade the poor tourists that no Greek fisherman ever goes to sea without such a talisman, which is hallowed at the shrine of St. Nicholas, and which saves them from storms.

But his most remarkable trick is diving. While accompanying a boating party of simple-minded tourists whom he bores with the inevitable “Our sea is deserted,” “Down Mother Volga,” and similar songs, he would skilfully and imperceptibly turn the conversation to the sunken squadron, the mythical Spiro, and the subject of diving in general. A quarter of an hour under water⁠—even to the credulous members of the boating party this sounded like a lie, like a specifically Greek lie. Two or three minutes, well, that may be possible.⁠ ⁠… But fifteen! Of course, Sashka is cut to the quick.⁠ ⁠… He frowns, offended.⁠ ⁠…