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

Well, if people don’t believe him, he will personally and on the spot, this very minute, prove that he, Sashka, will dive and stay under water all of ten minutes.

“It is true that the job is not an easy one,” he says rather gloomily. “In the evening blood will come out of my ears and eyes.⁠ ⁠… But I will not let anybody say that Sashka Argiridi is a braggart.”

The tourists try to make him listen to reason and to dissuade from such a reckless undertaking, but to no avail, since the man is insulted in his tenderest spot. Quickly and angrily he takes off his coat and trousers, in a twinkling strips off the rest of his clothes, making the ladies turn away and screen themselves with umbrellas, and then with a noise and a splash he throws himself into the water, head first, without forgetting, however, to measure with his eye the distance between the boat and the nearby public baths for men.

Sashka is really an excellent swimmer and diver. Deep down in the water he turns about under the keel of the boat and heads straight for the baths. And while the holiday makers in the boat are greatly alarmed⁠—reproach one another and, in general, make much and noisy ado⁠—Sashka sits on one of the steps of the baths and hurriedly finishes smoking someone’s cigarette end. He returns in the same manner, and quite unexpectedly bobs up out of the water⁠—to everybody’s relief and delight⁠—close to the boat, trying his best to make his eyes bulge and his chest pant from the exertion.

Of course, all this hocus-pocus is for Sashka a source of income. But it must be recognized that what guides him in his tricks is not at all greed, but rather the imp of gay, boyish mischief that lives in him.

IV

The Italians did not conceal the purpose of their visit: they came to Balaklava with the express intention of exploring the scene of the naval disaster, and, if circumstances permitted, to raise from the bottom all of the more valuable remnants⁠—mainly, of course, the legendary golden treasure. The expedition was headed by Giuseppe Restucci, an engineer and an inventor of a special diving apparatus. He was a middle-aged, tall, taciturn man, always dressed in gray, with a gray, oblong face and almost white hair, with a cataract on one eye⁠—in general, looking more like an Englishman than an Italian. He put up at the hotel on the beach, and of an evening, when you called on him, he treated you to Chianti and to the verses of his favorite poet, Steccheti:

“A woman’s love is like coal, which burns when aglow, and soils when cold.”

And although he recited the verses in Italian, with his soft and musical accent, their meaning was clear without translation, owing to his wonderfully expressive gestures: with such an air of sudden pain did he jerk away his hand, singed by the imaginary fire, and with such a mien of squeamish disgust did he spurn the cold coal!

There were also aboard the vessel a captain and two assistant officers. But the most remarkable member of the crew was, of course, the diver⁠—il palombaro⁠—a fine Genoese, by the name of Salvatore Trama.

Congested veins, like little, blue snakes, were seen on his big, round, dark-bronze face, studded with black dots which looked as if they were caused by a gunpowder burn. He was rather short, but because of the extraordinary volume of his chest, the breadth of his shoulders, and the massiveness of his powerful neck, he gave the impression of a very stout man. When he walked, with his lazy gait, along the embankment, his hands in his trousers pockets and his feet wide apart, he looked from afar like a walking square, his height not exceeding his breadth.

Salvatore Trama was an affable, indolently jovial, and trustful man, with a tendency toward apoplexy. He was not unwilling to relate strange, marvellous things about his professional experiences.

Once, in the Bay of Biscay, he went down to the bottom, fifty yards deep. Suddenly, amidst the greenish dusk of the deep, he noticed that a huge shadow was slowly moving from above straight toward him. Then the shadow halted. Through the round window of the diving-helmet Salvatore beheld right above his head, at the distance of about a yard, an enormous electric ray, about five yards in diameter, “as big as this room,” as Trama said. It stood motionless, waving the edges of its round, flat body. One slight contact with the diver’s body of its double tail, which carries a powerful electric charge, would mean death for brave Trama. Those two minutes of expectation, at the end of which the monster seemed to have changed its mind and slowly swam on, shaking its thin, waving sides, Trama considers the most horrible moments of his hard and dangerous life.

He spoke also of how he met under water dead sailors, who had been thrown overboard. In spite of the weight tied to their feet, and, owing to the decomposition of the body, they settle into a layer of water of such a density that they can neither sink nor rise. Standing upright, with the cannonball fastened to their feet, they travel in the water, carried by a gentle current.

Trama also related a mysterious accident which happened to another diver, his relative and teacher. He was an old, robust, cold-blooded, and daring man, who had searched the sea bottom of nearly all the seacoasts of the globe. His exceptional and dangerous trade he loved with all his heart, as does every true diver.

Once, this man, while engaged in laying a telegraph-cable at the bottom of the sea, had to go down to a comparatively slight depth. But as soon as he reached the bottom and signalled the fact, he gave the signal of alarm: “Lift me up. Am in danger.”

When he was hurriedly dragged out and freed from the brass helmet connected with