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

“Sasha, play something of your own.” All of a sudden his lips became contorted and his mug shook in his hand.

“Do you know, Madame Ivanova,” he said in a bewildered way, “they’re taking me as a soldier, to the war!”

Madame Ivanova threw up her hands in astonishment.

“But it’s impossible, Sasha, you’re joking.”

Sasha shook his head dejectedly and submissively. “I’m not joking.”

“But you’re over age, Sasha; how old are you?”

No one had ever been interested in that question. Everyone considered Sasha as old as the walls of the beershop, the marquises, the Ukrainians, the frogs, and even the painted king who guarded the entrance, Gambrinous himself.

“Forty-six.” Sasha thought for a second or two. “Perhaps forty-nine. I’m an orphan,” he added sadly.

“But you must go and explain to the authorities!”

“I’ve been to them already, Madame Ivanova. I have explained.”

“Well?”

“Well, they answered: ‘Scabby Jew, sheeny snout! Just you say a little more and you’ll be jugged, there!’ And then they struck me.”

Everyone heard the news that evening at Gambrinous’, and they got Sasha dead drunk with their sympathy. He tried to play the buffoon, grimaced, winked, but from his kind funny eyes there peeped out grief and awe. A strongish workman, a tinker by trade, suddenly offered to go to the war in Sasha’s place. The stupidity of the suggestion was quite clear to all, but Sasha was touched, shed a few tears, embraced the tinker, and then and there gave him his fiddle. He left Bielotchka with the woman at the buffet.

“Madame Ivanova, take care of the little dog! Perhaps I won’t come back, so you will have a souvenir of Sasha. Bielinka, good doggie! Look, it’s licking itself. Ah you, my poor little one. And I want to ask you something else, Madame Ivanova; the boss owes me some money, so please get it and send it on. I’ll write the addresses. In Gomel I have a first cousin who has a family and in Jmerinka there’s my nephew’s widow. I send it them every month. Well, we Jews are people like that, we are fond of our relations, and I’m an orphan. I’m alone. Goodbye, then, Madame Ivanova.”

“Goodbye, Sasha, we must at least have a goodbye kiss. It’s been so many years⁠ ⁠… and, don’t be angry, I’m going to cross you for the journey.”

Sasha’s eyes were profoundly sad, but he couldn’t help clowning to the end.

“But, Madame Ivanova, what if I die from the Russian cross?”

V

Gambrinous’ became empty as though orphaned without Sasha and his fiddle. The manager invited as a substitute a quartette of strolling mandolinists, one of whom, dressed like a comic-opera Englishman, with red whiskers and a false nose, check trousers, and a stiff collar higher than his ears, sang comic couplets and danced shamelessly on the platform. But the quartette was an utter failure; it was hissed and pelted with bits of sausage, and the leading comic was once beaten by the Tendrove fishermen for a disrespectful allusion to Sasha.

All the same, Gambrinous’, from old memory, was visited by the lads of sea and port whom the war had not drawn to death and suffering. Every evening the first subject of conversation would be Sasha.

“Eh, it would be fine to have Sasha back now. One’s soul feels heavy without him.”

“Ye‑e‑es, where are you hovering, Sashenka, dear, kind friend?”

“In the fields of Manchuria far away⁠ ⁠…” someone would pipe up in the words of the latest song. Then he would break off in confusion, and another would put in unexpectedly: “Wounds may be split open and hacked. And there are also torn ones.”

“I congratulate you on victory,
You with the torn-out arm.”

“Stop, don’t whine. Madame Ivanova, isn’t there any news from Sasha? A letter or a little postcard?”

Madame Ivanova used to read the paper now the whole evening, holding it at arm’s length, her head thrown back, her lips constantly moving. Bielotchka lay on her knees, giving from time to time little peaceful snores. The presider at the buffet was already far from being like a vigilant captain on his bridge and her crew wandered about the shop half asleep.

At questions about Sasha’s fate she would shake her head slowly. “I know nothing. There are no letters, and one gets nothing from the newspapers.”

Then she would take off her spectacles slowly, place them, with the newspaper, close to the warm body of Bielotchka, and turn round to have a quiet cry to herself.

Sometimes she would bend over the dog and ask in a plaintive, touching little voice: “Bielinka, doggie, where is our Sasha, eh? Where is our master?”

Bielotchka raised her delicate little muzzle, blinked with her moist black eyes, and, in the tone of the buffet woman, began quietly to whine out: “Ah, ou-ou-ou. Aou⁠—A-ou-ou-ou.”

But time smooths and washes up everything. The mandolinists were replaced by balalaika players, and they, in their turn, by a choir of Ukrainians with girls. Then the well-known Leshka, the harmonicist, a professional thief who had decided, in view of his marriage, to seek regular employment, established himself at Gambrinous’ more solidly than the others. He was a familiar figure in different cabarets, which explains why he was tolerated here, or, rather, had to be tolerated, for things were going badly at the beershop.

Months passed, a year passed; no one remembered anything more about Sasha, except Madame Ivanova, who no longer cried when she mentioned his name. Another year went by. Probably even the little white dog had forgotten Sasha.

But in spite of Sasha’s misgivings, he had not died from the Russian cross; he had not even been once wounded, though he had taken part in three great battles, and, on one occasion, went to the attack in front of his battalion as a member of the band, in which he played the fife. At Vafangoa he was taken prisoner, and at the end of the war he was brought back on board a German ship to the very port where his friends continued to work and create uproars.

The