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

Now for the second time Sasha was considered to be definitely buried. Someone had witnessed the whole scene outside the beershop and had handed it on to the others. And at Gambrinous’ there were sittings of experienced people who understood the meaning of such an establishment as the police-court, the meaning of a police-agent’s vengeance.

But now they were much less anxious about Sasha’s fate than they had been before; they forgot about him much more quickly. Two months later there appeared in his place a new violinist (incidentally, one of Sasha’s pupils), who had been fished up by the accompanist.

Then, one quiet spring evening, some three months later, just when the musicians were playing the waltz, “Expectation,” someone’s thin voice called out in fright:

“Boys, it’s Sasha!”

Everyone turned round and rose from the barrels. Yes, it was he, the twice resurrected Sasha, but now with a full-grown beard, thin, pale. They threw themselves at him, surrounded him, thronged to him, rumpled him, plied him with mugs of beer, but all at once the same thin voice exclaimed:

“Brothers, his hand⁠—”

Suddenly they all became silent. Sasha’s left hand, hooked and all shrivelled up, was turned with the elbow towards his side. Apparently it could not bend or unbend, the fingers were permanently sticking up under the chin.

“What’s the matter with you, comrade?” the hairy boatswain from the Russian Navigation Company asked.

“Oh, it’s nothing much⁠—a kind of sinew or something of that sort,” Sasha replied carelessly.

“So that’s it.”

They all became silent again. “That means it’s the end of the ‘Tchaban?’ the boatswain asked compassionately.

“The ‘Tchaban,’ ” Sasha exclaimed, with dancing eyes. “You there,” he ordered the accompanist with all his old assurance. “The ‘Tchaban’⁠—eins, zwei, drei.”

The pianist struck up the merry dance, glancing doubtfully over his shoulder.

But Sasha took out of his pocket with his healthy hand some kind of small instrument, about the size of his palm, elongated and black, with a stem which he put into his mouth, and bending himself to the left, as much as his mutilated, motionless hand allowed, he began suddenly to whistle an uproariously merry “Tchaban.”

“Ho, ho, ho!” the audience rocked with laughter.

“The devil,” exclaimed the boatswain and without in the least intending it he made a clever step and began to beat quick time. Fired by his enthusiasm the women and men began to dance. Even the waiters, trying not to lose their dignity, smilingly capered at their posts. Even Madame Ivanova, unmindful of the duties of the captain on his watch, shook her head in time with the flame dance and lightly snapped her fingers to its rhythm. And perhaps even the old, spongy, timeworn Gambrinous slightly moved his eyebrows and glanced merrily into the street. For it seemed that from the hands of the crippled, hooked Sasha the pitiable pipe-shell sang in a language, unfortunately not yet comprehensible to Gambrinous’ friends, or to Sasha himself.

Well, there it is! You may maim a man, but art will endure all and conquer all.

My Dearest Friend,

Here I am at our sanatorium by the sea, just as I was last spring. Even my room is the same. Only, during the winter, the wallpaper has been changed and there is a slight smell of paste still in the room. I don’t know how other people feel, but this smell always brings back to me that sweet, gentle melancholy which is so indissolubly linked with the memories of childhood. Perhaps it has clung to me ever since my schooldays. I remember how, in old times, they used to bring me back after the long summer holidays. As you pass through the quite familiar dormitory, the classrooms, the corridors and everywhere you detect the smell of paste, of fresh paint, of lime and varnish. And you feel, with a sense of troubled melancholy, that you are again stepping over a new border of life and you vaguely regret the past that has been left on the other side⁠—grey, ordinary, unpleasant, but endlessly dear, just because it is the past and will never, never repeat itself. Ah, that past! What a mysterious, untranslatable charm it retains over one’s soul! Even to you, my dearest, I only dare to write because I feel, since the morning, under the spell of last year’s memories.

I am sitting at this moment at the writing-table, but I have only to lift my eyes from it to see the sea, that very sea with which you and I⁠—do you remember?⁠—were so poetically in love. But, even without looking up, I can feel it. It seems to be rising in a level dark blue shroud right up to the middle of my window, which is wide open. Over it is the blue sky, quite cloudless and solemnly calm. And under the window an apple tree is in bloom. One of its branches, spreading out, covered all over with delicate blossoms, transparently white in the sunlight and faintly pink in the shade, peeps in over the sill. When a faint wind stirs from the sea, it rocks slightly, as though bowing to me in a friendly greeting, and, scarcely audibly, rustles against the green barred shutter. I gaze at it and can never get enough of the swan-like movements of this white branch, covered with bloom, which, so softly, with such exquisite precision, outlines itself gracefully against the deep strong, joyful blue of the sea. And I simply want to cry, so touched am I at its unsophisticated beauty.

Our sanatorium is drowned (forgive this antiquated comparison) in the white waves of pear trees, apple trees, almond trees and apricot trees, all in bloom. They say that in the language of the old inhabitants, the Tcherkesses, this exquisite little seaside village was called “The White Fiancée.” What a delightful and fitting name! There seems to emanate from it an atmosphere of coloured language and Eastern poetry an atmosphere as of from something taken straight out