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

restaurant. On the way he was silent, walked with a stoop, had an air of indifference, as though he were being led on a string, and I had to repeat every question I asked.

“Listen; what in the world is the matter with you? Have they changed you?” I said, touching his shoulder.

He shook my hand off.

“Nothing.⁠ ⁠… Only boredom with everything.⁠ ⁠…”

For some time we walked on side by side without a word.

I remembered his musty, neglected room, its untidiness, the dry bits of bread on the table, the cigarette ends on the saucers, and I said decidedly and with real anxiety:

“I’ll tell you what it is, my dear friend; in my opinion you are quite simply ill.⁠ ⁠… No, don’t wave your hands, but listen to what I’m going to say. These things can’t be neglected.⁠ ⁠… Have you got any money?”

A plan for curing my downhearted friend had quickly ripened in my mind. It was truly a rather ancient, rather trivial and, if you like, a rather ignoble plan. I had merely decided to take him to one of those equivocal places where one sings and dances, where people don’t know themselves what they are doing, but are sure that they are enjoying themselves and through this conviction infect other people with the same illusion.

Having dined somewhere or other, we turned towards the Aquarium at about eleven o’clock so as to get the atmosphere of a spree. I took a “swagger cab” which whirled us past the insults of the cabmen, past the pedestrians all slobbered over with mud.

I was supporting the shattered, thinned back of Boris; he was as stubbornly silent as ever, only once asking discontentedly:

“Where are we hurrying off to like this?”

The dense crowd, the smoke, the rattle of the orchestra, the naked shoulders of the women with their made-up eyes, the white splashes of the tables, the red, brutalised faces of the men⁠—all this pandemonium of tipsy gaiety had a quite different effect on Boris from what I was expecting. At my invitation he was drinking, but he was not getting drunk and his expression was becoming more and more distressed. A bulky, powdered woman, with an ostrich boa round her fat, naked neck, sat down for a minute at our table, tried to start a conversation with Boris, then looked at him in dismay and silently hurried off into the crowd, from which once more she glanced back towards us. And at this glance dread came to me, as if I had become stricken by something deadly, as if someone, black and silent, were standing close beside us.

“Let’s drink, Boris,” I shouted above the noise of the orchestra and the din of the crockery.

With his face puckered up as though from toothache, he formed an unspoken sentence on his lips, which I guessed to be:

“Let’s get out of this.⁠ ⁠…”

I insisted on driving from the Aquarium to another place from which we emerged at dawn in the cold, dark, blue twilight of Petersburg. The street in which we were walking was long and narrow, like a corridor. From the sleepy five-storied stone blocks there emanated the cold of the night. The sleepy dvorniks were plying their brooms while the chilled night-cabmen shivered and swore hoarsely. Stumbling as they strained on the cords round their chests, small boys were dragging their loaded stalls through the middle of the streets. At the doors of the butchers’ shops hung the red, open carcasses of repulsive-looking meat. Boris was walking dejectedly, when suddenly he caught me by the arm and, pointing to the end of the street, cried out:

“There it is, there.⁠ ⁠…”

“What is it?” I asked in consternation.

“You see⁠ ⁠… the fog.”

The fifth stories were drowning in the mist which, like the drooping belly of a black serpent, was descending into the corridor-like street, had stopped halfway and, hugging itself, was peering down as if getting ready to spring at someone.⁠ ⁠…

Boris shook my arm and said, with eyes blazing, in a sudden anger:

“Do you understand what this is? Do you understand? It is the town that is breathing; this is not fog, it is the breath from these stones with holes. There is here the reeking dampness from the laundries, the smoke from the coal; there is here the sin of the people, their anger, their hatred, the emanations from their mattresses, the reek of their sweat and their putrescent mouths.⁠ ⁠… My curse upon you! anathema, monster, monster⁠—I loathe you!”

Boris’ voice broke and rang alternately, as he shook his bony fists in the air.

“Cool down,” I said, taking him by the shoulders. “Come, cool down; can’t you see that you’re startling people?”

Boris choked and coughed for a long time.

“Look,” he exclaimed, his face contracted by his cough, and he showed me a handkerchief which he had pressed against his lips, on the whiteness of which I saw a large stain of blood.

“It is he who has eaten me up⁠ ⁠… the fog.⁠ ⁠…”

We walked back to his lodgings in silence.

In April, before Easter, I looked in at Boris one day. The weather was extraordinarily warm. There was a smell of melted snow, of earth, and the sun was shining bashfully and timidly, as a woman smiles when she is making friends again after tears. He was standing by the opening of the double window, breathing in the spring air. As I entered the room he turned round slowly and on his face there was a kind of tranquil, appeased, childish expression.

“It is nice now at home in the Government of Poltava,” he said, smiling, by way of a greeting.

And suddenly it came home to me that this man would die soon, perhaps even that very month.

“It is nice,” he went on thoughtfully and, getting suddenly animated, he hurried towards me, seized my hands and said:

“Sachenka, dear, take me down to my home⁠ ⁠… take me, old man. Won’t you do it?”

“But am I refusing? Of course we’ll go.”

And so just before Easter we started on our journey. When we left Petersburg it was a