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

what he had to do with the dramatic art!) When decadence became the rage, he bravely started studying painting, and even attained to the exhibition of female nudes, green in color, with violet hair and with wreaths of yellow flowers upon their heads. Later, rumors reached me somehow of his having held a position in a circus as referee in wrestling bouts, and even, I think, as a swallower of burning tow, of salamanders, adders, frogs, and an “Eat-’em-alive!” of cats, under the pseudonym of “Captain Greig, the Man with the Iron and Incombustible Stomach.” He was, likewise, a horticulturist, the editor of a yellow sheet, a representative for some rubber manufacturers, a tax comptroller, and a boatswain on a sailing vessel. Now, when his entire life is a thing of the past, I sometimes, in the periods of insomnia, recall him with tenderness and wonder⁠—where didn’t life (and, it may have been, curiosity) toss this man? I have forgotten to say that I knew something of his past. In his early youth he had served in a cavalry guard and had participated with immense success in gentlemanly races and steeple chases. Neither fears nor complicating difficulties existed for him: he could take any obstacle on any horse, as easy as cracking a nut. True, like every daring horseman, he had frequent spills. Almost all the parts of his arms and legs had been broken and had grown together again clumsily. As for his exit from the regiment, that was due to some absurd incident, in which, however, supersensitive corps d’esprit was far more at fault than he.

Frequently he disappeared from our midst, as though he had been swallowed up by the ocean. Nevertheless, fate inevitably threw us together.

The Russo-Japanese War burst into a blaze. And so I was simply convinced that he would prove to be there, “in the war zone.” And I was not mistaken. In one of the relayed dispatches I unexpectedly read that Captain of the Cavalry So-and-so, retired, had distinguished himself by his amazing valor at such-and-such a retreat, and had been awarded the Order of St. Vladimir of the Third Rank (with swords). This man interested me to such a degree⁠—or, rather, had grown so close to my heart⁠—that I, with absolute composure, even though not without a certain secret curiosity, waited to see how he would end.

When the war quieted down, the Roach came back to Russia with two Crosses of St. George and with a black bandage over his left eye.

“It’s abominable! It’s outrageous!” he stormed⁠—the same native of the shores of the Black Sea that he had always been, but by now already markedly gray. “They’ve sold the fatherland, the worthless scoundrels! They made hay while the sun shone! Deserted their positions, in order to lodge complaints! Kept up harems! Oh, if they’d only let me lay my hands on these skunks!⁠ ⁠…”

And right here came the Ninth of January, the Seventeenth of October, Gapon, Schmidt, and, in general, the whole Russian muddle of the first revolution. Of course he, like an imp or chimney-sweep jack-in-the-box, had to show his mettle even here. He made speeches somewhere, which no one understood⁠—and really, did he understand anything in them himself? Still, he was borne in the arms of the crowds, tossed aloft, and kissed.

But, in the meanwhile, the times were changing with unusual rapidity, and the destinies of the empire with them. Our little society of students was dispersed, every man going his own way. Some died, others became celebrities, fashionable physicians, or well-known lawyers; but for some reason this man, this Black Roach so dear to me, was decreed by fate always to encounter me.

“It’s an outrage!” he clamored, bursting into my rooms like a bomb. “A system of stool-pigeons! Stool-pigeons everywhere! A huge system! Men have lost all shame, fear, and conscience! Why, can one be sure that when a man is carrying a bomb in his hand he has not received four months’ salary for doing it? I can’t bear it any more! I shall expose these worthless scoundrels!”

It was amazing! Neither age, nor the wounds he had received in the war, nor fatigue from the intense life he had led, seemed to have any effect upon him. Every step in the life of Russia as a society was reflected in him as in a mirror⁠—but some sort of a droll mirror, such as are found in dime musees and panopticums, in which a man expands in finitely in breadth, or else suddenly increases in height and becomes as thin as a tapeworm.

And now a comparatively quiet time comes along. The Russian Parliament opens, and my Black Roach dashes off at a mad pace into some province or other, obtains dubious funds somewhere and buys the land necessary to secure an electorate, and exactly one year later, sitting in the galleries of the Tabriz Palace, I hear him delivering a thundering speech⁠—in any case, one not meant for the benefit of the government. I confess that, owing to the memories of my youth, I had preserved a sort of apprehensive tenderness toward him; and, as I listened to him, I feared all the time to see soldiers and jailers enter at any second and put handcuffs and leg-irons upon him, and take him away into tiny, narrow government quarters.

“The waves still mutter the same old thing.⁠ ⁠… Statute One-hundred-and-twenty still mutters the same old thing.⁠ ⁠… The many-headed tail of the old regime, having entwined with its sting well nigh one third of the terrestrial globe⁠ ⁠…”

Here the chairman stopped him and ordered him out of the room. He was muttering something else in the doorway, but I could no longer distinguish anything of what he was saying.

I had almost given up hope of meeting him after this scandal; but you can imagine my astonishment at meeting him both the next year, and the year after that⁠—in short, during all the sessions of Parliament in the self same Tabriz Palace. With horror and with pity