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

Yarmola would then heave a deep sigh, put the hornbook on the table, and announce with sad determination:

“No, I can’t.⁠ ⁠…”

“Why can’t you? It’s so easy. Just say ma simply, just as I say it.”

“No, sir, I cannot⁠ ⁠… I’ve forgotten.”

All my methods, my devices and comparisons were being shattered by this monstrous lack of understanding. But Yarmola’s longing for knowledge did not weaken at all.

“If I could only write my name!” Yarmola begged me bashfully. “I don’t want anything else. Only my name: Yarmola Popruzhuk⁠—that’s all.”

When I finally abandoned the idea of teaching him to read and write properly, I began to show him how to sign his name mechanically. To my amazement this method seemed to be the easiest for Yarmola, and at the end of two months he had very nearly mastered his name. As for his Christian name we had decided to make the task easier by leaving it out altogether.

Every evening, after he had finished filling the stoves, Yarmola waited on patiently until I called him.

“Well, Yarmola, let’s have a go at it,” I would say. He would sidle up to the table, lean on it with his elbows, thrust his pen through his black, shrivelled, stiff fingers, and ask me, raising his eyebrows:

“Shall I write?”

“Yes, write.”

Yarmola drew the first letter quite confidently⁠—P.2 (This letter was called “a couple of posts and a crossbeam on top.”) Then he looked at me questioningly.

“Why don’t you go on writing? Have you forgotten?”

“I’ve forgotten.” Yarmola shook his head angrily.

“Heavens, what a fellow you are! Well, make a wheel.”

“Ah, a wheel, a wheel!⁠ ⁠… I know.⁠ ⁠…” Yarmola cheered up, and diligently drew an elongated figure on the paper, in outline very like the Caspian Sea. After this labour he admired the result in silence for some time, bending his head now to the left, then to the right, and screwing up his eyes.

“Why have you stopped there? Go on.”

“Wait a little, sir⁠ ⁠… presently.”

He thought for a couple of minutes and then asked timidly:

“Same as the first?”

“Right. Just the same.”

So little by little we came to the last letter k, which we knew as “a stick with a crooked twig tilted sideways in the middle of it.”

“What do you think, sir?” Yarmola would say sometimes after finishing his work and looking at it with great pride; “if I go on learning like this for another five or six months I shall be quite a learned chap. What’s your idea?”

Yarmola was squatting on his heels in front of the stove door, poking the coals in the stove, while I walked from corner to corner of the room. Of all the twelve rooms of the huge country house I occupied only one⁠—the lounge that used to be. The other rooms were locked up, and there, grave and motionless, mouldered the old brocaded furniture, the rare bronzes, and the eighteenth-century portraits.

The wind was raging round the walls of the house like an old naked, frozen devil. Towards evening the snowstorm became more violent. Someone outside was furiously throwing handfuls of fine dry snow at the windowpanes. The forest near by moaned and roared with a dull, hidden, incessant menace.⁠ ⁠…

The wind stole into the empty rooms and the howling chimneys. The old house, weak throughout, full of holes and half decayed, suddenly became alive with strange sounds to which I listened with involuntary anxiety. Into the white drawing-room there broke a deep-drawn sigh, in a sad worn-out voice. In the distance somewhere the dry and rotten floorboards began to creak under someone’s heavy, silent tread. I think that someone in the corridor beside my room is pressing with cautious persistence on the door-handle, and then, suddenly grown furious, rushes all over the house madly shaking all the shutters and doors. Or he gets into the chimney and whines so mournfully, wearily, incessantly⁠—now raising his voice higher and higher, thinner and thinner, all the while, till it becomes a wailing shriek, then lowering it again to a wild beast’s growling. Sometimes this terrible guest would rush into my room too, run with a sudden coldness over my back and flicker the lamp flame, which gave a dim light from under a green paper shade, scorched at the top.

There came upon me a strange, vague uneasiness. I thought: Here am I sitting, this bad, stormy night, in a rickety house, in a village lost in woods and snowdrifts, hundreds of miles from town life, from society, from woman’s laughter and human conversation.⁠ ⁠… And I began to feel that this stormy evening would drag on for years and tens of years. The wind will whine outside the windows, as it is whining now; the lamp will burn dimly under the paltry green shade, as it burns now; I will walk just as breathlessly up and down my room, and the silent, intent Yarmola will sit so by the stove, a strange creature, alien to me, indifferent to everything in the world, indifferent that his family has nothing to eat, to the raging wind, and my own vague consuming anxiety.

Suddenly I felt an intolerable desire to break this anxious silence with some semblance of a human voice, and I asked:

“Why is there such a wind today? What do you think, Yarmola?”

“The wind?” Yarmola muttered, lazily lifting his head. “Don’t you really know?”

“Of course I don’t. How could I?”

“Truly, you don’t know?” Yarmola livened suddenly. “I’ll tell you,” he continued with a mysterious note in his voice. “I’ll tell you this. Either a witch is being born, or a wizard is having a wedding-party.”

“A witch?⁠ ⁠… Does that mean a sorceress in your place?”

“Exactly⁠ ⁠… a sorceress.”

I caught up Yarmola eagerly. “Who knows,” I thought, “perhaps I’ll manage to get an interesting story out of him presently, all about magic, and buried treasure, and devils.”

“Have you got witches here, in Polyessie?” I asked.

“I don’t know⁠ ⁠… may be,” Yarmola answered with his usual indifference, bending down to the stove