Yama, Aleksandr Kuprin [grave mercy TXT] 📗

“Karapet has a buffet,
On the buffet’s a confet,
On the confet’s a portret⁠—
That’s the selfsame Karapet.”28

Of these couplets (in the Caucasus they are called kinto-uri⁠—the song of the peddlers) the Prince knew an infinite many, but the absurd refrain was always one and the same:

“Bravo, bravo, Katenka,
Katerin Petrovna,
Don’t you kiss me on the cheek-a,
Kiss the backs of my head.”

These couplets Nijeradze always sang in a diminished voice, preserving on his face an expression of serious astonishment about Karapet; while Liubka laughed until it hurt, until tears came, until she had nervous spasms. Once, carried away, she could not restrain herself and began to chime in with him, and their singing proved to be very harmonious. Little by little, when she had by degrees completely ceased to be embarrassed before the Prince, they sang together more and more frequently. Liubka proved to have a very soft and low contralto, even though thin, on which her past life with its colds, drinking, and professional excesses had left absolutely no traces. And mainly⁠—which was already a curious gift of God⁠—she possessed an instinctive, inherent ability very exactly, beautifully, and always originally, to carry on the second voice. There came a time toward the end of their acquaintance, when Liubka did not beg the Prince, but the Prince Liubka, to sing some one of the beloved songs of the people, of which she knew a multitude. And so, putting her elbow on the table, and propping up her head with her palm, like a peasant woman, she would start off to the cautious, painstaking, soft accompaniment:

“Oh, the nights have grown tiresome to me, and wearisome;
To be parted from my dearie, from my mate!
Oh, haven’t I myself, womanlike, done a foolish thing⁠—
Have stirred up the wrath of my own darling:
When I did call him a bitter drunkard!⁠ ⁠…”

“ ‘Bitter drunkard!’ ” the Prince would repeat the last words together with her, and would forlornly toss his curly head, inclined to one side; and they both tried to end the song so that the scarcely seizable quivering of the guitar strings and the voice might by degrees grow quiet, and that it might not be possible to note when the sound ended and the silence came.

But then, in the matter of The Panther’s Skin, the work of the famous Georgian poet Rustavelli, Prince Nijeradze fell down completely. The beauty of the poem, of course, consisted in the way it sounded in the native tongue; but scarcely would he begin to read in singsong his throaty, sibilant, hawking phrases, when Liubka would at first shake for a long time from irresistible laughter; then, finally, burst into laughter, filling the whole room with explosive, prolonged peals. Then Nijeradze in wrath would slam shut the little tome of the adored writer, and swear at Liubka, calling her a mule and a camel. However, they soon made up.

There were times when fits of goatish, mischievous merriment would come upon Nijeradze. He would pretend that he wanted to embrace Liubka, would roll exaggeratedly passionate eyes at her, and would utter with a theatrically languishing whisper:

“Me soul! The best rosa in the garden of Allah! Honey and milk are upon thy lips, and thy breath is better than the aroma of shish-kabob. Give me to drink the bliss of Nirvanah from the goblet of thy lips, O thou, my best Tifflissian she-goat!”

But she would laugh, get angry, strike his hands, and threaten to complain to Likhonin.

“V-va!” the Prince would spread out his hands. “What is Likhonin? Likhonin is my friend, my brother, and bosom crony. But then, does he know what loffe is? Is it possible that you northern people understand loffe? It’s we, Georgians, who are created for loffe. Look, Liubka! I’ll show you right away what loffe is!” He would clench his fists, bend his body forward, and would start rolling his eyes so ferociously, gnash his teeth and roar with a lion’s voice so, that a childish terror would encompass Liubka, despite the fact that she knew this to be a joke, and she would dash off running into another room.

It must be said, however, that for this lad, in general unrestrained in the matter of light, chance romances, existed special firm moral prohibitions, sucked in with the milk of his mother Georgienne; the sacred adates concerning the wife of a friend. And then, probably he understood⁠—and it must be said that these oriental men, despite their seeming naiveness (and, perhaps, even owing to it), possess, when they wish to, a fine psychic intuition⁠—he understood, that having made Liubka his mistress for even one minute, he would be forever deprived of this charming, quiet, domestic evening comfort, to which he had grown so used. For he, who was on terms of thou-ing with almost the whole university, nevertheless felt himself so lonely in a strange city and in a country still strange to him!

These studies afforded the most pleasure of all to Soloviev. This big, strong, and negligent man somehow involuntarily, imperceptibly even to himself, began to submit to that hidden, unseizable, exquisite witchery of femininity; which not infrequently lurks under the coarsest covering, in the harshest, most gnarled environment. The pupil dominated, the teacher obeyed. Through the qualities of a primitive, but on the other hand a fresh, deep, and original soul, Liubka was inclined not to obey the method of another, but to seek out her own peculiar, strange processes. Thus, for example, she⁠—like many children, however⁠—learned writing before reading. Not she herself, meek and yielding by nature, but some peculiar quality of her mind, obstinately refused in reading to harness a vowel alongside of a consonant, or vice versa; in writing, however, she would manage this. For penmanship along slanted rulings she, despite the general wont of beginners, felt a great inclination; she wrote bending low over the paper; blew on the paper from exertion, as though blowing off imaginary dust; licked her