Yama, Aleksandr Kuprin [grave mercy TXT] 📗

your beauty, I would put such rings-around-a-rosie about a guest like that, that he’d take me and set me up. I’d have horses of my own, and diamonds.”

“Everyone to his tastes, Jennechka. You too, now, are a very pretty and darling girl, and your character is so independent and brave, and yet you and I have gotten stuck in Anna Markovna’s.”

Jennie flares up and answers with unsimulated bitterness:

“Yes! Why not! All things come your way!⁠ ⁠… You have all the very best guests. You do what you want with them, but with me it’s always either old men or suckling babies. I have no luck. The ones are snotty, the others have yellow around the mouth. More than anything else, now, I dislike the little boys. He comes, the little varmint; he’s cowardly, he hurries, he trembles, but having done the business, he doesn’t know what to do with his eyes for shame. He’s all squirming from disgust. I just feel like giving him one in the snout. Before giving you the banknote, he holds it in his pocket in his fist, and that note’s all hot, even sweaty. The milksop! His mother gives him a ten kopeck piece for a French roll with sausage, but he’s economized out of that for a wench. I had one little cadet in the last few days. So just on purpose, to spite him, I say: ‘Here, my dearie, here’s a little caramel for you on your way; when you’re going back to your corps, you’ll suck on it.’ So at first he got offended, but afterwards took it. Later I looked from the stoop, on purpose; just as soon as he walked out, he looked around, and pop! went the caramel into his mouth. The little swine!”

“But with old men it’s still worse,” says Little Manka in a tender voice, and slyly looks at Zoe. “What do you think, Zoinka?”

Zoe, who had already finished playing, and was just about to yawn, now cannot in any way give rein to her yawns. She does not know whether she wants to be angry or to laugh. She has a steady visitor⁠—some little ancient of high station, and with a large family⁠—who has perverted erotic habits. The entire establishment makes fun of his visits to her.

Zoe at last succeeds in yawning.

“To the devil’s dam with all of you,” she says, with her voice hoarse after the yawn; “may he be damned, the old anathema!”

“But still, the worst of all,” Jennie continues to discourse, “worse than your director, Zoinka, worse than my cadet, the worst of all⁠—are your sweeties. What can there be joyous in this: he comes drunk, poses, makes sport of you, wants to pretend there’s something in him⁠—only nothing comes of it all. Wha-at a lad-die, to be sure! The scummiest of the scum, dirty, beaten-up, stinking, his whole body in scars, there’s only one glory about him: the silk shirt which Tamarka will embroider for him. He curses one’s mother, the son of a bitch, always aching for a fight. Ugh! No!” she suddenly exclaimed in a merry provoking voice, “The one I love truly and surely, forever and ever, is my Mannechka, Manka the white, little Manka, my Manka-Scandalistochka.”

And unexpectedly, having embraced Manya by the shoulders and bosom, she drew her toward herself, threw her down on the bed, and began to kiss deeply and vigorously her hair, eyes, lips. Manka with difficulty tore herself away from her, with dishevelled, bright, fine, downy hair, all rosy from the struggle, and with eyes downcast and moist from shame and laughter.

“Leave off, Jennechka, leave off. Well, now, what are you doing? Let me go!”

Little Manya is the meekest and quietest girl in the entire establishment. She is kind, yielding, can never refuse anybody’s request, and involuntarily everybody treats her with great gentleness. She blushes over every trifle, and at such time becomes especially attractive, as only very tender blondes with a sensitive skin can be attractive. But it is sufficient for her to drink three or four glasses of Liqueur Benedictine, of which she is very fond, for her to become unrecognizable and to create brawls, such, that there is always required the intervention of the housekeepers, the porter, at times even the police. It is nothing for her to hit a guest in the face or to throw in his face a glass filled with wine, to overturn the lamp, to curse out the proprietress. Jennie treats her with some strange, tender patronage and rough adoration.

“Ladies, to dinner! To dinner, ladies!” calls Zociya the housekeeper, running along the corridor. On the run she opens the door into Manya’s room and drops hurriedly:

“To dinner, to dinner, ladies!”

They go again to the kitchen, all still in their underwear, all unwashed, in slippers and barefoot. A tasty vegetable soup of pork rinds and tomatoes, cutlets, and pastry⁠—cream rolls. But no one has any appetite, thanks to the sedentary life and irregular sleep, and also because the majority of the girls, just like schoolgirls on a holiday, had already managed during the day to send to the store for halvah, nuts, rakhat loukoum (Turkish Delight), dill-pickles and molasses candy, and had through this spoiled their appetites. Only Nina alone⁠—a small, pug-nosed, snuffling country girl, seduced only two months ago by a travelling salesman, and sold into a brothel (also by him)⁠—eats for four. The inordinate, provident appetite of a woman of the common people has not yet disappeared in her.

Jennie, who has only picked fastidiously at her cutlet and eaten half her cream roll, speaks to her in a tone of hypocritical solicitude:

“Really, Pheclusha, you might just as well eat my cutlet, too. Eat, my dear, eat; don’t be bashful⁠—you ought to be gaining in health. But do you know what I’ll tell you, ladies?” she turns to her mates, “Why, our Pheclusha has a tapeworm, and when a person has a tapeworm, they always eats for two: half for themselves, half for the worm.”

Nina