Yama by Aleksandr Kuprin (best ereader for pdf TXT) 📕

practice as an official city doctor, he had had his fill of seeing such things, so that he had already grown benumbed and hardened to human sufferings, wounds and death. He ordered Simeon to lift the corpse of Jennka a bit upward, and himself getting up on the seat, cut through the tape. Proforma, he ordered Jennka’s body to be borne away into the room that had been hers, and tried with the help of the same Simeon to produce artificial respiration; but after five minutes gave it up as a bad job, fixed the pince-nez, which had become crooked, on his nose, and said:

“Call the police in to make a protocol.”

Again Berkesh came, again whispered for a long time with the proprietress in her little bit of a cabinet, and again crunched in his pocket a new hundred-rouble bill.

The protocol was made in five minutes; and Jennka, just as half-naked as she had hung herself, was carted away in a hired wagon into an anatomical theatre, wrapped up in and covered with two straw mats.

Emma Edwardovna was the first to find the note that Jennka had left on her night table. On a sheet, torn out of the income-expense book, compulsory for every prostitute, in pencil, in a naive, rounded, childish handwriting⁠—by which, however, it could be judged that the hands of the suicide had not trembled during the last minutes⁠—was written:

“I beg that no one be blamed for my death. I am dying because I have become infected, and also because all people are scoundrels and it is very disgusting to live. How to divide my things⁠—Tamara knows about that. I told her in detail.”

Emma Edwardovna turned around upon Tamara, who was right on the spot among a number of other girls, and with eyes filled with a cold, green hatred, hissed out:

“Then you knew, you low-down thing, what she was preparing to do?⁠ ⁠… You knew, you vermin?⁠ ⁠… You knew and didn’t tell?⁠ ⁠…”

She already had swung back, in order, as was her wont, to hit Tamara cruelly and calculatingly; but suddenly stopped just as she was, with gaping mouth and with eyes wide open. It was just as though she was seeing, for the first time, Tamara, who was looking at her with a firm, wrathful, unbearable gaze, and slowly, slowly was raising from below, and at last brought up to the level of the housekeeper’s face, a small object, glistening with white metal.

VI

That very same day, at evening, a very important event took place in the house of Anna Markovna: the whole institution⁠—with land and house, with live and inanimate stock⁠—passed into the hands of Emma Edwardovna.

They had been speaking of this, on and off, for a long time in the establishment; but when the rumours so unexpectedly, immediately right after the death of Jennka, turned into realities, the misses could not for a long time come to themselves for amazement and fear. They knew well, having experienced the sway of the German upon themselves, her cruel, implacable pedantism; her greed, arrogance, and, finally, her perverted, exacting, repulsive love, now for one, now for another favorite. Besides that, it was no mystery to anyone, that out of the fifteen thousand which Emma Edwardovna had to pay the former proprietress for the firm and for the property, one third belonged to Berkesh, who had, for a long time already, been carrying on half-friendly, half-business relations with the fat housekeeper. From the union of two such people, shameless, pitiless, and covetous, the girls could expect all sorts of disasters for themselves.

Anna Markovna had to let the house go so cheaply not simply because Berkesh, even if he had not known about certain shady little transactions to her credit, could still at any time he liked trip her up and eat her up without leaving anything. Of pretexts and cavils for this even a hundred could be found every day; and certain ones of them not merely threatened the shutting down of the house alone, but, if you like, even with the court.

But, dissembling, oh-ing and sighing, bewailing her poverty, her maladies and orphanhood, Anna Markovna at soul was glad of even such a settlement. And then it must be said: she was already for a long time feeling the approach of senile infirmity, together with all sorts of ailments and the thirst for complete, benevolent rest, undisturbed by anything. All, of which she had not even dared dream in her early youth, when she herself had yet been a prostitute of the rank and file⁠—all had now come to her of itself, one in addition to the other; peaceful old age; a house, like a cup brimming over, on one of the snug, quiet streets, almost in the centre of the city; 120,000 roubles in The International Bank; the adored daughter Birdie, who⁠—if not today then tomorrow⁠—was to marry a respected man, an engineer, a house-owner, and member of the city council; provided for as she was with a respectable dowry and magnificent valuables⁠ ⁠… Now it was possible peacefully, without hurrying, with gusto, to dine and sup on sweet things, for which Anna Markovna had always nourished a great weakness; to drink after dinner good, homemade, strong cherry-brandy; and of evenings to play a bit at “preference,” for kopeck stakes, with esteemed elderly ladies of her acquaintance, who, even although they never as much as let it appear that they knew the real trade of the little old woman, did in reality know it very well, and not only did not condemn her business but even bore themselves with respect toward those enormous percentages which she earned upon her capital. And these charming friends, the joy and consolation of her untroubled old age, were: one⁠—the keeper of a loan office; another⁠—the proprietress of a lively hotel near the railroad; the third⁠—the owner of a jewelry shop, not large, but all the go and well known among the big thieves, etc. And about them, in her