Short Fiction by Aleksandr Kuprin (nonfiction book recommendations .txt) 📕

swore to me that business was going to the dogs and I made him a present of a hundred roubles.

At five o’clock that evening I was at the station. In my pocket, apart from my ticket to Moscow, I had only seventy roubles, but I felt like an emperor. When, after the second bell, I was getting into my compartment, Samoilenko, who, up to now, had kept his distance, came up to me.

“Forgive; I was hotheaded,” he said theatrically.

I pressed his outstretched hand and answered amiably: “Forgive, I too was hotheaded.”

They gave me a farewell cheer. I exchanged the last kindly glance with Nelioubov, The train started and everything receded never to return. And when the last of the little blue huts of the outskirts began to disappear and the mournful, yellow, burnt-out steppe stretched itself endlessly⁠—a strange sadness tugged at my heart, as if there, in that scene of my misfortunes, sufferings, hunger, and humiliations, had remained forever a particle of my soul.

“Allez!”

This jerky, exclamatory order was Melle Nora’s earliest memory from the dark monotony of her erring childhood. This word Allez was the very first that her weak, childish little tongue ever framed, and always, even in her dreams, this cry reproduced itself in Nora’s memory, evoking in its five letters the chill of the unheated circus ring, the smell of stables, the heavy gallop of the horse, the dry crackling of the long whip and the burning pain of its lash, suddenly deadening the momentary hesitation of fear.⁠ ⁠…

“Allez!⁠ ⁠…”

In the empty circus it is cold and dark. Here and there, the wintry sunlight, scarcely piercing the glass cupolas, lies in pale spots over the raspberry-coloured velvet and the gilt of the boxes, over the shields with the horses’ heads, over the flags that decorate the pillars; it plays on the dim glasses of the electric globes, gliding over the steel of the tourniquets and trapezes, up there at a tremendous height amid the entanglement of the machines and the ropes, from which one can scarcely distinguish the first rows of the stalls, and the seats behind and the gallery are completely drowned in darkness.

The day’s routine is in full swing. Five or six of the performers, in greatcoats and fur caps, are smoking rank cigars at the end of the first row of armchairs near the entrance from the stables. In the middle of the ring stands a square-built, short-legged man, with a tall hat perched on the back of his head, and a black moustache, carefully twisted to a fine point at the ends. He is tying a long string round the waist of a tiny little five-year-old girl, who is standing in front of him shivering from fright and cold. The big white horse, which a stableman leads round the ring, snorts loudly, shaking its arched neck as the white steam gushes from its nostrils. Every time that it passes the man in the tall hat, the horse looks askance at the whip that sticks out under his arm, snorts with agitation, and, plodding round, drags the tugging stable-boy behind it. Little Nora can hear behind her back its nervous plunges, and she shivers still more.

Two powerful hands seize her round the waist and lightly toss her on to the large leather mattress on the horse’s back. Almost at the same instant, the chairs, the white pillars, the tent cloth hangings at the entrance⁠—all this is merged in the bizarre circle which spins round to meet the horse. In vain her numb hands clutch convulsively at the rough wave of mane as her eyes close tightly, blinded by the devilish flash of the seething circle. The man in the tall hat walks in the centre of the ring, holding in front of the horse’s head the end of his long whip, which he cracks deafeningly.⁠ ⁠…

“Allez!⁠ ⁠…”

And again she is in her short gauze skirt, with her bare, thin, half-childish arms, standing in the electric light, beneath the very cupola of the circus on a well-balanced trapeze. From this, at the little girl’s feet, there is hanging, head downwards, his knees clutching the upright post, another square-built man, in pink tights, with gold spangles and fringe, curled, pomaded, and cruel. Now he has raised his lowered hands, spread them out, and, fixing Nora’s eyes with that penetrating, meaning look⁠—the hypnotising glance of the acrobat⁠—he claps his hands. Nora makes a quick forward movement with the intention of hurling herself straight down into those strong, pitiless hands. (What a thrill it will give the hundreds of spectators!) But all of a sudden, her heart grows cold, seems to stop from terror, and she only squeezes more tightly the thin ropes of the trapeze. Up go once more the cruel, bent hands, and the acrobat’s glance becomes still more intense⁠ ⁠… Beneath her feet the space seems that of an abyss.

“Allez!⁠ ⁠…”

Again she balances, scarcely able to breathe, on the very apex of the “Living Pyramid.” She glides, wriggling with her body, supple as a serpent’s, between the crossbeams of the long white ladder which a man is holding on his head. She turns a somersault in the air, thrown up by the feet of the jongleur, strong and terrible, like steel springs. Again at a great height, she walks on thin, trembling wire which cuts her feet unbearably.⁠ ⁠… And everywhere are the same dim, beautiful faces, the pomaded heads, the puffed curls, the moustaches upturned, the reek of cigars and perspiration, and always that inevitable fatal cry, the same for human beings, for horses, and for performing dogs:

“Allez!⁠ ⁠…”

She was just sixteen, and a very pretty girl when, during a performance, she fell from the airy tourniquet past the net on to the sand of the ring. She was picked up unconscious and taken behind the scenes, where, in accordance with circus traditions, they began to shake her by the shoulders with all their might