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

Far down beneath her, the carriages rattled, seeming from that height mere small, strange animals. The pavements glistened after the rain, and the reflections of the street lamps danced about in the pools of water.

Nora’s lingers grew cold and her heart stopped beating for a second of terror.⁠ ⁠… Then, closing her eyes and breathing heavily, she raised her hands above her head and, fighting down, as usual, her old weakness, she cried out, as if in the circus:

“Allez!⁠ ⁠…”

I remember perfectly his first arrival in Petersburg from his hot, lazy, sensual south. There emanated from him the very atmosphere of black earth-force, the odour of dry, sunbaked feather-grass, the simple poetry of quiet sunsets, gradually fading away behind the cherry trees of little orchards. He had the inexhaustible health of the steppe and he was so vivid in his fresh naivete.

He came straight from the station into the furnished rooms where I was living. It was winter, eight o’clock in the morning, when, in the Petersburg streets, the lamps are still lit and the tired horses are dragging the sleeping night-cab-men to their homes. He would take no refusal. He wouldn’t listen to any of the maid’s arguments, and said in his sonorous voice that rang through the corridor:

“What are you talking about? As if I didn’t know him! Why, he’s more to me than my own brother. What next? Show me in to him.”

We had been at school together in the South, where, incidentally, he had not finished his course. I was fond of him, not more than of a real brother⁠—he exaggerated this in his hurry⁠—but, all the same, I was sincerely attached to him. However, though I immediately recognised his voice with its soft and yet guttural southern g and its provincial breadth of diapason, I cannot say that in the first minute I was particularly pleased. You know what it is when a man has been gallivanting all over the place through the night, goes to bed with his head not quite clear and, on the top of it all, is faced with serious, timed work for the next day.⁠ ⁠… In a word, I cursed under my blankets and firmly decided, if he came in, to pretend that I was asleep or dead, like a beetle that has been placed on the palm of a hand.

Easier said than done. He burst in like a hurricane, threw himself at me, dragged me out of bed as if I were a child, shook me and pulled me about. It was impossible to be angry with him. The frost had given him a delightful emanation of apples and something else⁠—healthy and vigorous; his moustache and beard were thawing, his face was burning brightly, his eyes were shining.

“Well, well, how long are you going to wallow in those blankets? Get up,” he roared; “get up or I’ll smash you into little bits.”

“Listen, you poor, benighted provincial”⁠—I was trying to make him feel ashamed⁠—“here in Petersburg no one gets up before eleven. Lie down on the sofa or ask for some tea, or send someone to fetch newspapers and read, but let me doze, if only for half an hour.”

No, nothing had any effect on him. He was bursting with stories of the past and plans for the future, so filled with new impressions that he seemed ready to blow up under their pressure if I hadn’t acted as a sort of safety-valve. First came the greetings: it appears that, up to the present, they all remember me, are quite fond of me and read with pleasure my articles on economics. I was flattered and pretended not to have forgotten a single one of all those extraordinary names, all those Gouzikovs, Liadoushenkos, Tchernysh, and so many other old acquaintances. Secondly, Petersburg had utterly stupefied him.

“Deuce take it, what an enormous town! What do you think? At the station there were nothing but swagger cabs, not a single ordinary one.”

“Swagger cabs?” I repeated doubtfully.

“On my honour, yes. I didn’t grasp it at first and I was in one of them before I saw that it was on tyres. Well, I’ve let myself in, I thought. I wanted to crawl out of it but I was ashamed to do that and a policeman was hurrying them all. I was lucky to get out of it so cheaply⁠—a rouble and a half altogether!”

“At the very most you ought to have paid fifty kopecks,” I put in.

“There you’re talking nonsense. What! give a cab on tyres fifty kopecks, for such a distance! Oh, and what streets you have here! And the people⁠—oh, Lord! it’s worse than the ferryboats at home. They’re all over the place. And on one of the bridges there is a statue of four horses. Have you seen it? It’s a sight.⁠ ⁠… You live well here, I can see that.”

The whole time he kept saying “at home” and “you people here”⁠—drawing a line between the two as all provincials do. He was greatly struck by the fires lit at cross-streets on account of the severe frost.

“What’s that for?” he asked with naive curiosity.

I answered quite seriously:

“It’s an idea of the town council to heat the streets so as to spend less on fuel in Government offices.”

His eyes grew round, and so did his mouth, from astonishment, and all he could pronounce was:

“Oh!”

The next minute he saw it and burst out laughing⁠—laughed in long, deafening, youthful peals. I had to remind him that all the other lodgers were still asleep, that the partitions were made of papier-mâché and that I didn’t want to get into trouble with my landlady.

Irisha came in with the samovar. She looked sideways at Boris with an expression of distrust and agitation, as though a horse had been received into the room. She was a regular Petersburg maid, sensitive and not without understanding.

At five o’clock we dined at the Nevsky in an