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

tedium will run away from you, and will again find herself either walking the street, or in a brothel. That’s a fact, too! However, there is still a third combination. You’ll be vexing yourself about her like a brother, like the knight Lancelot, but she, secretly from you, will fall in love with another. Me soul, believe me, that wooman, when she is a wooman, is always⁠—a wooman. And the other will play a bit with her body, and after three months chuck her out into the street or into a brothel.”

Likhonin sighed deeply. Somewhere deep⁠—not in his mind, but in the hidden, almost unseizable secret recesses of his consciousness⁠—something resembling the thought that Nijeradze was right flashed through him. But he quickly gained control of himself, shook his head, and, stretching out his hand to the Prince, uttered triumphantly:

“I promise you, that after half a year you’ll take your words back, and as a mark of apology, you Erivanian billy goat, you Armavirian eggplant, you’ll stand me to a dozen of Cakhetine wine.”

“Va! That’s a go!” the Prince’s palm struck Likhonin’s hand with full force. “With pleasure. But if it comes out as I say⁠—then you do it.”

“Then I do it. However, au revoir, Prince. Whom are you lodging with?”

“Right here, in this corridor, at Soloviev’s. But you, of course, like a medieval knight, will lay a two-edged sword between yourself and the beauteous Rosamond? Yes?”

“Nonsense! I did want to pass the night at Soloviev’s myself. But now I’ll go and wander about the streets a bit and turn in into somebody’s; at Zaitzevich’s or Strump’s. Farewell, Prince!”

“Wait, wait!” Nijeradze called him, when he had gone a few steps. “I forgot to tell you the main thing: Partzan has tripped up!”

“So that’s how?” wondered Likhonin, and at once yawned long, deeply and with enjoyment.

“Yes. But there’s nothing dreadful; only the possession of some illegal brochures and stuff. He won’t have to sit for more than a year.”

“That’s nothing; he’s a husky lad, he can stand it.”

“He’s husky, all right” confirmed the Prince.

“Farewell!”

“Au revoir, knight Grunwaldus!”

“Au revoir, you Carbidinian stallion.”

XI

Likhonin was left alone. In the half-dark corridor it smelt of kerosene fumes from the guttering little tin lamp, and of the odour of stagnant bad tobacco. The daylight dully penetrated only near the top, from two small glass frames, let in the roof at both ends of the corridor.

Likhonin found himself in that simultaneously weakened and elevated mood which is so familiar to every man who has happened to be thoroughly sleepless for a long time. It was as though he had gone out of the limitations of everyday human life, and this life had become to him distant and of indifference; but at the same time his thoughts and emotions obtained a certain peaceful clarity and apathetic distinctness, and there was a tedious and languishing allurement in this crystal Nirvanah.

He stood near his room, leaning against the wall, and seemed to see, feel, and hear how near him and below him were sleeping several score of people; sleeping with the last, fast morning sleep, with open mouths, with measured deep breathing, with a wilted pallor on their faces, glistening from sleep; and through his head flashed the thought, remote yet familiar since childhood, of how horrible sleeping people are⁠—far more horrible than dead people. Then he remembered about Liubka. His subterranean, submerged, mysterious “I” rapidly, rapidly whispered that he ought to drop into the room, and see if the girl were all right, as well as make certain dispositions about tea in the morning; but he made believe to himself that he was not at all even thinking of this, and walked out into the street.

He walked, looking closely at everything that met his eyes, with an idle and exact curiosity new to him; and every feature was drawn for him in relief to such a degree that it seemed to him as though he were feeling it with his fingers⁠ ⁠… There a peasant woman passed by. Over her shoulder is a yoke staff, while at each end of the yoke is a large pail of milk; her face is not young, with a net of fine wrinkles on the temples and with two deep furrows from the nostrils to the corners of the mouth; but her cheeks are rosy, and, probably, hard to the touch, while her hazel eyes radiate a sprightly peasant smile. From the movement of the heavy yoke and from the smooth walk her hips sway rhythmically now to the left, now to the right, and in their wavelike movements there is a coarse, sensual beauty.

“A mischievous dame, and she’s lived through a checkered life,” reflected Likhonin. And suddenly, unexpectedly to himself, he had a feeling for, and irresistibly desired, this woman, altogether unknown to him, homely and not young; in all probability dirty and vulgar, but still resembling, as it seemed to him, a large Antonovka22 apple which had fallen to the ground⁠—somewhat bored by a worm, and which had lain just a wee bit too long, but which has still preserved its bright colour and its fragrant, winey aroma.

Getting ahead of her, an empty, black, funereal catafalque whirled by; with two horses in harness, and two tied behind to the little rear columns. The torchbearers and gravediggers, already drunk since morning, with red, brutish faces, with rusty opera hats on their heads, were sitting in a disorderly heap on their uniform liveries, on the reticular horse-blankets, on the mourning lanterns; and with rusty, hoarse voices were roaring out some incoherent song. “They must be hurrying to a funeral procession; or, perhaps, have even finished it already,” reflected Likhonin; “merry fellows!” On the boulevard he came to a stop and sat down on a small wooden bench, painted green. Two rows of mighty centenarian chestnuts went away into the distance, merging together somewhere afar into one straight green arrow. The prickly large nuts were already