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

up her eyes from the smoke, all she does is to turn the pages constantly with a moistened finger. Her legs are bare to the knees; the enormous balls of the feet are of the most vulgar form; below the big toes stand out pointed, ugly, irregular bunions.

Here also, with her legs crossed, slightly bent, with some sewing, sits Tamara⁠—a quiet, easygoing, pretty girl, slightly reddish, with that dark and shining tint of hair which is to be found on the back of a fox in winter. Her real name is Glycera, or Lukeria, as the common folk say it. But it is already an ancient usage of the houses of ill-fame to replace the uncouth names of the Matrenas, Agathas, Cyclitinias with sonorous, preferably exotic names. Tamara had at one time been a nun, or, perhaps, merely a novice in a convent, and to this day there have been preserved on her face timidity and a pale puffiness⁠—a modest and sly expression, which is peculiar to young nuns. She holds herself aloof in the house, does not chum with anyone, does not initiate anyone into her past life. But in her case there must have been many more adventures besides having been a nun: there is something mysterious, taciturn and criminal in her unhurried speech, in the evasive glance of her deep and dark-gold eyes from under the long, lowered eyelashes, in her manners, her sly smiles and intonations of a modest but wanton would-be saint. There was one occurrence when the girls, with well-nigh reverent awe, heard that Tamara could talk fluently in French and German. She has within her some sort of an inner, restrained power. Notwithstanding her outward meekness and complaisance, all in the establishment treat her with respect and circumspection⁠—the proprietress, and her mates, and both housekeepers, and even the doorkeeper, that veritable sultan of the house of ill-fame, that general terror and hero.

“I’ve covered it,” says Zoe and turns over the trump which had been lying under the pack, wrong side up. “I’m going with forty, going with an ace of spades⁠—a ten-spot, Mannechka, if you please. I’m through. Fifty-seven, eleven, sixty-eight. How much have you?”

“Thirty,” says Manka in an offended tone, pouting her lips; “oh, it’s all very well for you⁠—you remember all the plays. Deal⁠ ⁠… Well, what’s after that, Tamarochka?” she turns to her friend. “You talk on⁠—I’m listening.”

Zoe shuffles the old, black, greasy cards, allows Manya to cut, then deals, having first spat upon her fingers.

Tamara in the meanwhile is narrating to Manya in a quiet voice, without neglecting her sewing.

“We embroidered with gold, in flat embroidery⁠—altar covers, palls, bishops’ vestments⁠ ⁠… With little grasses, and flowers, and little crosses. In winter, you’d be sitting near a casement; the panes are small, with gratings, and don’t give much light; there’s a smell of lamp oil, of incense and cypress; you mustn’t talk⁠—the mother superior was strict. Someone from weariness would start humming the first verse of a pre-Lenten hymn⁠ ⁠… ‘When I consider thy heavens⁠ ⁠…’ We sang fine, beautifully, and it was such a quiet life, and the smell was so fine; you could see the flaky snow falling outside the windows⁠—well, now, just like in a dream⁠ ⁠…”

Jennie puts the tattered novel down on her stomach, throws the cigarette over Zoe’s head, and says mockingly:

“We know all about your quiet life. You chucked the infants into toilets. The Evil One is always snooping around your holy places.”

“I call forty. I had forty-six. Finished!” Little Manka exclaims excitedly and claps her palms. “I open with three.”

Tamara, smiling at Jennie’s words, answers with a scarcely perceptible smile, which barely distends her lips, but makes little, sly, ambiguous depressions at their corners, altogether as with Mona Lisa in the portrait by Leonardo da Vinci.

“Lay folk say a lot of things about nuns⁠ ⁠… Well, even if there had been sin once in a while⁠ ⁠…”

“If you don’t sin⁠—you don’t repent,” Zoe puts in seriously, and wets her finger in her mouth.

“You sit and sew, the gold eddies before your eyes, while from standing in the morning at prayer your back just aches, and your legs ache. And at evening there is service again. You knock at the door of the mother superior’s cell: ‘Through prayers of Thy saints, oh Lord, our Father, have mercy upon us.’ And the mother superior would answer from the cell, in a little bass-like ‘A-men.’ ”

Jennie looks at her intently for some time, shakes her head and says with great significance:

“You’re a queer girl, Tamara. Here I’m looking at you and wondering. Well, now, I can understand how these fools, on the manner of Sonka, play at love. That’s what they’re fools for. But you, it seems, have been roasted on all sorts of embers, have been washed in all sorts of lye, and yet you allow yourself foolishness of that sort. What are you embroidering that shirt for?”

Tamara, without haste, with a pin refastens the fabric more conveniently on her knee, smooths the seam down with the thimble, and speaks, without raising the narrowed eyes, her head bent just a trifle to one side:

“One’s got to be doing something. It’s wearisome just so. I don’t play at cards, and I don’t like them.”

Jennie continues to shake her head.

“No, you’re a queer girl, really you are. You always have more from the guests than all of us get. You fool, instead of saving money, what do you spend it on? You buy perfumes at seven roubles the bottle. Who needs it? And now you have bought fifteen roubles’ worth of silk. Isn’t this for your Senka, now?”

“Of course, for Sennechka.”

“What a treasure you’ve found, to be sure! A miserable thief. He rides up to this establishment like some general. How is it he doesn’t beat you yet? The thieves⁠—they like that. And he plucks you, have no fear?”

“More than I want to, I won’t give,” meekly answers Tamara and bites the thread in two.

“Now that is just what I wonder at. With your mind,