Yama (The Pit) by Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
A long, long time ago, long before the railroads, the stage-
drivers—both government and private—used to live, from
generation to generation, at the very farthest confine of a large
southern city. And that is why the entire region was called the
Yamskaya Sloboda—the Stage-drivers' Borough; or simply Yamskaya,
or Yamkas—Little Ditches, or, shorter still, Yama—The Pit. In
the course of time, when hauling by steam killed off
transportation by horses, the mettlesome tribe of the stage-
drivers little by little lost its boisterous ways and its brave
customs, went over into other occupations, fell apart and
scattered. But for many years—even up to this time—a shady
renown has remained to Yama, as of a place exceedingly gay, tipsy,
brawling, and in the night-time not without danger.
Somehow it came about of itself, that on the ruins of those
ancient, long-warmed nests, where of yore the rosy-cheeked,
sprightly wives of the soldiery and the plump widows of Yama, with
their black eyebrows, had secretly traded in vodka and free love,
there began to spring up wide-open brothels, permitted by the
authorities, regulated by official supervision and subject to
express, strict rules. Towards the end of the nineteenth century
both streets of Yama—Great Yamskaya and Little Yamskaya—proved
to be entirely occupied, on one side of the street as well as the
other, exclusively with houses of ill-fame. [Footnote: "Houses of
Suffrance"—i.e., Houses of the Necessary Evil.—Trans.] Of the
private houses no more than five or six were left, but even they
were taken up by public houses, beer halls, and general stores,
catering to the needs of Yama prostitution.
The course of life, the manners and customs, are almost identical
in all the thirty-odd establishments; the difference is only in
the charges exacted for the briefly-timed love, and consequently
in certain external minutiae as well: in the assortment of more or
less handsome women, in the comparative smartness of the costumes,
in the magnificence of the premises and the luxuriousness of the
furnishings.
The most chic establishment is that of Treppel, the first house to
the left upon entering Great Yamskaya. This is an old firm. Its
present owner bears an entirely different name, and fills the post
of an elector in the city council and is even a member of the city
board. The house is of two stories, green and white, built in the
debauched pseudo-Russian style a la Ropetovsky, with little
horses, carved facings, roosters, and wooden towels bordered with
lace-also of wood; a carpet with a white runner on the stairs; in
the front hall a stuffed bear, holding a wooden platter for
visiting cards in his out-stretched paws; a parquet floor in the
ballroom, heavy raspberry silk curtains and tulle on the windows,
along the walls white and gold chairs and mirrors with gilt
frames; there are two private cabinets with carpets, divans, and
soft satin puffs; in the bedrooms blue and rose lanterns, blankets
of raw silk stuff and clean pillows; the inmates are clad in low-
cut ball gowns, bordered with fur, or in expensive masquerade
costumes of hussars, pages, fisher lasses, school-girls; and the
majority of them are Germans from the Baltic provinces—large,
handsome women, white of body and with ample breasts. At Treppel's
three roubles are taken for a visit, and for the whole night, ten.
Three of the two-rouble establishments—Sophie Vassilievna's, The
Old Kiev, and Anna Markovna's—are somewhat worse, somewhat
poorer. The remaining houses on Great Yamskaya are rouble ones;
they are furnished still worse. While on Little Yamskaya, which is
frequented by soldiers, petty thieves, artisans, and drab folk In
general, and where fifty kopecks or less are taken for time,
things are altogether filthy and poor-the floor in the parlor is
crooked, warped, and full of splinters, the windows are hung with
pieces of red fustian; the bedrooms, just like stalls, are
separated by thin partitions, which do not reach to the ceiling,
and on the beds, on top of the shaken down hay-mattresses, are
scattered torn, spotted bed-sheets and flannel blankets, dark from
time, crumpled any old way, full of holes; the air is sour and
full of fumes, with a mixture of alcohol vapours and the smell of
human emanations; the women, dressed in rags of coloured printed
calico or in sailor costumes, are for the greater part hoarse or
snuffling, with noses half fallen through, with faces preserving
traces of yesterday's blows and scratches and naively bepainted
with the aid of a red cigarette box moistened with spit.
All the year round, every evening—with the exception of the last
three days of Holy Week and the night before Annunciation, when no
bird builds its nest and a shorn wench does not plait her braid—
when it barely grows dark out of doors, hanging red lanterns are
lit before every house, above the tented, carved street doors. It
is just like a holiday out on the street—like Easter. All the
windows are brightly lit up, the gay music of violins and pianos
floats out through the panes, cabmen drive up and drive off
without cease. In all the houses the entrance doors are opened
wide, and through them one may see from the street a steep
staircase with a narrow corridor on top, and the white flashing of
the many-facetted reflector of the lamp, and the green walls of
the front hall, painted over with Swiss landscapes. Till the very
morning hundreds and thousands of men ascend and descend these
staircases. Here everybody frequents: half-shattered, slavering
ancients, seeking artificial excitements, and boys-military cadets
and high-school lads—almost children; bearded paterfamiliases;
honourable pillars of society, in goldon spectacles; and newly-
weds, and enamoured bridegrooms, and honourable professors with
renowned names; and thieves, and murderers, and liberal lawyers;
and strict guardians of morals—pedagogues, and foremost writers—
the authors of fervent, impassioned articles on the equal rights
of women; and catchpoles, and spies, and escaped convicts, and
officers, and students, and Social Democrats, and hired patriots;
the timid and the brazen, the sick and the well, those knowing
woman for the first time, and old libertines frayed by all species
of vice; clear-eyed, handsome fellows and monsters maliciously
distorted by nature, deaf-mutes, blind men, men without noses,
with flabby, pendulous bodies, with malodorous breath, bald,
trembling, covered with parasites—pot-bellied, hemorrhoidal apes.
They come freely and simply, as to a restaurant or a depot; they
sit, smoke, drink, convulsively pretend to be merry; they dance,
executing abominable movements of the body imitative of the act of
sexual love. At times attentively and long, at times with gross
haste, they choose any woman they like and know beforehand that
they will never meet refusal. Impatiently they pay their money in
advance, and on the public bed, not yet grown cold after the body
of their predecessor, aimlessly commit the very greatest and most
beautiful of all universal mysteries—the mystery of the
conception of new life. And the women with indifferent readiness,
with uniform words, with practiced professional movements, satisfy
their desires, like machines—only to receive, right after them,
during the same night, with the very same words, smiles and
gestures, the third, the fourth, the tenth man, not infrequently
already biding his turn in the waiting room.
So passes the entire night. Towards daybreak Yama little by little
grows quiet, and the bright morning finds it depopulated,
spacious, plunged into sleep, with doors shut tightly, with
shutters fixed on the windows. But toward evening the women awaken
and get ready for the following night.
And so without end, day after day, for months and years, they live
a strange, incredible life in their public harems, outcast by
society, accursed by the family, victims of the social
temperament, cloacas for the excess of the city's sensuality, the
guardians of the honour of the family—four hundred foolish, lazy,
hysterical, barren women.