Yama (The Pit) by Aleksandr Ivanovich Kuprin
PART ONE
CHAPTER IV
The late twilight came on, and after it the warm, dark night, but
for long, until very midnight, did the deep crimson glow of the
sky still smoulder. Simeon, the porter of the establishment, has
lit all the lamps along the walls of the drawing room, and the
lustre, as well as the red lantern over the stoop. Simeon was a
spare, stocky, taciturn and harsh man, with straight, broad
shoulders, dark-haired, pock-marked, with little bald spots on his
eye-brows and moustaches from small-pox, and with black, dull,
insolent eyes. By day he was free and slept, while at night he sat
without absenting himself in the front hall under the reflector,
in order to help the guests with their coats and to be ready in
case of any disorder.
The pianist came—a tall, elegant young man, with white eyebrows
and eyelashes, and a cataract in his right eye. The while there
were no guests, he and Isaiah Savvich quietly rehearsed Pas
d'Espagne, at that time coming into fashion. For every dance
ordered by the guests, they received thirty kopecks for an easy
dance, and a half rouble for a quadrille. But one-half of this
price was taken out by the proprietress, Anna Markovna; the other,
however, the musicians divided evenly. In this manner the pianist
received only a quarter of the general earnings, which, of course,
was unjust, since Isaiah Savvich played as one self-taught and was
distinguished for having no more ear for music than a piece of
wood. The pianist was constantly compelled to drag him on to new
tunes, to correct and cover his mistakes with loud chords. The
girls said of their pianist to the guests, with a certain pride,
that he had been in the conservatory and always ranked as the
first pupil, but since he is a Jew, and in addition to that his
eyes had begun to trouble him, he had not succeeded in completing
the course. They all treated him carefully and considerately, with
some sort of solicitous, somewhat mawkish, commiseration, which
chimes so well with the inner, backstage customs of houses of ill-
fame, where underneath the outer coarseness and the flaunting of
obscene words dwells the same sweetish, hysterical sentimentality
as in female boarding schools, and, so they say, in penal
institutions.
In the house of Anna Markovna everybody was already dressed and
ready for the reception of the guests, and languishing from
inaction and expectation. Despite the fact that the majority of
the women experienced toward men—with the exception of their
lovers—a complete, even somewhat squeamish, indifference, before
every evening dim hopes came to life and stirred within their
souls; it was unknown who would choose them, whether something
unusual, funny and alluring might not happen, whether a guest
would not astonish with his generosity, whether there would not be
some miracle which would overturn the whole life...In these
presentiments and hopes was something akin to those emotions which
the accustomed gamester experiences when counting his ready money
before starting out for his club. Besides that, despite their
asexuality, they still had not lost the chiefest instinctive
aspiration of women—to please.
And, in truth, altogether curious personages came into the house
at times and ludicrous, motley events arose. The police would
appear suddenly together with disguised detectives and arrest some
seemingly respectable, irreproachable gentlemen and lead them off,
pushing them along with blows in the neck. At times brawls would
spring up between the drunken, trouble-making company and the
porters of all the establishments, who had gathered on the run for
the relief of a fellow porter—a brawl, during which the window-
panes and the decks of grand-pianos were broken, when the legs of
the plush chairs were wrenched out for weapons, blood ran over the
parquet floor of the drawing room and the steps of the stairs, and
people with pierced sides and broken heads fell down into the dirt
near the street entrance, to the feral, avid delight of Jennka,
who, with burning eyes, with happy laughter, went into the
thickest of the melee, slapped herself on the hips, swore and
sicked them on, while her mates were squealing from fear and
hiding under the beds.
There were occurrences when there would arrive, with a pack of
parasites, some member of a workingmen's association or a cashier,
long since far gone in an embezzlement of many thousands through
gambling at cards and hideous orgies, and now, in a drunken,
senseless delirium, tossing the last money after the other, before
suicide or the prisoner's box. Then the doors and windows of the
house would be tightly closed, and for two days and nights at a
stretch a Russian orgy would go on—nightmarish, tedious, savage,
with screams and tears, with revilement over the body of woman;
paradisaical nights were gotten up, during which naked, drunken,
bow-legged, hairy, pot-bellied men, and women with flabby, yellow,
pendulous thin bodies hideously grimaced to the music; they drank
and guzzled like swine, on the beds and on the floor, amidst the
stifling atmosphere, permeated with spirits, befouled with human
respiration and the exhalations of unclean skins.
Occasionally, there would appear a circus athlete, creating in the
low-ceiled quarters a strangely cumbersome impression, somewhat
like that of a horse led into a room; a Chinaman in a blue blouse,
white stockings, and with a queue; a negro from a cabaret, in a
tuxedo coat and checked pantaloons, with a flower in his button-
hole, and with starched linen, which, to the amazement of the
girls, not only did not soil from the black skin, but appeared
still more dazzlingly white.
These rare people fomented the satiated imagination of the
prostitutes, excited their exhausted sensuality and professional
curiosity, and all of them, almost enamoured, would walk in their
steps, jealous and bickering with one another.
There was one incident when Simeon had let into the room an
elderly man, dressed like a bourgeois. There was nothing
exceptional about him; he had a stern, thin face, with bony, evil-
looking cheek-bones, protruding like tumours, a low forehead, a
beard like a wedge, bushy eyebrows, one eye perceptibly higher
than the other. Having entered, he raised his fingers, folded for
the sign of the cross, to his forehead, but having searched the
corners with his eyes and finding no image, he did not in the
least grow confused, put down his hand, and at once with a
business-like air walked up to the fattest girl in the
establishment—Kitty.
"Let's go!" he commanded curtly, and with determination nodded his
head in the direction of the door.
During the entire period of her absence the omniscious Simeon,
with a mysterious, and even somewhat proud air, managed to inform
Niura, at that time his mistress, while she, in a whisper, with
horror in her rounded eyes, told her mates, in secret, that the
name of the bourgeois was Dyadchenko, and that last fall he had
volunteered, owing to the absence of the hangman, to carry out the
execution of eleven rioters, and with his own hands had hung them
in two mornings. And—monstrous as it may be—at that hour there
was not in the establishment a single girl who did not feel envy
toward the fat Kitty, and did not experience a painful, keen,
vertiginous curiosity. When Dyadchenko was going away half an hour
later—with his sedate and stern air, all the women speechlessly,
with their mouths gaping, escorted him. to the street door and
afterwards watched him from the windows as he walked along the
street. Then they rushed into the room of the dressing Kitty and
overwhelmed her with interrogations. They looked with a new
feeling, almost with astonishment, at her bare, red, thick arms,
at the bed, still crumpled, at the old, greasy, paper rouble,
which Kitty showed them, having taken it out of her stocking.
Kitty could tell them nothing. "A man like any man, like all men,"
she said with a calm incomprehension; but when she found out who
her visitor had been, she suddenly burst into tears, without
herself knowing why.
This man, the outcast of outcasts, fallen as low as the fancy of
man can picture, this voluntary headsman, had treated her without
rudeness, but with such absence of even a hint at endearment, with
such disdain and wooden indifference, as no human being is
treated; not even a dog or a horse, and not even an umbrella,
overcoat or hat, but like some dirty, unclean object, for which a
momentary, unavoidable need arises, but which, at the passing of
its needfulness, becomes foreign, useless, and disgusting. The
entire horror of this thought the fat Kate could not embrace with
her brain of a fattened turkey hen, and because of that cried—as
it seemed even to her—without cause and reason.
There were also other happenings, which stirred up the turbid,
foul life of these poor, sick, silly, unfortunate women. There
were cases of savage, unbridled jealousy with pistol shots and
poisoning; occasionally, very rarely, a tender, flaming and pure
love would blossom out upon this dung; occasionally the women even
abandoned an establishment with the help of the loved man, but
almost always came back. Two or three times it happened that a
woman from a brothel would suddenly prove pregnant—and this
always seemed, on the face of it, laughable and disgraceful, but
touching in the profundity of the event.
And no matter what may have happened, every evening brought with
it such an irritating, strained, spicy expectation of adventures
that every other life, after that in a house of ill-fame, would
have seemed flat and humdrum to these lazy women of no will power.