Short Fiction - Aleksandr Kuprin (best ebook reader for ubuntu .TXT) 📗

dirty beds, children’s clothes, and some sort of acrid food. In front of the curtain a wooden counter extended.

At one of the tables opposite Kashintzev sat a peasant in a brown Ukrainian overcoat and a sheepskin cap, his untidy head leaning on his sprawling elbows. He was drunk with a heavy, helpless drunkenness, and he rolled his head on the table, hiccupping and blubbering out something incomprehensible in a hoarse, soaked, bubbling voice.

“What are you going to give me to eat?” Kashintzev asked. “I feel very hungry.”

Khatzkel hunched his shoulders up, spread his hands apart, winked with his left eye, and remained in this position for several seconds.

“What am I going to give his honour to eat?” he repeated, with a sly penetrating air. “And what does his honour want? One can get everything. One can put the samovar on, one can cook eggs, one can get milk. Well, you understand yourself, your honour, what is to be got in such a scabby village. One can cook a chicken, but that will take a very long time.”

“Give me eggs and milk. And what else?”

“What e‑else?” Khatzkel seemed surprised. “I could offer your honour a stuffed Jewish fish. But perhaps your honour doesn’t like Jewish cooking? You know, an ordinary Jewish fish which my wife prepares on the Sabbath.”

“Give me fish, too. And a liqueur-glass of vodka, please.”

The Jew closed both his eyes, shook his head, and smacked his lips with an air of consternation.

“No vodka,” he whispered. “You know yourself how strict they are nowadays. Are you going far, your honour?”

“To Goussiatine.”

“May I ask if your honour is in the police service?”

“No, I’m a doctor, an army doctor.”

“Ah, his honour is a doctor. That’s very nice. On my conscience, I’m very sorry that I can’t got you any vodka. Still⁠ ⁠… Etlia,” he shouted, moving away from the table, “Etlia!”

He disappeared behind the curtain and spoke rapidly in Yiddish as though he were angry. After this he kept on appearing and disappearing, and apparently bustled about a great deal. By this time the peasant who was sprawling at the table, raised his head and, with his wet mouth wide open and his eyes glassy, began to sing hoarsely, with a snapping gurgling in his throat.

Khatzkel rushed up to him and shook him, by the shoulder.

“Trokhim, listen, Trokhim.⁠ ⁠… I have asked you again and again not to yell like this. His honour there is getting angry.⁠ ⁠… Well, you’ve had a drink and all is well. God give you happiness, and just you go quietly home, Trokhim.”

“Sheenies,” the peasant suddenly howled in a terrible voice, and he banged his fist on the table with all his might. “Sheenies, you devil’s spawn! I’ll k‑kill⁠ ⁠…”

He fell heavily face forward on the table, still jabbering.

Khatzkel, with a pale face, sprang away from the table. His lips grimaced in a scornful but at the same time troubled and helpless smile.

“You see, your honour, what my bread’s like,” he said bitterly, addressing Kashintzev. “Tell me what I can do with a fellow like that? What can I do? Etlia!” he shouted in the direction of the curtain. “When are you going to serve his honour?”

Once more he dived into the curtained part of the room and immediately returned with a dish on which lay a fish, cut in thin slices and covered with a dark sauce. He also brought back a large white loaf with a thick solid crust speckled with black grains of some aromatic seasoning.

“Your honour,” Khatzkel said mysteriously, “my wife in there has found some vodka. Taste it; it’s a good fruit vodka. We drink it at our Easter and it’s called Easter vodka. There!”

He drew from his waistcoat a tiny narrow-necked decanter and a liqueur glass which he placed in front of Kashintzev. The vodka was of a yellowish colour and had a slight smell of cognac, but when the doctor had swallowed a glass it seemed to him that all his mouth and throat had been filled with some burning, scented gas. He felt at once in his stomach a sensation of cold, and then of a gentle warmth, and he was seized with a terrific appetite. The fish proved to be extremely good and so spiced that it made his tongue smart. How do they prepare it? The cautious thought flashed through his brain, and then and there he laughed aloud as he recalled one of Dr. von Ruhl’s familiar evening aphorisms: “One must never think about what one eats or whom one loves.”

Khatzkel was standing at a little distance, his hands folded behind his back. Apparently guessing the train of Kashintzev’s thoughts, he said with an obliging and kind expression:

“Perhaps your honour imagines that this is prepared in some dirty way? No such thing.⁠ ⁠… Our Jewish women do everything according to the holy books, and everything is written there: how to clean, how to cut it, and when to wash one’s hands. And if it isn’t done just like that, it is considered a sin. Your honour must eat his fill. Etlia, bring in more fish.”

From behind the curtain a woman appeared and stood at the counter covering her head with a large grey shawl. When Kashintzev turned towards her he had the impression of receiving an invisible blow in the chest and of a cold hand squeezing his palpitating heart. Not only had he never seen such a dazzling, superb, perfect beauty, but he had not even dared to dream that there existed such in the world. Before, when he happened to see the little heads of beautiful women in the pictures of well-known artists, he was inwardly convinced that these regular, faultless features had no existence in nature, but were the mere fictions of a creative imagination. All the more surprising and unreal, then, was this dazzling, beautiful face which he now beheld in a dirty lodging-house, reeking with the odours of unclean habitation, in this bare, empty, cold room, behind the counter, close to a drunken, snoring peasant who