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

on current questions, and suffer from feminine maladies, and both of us, mere male and female, will feel towards each other indifference if not disgust. And perhaps the whole goal, the whole purpose, the whole joy of my life, consists, by any means, true or untrue, in taking possession of a woman like this, stealing her, taking her away, seducing her⁠—what does it matter? Even if she is dirty, ignorant, undeveloped, greedy, God in heaven! what trifles these are compared with her miraculous beauty.”

Khatzkel approached Kashintzev once more, thrust his hands into his trouser-pockets and sighed:

“Do you happen to have read the papers?” he asked with hesitating politeness. “Is there anything new about the war?”

“Everything is just the same. We retreat, we are being beaten. However, I haven’t read the papers today,” Kashintzev answered.

“Your honour hasn’t read them! What a pity! We here, you know, live in the steppes and learn nothing of what is going on in the world. They’ve been writing, too, about the Zionists. Has your honour heard that there has been a congress of them in Paris?”

“Certainly, of course.”

Kashintzev looked at him more closely. Under his external cunning one detected something starved and puny which spoke of poverty, humiliation, and bad food. His long neck, above his worsted scarf, was thin and of a dirty yellow colour. On it two long strained veins, with an indentation between them, stuck out on each side of his throat.

“What is your ordinary occupation here?” Kashintzev asked, seized with a sense of guilty pity.

“We‑ell!” Khatzkel shrugged his shoulders hopelessly and scornfully. “What can a poor Jew do within the pale? We scratch a living somehow or other. We buy and sell when there’s a market. We fight each other for the last little morsel of bread. Eh! what can one say? Is anyone interested in knowing how we suffer here?”

He waved his hand wearily and withdrew behind the curtain, while Kashintzev resumed once more his interrupted thoughts. These thoughts were like the moving, multicoloured images which come to one in the morning when one is on the border between sleep and awakening⁠—thoughts which, before one wakes up completely, seem so fantastically malleable and at the same time full of such deep importance.

Kashintzev had never experienced such pleasure in dreaming as he did now, mollified by the warmth and the sense of satiety, leaning with his back against the wall and stretching his legs straight in front of him. In this pleasure, a sort of not very well-defined spot in the design of the many-coloured curtain had a great significance. He had unfailingly to find it with his eyes, stop at it, after which his thoughts of their own accord began to flow evenly, freely, and harmoniously, without any obstruction of the brain-cells⁠—thoughts that leave no trace behind them and bring with them a kind of quiet, caressing joy. And then everything would disappear in a pale, bluish, hesitating fog⁠—the papered walls of the lodging-house, its crooked tables, its dirty counter. There would remain only the beautiful face which Kashintzev saw and even felt, in spite of the fact that he was looking not at it, but at the vague, indistinguishable spot in the curtain.

What an extraordinary, unattainable race these Jews are, he was thinking. What is the Jew fated to experience in the future? He has gone through decades of centuries, without mixing with anyone else, disdainfully isolating himself from all other nations, hiding in his heart the old sorrow and the old flame of the centuries. The vast, varied life of Rome, of Greece, of Egypt, had long ago become the possession of museums, had become a delirium of history, a far-off fairytale. But this mysterious type, which was already a patriarch when these others were infants, not only continues to exist, but has kept his strong, ardent, southern individuality, has kept his faith with its great hopes and its trivial rites, has kept the holy language of his inspired divine books, has kept his mystical alphabet from the very form of which there vibrates the spell of thousands of years ago. What has the Jew experienced in the days of his youth? With whom has he traded and signed treaties? Against whom has he fought? Nowhere has a trace been left of his enigmatic enemies from all those Philistines, Amalakites, Moabites, and other half mythical people, while he, supple and undying, still lives on, as though, indeed, fulfilling someone’s supernatural prediction. His history is permeated by tragic awe and is stained throughout by his own blood: centuries of prison, violence, hatred, slavery, torture, the funeral pyre, deportation, the denial of all human rights⁠—how could he remain alive? Or have the fates of a people indeed their own incomprehensible goals that are forever hidden from us? How can we know? Perhaps it pleased some Higher Force that the Jews, having lost their own country, should play the rule of a perpetual leaven in the gigantic fermentation of the world.

There stands this woman whose face reflects a divine beauty, that inculcates a holy enthusiasm. For how many thousands of years must her people have refrained from mixing with any other race to preserve these amazing biblical features? With the same plain fichu on the head, with the same deep eyes and sorrowful line near the lips, they paint the Mother of Jesus Christ. With the same pure charm shone the gloomy Judith, the sweet Ruth, the tender Leah, the beautiful Rachel and Hagar and Sarah. Looking at her, you believe, feel, and almost see how this people reverts in its stupendous genealogy back to Moses, to Abraham, and higher, still higher⁠—straight back to the great, terrible, avenging biblical God.

“With whom was I discussing not long ago?” Kashintzev suddenly remembered. “I was discussing the Jews, I think with a staff colonel in the train. No, it was with the town doctor from Stepany. He was saying: ‘The Jews have grown decrepit, the Jews have lost their nationality and their country. The