Short Fiction Aleksandr Kuprin (free novel reading sites TXT) 📖

In the morning the pogrom began. These people who, so recently uplifted by the pure, general joy, so recently softened by the light of the coming brotherhood of man, who had gone through the streets singing beneath the symbols of the liberty they had won⁠—these very people were now going to kill, not because they had been ordered to kill, not because they had any hatred against the Jews, with whom they had often close friendships, not even for the sake of loot, which was doubtful, but because the sly dirty devil that lives deep down in each human being was whispering in their ears: “Go. Nothing will be punished: the forbidden curiosity of the murderer, the sensuality of rape, the power over other people’s lives.”

In these days of the pogroms, Sasha, with his funny, monkey-like, purely Jewish physionomy, went freely about the town. They did not touch him. There was about him that immovable courage of the soul, that absence even of fear of fear which guards the weakest better than any revolver. But on one occasion, when, jammed against the wall, he was trying to avoid the crowd that flowed like a hurricane down the full width of the street, a mason in a red shirt and a white apron threatened him with his pointed crowbar and grunted out, “Sheeny! Smash the sheeny! Smash him to the gutter.”

Someone seized his hands from behind.

“Stop, devil! It’s Sasha, you lout!”

The mason stopped. In this drunken, delirious, insane moment he was ready to kill anyone⁠—his father, his sister, the priest, the Orthodox God himself⁠—but he was also ready, as an infant, to obey the orders of any strong will. He grinned like an idiot, spat, and wiped his nose with his hand. Suddenly his eyes fell on the white, nervous little dog, which was trembling all over as it rubbed itself against Sasha. The man bent down quickly, caught it by the hind legs, lifted it up, struck it against the paving-stone, and then took to his heels. Sasha looked at him in silence. He was running all bent forward, his hands stretched out, without his cap, his mouth open, his eyes white and round with madness.

On Sasha’s boots were sprinkled the brains of little Bielotchka. Sasha wiped off the stains with his handkerchief.

Then began a strange period that resembled the sleep of a man in paralysis. There was no light in a single window throughout the whole town in the evening, but for all that the flaming signboards of the cafés chantants and the little cabarets shone brightly. The conquerors were proving their force, not yet satiated with their impunity. Savage people, in Manchurian fur caps with St. George’s ribbons in their buttonholes, visited the restaurants and insistently demanded the playing of the national anthem, making sure that everybody rose to his feet. They also broke into private flats, fumbled about in the beds and chests of drawers, asking for vodka, money, and the national anthem, their drunken breath polluting the atmosphere.

Once, some ten of them visited Gambrinous’ and occupied two tables. They behaved with the greatest insolence, talked dictatorially to the waiters, spat over the shoulders of perfect strangers, put their feet on other people’s seats, and threw their beer on the floor, under the pretext that it was flat. Everyone let them alone. Everyone knew that they were police-agents and looked at them with that secret awe and disgusted curiosity with which the people regard executioners. One of them was apparently the leader. He was a certain Motka Gundoss, a red-haired, snuffling fellow with a broken nose, a man who was said to be enormously strong, formerly a professional thief, then a bully in a disorderly house, and after that a souteneur and a police-agent. He was a converted Jew.

Sasha was playing the “Metelitza,” when all of a sudden Gundoss came up to him and seized his right hand firmly, shouting, as he turned to the audience, “The national anthem⁠—the anthem, the anthem, the national anthem, brothers, in honour of our adored monarch!”

“The anthem, the anthem,” groaned the other scoundrels in the fur caps.

“The anthem,” shouted a solitary uncertain, voice.

But Sasha freed his hand and said calmly: “No anthems whatever.”

“What?” bellowed Gundoss, “you refuse? Ah, you stinking sheeny!”

Sasha bent forward quite close to Gundoss, holding his lowered fiddle by the fingerboard, his face all wrinkled up, as he said:

“And you?”

“What, me?”

“I am a stinking sheeny; all right; and you?”

“I am orthodox.”

“Orthodox? And for how much?”

The whole of Gambrinous’ burst out laughing, and Gundoss turned to his comrades, white with rage.

“Brothers,” he said, in a plaintive, shaking voice, and using words that were not his own but which he had learned by heart. “Brothers, how long are we to tolerate the insults of these sheenies against the throne and the Holy Church?”

But Sasha, who had drawn himself up compelled him with a single sound to face him again, and no one at Gambrinous’ would ever have believed that this funny, grimacing Sasha could talk with such weight and power.

“You?” shouted Sasha. “You, you son of a dog. Show me your face, you murderer. Look right at me. Well? Well⁠—”

It all happened in the flash of a second. Sasha’s fiddle rose swiftly, swiftly flashed in the air, and crack⁠—the big fellow in the fur cap reeled from a sound blow on the temple. The fiddle broke into fragments and in Sasha’s hands remained only the fingerboard, which he brandished victoriously over the heads of the crowd.

“Br‑o‑th‑ers, help! Save me‑e,” howled Gundoss.

But already it was too late to save him. A powerful wall surrounded Sasha and covered him. And this same wall swept the people in the fur caps out of the place.

An hour later, when Sasha, after finishing his night’s work in the beerhouse, was coming out into the street, several people threw themselves on him. Someone struck him in the eye, whistled, and said to the policeman who ran up:

“To the police-station. Secret service.