Yama (The Pit) | Page 5

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.

CHAPTER II.
Two in the afternoon. In the second-rate, two-rouble establishment of Anna Markovna
everything is plunged in sleep. The large square parlor with mirrors in gilt frames, with a
score of plush chairs placed decorously along the walls, with oleograph pictures of
Makovsky's Feast of the Russian Noblemen, and Bathing, with a crystal lustre in the
middle, is also sleeping, and in the quiet and semi-darkness it seems unwontedly pensive,
austere, strangely sad. Yesterday here, as on every evening, lights burned, the most
rollicking of music rang out, blue tobacco smoke swirled, men and women careered in
couples, shaking their hips and throwing their legs on high. And the entire street shone on
the outside with the red lanterns over the street doors and with the light from the windows,
and it seethed with people and carriages until morning.
Now the street is empty. It is glowing triumphantly and joyously in the glare of the
summer sun. But in the parlor all the window curtains are lowered, and for that reason it
is dark within, cool, and as peculiarly uninviting as the interiors of empty theatres, riding
academies and court buildings usually are in the middle of the day.
The pianoforte glimmers dully with its black, bent, glossy side; the yellow, old,
time-eaten, broken, gap-toothed keys glisten faintly. The stagnant, motionless air still
retains yesterday's odour; it