Yama (The Pit) | Page 9

that spray flies out of her mouth and bubbles
effervescence on the red lips, as in children.
Opposite, out of the dram-shop, a servant pops out for a minute--a curly, besotted young
fellow with a cast in his eye--and runs into the neighbouring public house.
"Prokhor Ivanovich, oh Prokhor Ivanovich," shouts Niura, "don't you want some?--I'll
treat you to some sunflower seeds!"
"Come on in and pay us a visit," Liubka chimes in.
Niura snorts and adds through the laughter which suffocates her:
"Warm your feet for a while!"
But the front door opens; in it appears the formidable and stern figure of the senior
housekeeper.
"Pfui! [Footnote: A German exclamation of disgust or contempt, corresponding to the
English fie.--Trans.] What sort of indecency is this!" she cries commandingly. "How
many times must it be repeated to you, that you must not jump out on the street during
the day, and also--pfui!--only in your underwear. I can't understand how you have no
conscience yourselves. Decent girls, who respect themselves, must not demean
themselves that way in public. It seems, thank God, that you are not in an establishment
catering to soldiers, but in a respectable house. Not in Little Yamskaya."
The girls return into the house, get into the kitchen, and for a long time sit there on
tabourets, contemplating the angry cook Prascoviya, swinging their legs and silently
gnawing the sunflower seeds.
In the room of Little Manka, who is also called Manka the Scandaliste and Little White
Manka, a whole party has gathered. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she and another
girl--Zoe, a tall handsome girl, with arched eyebrows, with grey, somewhat bulging eyes,
with the most typical, white, kind face of the Russian prostitute--are playing at cards,
playing at "sixty-six." Little Manka's closest friend, Jennie, is lying behind their backs on

the bed, prone on her back, reading a tattered book, The Queen's Necklace, the work of
Monsieur Dumas, and smoking. In the entire establishment she is the only lover of
reading and reads intoxicatingly and without discrimination. But, contrary to expectation,
the forced reading of novels of adventure has not at all made her sentimental and has not
vitiated her imagination. Above all, she likes in novels a long intrigue, cunningly thought
out and deftly disentangled; magnificent duels, before which the viscount unties the laces
of his shoes to signify that he does not intend to retreat even a step from his
position,[Footnote: Probably a sly dig at Gautier's Captain Fracasse.-Trans.] and after
which the marquis, having spitted the count through, apologizes for having made an
opening in his splendid new waistcoat; purses, filled to the full with gold, carelessly
strewn to the left and right by the chief heroes; the love adventures and witticisms of
Henry IV--in a word, all this spiced heroism, in gold and lace, of the past centuries of
French history. In everyday life, on the contrary, she is sober of mind, jeering, practical
and cynically malicious. In her relation to the other girls of the establishment she
occupies the same place that in private educational institutions is accorded to the first
strong man, the man spending a second year in the same grade, the first beauty in the
class--tyrannizing and adored. She is a tall, thin brunette, with beautiful hazel eyes, a
small proud mouth, a little moustache on the upper lip and with a swarthy, unhealthy pink
on her cheeks.
Without letting the cigarette out of her mouth and screwing up her eyes from the smoke,
all she does is to turn the pages constantly with a moistened finger. Her legs are bare to
the knees; the enormous balls of the feet are of the most vulgar form; below the big toes
stand out pointed, ugly, irregular tumours.
Here also, with her legs crossed, slightly bent, with some sewing, sits Tamara--a quiet,
easy-going, pretty girl, slightly reddish, with that dark and shining tint of hair which is to
be found on the back of a fox in winter. Her real name is Glycera, or Lukeria, as the
common folk say it. But it is already an ancient usage of the houses of ill-fame to replace
the uncouth names of the Matrenas, Agathas, Cyclitinias with sonorous, preferably exotic
names. Tamara had at one time been a nun, or, perhaps, merely a novice in a convent, and
to this day there have been preserved on her face timidity and a pale puffiness--a modest
and sly expression, which is peculiar to young nuns. She holds herself aloof in the house,
does not chum with any one, does not initiate any one into her past life. But in her case
there must have been many more adventures besides having been a nun: there is
something mysterious, taciturn and criminal in her unhurried speech,