The Abyss and Other Stories (Alma Classics) Read online

  The Abyss

  and Other Stories

  Leonid Andreyev

  Translated by Hugh Aplin

  ALMA CLASSICS

  Alma Classics

  an imprint of

  alma books ltd

  3 Castle Yard

  Richmond

  Surrey TW10 6TF

  United Kingdom

  www.almaclassics.com

  The Abyss and the stories in this volume first published in Russian between 1898–1914. The date of composition is given after each story.

  This collection first published by Alma Classics in 2018

  Translation and Notes © Hugh Aplin, 2018

  Cover design by Will Dady

  Published with the support of the

  Institute for Literary Translation, Russia.

  isbn: 978-1-84749-723-9

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  The Abyss and Other Stories

  Bargamot and Garaska

  A Grand Slam

  Silence

  Once upon a Time There Lived

  A Robbery in the Offing

  The Abyss

  Ben Tobit

  Phantoms

  The Thief

  Lazarus

  A Son of Man

  Incaution

  Peace

  Ipatov

  The Return

  The Flight

  Notes

  The Abyss

  and Other Stories

  BARGAMOT AND GARASKA

  It would be unfair to say that nature had been mean to Ivan Akindinych Bergamotov, known in his official capacity as “police badge No. 20”, and in his unofficial one simply as “Bargamot”. In giving Ivan Akindinovich this name, the inhabitants of one of the suburbs of the provincial capital Oryol – called in their turn, with reference to their place of residence, “gunners” (from the name Gunner Street), and characterized from a spiritual angle by the sobriquet “gunners – head-butters” – certainly did not have in mind the attributes inherent in such a tender and delicate fruit as the bergamot. In his appearance, Bargamot was more reminiscent of a mastodon or, generally, one of those lovable but lost creatures who, through a shortage of space, long ago departed an earth filled up with puny little people. Tall, fat, strong, loud-voiced Bargamot constituted a conspicuous figure on the police horizon and would, of course, have risen long ago to certain levels had his soul, confined by thick walls, not been sunk in a sleep of heroic depth. External impressions, passing into Bargamot’s soul through his bloated little eyes, would lose all their sharpness and power on the way and reach their destination only in the form of faint echoes and reflections. Someone with lofty demands would have called him a piece of meat, police-station supervisors dignified him with the name of “numskull” – albeit a dependable one – while for the gunners, the people with the greatest interest in the question, he was a steady, serious and solid man, worthy of every esteem and respect. What Bargamot knew, he knew soundly. Maybe this was nothing more than the instructions for policemen which he had mastered once with the exertion of his entire enormous body, but those instructions had lodged themselves so deeply in his sluggish brain that it was impossible to drive them out of it, even with strong vodka. A no less firm place in his soul was occupied by the few truths which had been acquired by dint of experience of the world, and which undoubtedly held sway over the locality. About what he did not know, Bargamot remained silent with such indestructible solidity that knowing people would seem to grow a little ashamed of their own knowledge. But the main thing was that Bargamot was possessed of inordinately huge strength, and strength on Gunner Street was everything. Populated by cobblers, hemp scutchers, primitive tailors and representatives of other free professions, and possessing two low taverns, Gunner Street devoted all of its leisure hours on Sundays and Mondays to Homeric fighting, direct participants in which were wives, dishevelled and bareheaded, who pulled their husbands apart, and little kiddies, who gazed in rapture at the bravery of their daddies. This entire violent wave of drunken gunners would break, as on a bulwark of stone, on the unshakable Bargamot, who would methodically take a couple of the most desperate loudmouths into his powerful palms and personally convey them “into clink”. The loudmouths would submissively deliver their fate into Bargamot’s hands, protesting only for the sake of convention.

  Such was Bargamot in the realm of international relations. In the sphere of internal politics he conducted himself with no less dignity. The rickety little shack in which Bargamot dwelt with his wife and two little children, and which barely accommodated his bulky body, shaking with decrepitude and fear for its existence when Bargamot was turning over in bed, could rest assured – if not about its wooden foundations, then about the foundations of the family union. Economical, zealous, fond on free days of digging in the kitchen garden, Bargamot was strict. By means of that same physical influence, he schooled his wife and children, in conformity not so much with their actual learning needs as with the vague directions in that regard which existed somewhere in a secluded corner of his large head. This did not prevent his wife Maria, a woman still young-looking and pretty, from, on the one hand, respecting her husband as a steady and temperate man, nor, on the other, from twisting him around her finger, for all his bulk, with the sort of ease and force of which only weak women are capable.

  After nine o’clock, or thereabouts, on a warm spring evening, Bargamot was standing at his usual post on the corner of Gunner Street and Third Trading Quarter Street. Bargamot’s mood was a foul one. Tomorrow was Easter Sunday and people would soon be going to church, while he had to stand on duty until three o’clock in the morning and would only get home in time to break the fast. Bargamot felt no need to pray, but the bright, festive mood spilling down the exceptionally quiet and peaceful street touched him too. He disliked the spot on which he had calmly stood every day over the course of some ten years; he too felt like doing something a little bit festive, as others were. In the form of obscure sensations there arose within him discontent and impatience. And apart from that, he was hungry. His wife had given him no dinner at all that day. He had had to make do with just some bread and water broth. His big stomach was insistently demanding food – and when was he going to get to break his fast?

  “Pah!” spat Bargamot, after making a roll-up, on which he reluctantly began to suck. He had some good cigarettes at home, presented by a local shopkeeper, but they, too, had been set aside until “break-the-fast time”.

  And soon lines of gunners began going to church; they were clean and decent-looking, wearing jackets and waistcoats over red and blue woollen shirts, long boots with an endless number of gathers on high, sharp little heels. What lay in store for all this magnificence tomorrow was partly ending up on the bars of the taverns, and partly being ripped to shreds in a friendly skirmish over an accordion – but today the gunners were radiant. Each was carefully carrying a little bundle with a paskha and Easter cakes.* Nobody paid Bargamot any attention, and it was with no particular affection that he threw the occasional glance at his “godsons”, having a dim presentiment of the number of journeys he would have to make to the police station tomorrow. In
essence, he was envious that they were free and going where it would be noisy, bright and joyful, while he was to hang around here like a lost soul.

  “Stand here because of you drunkards!” he summed up his thoughts and spat once again – there was a gnawing in the pit of his stomach.

  The street emptied. The ringing for the Liturgy ended.* Then a joyful modulating peal, so cheerful after the doleful bells of Lent, bore the glad tidings of the resurrection of Christ off around the world. Bargamot removed his hat and crossed himself. He would soon be off home. Bargamot cheered up, picturing to himself the table covered with a clean cloth, the Easter cakes, the eggs. He would unhurriedly exchange three kisses with everyone. They would wake and bring Vanyushka, who would start off by demanding a painted egg, about which he had been having detailed conversations with his more experienced sister for a whole week. How his jaw would drop when his father presented him not with an egg stained with fuchsine that would fade* but with a real marble one, given to his father as a gift by that same obliging shopkeeper.

  “He’s a funny boy!” Bargamot grinned, feeling something akin to parental tenderness rising from the depths of his soul.

  But Bargamot’s good humour was violated in the most despicable manner. From around the corner came the sounds of uneven footsteps and hoarse muttering. “Who the devil’s this coming?” Bargamot thought, and he glanced around the corner and felt insulted with all his soul. Garaska! The man himself, in person, drunk – that was all he needed! Where he had managed to get sozzled before daylight constituted his secret, but that he had got sozzled was beyond all doubt. His behaviour, enigmatic for any stranger, was, for Bargamot – who had studied the soul of the gunner in general and Garaska’s despicable nature in particular – perfectly clear. Drawn by an irresistible force from the middle of the street, along which he was in the habit of processing, Garaska was squeezed up against a fence. Resting both arms on it and peering fixedly and enquiringly at the wall, Garaska was swaying, gathering his strength for a new struggle against unexpected obstacles. After intense thought of no great duration, Garaska energetically pushed off from the wall, backed away as far as the middle of the street and, making a decisive turn, headed with long strides into space, which proved to be not at all as infinite as they say it is, and limited in reality by masses of lamp-posts. Garaska entered into the closest of relations with the very first of them, folding it in a firm and friendly embrace.

  “A lamp-post. Whoa!” Garaska recorded the fait accompli. Contrary to his custom, Garaska was in an extremely genial humour. Instead of bombarding the post with the oaths it deserved, Garaska addressed it with meek reproofs which bore a somewhat familiar colouring.

  “Hang on, stupid, where are you going?” he muttered, swaying back from the post and then pressing his entire chest up against it once more, all but squashing his nose flat on its cold and dampish surface. “Here, here!…” Garaska had already slipped halfway down the post, but he managed to hold on, and sank into a reverie.

  Bargamot looked down on Garaska from his great height, twisting his lips scornfully. Nobody on Gunner Street annoyed him as much as this soak. Body and soul were scarcely held together, if you looked at him, yet he was the number-one troublemaker in the whole suburb. Not a man, but a scumbag. A gunner will get drunk, be a bit rowdy, spend the night at the police station, and he manages it all in a civilized way, but Garaska does everything on the sly, with sarcasm. He had been both beaten half to death and kept half starved at the station, but still they had been unable to break him of his abuse – the most offensive and foul-mouthed. He would stand beneath the windows of one of the most esteemed figures on Gunner Street and start swearing at them for no reason, just for the heck of it. Bailiffs catch Garaska and beat him and the crowd roars with laughter, recommending they put their backs into it. Garaska abused Bargamot himself with such fantastical realism that the latter, not even understanding all the spice of Garaska’s witticisms, felt he had been hurt worse than if he had been flogged.

  How Garaska earned his living remained for the gunners one of the mysteries in which his existence as a whole was enveloped. Nobody had seen him sober, not even the nanny who slaps kids in their childhood, after which they give off a smell of alcohol – Garaska was reeking of raw vodka even before he was slapped. Garaska lived, i.e. slept the night, on allotments, on the riverbank, under bushes. In winter he would disappear somewhere, then appear with the first breath of spring. What attracted him to Gunner Street, where only the idle did not beat him, was, again, a secret of Garaska’s bottomless soul, but there was no way he could be got rid of. It was assumed, and not without foundation, that Garaska did a bit of thieving, but he could never be caught and was beaten only on the basis of circumstantial evidence.

  On this occasion, Garaska had evidently had to get the better of a difficult road. The rags that pretended they seriously covered his scrawny body were caked in mud which had yet had no time to dry. Garaska’s physiognomy, with its big, red, drooping nose, which unarguably served as one of the reasons for his unsteadiness, and covered with a sparse, unevenly distributed growth of hair, preserved material signs of material relations with alcohol and a neighbour’s fist. Visible on one cheek, right beside the eye, was a scratch of evidently recent origin.

  Garaska had finally succeeded in parting with the post when he noticed the majestically silent figure of Bargamot. Garaska was delighted.

  “Our greetings to you, Bargamot Bargamotych!… How’s your precious health?” He waved hello gallantly, but, staggering, propped his back against the post to be on the safe side.

  “Where are you going?” droned Bargamot darkly.

  “Our road’s a straight and narrow one…”

  “To thieving? Want to go to the station? I’ll send you right now, you villain.”

  “You can’t.”

  Garaska wanted to make a gesture that would express boldness, but prudently restrained himself, spat, then shuffled one foot about on the spot, pretending he was wiping the spittle.

  “Well, you’ll talk at the station! Get going!” Bargamot’s mighty palm headed for Garaska’s soiled collar, soiled and torn to such an extent that it was obvious Bargamot was not Garaska’s first guide on the thorny path of virtue.

  Having given the drunk a bit of a shake, and imparted the appropriate direction and a certain stability to his body, Bargamot started dragging him to the aforementioned objective, becoming just like a mighty tugboat, drawing behind it a light little schooner which has crashed right at the entrance to harbour. He felt deeply offended: instead of the rest he had earned, he had to drag himself down to the police station with this soak. Blast it! Bargamot’s hands were itching, but his consciousness that it was somehow awkward putting them into action on such a great day held him in check. Garaska strode along jauntily, combining, in an astonishing manner, self-confidence – and even audacity – with meekness. He obviously had an idea of his own, which, indeed, he began to approach using the Socratic method:*

  “Tell me, Mr Policeman, what day is it today?”

  “You need to keep yourself quiet!” Bargamot replied scornfully. “Sloshed before daylight.”

  “Have they rung the bells at Archangel Michael’s?”

  “They have. And what’s it to you?

  “So Christ’s risen, then?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “If I may, then…” Garaska, who had been half-turned towards Bargamot while conducting this conversation, resolutely turned to face him.

  Intrigued by Garaska’s strange questions, Bargamot mechanically released the soiled collar from his grasp; Garaska, losing his point of support, staggered and fell before he had had time to show Bargamot the object he had just taken from his pocket. Raising only his torso and propping himself up with his arms, Garaska looked down – then fell face first onto the ground and started howling, the way peasant women howl over a dead man.

 
Garaska howling! Bargamot was amazed. “This must be some new trick he’s come up with,” he decided, but he was interested all the same in what would happen next. Next, Garaska continued howling wordlessly, like a dog.

  “What is it – off your head, are you?” Bargamot prodded him with a foot.

  He howls. Bargamot hesitates.

  “So what is it tearing you up, then?”

  “The egg…”

  Continuing to howl, but already a little more quietly, Garaska sat up and raised a hand. The hand was covered in some sort of slime, stuck to which were pieces of stained eggshell. Continuing to be at a loss, Bargamot is beginning to feel something bad has happened.

  “In a civilized way… three kisses… an egg, and you…” Garaska seethed incoherently, but Bargamot understood. So that was what Garaska had been leading up to: he had wanted to follow up three kisses, in accordance with Christian custom, by presenting an egg, but he, Bargamot, had wanted to send him to the police station. Who knows where he had been carrying the egg from, but now he had gone and smashed it. And he was crying.

  Bargamot imagined that the marble egg he was keeping safe for Vanyushka had smashed, and how sorry he, Bargamot, was about it.

  “What an odd thing,” Bargamot shook his head, gazing at the lolling soak and feeling he found this man pitiful, like a brother cut to the quick by his very own brother.

  “He wanted to exchange three kisses… He’s a living soul as well,” the policeman muttered, trying with all clumsiness to make himself clearly aware of the state of things and of the complex feeling of shame and pity oppressing him more and more. “And there’s me with… ‘to the station’! How about that!”

  Wheezing heavily and banging his sword against a rock, Bargamot squatted down beside Garaska.

  “Well…” he droned in embarrassment. “Maybe it isn’t smashed?”

  “No, not smashed, and you’re ready to smash my whole mug in too. Monster!”