Yama [The Pit], a Novel in Three PartsKuprin, A. I. (Aleksandr Ivanovich)
General
Yama [The Pit], a Novel in Three Parts
Kuprin, A. I. (Aleksandr Ivanovich)
Prostitutes -- Russia -- Fiction; Russia -- Fiction; Russian fiction -- Translations into English
Finally Simeon threw the door wide open.
Jennka was hanging in the middle of the water-closet on a tape from her
corset, fastened to the lamphook. Her body, already motionless after an
unprolonged agony, was slowly swinging in the air, and describing
scarcely perceptible turns to the right and left around its vertical
axis. Her face was bluishly-purple, and the tip of the tongue was
thrust out between clenched and bared teeth. The lamp which had been
taken off was also here, sprawling on the floor.
Some one began to squeal hysterically, and all the girls, like a
stampeded herd, crowding and jostling each other in the narrow
corridor, vociferating and choking with hysterical sobbings, started in
to run.
The doctor came upon hearing the outcries... Came, precisely, and not
ran. Seeing what the matter was, he did not become amazed or excited;
during his practice as an official city doctor, he had had his fill of
seeing such things, so that he had already grown benumbed and hardened
to human sufferings, wounds and death. He ordered Simeon to lift the
corpse of Jennka a bit upward, and himself getting up on the seat, cut
through the tape. Proforma, he ordered Jennka’s body to be borne away
into the room that had been hers, and tried with the help of the same
Simeon to produce artificial respiration; but after five minutes gave
it up as a bad job, fixed the pince-nez, which had become crooked, on
his nose, and said:
“Call the police in to make a protocol.”
Again Kerbesh came, again whispered for a long time with the
proprietress in her little bit of a cabinet, and again crunched in his
pocket a new hundred-rouble bill.
The protocol was made in five minutes; and Jennka, just as half-naked
as she had hung herself, was carted away in a hired wagon into an
anatomical theatre, wrapped up in and covered with two straw mats.
Emma Edwardovna was the first to find the note that Jennka had left on
her night table. On a sheet, torn out of the income-expense book,
compulsory for every prostitute, in pencil, in a naive, rounded,
childish handwriting—by which, however, it could be judged that the
hands of the suicide had not trembled during the last minutes—was
written:
“I beg that no one be blamed for my death. I am dying because I have
become infected, and also because all people are scoundrels and it is
very disgusting to live. How to divide my things—Tamara knows about
that. I told her in detail.”
Emma Edwardovna turned around upon Tamara, who was right on the spot
among a number of other girls, and with eyes filled with a cold, green
hatred, hissed out:
“Then you knew, you low-down thing, what she was preparing to do? ...
You knew, you vermin? ... You knew and didn’t tell? ...”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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