VIII
Now for the second time Sasha was considered to be definitely buried. Someone had witnessed the whole scene outside the beershop and had handed it on to the others. And at Gambrinous’ there were sittings of experienced people who understood the meaning of such an establishment as the police-court, the meaning of a police-agent’s vengeance.
But now they were much less anxious about Sasha’s fate than they had been before; they forgot about him much more quickly. Two months later there appeared in his place a new violinist (incidentally, one of Sasha’s pupils), who had been fished up by the accompanist.
Then, one quiet spring evening, some three months later, just when the musicians were playing the waltz, “Expectation,” someone’s thin voice called out in fright:
“Boys, it’s Sasha!”
Everyone turned round and rose from the barrels. Yes, it was he, the twice resurrected Sasha, but now with a full-grown beard, thin, pale. They threw themselves at him, surrounded him, thronged to him, rumpled him, plied him with mugs of beer, but all at once the same thin voice exclaimed:
“Brothers, his hand—”
Suddenly they all became silent. Sasha’s left hand, hooked and all shrivelled up, was turned with the elbow towards his side. Apparently it could not bend or unbend, the fingers were permanently sticking up under the chin.
“What’s the matter with you, comrade?” the hairy boatswain from the Russian Navigation Company asked.
“Oh, it’s nothing much—a kind of sinew or something of that sort,” Sasha replied carelessly.
“So that’s it.”
They all became silent again. “That means it’s the end of the ‘Tchaban?’ the boatswain asked compassionately.
“The ‘Tchaban,’ ” Sasha exclaimed, with dancing eyes. “You there,” he ordered the accompanist with all his old assurance. “The ‘Tchaban’—eins, zwei, drei.”
The pianist struck up the merry dance, glancing doubtfully over his shoulder.
But Sasha took out of his pocket with his healthy hand some kind of small instrument, about the size of his palm, elongated and black, with a stem which he put into his mouth, and bending himself to the left, as much as his mutilated, motionless hand allowed, he began suddenly to whistle an uproariously merry “Tchaban.”
“Ho, ho, ho!” the audience rocked with laughter.
“The devil,” exclaimed the boatswain and without in the least intending it he made a clever step and began to beat quick time. Fired by his enthusiasm the women and men began to dance. Even the waiters, trying not to lose their dignity, smilingly capered at their posts. Even Madame Ivanova, unmindful of the duties of the captain on his watch, shook her head in time with the flame dance and lightly snapped her fingers to its rhythm. And perhaps even the old, spongy, timeworn Gambrinous slightly moved his eyebrows and glanced merrily into the street. For it seemed that from the hands of the crippled, hooked Sasha the pitiable pipe-shell sang in a language, unfortunately not yet comprehensible to Gambrinous’ friends, or to Sasha himself.
Well, there it is! You may maim a man, but art will endure all and conquer all.