“Is that so?” said one of the layabouts, scratching his head. “I can’t hardly believe it.”
“You say that again,” retorted the sailor Komrower, “and I’ll be obliged to kill you for insulting the Imperial Russian Navy. I’ll have you know I learned this whole story at our Naval Academy, and His Grace, our Captain Voroshenko, told it to us in person.”
They drank some more mead and one or two more brandies, and then the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik paid for everyone. He had had a few drinks himself, though not as many as the others. But when he stepped out onto the street, arm-in-arm with the young sailor Komrower, it seemed to him as though the middle of the road was a river with waves rippling up and down it, the occasional oil lanterns were lighthouses, and he had better stick to the side of the road if he wasn’t to fall into the water. The young fellow was swaying all over the place. Now, from his childhood days, Nissen Piczenik had said his prayers every evening, the one that you say when it starts to get dark, the other one at nightfall. Today, for the first time, he had missed them both. The stars were twinkling reproachfully at him up in the sky, he didn’t dare look at them. At home his wife would be waiting with his usual evening meal, radish with cucumbers and onions, a piece of bread and dripping, a glass of kvas and hot tea. He felt more shame on his own behalf than in front of other people. He had the feeling, walking along arm-in-arm with the heavy, stumbling young man, that he was continually running into himself, the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik was meeting the coral merchant Nissen Piczenik, and they were laughing at one another. However, he was able to avoid meeting anyone else. He brought young Komrower home, took him into the room where the old Komrowers were sitting, and said: “Don’t be angry with him. I went to the bar with him, he’s had a bit to drink.”
“You, Nissen Piczenik, the coral merchant, have been drinking with him?” asked old Komrower.
“Yes, I have!” said Piczenik. “Now, good night!” And he went home. His beautiful threaders were still all sitting at the four long tables singing and fishing up corals with their delicate needles in their fine hands.
“Just give me some tea,” said Nissen Piczenik to his wife. “I have work to do.”
And he drank his tea, and while his hot fingers scrabbled about in the large, still unsorted heaps of corals, and in their delicious rosy cool, his poor heart was wandering over the wide and roaring highways of the mighty ocean.
And there was a mighty burning and roaring in his skull. Sensibly, though, he remembered to take off his cap, pull out his purse, and put it back in his shirt once more.
IV
THE DAY DREW nigh when the sailor Komrower was to report back to his cruiser in Odessa — and the coral merchant dreaded the prospect. In all Progrody, young Komrower is the only sailor, and God knows when he’ll be given leave again. Once he goes, that’ll be the last you hear of the waters of the world, apart from the odd item in the newspapers.
The summer was well advanced, a fine summer, by the way, cloudless and dry, cooled by the steady breeze across the Volhynian steppes. Another two weeks and it would be harvest time, and the peasants would no longer be coming in from their villages on market days to buy corals from Nissen Piczenik. These two weeks were the height of the coral season. In this fortnight the customers came in great bunches and clusters, the threaders could hardly keep up with the work, they stayed up all night sorting and threading. In the beautiful early evenings, when the declining sun sent its golden adieus through Piczenik’s barred windows, and the heaps of coral of every type and hue, animated by its melancholy and bracing light, started to glow as though each little stone carried its own microscopic lantern in its delicate interior, the farmers would turn up boisterous and a little merry, to collect their wives, with their red and blue handkerchiefs filled with silver and copper coins, in heavy hobnailed boots that clattered on the cobbles in the yard outside. The farmers greeted Nissen Piczenik with embraces and kisses, like a long-lost friend. They meant well by him, they were even fond of him, the lanky, taciturn, red-haired Jew with the honest, sometimes wistful china blue eyes, where decency lived and fair dealing, the savvy of the expert and the ignorance of the man who had never once left the small town of Progrody. It wasn’t easy to get the better of the farmers. For although they recognized the coral merchant as one of the few honest tradesmen in the area, they wouldn’t forget that he was a Jew. And they weren’t averse to haggling themselves. First, they made themselves at home on the chairs, the settee, the two wide wooden double beds with plump bolsters on them. And some of them, their boots encrusted with silvery-gray mud, even lay down on the beds, the sofa, or the floor. They took pinches of loose tobacco from the pockets of their burlap trousers, or from the supplies on the windowsill, tore off the edges of old newspapers that were lying around in Piczenik’s room, and rolled themselves cigarettes — cigarette papers were considered a luxury, even by the well-off among them. Soon, the coral merchant’s apartment was filled with the dense blue smoke of cheap tobacco and rough paper, blue smoke gilded by the last of the sunlight, gradually emptying itself out into the street in small clouds drifting through the squares of the barred open windows.
In a couple of copper samovars on a table in the middle of the room — these too burnished by the setting sun — hot water was kept boiling, and no fewer than fifty cheap green double-bottomed glasses were passed from hand to hand, full of schnapps and steaming golden-brown tea. The prices of the coral necklaces had already been agreed on with the women in the course of several hours’ bargaining in the morning. But now the husbands were unhappy with the price, and so the haggling began all over again. It was a hard struggle for the skinny Jew, all on his own against overwhelming numbers of tightfisted and suspicious, strongly built and in their cups potentially violent men. The sweat ran down under the black silk cap he wore at home, down his freckled, thinly bearded cheeks into the red goatee, and the hairs of his beard grew matted together, so that in the evening, after the battle, he had to part them with a little fine-toothed steel comb. Finally, he won the day against his customers, in spite of his ignorance. For, in the whole wide world, there were only two things that he understood, which were corals and the farmers of the region — and he knew how to thread the former and outwit the latter. The implacably obstinate ones would be given a so-called extra — in other words, when they agreed to pay the price he had secretly been hoping for all along, he would give them a tiny coral chain made from stones of little value, to put round the necks or wrists of their children, where it was guaranteed to be effective against the Evil Eye or spiteful neighbors and wicked witches. And all the time he had to watch what the hands of his customers were up to, and to keep gauging the size of the various piles of coral. It really wasn’t easy!