As he strolled with his comrades along the fogbound filthy walk, Sergei Zarubkin wondered if the war with the Japanese were to blame for the eruptions of violence spreading through Moscow. The war had become a travesty in the failure of so vast a nation as Russia to devastate the upstart orientals. Added to that, the hot August temperatures this year had inflamed tempers, fueled fights, even murders ... as for instance last night in the Yama.
The Yama: the Pit, Moscow's Red Light District. Three blocks of ornate houses, with windows trimmed in carved scrollwork and lace curtains; where a woman cost three rubles for one hour of her time, ten rubles for a night; where boys of high-standing became men. But that quiet tradition had been suspended--because this night the Yama lay in darkness, in absolute stillness, with the houses all looted, their bright scrollwork smashed, lace curtains charred and hanging in tatters. All the whores had been beaten, killed, or driven out. And that was why four soldiers had to come here to the cesspool called Khitrovka Market, in search of women for the night.
Zarubkin took a swig from the bottle of Smirnov's he carried, then passed it to Gladykin on his right, who lifted it, hailed it as a national treasure, and drank his fill before passing it on to Getz. From Zarubkin's left, Vanya handed him another bottle--he must have had it hidden inside his greatcoat. Zarubkin smiled to him, but recalled for an instant Vanya's despairing face, lit by the fires all around, last night in the Yama. Dragoons not unlike him had initiated the destruction: Two fools who decided they had been cheated out of three rubles by some madam; two men who had, because of tension and heat, impotency and drink, managed to stir a civilian army into looting and killing. Tonight those same civilians ran amok somewhere in Moscow, violence begetting violence. The disease of the mob had turned away from the whores, reshaping into something with a more sinister purpose: Zhidov, the new target. Jews.
Zarubkin, a captain in the Czar's guards, looked past his friends and into the fog. Why, he wondered, hadn't the zealots burned this pestilential place instead of the Yama? Even the police tended to avoid Khitrovka Market. The thick blanket of fog tonight hid much of the district's rot, but it carried the intense stench of the place, so that Zarubkin felt smeared with rheum. He took a hard pull from Vanya's bottle, then snarled, "To hell with the righteous citizens." It was they, after all, who had forced him and his friends to come here. Anywhere but where the mob was on this night off. Let those on duty look into the face of Hell. Not him, not two nights in a row.
Gladykin laughed and slapped his shoulder. "To hell with the righteous," he agreed, then added, "May they all burn for every one of us who carries crabs out of here tonight." And "Crabs!" cried Vanya, "To the crabs!"
They all drank to the health of lice and strode on. Their boots clopped like horses' hooves on the cobblestones in the dark.
Whatever evil had really dwelled in "The Pit," it hardly compared with Khitrovka. Here, as Zarubkin had learned from the heartfelt writings of Gilyarovski, the young girls were called tyetki when they advanced, at the age of ten or eleven, from begging to prostitution. Many had become alcoholics by that point, although their pimps--their "cats--generally watered down the vodka. Few survived past their fourteenth year. Gilyarovski had found none in his search through the rubble. Because of two uniformed idiots, those hapless children would now have to match their indecent skills against professional prostitutes--the desperate survivors of last night's conflagration. How many of each, Zarbukin wondered, lurked in the fog ahead?
As the four men neared the heart of Khitrovka, beggars began to emerge from the darkness. The beggars choked the houses round about--thousands of soiled bodies wedged into a few blocks of space. Some were mutilated or deformed, unable to work. Some carried the corpses of babies in their arms as an appeal for sympathy in the form of coins even though with the child dead they had one less problem in their lives. Often the dead babies weren't even their own.
The sight of four large, well-fed guards in uniform sent most of the beggars scurrying back into shadow, the fog swirling after them. The four men walked on toward the building called Peresylny where the prostitutes had most likely found a haven. As he passed a curbstone fire, Zarubkin sensed someone watching him. The watcher turned out to be a scrawny creature warming its hands over the fire where another wretch, oblivious of him, cooked up a "dog's mess" of sausage and onions in a rusty iron pot. The creature staring so boldly was by appearances an ancient dwarf. The fire between his fingers revealed skin like parchment and a nearly hairless head that looked to have been smashed in on one side. The dwarf sneered at him, revealing brown and broken stubs, and gaps in the gums, like a child in the process of losing his baby teeth. His nose looked like a rotting carrot. By a trick of sound, the sizzle of the "dog's mess" seemed to emanate from the dwarf. Zarubkin looked away. He made himself relax, and discovered that his hand had closed over the butt of his revolver.
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