The anatomical theatre represented a long, one-storied, dark-gray building, with white frames around the windows and doors. There was in its very exterior something low, pressed down, receding into the ground, almost weird. The girls one after the other stopped near the gates and timidly passed through the yard into the chapel; nestled down at the other end of the yard, in a corner, painted over in the same dark gray colour, with white framework.
The door was locked. It was necessary to go after the watchman. Tamara with difficulty sought out a bald, ancient old man, grown over as though with bog moss by entangled gray bristles; with little rheumy eyes and an enormous, reddish, livid granulous nose, on the manner of a cookie.
He unlocked the enormous hanging lock, pushed away the bolt and opened the rusty, singing door. The cold, damp air together with the mixed smell of the dampness of stones, frankincense, and dead flesh breathed upon the girls. They fell back, huddling closely into a timorous flock. Tamara alone went after the watchman without wavering.
It was almost dark in the chapel. The autumn light penetrated scantily through the little, narrow prison-like window, barred with an iron grating. Two or three images without chasubles, dark and without visages, hung upon the walls. Several common board coffins were standing right on the floor, upon wooden carrying shafts. One in the middle was empty, and the taken-off lid was lying alongside.
“What sort is yours, now?” asked the watchman hoarsely, and took some snuff. “Do you know her face or not?”
“I know her.”
“Well, then, look! I’ll show them all to you. Maybe this one? …”
And he took the lid off one of the coffins, not yet fastened down with nails. A wrinkled old woman, dressed any old way in her tatters, with a swollen blue face, was lying there. Her left eye was closed; while the right was staring and gazing immovably and frightfully, having already lost its sparkle and resembling mica that had lain for a long time.
“Not this one, you say? Well, look … Here’s more for you!” said the watchman; and one after the other, opening the lids, exhibited the decedents—all, probably, the poorest of the poor: picked up on the streets, intoxicated, crushed, maimed and mutilated, beginning to decompose. Certain ones had already begun to show on their hands and faces bluish-green spots, resembling mould—signs of putrefaction. One man, without a nose, with an upper harelip cloven in two, had worms, like little white dots, swarming upon his sore-eaten face. A woman who had died from hydropsy, reared like a whole mountain from her board couch, bulging out the lid.
All of them had been hastily sewn up after autopsy, repaired, and washed by the moss-covered watchman and his mates. What affair was it of theirs if, at times, the brain got into the stomach; while the skull was stuffed with the liver and rudely joined with the help of sticking plaster to the head? The watchmen had grown used to everything during their nightmarish, unlikely, drunken life; and, by the by, almost never did their voiceless clients prove to have either relatives or acquaintances …
A heavy odour of carrion—thick, cloying, and so viscid that to Tamara it seemed as though it was covering all the living pores of her body just like glue—stood in the chapel.
“Listen, watchman,” asked Tamara, “what’s this crackling under my feet all the time?”
“Crack-ling?” the watchman questioned her over again, and scratched himself, “why, lice, it must be,” he said indifferently. “It’s fierce how these beasties do multiply on the corpseses! … But who you lookin’ for—man or woman?”
“A woman,” answered Tamara.
“And that means that all these ain’t yours?”
“No, they’re all strangers.”
“There, now! … That means I have to go to the morgue. When did they bring her, now?”
“On Saturday, grandpa,” and Tamara at this got out her purse. “Saturday, in the daytime. There’s something for tobacco for you, my dear sir!”
“That’s the way! Saturday, you say in the daytime? And what did she have on?”
“Well, almost nothing; a little night blouse, an underskirt … both the one and the other white.”
“So-o! That must be number two hundred and seventeen … How is she called, now? …”
“Susannah Raitzina.”
“I’ll go and see—maybe she’s there. Well, now, mam’selles,” he turned to the young ladies, who were dully huddling in the doorway, obstructing the light. “Which of you are the braver? If your friend came the day before yesterday, then that means that she’s now lying in the manner that the Lord God has created all mankind—that is, without anything … Well, who of you will be the bolder? Which two of you will come? She’s got to be dressed …”
“Well, now, you go, Manka,” Tamara ordered her mate, who, grown chill and pale from horror and aversion, was staring at the dead with widely open, limpid eyes. “Don’t be afraid, you fool—I’ll go with you! Who’s to go, if not you?
“Well, am I … well, am I …” babbled Little White Manka with barely moving lips. “Let’s go. It’s all the same to me …”
The morgue was right here, behind the chapel—a low, already entirely dark basement, into which one had to descend by six steps.
The watchman ran off somewhere, and returned with a candle-end and a tattered book. When he had lit the candle, the girls saw a score of corpses that were lying directly on the stone floor in regular rows—extended, yellow, with faces distorted by pre-mortal convulsions, with skulls split open, with clots of blood on their faces, with grinning teeth.
“Right away … right away …” the watchman was saying, guiding his finger over the headings. “The day before yesterday … that means, on Saturday … on Saturday … What did you say her name was, now?”
“Raitzina, Susannah,” answered Tamara.
“Rai-tzina Susannah …” said the watchman, just as though he were
