The Gambrinus

I

This was the name of a beerhouse in a bustling seaport town in southern Russia. Situated in one of the busiest thoroughfares, it was, nevertheless, rather hard to find because of its underground position. Even a regular customer, well known at the Gambrinus, often somehow missed that famous establishment, and walked past two or three neighbouring shops before he turned back.

No sign marked the house. Customers went in from the pavement through a narrow door that always stood open. An equally narrow staircase of twenty stone steps, battered and deformed by millions of heavy boots, led down from the entrance. On the wall facing the bottom of the stairs was a painted ten-foot alto-relievo image of King Gambrinus, the famous patron of brewers. It looked as if it had been crudely hewn out of petrified blocks of sponge, and must have been the first creation of an amateur; but the red doublet, the ermine cloak, the golden crown and the tankard raised high and running over with white foam, left no room for doubt: here in person was the great patron of brewers.

The place consisted of two long but exceedingly low vaulted halls. Subterranean moisture was for ever trickling down the stone walls, glittering in the light of gas-jets, which burned day and night because the place had no windows. Traces of droll murals were, however, still discernible. One painting represented a large company of carousing young Germans in green sporting jackets and with pheasant feathers in their hats, their fowling-pieces slung across their shoulders. Facing the hall, they all greeted you with raised tankards, two of them, moreover, holding by the waist two plump wenches – waitresses at the village inn, or perhaps daughters of a goodly farmer. Another mural depicted a high-life picnic in the first half of the eighteenth century; genteel countesses and viscounts in powdered wigs frolicked with Lambs on a green meadow, and close by, under a clump of spreading willows, was a pond with swans fed gracefully by ladies and their escorts, who were sitting in a golden shell-like contraption. The next painting showed the interior of a Ukrainian cottage and happy rustics dancing the hopak with bottles of horilka in their hands. Farther on stood in all its splendour a big barrel with two fulsomely fat, red-faced and thick-lipped Cupids on it, decked with vines and hop leaves, and staring with shamelessly oily eyes as they clinked shallow wineglasses. The second hall, separated from the first by an arch, displayed scenes from frog life: frogs drinking beer in a green swamp, chasing dragonflies among the rushes, playing in a string quartet, fencing, and soon. The painter had obviously been a foreigner.

Instead of tables, heavy oak barrels stood on the floor, which was thickly strewn with sawdust, and small kegs did duty as chairs. To the right of the entrance was a low dais with a piano. There Sashka the musician, a meek, bald-headed Jew of uncertain age, always drunk and gay, looking like a shabby ape, had for many years played the violin every night to cheer and entertain the customers. As the years rolled by waiters in leather cuffs were succeeded by others; so were caterers and deliverers of beer, and even the proprietors of the house. But every day at six Sashka would invariably be sitting on the dais, with his violin in his hands and a little white dog on his knees, and towards one o’clock in the morning he would leave the Gambrinus, groggy with the beer he had drunk, in the company of Snowdrop, the little dog.

However, there was another permanent character at the Gambrinus – Mme Ivanova, the barmaid. She was a stout, bloodless old woman, who, having spent all her time in the damp basement, had come to resemble one of those lazy white fishes that dwell in the depths of sea grottoes. Like a skipper from his bridge, she silently ordered the waiters about from the eminence of the bar and smoked endlessly, holding the cigarette in the right corner of her mouth and screwing up her right eye against the smoke. Few people ever heard her voice, and to all who greeted her with a bow she always gave the same faded smile.

II

The huge harbour, one of the biggest in the world, was always crammed with ships. Giant dreadnoughts, dark with rust, put into it. Yellow, thick-funnelled steamers of the Dobrovolny Line, bound for the Far East, took cargo there, daily swallowing up trainloads of goods or thousands of convicts. In spring or autumn, hundreds of flags from every corner of the globe fluttered in the wind, and orders and oaths in every imaginable tongue rang out from morning till night. Dockers scurried to the countless warehouses and back to the ships over swinging gangplanks. They were Russian tramps, ragged and almost naked, with puffy drunkards’ faces; swarthy Turks, dirty-turbaned and wearing baggy trousers that were very wide to the knees and close-fitting below; thickset, muscular Persians, their hair and nails dyed with henna to a bright carrot colour. Two-or three-masted Italian schooners were frequent callers; they were beautiful to look at from a distance, with their tiered sails, pure and white and round like the breasts of young women. And as these shapely vessels came into view round the lighthouse, they were, especially on a bright spring morning, like wonderful white visions floating, not in water, but in the air above the horizon. High-topped Anatolian kachirmas and Trebizond feluccas of strange colours, with carvings and grotesque ornaments, bobbed for months in the dirty green water of the harbour, amid rubbish, egg-shells, watermelon rinds, and flocks of white sea-gulls. Occasionally a strange narrow ship would run in under black paid sails, with a bit of soiled cloth for a flag; rounding the jetty and all but grazing it with her side, she would rush at full speed into harbour, heeling hard, and, amid a babel of curses and threats, come alongside a random pier, where her crew – stark naked bronzed little men jabbering gutturally – would furl the ragged sails with unaccountable rapidity, and the dingy, mysterious ship would instantly become as quiet as if she were dead. And just as mysteriously she would steal out of harbour on a dark night, without putting on her lights. At night the bay swarmed with the light boats of smugglers. Fishermen brought in their haul from far and near: in spring the tiny anchovy, of which it took millions to fill the boats, in summer the ugly plaice, in autumn mackerel, the fat grey mullet and oysters, and in winter the white sturgeon – anything from three to six hundredweights each, often caught at the risk of men’s lives, many miles from the shore.

All those men – sailors from various countries, fishermen, stokers, light-hearted ship’s boys, harbour thieves, engineers, workmen, dockers, boatmen, divers, smugglers – were young and robust, steeped in the tang of sea and fish; they knew what hard work was, loved the beauty and terror of daily risk, and prized above all else strength, prowess and the sting of strong language, and on shore they gave themselves up with savage relish to wild revelry, to drink and fighting. After nightfall the lights of the big city, running uphill from the harbour, would lure them like shining magic eyes, always promising something new and joyous, something they had not yet tried, and always deceiving them.

The city was linked with the harbour by narrow, steep, cranked streets where law-abiding citizens preferred not to venture at night. At every turn you came upon doss-houses with dingy latticed windows, with the dismal light of a single lamp inside. Still more numerous were the shops where you could sell your clothes down to your sailor’s singlet or buy yourself any sea garb. There were also a great many beerhouses, taverns and eating-houses with expressive signs in all languages, and not a few brothels, public or illegal, from whose doorways at night coarsely painted women called to seamen in husky voices. In the Greek coffee-houses customers played dominoes or cards, and in the Turkish ones they could have night lodgings for five kopeks and smoke the narghile; there were small Oriental taverns that served snails, limpets, shrimps, mussels, large warted cuttle-fish, and other sea creatures. In garrets and cellars, behind tightly closed shutters, were gambling haunts where a game of faro or baccara often wound up with a ripped belly or a broken skull and where, just round the corner, sometimes in an adjoining cubicle, one could get rid of any stolen article, from a diamond bracelet to a silver cross, from a bale of Lyonese velvet to a sailor’s greatcoat.

Those steep, narrow lanes, black with coal-dust, always grew sticky and fetid towards nightfall, as if they sweated in a nightmare. They were like gutters or filthy sewers down which the big international city ejected into the sea all its offal, all its rot and garbage and vice, which infected strong sinewy bodies and simple souls.

The roistering inhabitants of that district seldom went up to the elegant, trim city with its plate-glass shop windows, proud monuments, electric lights, asphalt pavements, rows of white acacias, and majestic policemen, a city flaunting cleanliness and comfort. But before throwing away his hard-earned, greasy, ragged ruble notes every one of them was sure to drop into the Gambrinus. It was a time-honoured custom, though it meant making your way, under cover of the night, to the very heart of the city.

True, many of the customers could not have told you the difficult name of the celebrated beer king. Someone would simply say, “Shall we go to Sashka’s?”

Someone else would reply, “Ay-ay, sir! Keep her so.”

And then they would all say in chorus, “Anchors aweigh!”

No wonder that, among the harbour and sea people, Sashka enjoyed greater respect and fame than, say, the local bishop or governor. And it is certain that, if not his name, then his lively ape’s face and his violin were recalled once in a while in Sydney or Plymouth, in New York, Vladivostok, Constantinople or Ceylon, not to speak of all the bays and sounds of the Black Sea, where he had many admirers among the courageous fishermen.