“Why didn’t you come there yesterday?” the prisoner began with a smug little smile.
“That’s a good one! I did come, and it was you that played hooky,” the pert wench replied.
“We were called for, otherwise I’d have showed up without fail … And two days ago all your friends came to me.”
“Who’s that, then?”
“Maryashka, and Khavroshka, and Chekunda, and Two-penny …”
“What is this?” I asked Akim Akimych. “Can it be?…”
“It happens, sir,” he replied, modestly lowering his eyes, because he was an extremely chaste man.
It did happen, of course, but very rarely and with the greatest difficulty. Generally, there were more lovers of drink, for instance, than of that sort of thing, despite all the natural burden of this forced life. It was hard to get hold of a woman. You had to choose the time, the place, make arrangements, set up a meeting, hunt for seclusion, which was especially difficult, win over the guards, which was still more difficult, and generally spend a heap of money, relatively speaking. But all the same I did manage, later on, to be a witness to occasional love scenes. I remember once in the summer there were three of us in some shed on the bank of the Irtysh, firing up a brick-baking oven. The guards were nice fellows. Finally, two “prompters,” as the prisoners call them, showed up.
“Well, where were you sitting so long? At the Zverkovs’, I bet,” the prisoner they had come to see greeted them, having waited a good while already.
“Sat for a long time, did I? That magpie just sat longer on the post than I did at their place,” the girl replied merrily.
She was the dirtiest girl in the world. This was Chekunda. Two-penny came with her. She was beyond all description.
“And it’s a long time since I’ve seen you,” the philanderer went on, turning to Two-penny. “Seems you’ve lost weight.”
“Maybe so. I used to be real fat, but now—it’s like I swallowed a needle.”
“So you keep company with soldiers, eh?”
“No, it’s wicked people fed you that about us—but anyhow, what of it? Though I go without a rib, I love the soldiers, that’s no fib.”
“Drop them and love us; we’ve got money …”
To complete the picture, imagine this philanderer, head shaved, fettered, in stripes, and under guard.
I said good-bye to Akim Akimych and, learning that I could go back to the prison, took my guard and went home. People were already gathering. The first to come back were those who worked at set tasks. The only way to make a prisoner work diligently was to give him a set task. Sometimes these tasks were enormous, but even so they got done twice sooner than if a man was made to work until the dinner drum. Once the task was done, the prisoner went home without hindrance, and no one could stop him.
We did not eat together, but haphazardly, whoever came first; besides, the kitchen had no room for everybody at once. I tried the shchi, but, being unaccustomed, was unable to swallow it, so I made myself some tea. We sat down at the end of the table. I had a comrade with me, a nobleman like myself.
Prisoners came and went. However, there was room enough, not everyone had gathered yet. A group of five men seated themselves separately at a big table. The cook poured them two bowls of shchi and set a whole skillet of fried fish on the table. They were celebrating something and were eating their own food. They looked askance at us. A Pole came in and sat down beside us.
“I wasn’t at home, but I know everything!” a tall prisoner shouted loudly, coming into the kitchen and glancing around at everyone there.
He was about fifty, muscular and lean. There was something sly and at the same time merry in his face. Especially remarkable was his thick, pendulous lower lip: it gave his face an extremely comical look.
“So you had a good night? Why don’t you say good day? To our Kurskis!” he added, sitting down beside the men eating their own food. “Greetings! Welcome your guest.”
“We’re not from Kursk, brother.”
“Tambov, then?”
“Not from Tambov either. We’ve got nothing for you, brother. Go find a rich muzhik and ask him.”
“I’ve got Ivan-Rumble and Marya-Hiccup in my belly today, brothers—where does he live, this rich muzhik?”
“Gazin’s a rich muzhik: go to him.”
“Gazin’s on a drinking binge today, brothers; he’s drinking up his whole purse.”
“That’s twenty roubles,” another man observed. “It’s profitable, brothers, selling vodka.”
“So you won’t receive a guest? Well, then we’ll gulp from the common bowl.”
“Go and ask for tea. The gentlemen there are having tea.”
“What gentlemen, there are no gentlemen here; they’re just like us now,” one prisoner who was sitting in the corner observed gloomily. Until then he had not uttered a word.
“I’d like some tea, but I’m ashamed to ask: I’ve got my anbishin,” the prisoner with the thick lip said, looking at us good-naturedly.
“I’ll give you tea, if you like,” I said, inviting the prisoner. “Want some?”
“Want some? How could I not!” He came over to the table.
“See, at home he was just a clodhopper, but here he’s learned about tea; wants to drink with gentlemen,” the gloomy prisoner pronounced.
“Does nobody drink tea here?” I asked him, but he did not deign to answer.
“Here come the kalachi. Honor us with a little kalach!”
They brought the kalachi. A young prisoner brought a whole string of them and sold them all over the prison. The kalach girl gave him every tenth one for it; that one kalach was what he counted on.
“Kalachi, kalachi!” he cried, coming into the kitchen. “Hot Moscow kalachi! I’d eat plenty, but my pocket’s empty. Well, lads, here’s the last of them: has anybody got a mother?”
This appeal to maternal love made them all laugh, and they took several kalachi from him.
“You know, brothers,” he went on, “Gazin’s going to carouse himself into trouble today. By God! Found a good time for a binge. Eight-eyes is bound to turn up.”
“They’ll hide him. What, is he badly drunk?”
“Far gone! He’s turning mean.”
“Well, it’ll come to fists then …”
“Who are they talking about?” I asked the Pole who was sitting beside me.
“Gazin, a prisoner. He deals in vodka here. Once he makes enough money, he drinks it away at once. He’s cruel and malicious. He’s quiet enough when he’s sober, but when he’s drunk, it all comes out. He goes for people with a knife. Then they calm him down.”
“How do they do that?”
“Ten or so prisoners fall on him and beat him terribly, till he’s lost all consciousness, that is, till he’s half-dead. Then they put him on a bunk and cover him with a coat.”
“But mightn’t they kill him?”
“It would kill another man, but not him. He’s terribly strong, stronger than anybody here in prison, and of the sturdiest constitution. The next morning he gets up feeling perfectly fine.”
“Tell me, please,” I went on questioning the Pole, “I see them eating their own food, while I’m drinking tea. And yet they look at me as if they envy this tea. What does it mean?”
“It’s not about the tea,” the Pole replied. “They’re angry with you because you’re a nobleman and not like them. Many of them would like to pick on you. They’d like very much to insult you and humiliate you. You’re going to see a lot more unpleasantness here. It’s terribly hard here for all of us. For us it’s harder in all respects. It takes a lot of indifference to get used to it. You’ll meet with unpleasantness and abuse more than once over tea and your own food, though quite often quite a lot of them here have their own food, and some drink tea all the time. They can, but you can’t.”
Having said that, he got up and left the table. A few minutes later, his words came true …
* * *
* “Cle
an prison bread” means bread made from pure flour, with no admixtures. Author.
III
First Impressions
M—cki (the Pole who talked to me)1 had only just left when Gazin, completely drunk, barged into the kitchen.
A drunken prisoner, in broad daylight, on a weekday, when everybody was obliged to go out to work, with a strict superior who might turn up in the prison at any moment, with a sergeant who was in charge of the prisoners and never left the prison, with the guards, the invalids—in short, with all this strictness—completely confused the notions of the prisoners’ everyday life that had been taking shape in me. I had to spend a long time in prison before I could explain to myself all these facts that puzzled me so much in the first days of my term.
I have already said that the prisoners always had their own work and that this work was a natural need in the life at hard labor; that, apart from this need, a prisoner passionately loves money and values it above everything, almost on a par with freedom, and that it is enough to have it jingling in his pocket for him to be comforted. On the other hand, he is gloomy, sad, restless, and dispirited if he has none, and then he is ready to steal or do anything at all only so as to get it. But, though money was so precious in prison, it never stayed long with the lucky fellow who had it. First of all, it was hard to keep it from being stolen or confiscated. If the major laid hands on it during surprise searches, he immediately confiscated it. He may have used it to improve the prisoners’ food; in any case it was turned over to him. But most often it was stolen: you could not rely on anyone. Later on we discovered a way of keeping money in total security. We gave it for safekeeping to an old man, an Old Believer, who came to us from the Starodubsky settlements, and before that from Vietka …2 I cannot help saying a few words about him, though it takes me away from my subject.
He was a little old man of about sixty, small, gray-haired. He made a distinct impression on me from the first glance. He was so unlike the other prisoners: there was something so serene and gentle in his gaze that I remember looking with special pleasure at his clear, bright eyes, surrounded by small, radiating wrinkles. I often talked with him, and rarely in my life have I met such a kind, good-natured being. He was sent up for an extremely serious crime. Among the Starodubsky Old Believers some converts to Orthodoxy began to appear. The government strongly encouraged them and began making every effort to further the conversions of other dissenters. The old man together with other fanatics resolved to “stand for the faith,” as he put it. The building of a church for the reconciled was begun, and they burned it down. The old man was sent to hard labor as one of the instigators. He had been a well-to-do tradesman; he left a wife and children behind; but he went into exile firmly, because in his blindness he regarded it as “suffering for the faith.” After living with him for some time, you would involuntarily wonder: how could this man, humble, meek as a child, be a rebel? I spoke with him several times “about faith.” He never yielded anything in his convictions; but there was never any anger or any hatred in his objections. And yet he had destroyed the church and did not deny it. It seemed that, with his convictions, he must regard his act and the “suffering” he endured for it as a glorious deed. But however attentively I looked, however I studied him, I never noticed any sign of vanity or pride in him. We had other Old Believers with us in prison, most of them Siberians. They were highly developed folk, cunning muzhiks, great Bible readers and dogmatists, and, in their own way, strong dialecticians; haughty, arrogant folk, devious and intolerant in the highest degree. The old man was a completely different sort of person. Though maybe a greater Bible reader than all of them, he avoided arguments. In character he was highly gregarious. He was mirthful, laughed frequently—not with the coarse, cynical laughter of the convicts, but with a serene, gentle laughter that had much childlike artlessness in it and that somehow especially suited his gray hair. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me that you can know a man by his laughter, and if from the first encounter you like the laughter of some completely unknown person, you may boldly say that he is a good man. The old man gained universal respect throughout the prison, which did not make him vainglorious in the least. The prisoners called him “grandpa” and never offended him. I partly understood how he was able to influence his fellow believers. But despite the apparent firmness with which he endured his hard labor, a deep, incurable sadness lay hidden in him, which he tried to conceal from everybody. I lived in the same barrack with him. Once during the night, past two o’clock, I woke up and heard a quiet, restrained weeping. The old man was sitting on the stove (the same one on which the Bible-reading prisoner used to pray at night, the one who had wanted to kill the major) and praying from his handwritten book. He was weeping, and I heard him say from time to time: “Lord, do not abandon me! Lord, give me strength! Children, my little ones, my dears, I’ll never see you again!” I cannot tell you how sad I felt. So it was to this old man that almost all the prisoners gradually began to give their money for safekeeping. Almost all the men in the prison were thieves, but for some reason everybody suddenly became convinced that the old man simply could not steal. They knew that he hid the money entrusted to him somewhere, but it was in such a secret place that nobody was able to find it. Later he explained his secret to me and to some of the Poles. There was a knot in one of the posts that looked as if it was firmly embedded in the tree. But it could be taken out, and there was a deep hollow behind it. Grandpa hid the money in it and put the knot back in place, so that nobody could ever find anything.
But I have digressed from my story. I stopped at why money never stayed long in a prisoner’s pocket. But, apart from the difficulty of safeguarding it, there is so much anguish in prison, and a prisoner is by nature a being who yearns so much for freedom, and, finally, by his social position, is so light-minded and disorderly, that he is naturally inclined to suddenly “go all out,” to carouse away all his capital, with noise and music, so as to forget his anguish if only for a moment. It was even strange to watch some of them work without letup, sometimes for several months, solely in order to squander all their earnings in one day, clean themselves out, and then drudge away for several more months until the next binge. Many of them liked buying new clothes, which were unfailingly of the civilian sort: non-uniform black trousers, vests, Siberian kaftans. Calico shirts and metal-studded belts were also very popular. On feast days they would dress up, and the dressed-up man unfailingly went about all the barracks showing himself to everybody. The self-satisfaction of a well-dressed man was almost childish—and in many ways the prisoners were perfect children. True, all these fine things somehow suddenly left their owner, were sometimes pawned and let go for nothing the same evening. However, a binge unfolded gradually. It was usually timed to a feast day or the binger’s name day. The prisoner would get up in the morning, light a candle before the icon and pray; then he would dress up and order himself a dinner: beef and fish would be bought, Siberian dumplings prepared; he would eat like a horse, almost always alone, rarely inviting comrades to share his meal. Then vodka would appear: the name-day man would get plastered and unfailingly walk around the barracks, reeling and stumbling, trying to show everybody that he was “on a spree,” and thereby earn universal respect. Everywhere among Russian people a certain sympathy is felt for a drunk man; but in prison a man on a spree was even shown deference. Prison carousing had its own sort of aristocratism. In making merry, a prisoner unfailingly hired music. There was a little Pole in the prison, a runaway soldier, quite a vile little fellow, but who played the fiddle and had his own instrument—it was all he possessed. He did not know any craft and thus his only earnings came from getting hired by carousers to play merry dances. His duty consisted in constantly following his drunken master from barrack to barrack and sawing away at his fiddle for all he was worth. Boredom and anguish often showed on his face. But the cry “Play, you’ve been paid for it” made him saw away again and again. A prisoner setting out on a spree could be firmly assure
d that, if he got very drunk, he would unfailingly be looked after, put to bed in time, and always be hidden somewhere if the authorities appeared, and all that quite disinterestedly. For their part, the sergeant and the invalids who lived and kept order in the prison could also be completely at ease: the drunk man could not cause any disorder. The whole barrack looked after him, and if he got noisy or rowdy—he would be pacified at once, even simply tied up. And therefore the lower-ranking prison authorities turned a blind eye on drunkenness and declined to notice it. They knew very well that if they forbade vodka, there would be something worse. But where did the vodka come from?
Vodka was bought right in the prison, from so-called taverners.3 There were several of them, and they carried on their trade continuously and successfully, even though there were generally few drinkers and “carousers,” because carousing called for money, and prisoner money was hard to come by. The trade began, went on, and was concluded in a rather original way. Suppose a prisoner has no craft and no wish to work (there were such), but wants to get money and besides is an impatient man, who wants to make a quick fortune. He has some money to start with, and he decides to deal in vodka: a bold venture, involving great risk. You could pay for it with your hide and lose both goods and capital straight off. But the taverner goes into it. He has little money to start with, so the first time he brings the vodka to the prison himself and, naturally, sells it for a good profit. He repeats the experiment a second and third time, and if he is not caught by the authorities, he quickly sells out, and only then does he establish a real business on broad foundations: he becomes an entrepreneur, a capitalist, keeps agents and assistants, risks much less, and earns more and more. His assistants take the risks.
In prison there are always many people who have squandered, gambled, or caroused away everything to the last kopeck, people without a craft, pitiful and bedraggled, but endowed with a certain degree of boldness and resolution. Such people have nothing left for capital, nothing intact but their hide; it can still serve for something, and it is this last capital that the spendthrift carouser decides to invest. He goes to an entrepreneur and hires himself out to smuggle vodka into the prison; a rich taverner has several such employees. Somewhere outside the prison there exists such a person—a soldier, a tradesman, sometimes even a wench—who, on the entrepreneur’s money and for a certain reward, comparatively rather decent, buys vodka in a pothouse and hides it in a secluded spot where the prisoners go to work. The supplier almost always begins by testing the quality of the vodka and sips some—mercilessly topping it up with water; take it or leave it, the prisoner cannot be too choosy: it is already enough that his money has not been lost altogether and the vodka has been delivered; whatever it is, it is still vodka. The smuggler, pointed out to the supplier beforehand, comes to him from the prison taverner with bulls’ guts. These guts have first been washed out, then filled with water to keep them in their original moist and pliant state, so as to be suitable in due time for holding vodka. Having filled the guts with vodka, the prisoner ties them around himself, as far as possible in the most hidden parts of his body. Naturally, the contrabandist here shows all his adroitness, all his thievish cunning. It is partly a matter of honor: he has to fool both the guards and the sentries. And he does fool them: a guard, often a new recruit, will always be outsmarted by a good thief. Naturally, the guard is studied beforehand; the time and place of work are also taken into consideration. The prisoner, a stove maker, for instance, will climb up on a stove: who is going to see what he’s doing there? The guard is not going to follow after him. Coming to the prison, he keeps a coin in his hand—fifteen or twenty silver kopecks, just in case—and waits for the corporal at the gates. Each prisoner coming back from work is searched and felt all over by the corporal of the guards, who then unlocks the prison gates for him. The vodka smuggler usually counts on his being ashamed to feel too thoroughly in certain places. But sometimes the shrewd corporal gets to those places as well and feels out the vodka. Then there remains one last resort: the smuggler, silently and in secret from the guards, slips the hidden coin into the corporal’s hand. It may happen that by means of this maneuver he passes through safely and brings in the vodka. But sometimes the maneuver does not succeed, and then he has to settle accounts with his last capital, that is, his hide. A report is made to the major, the capital is whipped, and whipped painfully, the vodka is confiscated, and the smuggler takes it all on himself, without betraying the entrepreneur, but, let us note, not because he scorns informing, but solely because informing is not profitable for him: he would be whipped anyway; his only consolation would be that they both got whipped. But he still needs the entrepreneur, though, by prior arrangement, the smuggler does not get a kopeck from him for his whipped back. As for informing in general, it usually flourishes. In prison an informer is not subject to the least humiliation; to be indignant at him is even unthinkable. He is not shunned, people are friends with him, so that if you were to start proving to the prisoners all the vileness of informing, you would meet with complete incomprehension. That inmate from the nobility, depraved and base, with whom I broke all relations, was friends with the major’s orderly Fedka and served him as a spy, and Fedka told the major everything he heard about the prisoners. We all knew it, and it never even occurred to anyone to punish or even reproach the scoundrel.
Notes from a Dead House Page 6