But I digress. Of course, it happens that vodka is brought in safely; then the entrepreneur receives the delivered guts, pays for them, and begins to calculate. The calculation shows that his goods have already cost him very dearly; and so, for greater gain, he decants it again, diluting it again almost by half with water, and, now quite prepared, awaits a buyer. The next Sunday, and sometimes on a weekday, a buyer appears: he is a prisoner who has worked like an ox for several months and saved a bit of money in order to drink it all up on a prearranged day. The poor toiler has been dreaming about this day long before its arrival, in sleep and in happy reveries over his work, and its charm has kept up his spirits in the dull course of prison life. At last the dawn of the bright day shows in the east; the money has been saved, not confiscated, not stolen, and he takes it to the taverner. The man first serves him vodka as pure as possible, that is, only diluted by half; but as the vodka is drunk, the bottle immediately gets topped up with water. A glass of vodka costs five or six times more than in a pothouse. Imagine how many such glasses you have to drink, and how much you have to pay, in order to get drunk! But, being unaccustomed to drinking and having abstained for a long time, the prisoner gets tipsy rather quickly, and usually goes on drinking until he drinks up all his money. Then all the new things go: the taverner is at the same time a usurer. First the most recently bought personal things go to him, then it gets on to old junk, and, finally, the government things. Having drunk up everything to the last rag, the drunkard goes to sleep, and waking up the next day with the unavoidable din in his head, he begs the taverner in vain for at least one sip of vodka for the hair of the dog. He sadly endures his adversity, and sets to work again the same day, and again works for several months without letup, thinking of the happy day of his binge, which has irrevocably sunk into oblivion, and gradually beginning to take heart and wait for another such day, which, though still far off, is sure to come in due course.
As for the taverner, having finally earned the enormous sum of several dozen roubles, he gets a last supply of vodka and now does not dilute it with water, because he intends it for himself: enough dealing, it’s time to celebrate! Carousing, drinking, eating, music begin. He has great means; even the nearest, lowest prison authorities have been buttered up. The binge sometimes goes on for several days. Naturally, the supply of vodka is soon drunk; then the carouser goes to other taverners, who are already expecting him, and drinks until he has drunk up every kopeck. However well the prisoners protect the carouser, he is sometimes noticed by the higher authorities, the major or the duty officer. He is taken to the guardhouse, his capital, if any is found on him, is confiscated, and in conclusion he is whipped. He shakes himself, goes back to the prison, and a few days later again takes up his profession of taverner. Some carousers, the rich ones, naturally, also dream about the fair sex. For big money, instead of working, they sometimes make their way from the fortress to the outskirts, accompanied by a bribed guard. There, in some remote little house, somewhere on the very edge of town, a great feast is thrown, and really big money is squandered. Even a prisoner is not scorned if he has money; a guard who knows the business is somehow chosen beforehand. Such guards are usually future candidates for prison themselves. However, everything can be done for money, and such excursions almost always remain secret. It should be added that they occur quite rarely; they require a good deal of money, and lovers of the fair sex resort to other means that are totally without danger.
From the first days of my prison life, one young prisoner, an extremely pretty boy, aroused a special curiosity in me. His last name was Sirotkin. He was a rather mysterious being in many respects. I was struck first of all by his beautiful face; he was no more than twenty-three years old. He was in a special section, without a term, which meant he was considered one of the most important military criminals. Gentle and meek, he spoke little, laughed rarely. His eyes were blue, his features regular, his face clean, tender, his hair a light brown. Even his half-shaven head did little to disfigure him, such a pretty boy he was. He had no skills, but he managed to get money, not much, but often. He was noticeably lazy and went about looking slovenly. Unless someone else dressed him nicely, sometimes even in a red shirt, and Sirotkin would obviously be glad of the new clothes: he would go about the barracks, showing himself off. He did not drink, did not play cards, hardly ever quarreled with anyone. He used to stroll behind the barracks—hands in his pockets, quiet, pensive. What he could have been thinking about was hard to imagine. You would sometimes call to him out of curiosity and ask him about something, and he would answer at once and even somehow deferentially, not prisoner-fashion, but always briefly, tersely; and he would look at you like a ten-year-old boy. When he happened to have money, he did not buy something necessary, did not have his jacket mended or get himself new boots, but would buy a kalach or a gingerbread and eat it up—just as if he were seven years old. “Hey, Sirotkin,” the prisoners used to say, “you orphan from Kazan!”4 During off-hours he usually hangs around the other barracks; almost everybody is busy doing something, he alone does nothing. They would say something to him, almost always in mockery (he and his comrades were often made fun of)—he says nothing, turns, and goes to another barrack; but sometimes, if they teased him badly, he would blush. I often thought: what has this quiet, simple-hearted being done to wind up in prison? Once I was lying in the hospital, in the prisoners’ ward. Sirotkin was also sick and lay next to me. One evening he and I got to talking; he became unexpectedly animated and, incidentally, told me how he had been sent for a soldier, how his mother had wept over him, seeing him off, and how hard it had been for him as a recruit. He added that he had been unable to endure life as a recruit, because everyone was so angry there, so stern, and the commanders were almost always displeased with him …
“How did it end?” I asked him. “What did you do to land here? And in the special section at that … Ah, Sirotkin, Sirotkin!”
“I spent only a year in the battalion, Alexander Petrovich; and I came here because I killed Grigory Petrovich, my company commander.”
“So I heard, Sirotkin, but I don’t believe it. How could you kill anybody?”
“That’s what happened, Alexander Petrovich. It was so-o hard for me.”
“But how do other recruits live through it? Of course, it’s hard at first, but then they get used to it, and, lo and behold, out comes a fine soldier. Your mother must have pampered you, fed you on milk and gingerbread till you were eighteen?”
“It’s true my dear mother loved me very much, sir. When I went as a reecruit, she took to her bed, and I’ve heard she never got up again … Life as a reecruit got very bitter for me towards the end. The commander didn’t like me and kept punishing me—and what for? I’m obedient in everything, live properly, don’t drink, don’t borrow money; and that’s a bad business, Alexander Petrovich, if a man borrows money. Everybody around is so hardhearted—there’s no place to go and weep. I used to slip around a corner somewhere and cry there. So once I was standing guard. It was nighttime; they put me on watch at the guardhouse by the gun racks. Wind: it was autumn, dark as could be. And I felt so heartsick, so heartsick! I set my gun by my foot, unfixed the bayonet and laid it aside, kicked off my right boot, aimed the muzzle at my chest, leaned against it, and pulled the trigger with my toe. Misfire! I examined the gun, cleaned the touchhole, poured in new primer, rubbed the flint a little, and put the gun to my chest again. What then, sir? The powder flashed, but again no shot! What’s this? I think. I put my boot on, fixed the bayonet, and paced about silently. It was then that I decided to do this thing: anywhere at all, so long as it’s out of the reecruits! Half an hour later the commander arrives; he was making the main round. He comes straight at me: ‘Is that any way to stand guard?’ I grabbed my gun and stuck the bayonet into him up to the muzzle. Got four thousand,5 and then came here, to the special section …”
He was not lying. Why else would they have sent him to the special section? Ordinary crimes are
punished much more lightly. However, Sirotkin alone among all his comrades was such a good-looking boy. As for the others like him, of whom we had as many as fifteen, it was even strange to look at them; only two or three faces were more or less tolerable; the others were all lop-eared, ugly, slovenly; some were even going gray. If circumstances permit, I will tell about this group in more detail some day. Sirotkin was often friendly with Gazin, the same one apropos of whom I began this chapter, recalling how he had barged into the kitchen drunk and that this had confused my first notions of prison life.
This Gazin was a terrible creature. He made a ghastly, tormenting impression on everybody. It always seemed to me that nothing could be more ferocious, more monstrous, than he. In Tobolsk I saw the robber Kamenev, famous for his evildoings; later I saw Sokolov, a runaway soldier, in prison awaiting trial as a hideous murderer. But neither of them made such a repulsive impression on me as Gazin. I sometimes imagined that I saw before me an enormous, gigantic spider the size of a man. He was a Tatar; terribly strong, the strongest man in the prison; of above average height, of Herculean build, with an ugly, disproportionately huge head; he walked with a stoop and wore a perpetual scowl. Strange rumors about him circulated in the prison: it was known that he was from the military; but the talk among the prisoners, whether true or not I don’t know, was that he had escaped from Nerchinsk;6 that he had been sent to Siberia more than once, had escaped more than once, had changed his name, and had finally landed in our prison, in the special section. It was also told of him that he used to like putting the knife to little children just for the pleasure of it: he would take the child to some convenient place, frighten and torment him first, and then, having fully enjoyed the terror and trembling of the poor little victim, would put the knife to him, quietly, slowly, with enjoyment. All of that may have been invented, owing to the generally painful impression Gazin made on everybody; but these inventions somehow suited him, they went well with him. And yet, when he was not drunk, he usually behaved quite reasonably in prison. He was always quiet, did not quarrel with anybody and avoided quarrels, but as if out of contempt for the others, as if he considered himself above the rest; he spoke very little and was somehow deliberately uncommunicative. All his movements were slow, calm, self-confident. You could see by his eyes that he was far from stupid and extremely cunning; but there was always something haughtily mocking and cruel in his face and in his smile. He traded in vodka and was one of the most prosperous taverners in the prison. But a couple of times a year he would get drunk himself, and it was then that the whole bestiality of his nature would come out. Getting drunk gradually, he first started picking on people with little jibes, very vicious and calculated, and as if prepared long in advance; finally, getting completely drunk, he became horribly violent, grabbed a knife, and threw himself at people. The prisoners, knowing his terrible strength, scattered and hid; he threw himself at anyone he met. But they soon found a way to handle him. Some ten men from his barrack would suddenly throw themselves on him all at once and start beating him. It is impossible to imagine anything more cruel: they beat him in the chest, under the heart, in the pit of the stomach, in the belly; they beat him hard and long and stopped only when he lost all consciousness and became like a dead man. They would not have ventured to beat anyone else that way: it would have killed another man, but not Gazin. After beating him completely unconscious, they wrapped him in a sheepskin jacket and laid him on the bunk: “He’ll sleep it off.” And in fact he would get up the next morning almost well and go silently and sullenly to work. And each time Gazin got drunk, everybody in the prison knew that the day was bound to end for him with a beating. He knew it himself, and still he got drunk. Several years passed like that. Finally, they noticed that Gazin was starting to cave in. He complained of various pains, grew noticeably more sickly, went to the hospital more and more often … “He’s caving in!” the prisoners said among themselves.
He came into the kitchen in the company of that vile little Pole with the violin that carousers usually hired to fill out their revelry, and stopped in the middle of it, looking silently and attentively at everyone there. They all fell silent. Finally, seeing me and my comrade, he looked at us spitefully and mockingly, smiled smugly, seemed to have figured something out for himself, and, reeling badly, came over to our table.
“Allow me to ask,” he began (he spoke Russian), “on what sort of income are you pleased to be drinking tea here?”
I silently exchanged glances with my comrade, realizing that it would be best to keep silent and not answer him. The first contradiction would send him into a rage.
“So you’ve got money?” he went on asking. “So you’ve got heaps of money, eh? Came to hard labor just to sit and sip tea? Came to sit and sip tea, did you? Speak up, or else!…”
But seeing that we were resolved to keep silent and not notice him, he turned purple and trembled with fury. Beside him, in the corner, stood a big tray, where all the bread cut for the prisoners’ dinner or supper was placed. It was so big that it could hold bread enough for half the prison, but now it was empty. He seized it with both hands and brandished it over us. A little more and he would have smashed our heads. Despite the fact that murder or intended murder threatened the whole prison with extreme unpleasantness: there would be investigations, interrogations, reinforced strictness, and therefore the inmates generally did everything they could not to reach the point of such extremes—despite that, they all now sat hushed and expectant. Not a word in our defense! Not a cry against Gazin!—so strong was their hatred of us! Our dangerous situation obviously pleased them … But the affair ended well: he was just about to bring the tray down, when someone shouted from the front hall:
“Gazin! The vodka’s been stolen!…”
He slammed the tray on the floor and rushed out of the kitchen like a madman.
“Well, God saved them!” the prisoners said among themselves. And they went on talking about it long afterwards.
I was unable to find out afterwards whether this news of the stolen vodka was true or had been invented on the spot to save us.
That evening, already in the dark, before they locked the barracks, I wandered near the fence, and a heavy sadness fell on my soul, and never again did I experience such sadness in all my prison life. It was hard to endure the first day of imprisonment, wherever it might be: in a prison, in a fortress, at hard labor. But I remember being occupied most of all by one thought, which afterwards constantly pursued me during all my life in prison—a partly insoluble thought, insoluble for me even now: about the inequality of punishment for the same crime. True, crimes cannot be compared with each other, even approximately. For instance, two criminals each killed a man; the circumstances of both cases are weighed, and both wind up with the same punishment. Yet look at the difference between the crimes. One, for instance, put a knife into a man just like that, for nothing, for an onion: he came out on the high road, put a knife into a muzhik, and all the man had was an onion. “Look, man! You sent me out to rob: so I put a knife in a muzhik and all I found on him was an onion.” “Fool! An onion’s a kopeck! A hundred men—a hundred kopecks. There’s a rouble for you!” (A prison legend.) But another killed defending the honor of his bride, his sister, his daughter from the lust of a tyrant. One killed as a vagrant beset by a whole regiment of pursuers, defending his freedom, his life, often dying of hunger; another cuts little children’s throats for the pleasure of it, to feel their warm blood on his hands, to enjoy their fear, their last dove-like trembling under his knife. And what then? They both go to the same hard labor. True, there are variations in the length of the sentences. But these variations are relatively few; while the variations in one and the same crime are a numberless multitude. For each character there is a variation. But suppose it’s impossible to reconcile, to smooth over this difference, that it’s an insoluble problem—sort of like squaring the circle—let’s suppose so! But even if this inequality did not exist—look at another difference, the
difference in the consequences of the punishment … Here is a man who languishes at hard labor, who melts down like a candle; here is another who, before he got to hard labor, did not even know there was such a rollicking life, such a pleasant club of jolly fellows. Yes, there are such men in prison. Here, for instance, is an educated man, with a highly developed conscience, with awareness, with heart. The aching of his own heart will kill him with its torment before any punishments. He will condemn himself for his crime more mercilessly, more pitilessly than the most terrible law. And here next to him is another man, who will not think even once of the murder he has committed all the while he is in prison. He even considers himself in the right. And there are some who commit murders on purpose, so as to get to hard labor and thus rid themselves of an even harder life in freedom. There he lived in the last degree of humiliation, never ate his fill, and worked for his entrepreneur from morning till night; at hard labor the work is easier than at home, there is more than enough bread, and such as he never saw before; on holidays there is beef, there are alms, there is the possibility of earning a kopeck or two. And the company? Crafty, cunning, all-knowing folk. And so he looks at his comrades with respectful amazement; he has never seen the like; he considers them the best society there could be. Can the punishment of these two be felt in the same way? But, anyhow, why occupy oneself with insoluble problems? There’s the drum, it’s time for the barracks.
Notes from a Dead House Page 7