Dostoevsky in Love

by Alex Christofi

  On that first morning, he was not sent out to work with the others, who had to clear snow around government buildings or bake alabaster for pounding. He was allowed three days to rest from the journey. Left to his own devices for the short daylight hours, he familiarised himself with the grounds. The prison yard was an irregular hexagon, perhaps 200 paces long and 150 wide, surrounded by a high fence or stockade with 1,500 posts (one of the prisoners had counted them). One for every day of his sentence, near enough. Along the sides there were two long, wooden barracks, the kitchen and a storage hut. If you glimpsed through the gaps in the fence, you could see only a muddy rampart guarded by sentries and a thin strip of sky – a free, open sky, hardly the same as the one which gave a ceiling to the prison yard. But man is a creature that can get used to anything; indeed, that’s the best definition of him.103 Which was just as well because, when they returned to the kitchen for dinner, the great cauldron of cabbage soup had been thickened not only with grain, but with an immense number of cockroaches.

  The next day, he was taken to the engineers’ workshop to have his fetters changed. It was a low stone building in a large courtyard, comprising a smithy, locksmith, carpentry and painter’s workshop. Belykh had come along too, to mix paints, and Fyodor mentioned the grim looks he had been attracting.

  ‘Yes,’ Belykh replied, ‘they don’t like gentlemen, especially the political ones. They’d ideally like to kill them. But what can you expect? They’ve all been serfs or soldiers.’104 It was nauseating to think that he might be killed by a group of peasants, like his father before him, not least because he had been arrested for plotting their emancipation.

  In the smithy, they took off his first fetters, which he couldn’t work in as they were made up of rings and sat outside the clothes. He had a brief moment without them – ten pounds lifted off his body! – before the new ones went on. He had to take off his trousers, put on the fetters, which attached to a belt around his waist, then put his trousers back on over them. Strange to think that he would not take them off again until he was thirty-three.

  Some peasant girls from the town came round selling white rolls – some of the girls quite little. One of the convicts began flirting with one of the older girls quite unashamedly, and Fyodor turned back to Belykh incredulously.

  ‘Are they really . . .?’105

  ‘It does happen,’ Belykh replied, lowering his eyes.

  Apparently, their mothers baked the rolls and the girls brought them in to sell to the prisoners. When they grew up, they kept coming to the prison, only they stopped bringing the bread. Of course, a rendezvous was a complicated business. It meant arranging a time and a secluded spot, not to mention coming to an understanding with the guards, all of which involved considerable expense. And so instead, smuggled vodka was considered the most economical of the available vices.

  During those first days I loitered miserably around the prison, tormented by a terrible devouring melancholy.106 ‘A dead house,’ I thought to myself, standing on the prison steps at twilight and looking at the convicts who had returned from work, loafing about the yard.107 But it’s my world now, which I must live in whether I like it or not. It was almost a relief when, on the fourth morning, he was sent out to work.

  Out in the yard, an officer stood with a few other soldiers. The roll was called and the tailors were sent off first. Then there were those in the workshops, followed by the unskilled workers. Fyodor was assigned to help break up old government barges on the River Irtysh behind the fortress.4

  Two or three men went off to get tools. The day was cloudy but warm, almost thawing, as they set off with a rhythmic, metallic clinking. Fyodor was eager to find out what sort of work it was, this hard labour, and how he would acquit himself, doing manual work for the first time. On the way, they met a bearded man who stopped and put his hand in his pocket, and a convict rushed forward to receive his loose change. Some of the group were sullen, others listless, though one was inexplicably merry, singing a jaunty tune, which drew heckles. He was evidently one of those volunteer entertainers, or rather buffoons, who make it their duty to amuse their gloomy companions, and who get nothing but abuse for their trouble.108

  Presently they reached the riverbank, where the barge lay trapped in the ice. On the other bank the steppe stretched into the blue distance. From up on this side the broad landscape opened up and he could just see the black specks of nomads’ tents. There, men were living free, utterly unlike the men here; there time itself seemed to stand still, as if they and their flock were still in the time of Abraham.

  I expected that everyone would get straight to work, but they had no intention.109 Some of the party sat down on the nearest log; people started taking little pouches of tobacco and short, home-made willow pipes out of their boots. The soldiers had formed a half-hearted cordon around them. They lit their pipes, watching peasants trudge down the road to work. A brisk, lively woman came selling rolls, and the communal 5 copecks was handed over, the rolls shared out.

  Eventually the sergeant came to chivvy them along, and they slouched down to the river. They bickered about how best to preserve the barge’s beams and ribs. One silent lad went over and grabbed a beam, but no one came to help him.

  ‘Shall I pickle you for the winter?’ shouted the sergeant. ‘Get on with it!’

  They began unwillingly and incompetently. It was quite irritating to see a crowd of sturdy workmen who seemed determined to be puzzled about how to go about the work.110 They started to remove the smallest beam, but it began to break, and they stopped again for a lengthy discussion about what was to be done. In the end, it seemed that axes weren’t enough, and other tools were needed. Two people were dispatched with a convoy to the fortress to get them. The others serenely sat down on the barge, pulled out their pipes, and began smoking again at their leisure. The sergeant gave up and stormed off to the fortress.

  An hour or so later, the officer in charge appeared. He heard the convicts out and then announced that they were to get four beams out without splitting them and break up a good chunk of the rest before they could pause for their meal. Suddenly axes started swinging, bolts were unscrewed. Others thrust thick poles into the ground and 20 of them levered out the beams. Wherever I tried to help, I was superfluous, in the way, pushed aside.111

  Finally one of them turned and said, ‘Why do you keep sticking your nose in where you’re not wanted?’

  ‘You’re out of your depth,’ chimed in another.

  Fyodor went and stood on his own at the other end of the barge.

  ‘Look at the workmen they send us,’ said another. ‘He can’t do anything.’

  The others seemed to find that very amusing.

  The barge was by now seething with activity. It was a lot of work, but half an hour before the drum beat, it was done, and they started back to the fortress, tired but content. It seemed they would work as hard as necessary for that bare half hour of relative freedom.

  On the way back, Fyodor fell into a reverie. The labour itself did not seem so very hard, so penal, but after a while I realised that the penal character of the work lay not so much in its being difficult and unremitting as its being forced.112 The work itself was barely worth doing – most of the salvage was only good for firewood, and would sell for a pittance in the town. It occurred to me that if one wanted to crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the worst possible punishment, so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at the thought, one need only give him work that was absolutely useless and nonsensical. If he had to pour water from one vessel to the other and back, over and over again, or move a heap of earth from one place to another and back, I believe the convict would hang himself in a few days or commit a thousand new crimes, preferring to die rather than endure such humiliation, shame and suffering.113

  Fyodor returned to the fortress that evening worn out and miserable. He paced up and down along the fence as dusk came on, counting the fence posts, thinking how many days he had ahea
d of him, all exactly alike. As he walked, a big mongrel came wagging up, black with white markings. No one else had taken any notice of him. Fyodor bent to stroke him. The dog stood quietly, wagging his bushy tail. I don’t know what came over me, but I fell to kissing him, I put my arms around his head; he put his front paws on my shoulders and licked my face. From that day, when I returned from work during that hard and gloomy period, I would hurry behind the prison buildings to find the dog leaping and whining with joy. And I remember I even took pleasure, as though I were gloating to myself of my own misery, in thinking that this dog was the only creature who loved me, who was devoted to me, my only friend in the world.114

  As it turned out, there was nowhere to bathe at all within the fortress. There were two public bath houses in the town, one for the rich and the other for the poor, and it was the latter to which they were taken one frosty, sunny morning. Everyone was delighted to escape the grounds of the fortress, and to see the town. The guards weren’t taking any chances, and an entire platoon of soldiers accompanied them with loaded rifles. Next to Fyodor walked Petrov, a short, well-built man of forty, never without a lump of tobacco resting on his gum, who was in the ‘special class’ reserved for the worst criminals. For reasons that Fyodor couldn’t discern, Petrov had begun to seek him out most days, and would stop by to exchange a word or two with him. He seemed to look on me as a sort of child, almost a baby, who didn’t understand the simplest things of the world.115

  It was almost as cold inside as it had been outdoors. In one corner, someone was selling hot spiced tea and rolls. Petrov helped Fyodor to undress, which was not as easy as you might assume, in fetters. First you had to unlace the leather bands that went underneath the ankle irons to prevent the iron from rubbing off the skin. Then, you had to get your underclothes off from under the fetters. There was a real art to it: first you pulled one side down underneath the fetters, pulled your foot out, and then drew the leg of it back up through the ring, then you had to repeat the action on the other side. He had had to do it once before, on the way here, when they stopped in Tobolsk – he’d been shown the ropes by a robber who had been chained to a wall for the past five years.

  Fyodor gave Petrov a few copecks to get soap, and he duly returned with a little coin of it, no deeper than a slice of cheese. Each of them was allowed a single bucketful of hot water. Petrov led him by the arm towards the bathing room, as Fyodor stumbled in his loose fetters.

  ‘Pull them up, around your calves,’ Petrov repeated, holding Fyodor up like a nurse, ‘and now be careful – here’s a step.’ I wanted to assure Petrov that I could walk alone, but he wouldn’t have believed me. And yet he was not servile in the least; if I had offended him, he would have known how to deal with me. I had not promised him money for his services, and he himself had not asked me for any. Why, then, did he look after me?116

  They opened the door to the bathroom itself. Imagine: a square room 12 paces across, in which were packed at least 80 men. Steam blinded the eyes and there was nowhere to put a foot down. Fyodor tried to turn back, but Petrov egged him on. They squeezed through the slippery bodies to the benches at the end, over the heads of men squatting on the floor, who stooped to one side as they passed. Every place on the benches was taken. Petrov began negotiating with a convict for a place on the bench with a copeck that he’d had the foresight to bring with him, and the convict immediately ducked underneath the bench, where others still were swarming, and where it was hot and dirty, the slime on the floor accumulating to the depth of almost half a finger. There was not a spot on the floor as big as the palm of your hand where there was not a convict squatting, splashing from his bucket. Some washed themselves standing, and the dirty water trickled off them onto the shaven heads of the convicts sitting below them. Further up on the top bench, others huddled in the steam. Men of the peasant class don’t wash much with soap and water; they only steam themselves terribly and then splash themselves with cold water – that’s their idea of a bath.117

  Petrov had sat down at Fyodor’s feet and declared himself very comfortable. He helped Fyodor to soap himself, and washed his ‘little feet’, as he called them. Around them, fifty birches rose and fell in unison as the peasants thrashed themselves stupid among the steam, the shouting and the clanking of chains. As prisoners passed each other, some of their chains got tangled up and they would fall into the liquid filth, cursing. As they grew hotter, the steaming backs of the convicts began to reveal every lash they had received in the past, so that they all began to look freshly wounded. A shiver ran through me at the sight of them. It occurred to me that if one day we should all be in hell together it would be very much like this place. I could not help expressing this thought to Petrov; he looked around and said nothing.118

  Time passed, and little by little I got used to it. Every day, I was less bewildered by my new life. My eyes grew accustomed to my surroundings. To be reconciled to this life was impossible, but it was high time to accept it as a stubborn fact. I no longer drew the same intense curiosity from the other convicts. I walked around as if I were at home and kept to my place on the planks. Regularly once a week I went to have my head shaved. I felt that work would prove my salvation: let me be out in the open air, make myself tired, grow used to carrying heavy weights. At first my love of work provoked the other convicts, who jeered and mocked me. But I took no notice.119 Once, he woke up around two in the morning to the sound of stifled sobs. A little grey old man of sixty, a schismatic who had been imprisoned for burning down an Orthodox church, was sitting up on the stove, reading prayers aloud from a little book. From time to time he muttered, ‘Lord, do not forsake me! Lord, give me strength! My little ones, my darling little ones, I shall never see you again!’ I was filled with an indescribable sorrow.120

  The first real break from routine came with Easter, when the prisoners had complex arrangements in place to secure their contraband vodka. First, they had to find an agent, whether soldier or prostitute, who would acquire a quantity of vodka (and, inevitably, water it down). The smuggler on the inside would then turn up to the handover with a clean ox-gut, fill it with the vodka, and try to fasten it somewhere inconspicuous, though he might bring a few copecks with him just in case a guard required further assurance. It was a risky business, and so naturally the smuggler was prone to decant a little for his troubles and water the rest down further. The prisoners had to save up for months for the pleasure of drinking this weak vodka on the traditional holiday binge. This day has been the object of the convict’s dreams, night and day, and has kept up his spirits through the weary routine of life. A cup of vodka costs five or six times as much as in a tavern; you can imagine what they will have cost by the time he is drunk.121

  By the second day of Easter, the sky was blue, the sun warm and bright (but there was only gloom in my heart).122 The prisoners didn’t have to work today and the prison staff had left the convicts to their own devices. Many were already drunk and fights were breaking out across the prison. People sang hideous songs and played cards. On one or two occasions, knives were drawn. A huge Tatar named Gazin lay out cold under his sheepskin, having been beaten senseless by six of the others. He barely showed any sign of life. All this had worn me out to the point of illness. I made my way to my place and lay down on my back, my hands behind my head, and closed my eyes. I liked to lie like that: a sleeping man was left alone.123 Still, he was exposed, lying on his back: the Major sometimes burst into the barracks at night and, if he found anyone sleeping on their right side or their back, he’d punish them the next day. (He had taken up a notion that Christ only slept on his left side.)124 Lying there with the peasants shouting all around him, Fyodor suddenly remembered the day that he had heard someone cry, ‘Wolf!’, in the copse in Darovoe, and he remembered how the kindly serf Marko had comforted him. He remembered every detail, down to the motherly way that Marko had touched his cheek. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory preserved from childhood is perh
aps the best education. If you have only one good memory left in your heart, even that may prove your salvation.125

  Fyodor felt progressively more ill over the next few days. He had terrible diarrhoea from the holiday food – a thin porridge with an imperceptible amount of fat in it – and the joints in his legs became inflamed. One morning, he was too sick to work, and stayed lying on his plank while the others went out for the morning shift. Just then, the Major turned up for a spot inspection, and was incensed to discover Fyodor lying down in the barracks. He flew into a rage and ordered Fyodor lashed. The duty officer tried to explain that he was ill, but the Major was having none of it: he declared that Fyodor was being protected, and must be flogged immediately. Soldiers were dispatched to gather switches and preparations were already underway when the commandant himself, General de Grave, arrived, and called the whole thing off. He even gave the Major a dressing down for trying to flog a sick prisoner.

  Soon after the holidays I was taken ill and went to our military hospital.126 What ‘taken ill’ meant he struggled to verbalise, so violent was the seizure, the convulsions, the foaming mouth and ragged pulse. It began with an aura, an unpleasant confusion of thought and sensation, as if time itself was being crumpled by a great force. But that was only a foretaste of the disturbance to come. The next moment, the Devil shot into his spine, but Fyodor was gone by then. He went rigid and fell to the ground, landing on his back and head, his muscles spasming rhythmically and painfully. He flapped about on the barrack floor like a galvanised frog. He woke up in a puddle of filth, some of it his own.

  The hospital was a long, narrow, one-storey wooden building about half a verst from the fortress, painted a yellow ochre. The doctors there were kind, and efforts were made to clean all the surfaces, though the beds still had bugs. The other patients noticed that Fyodor had brought his own tea – his only real extravagance in prison, other than the occasional bit of meat when he was sick of cabbage soup. Someone offered to get hold of a pot for Fyodor, and one of their neighbours accused the man of being a flunkey. But I did always prefer to do everything for myself, and indeed I wanted to avoid looking like a soft-handed, womanish little gentleman.127