The House of the Dead or Prison Life in Siberia Part 30

On me, as well as others, the spring exercised its influence. Well do I remember the avidity with which my gaze fed upon the horizon through the gaps in the palisades; long, long did I stand with my head glued to the pickets, obstinately and insatiably gazing on the gra.s.s greening in the ditch surrounding the fortress, and at the blue of the distant sky as it grew denser and denser. My anguish, my melancholy, were heavier on me; as each day wore away the jail became odious, detestable. Hatred for me, as a man of the n.o.bility, filled the hearts of the convicts during these first years, and this feeling of theirs simply poisoned my life for me.

Often did I ask to be sent to the hospital, when there was no need of it, merely to be out of the punishment part of the place, to feel myself out of the range of this unrelenting and implacable hostility.

"You n.o.bles have beaks of iron, and you tore us to pieces with your beaks when we were serfs," is what the convicts used to say to us. How I envied the people of the lower cla.s.s who came into the place as prisoners! It was different with them, they were in comradeship with all there from the very first moment. So was it that in the spring, Freedom showing herself as a sort of phantom of the season, the joy diffused throughout all Nature, translated themselves within my soul into a more than doubled melancholy and nervous irritability.

As the sixth week of Lent came I had to go through my religious exercises, for the convicts were divided by the sub-superintendent into seven sections--answering to the weeks in Lent--and these had to attend to their devotions according to this roster. Each section was composed of about thirty men. This week was a great solace to me; we went two or three times a day to the church, which was close to the prison. I had not been in church for a long time. The Lenten services, familiar to me from early childhood in my father's house, the solemn prayers, the prostrations--all stirred in me the fibres of the memory of things long, long past, and woke my earliest impressions to fresh life. Well do I remember how happy I was when at morn we went into G.o.d's house, treading the ground which had frozen in the night, under the escort of soldiers with loaded guns; the escort remained outside the church.

Once within we were ma.s.sed close to the door so that we could scarcely hear anything except the deep voice of the ministering deacon; now and again we caught a glimpse of a black chasuble or the bare head of the priest. Then it came into my mind how, when a child, I used to look at the common people who formed a compact ma.s.s at the door, and how they would step back in a servile way before some important epauletted fellow, or some n.o.bleman with a big paunch, some lady splendidly dressed and of high devotion who, in a hurry to get at the front benches, and ready for a row if there was any difficulty as to their being honoured with the best of places. As it seemed to me then, it was only _there_, near the church door, not far from the entry, that prayer was put up with genuine fervour and humility, only there that, when people did prostrate themselves on the floor it was done with real abas.e.m.e.nt of self and full sense of unworthiness.

And now I myself was in that place of the common people, no, not in their place, for we who were there were in chains and degradation.

Everybody kept himself at a distance from us. We were feared, and alms were put in our hands as if we were beggars; I remember that all this gave me the strange sensation of a refined and subtle pleasure. "Let it even be so!" such was my thought. The convicts prayed with deep fervour; every one of them had with him his poor farthing for a little candle, or for their collection for the church expenses. "I too, I am a man," each one of them perhaps said, as he made his offering; "before G.o.d we are all equal."

After the six o'clock ma.s.s we went up to communion. When the priest, _ciforium_ in hand, recited the words, "Have mercy on me as Thou hadst on the thief whom Thou didst save," nearly all the convicts prostrated themselves, and their chains clanked; I think they took these words literally as applied to themselves, and not as being in Scripture.

Holy Week came. The authorities presented each of us with an Easter egg, and a small piece of wheaten bread. The townspeople loaded us with benevolences. As at Christmas there was the priest's visitation with the cross, inspecting visit of the heads of departments, larded cabbage, general enlargement of soul, and unlimited lounging, the only difference being, that one could now walk about in the court-yard, and warm oneself in the sun. Everything seemed filled with more light, larger than in the winter, but also more fraught with sadness. The long, endless, summer days seemed peculiarly unbearable on Church holidays. Work days were at least shortened to our sense by the fatigue of work.

Our summer labours were much more trying than the winter tasks; our business was princ.i.p.ally that of carrying out engineering works. The convicts were set to building, digging, bricklaying, or repairing Government buildings, locksmith's work, or carpentering, or painting.

Others went into the brick-fields, and that was looked upon by us as the hardest of all we had laid on us. The brick-fields were situated about four versts from the fortress; through all the summer they sent there, every morning at six o'clock, a gang of fifty convicts. For this gang they used to pick out workmen who had learned no trade in particular.

The convicts took with them their bread for the day, the distance was too great for them to come back, eight useless versts, for dinner with the others, so they had a meal when they returned in the evening.

Work was a.s.signed to each for the day, but there was so much of it that it was all a man could do, nay, more, to get to the end of it. First, we had to dig and carry the clay, moisten it, and mould it in the ditch, and then make a goodly quant.i.ty of bricks, two hundred or so, sometimes fifty more than that. I was only twice sent to the brick-field. The convicts sent to this labour came back in the evening dead tired, and every one of them complained of the others, that he had had the worst of the work put on him. I believe that reproaches of this kind were a pleasure, a consolation to them. Some of them, however, liked the brick-field work, because they got away from the town, and to the banks of the Irtych into open, agreeable country, with the sky overhead; the surroundings were more agreeable than those frightful Government buildings. They were allowed to smoke there in all freedom, and to remain lying down for half-an-hour or so, which was a great pleasure.

As for me, I was sent to one of the shops, or else to pound up alabaster, or to carry bricks, which last job I had for two months together. I had to take my tale of bricks from the banks of the Irtych to a distance of about 140 yards, and to pa.s.s the ditch of the fortress before getting to the barrack which they were putting up. This work suited me well enough, although the cord with which I carried my bricks sawed my shoulders; what particularly pleased me was that my strength increased sensibly. At the outset I could not carry more than eight bricks at once; each of them weighed about twelve pounds. I got to be able to carry twelve, or even fifteen, which delighted me much. You wanted physical as well as moral strength to be able to bear all the discomforts of that accursed life.

There was this, too: I wanted, when I left the place, really to live, not to be half-dead. I took pleasure in carrying my bricks, then; it was not merely that this labour strengthened my body, but because it took me always to the banks of the Irtych. I speak often of this spot, it was the only one where we saw G.o.d's _own_ world, a pure and bright horizon, the free desert steppes, whose bareness always produced a strange impression on me. All the other workyards were in the fortress itself, or in its neighbourhood; and the fortress, from the earliest days I was there, was the object of my hatred, and, above all, its appurtenant buildings. The house of the Major Commandant seemed to me a repulsive, accursed place. I never could pa.s.s it without casting upon it a look of detestation; while at the river-bank I could forget my miserable self as I sent my gaze over the immense desert s.p.a.ce, just as a prisoner may when he looks at the world of freedom through the barred cas.e.m.e.nt of his dungeon. Everything in that place was dear and gracious to my eyes; the sun shining in the infinite blue of heaven, the distant song of the Kirghiz that came from the opposite bank.

Sometimes I would fix my sight for a long while upon the poor smoky cabin of some _bagouch_; I would study the bluish smoke as it curled in the air, the Kirghiz woman busy with her two sheep.... The things I saw were wild, savage, poverty-stricken; but they were free. I would follow the flight of a bird threading its way in the pure transparent air; now it skims the water, now disappears in the azure sky, now suddenly comes to view again, a mere point in s.p.a.ce. Even the poor wee floweret fading in a cleft of the bank, which would show itself when spring began, fixed my attention and would draw my tears.... The melancholy of this first year of convict life and hard labour was unendurable, too much for my strength. The anguish of it was so great, I could not notice my immediate surroundings at all; I merely shut my eyes and would not see.

Among the creatures with spoiled lives with whom I had to live, I did not yet note those who were capable of thinking and feeling, in spite of their external repulsiveness. There came not to my ears (or if there did I knew it not) one word of kindliness in the midst of the rain of poisonous talk that came down all the time. Still one such utterance there was, simple, straightforward, of pure motive, and it came from the heart of a man who had suffered and endured more than myself. But it is useless to enlarge on this.

The great fatigue I underwent was a source of satisfaction, it gave me hope of sound sleep. During the summer sleep was torment, more intolerable than the closeness and infection winter brought with it.

Some of the nights were certainly very beautiful. The sun, which had not ceased to inundate the court-yard all the day, hid itself at last. The air freshened, and the night, the night of the steppe, became comparatively cold. The convicts, until shut up in their barracks, walked about in groups, especially on the kitchen side; for that was the place where questions of general interest were by preference discussed, and comments were made upon the rumours from without, often absurd indeed, but always keenly exciting to these men cut off from the world.

For example, we suddenly learn that our Major had been roughly dismissed from his post. Convicts are as credulous as children; they know the news to be false, or most unlikely, and that the fellow who brings it is a past master in the art of lying, Kva.s.soff; for all that they clutch at the nonsensical story, go into high delight over it, are much consoled, and at last quite ashamed to have been duped by a Kva.s.soff.

"I should like to know who'll show _him_ the door?" cries one convict; "don't you fear, he's a fellow who knows how to stick on."

"But," says another, "he has his superiors over him." This one is a warm controversialist, and has seen the world.

"Wolves don't feed on one another," says a third gloomily, half to himself. _This_ one is an old fellow, growing gray, and he always takes his sour cabbage soup into a corner, and eats it there.

"Do you think his superiors will take _your_ advice whether they shall show him the door or not?" adds a fourth, who doesn't seem to care about it at all, giving a stroke to his balalaka.

"Well, why not?" replies the second angrily; "if you _are_ asked, answer what's in your mind. But no, with us fellows it's all mere cry, and when you ought to go at things with a will, everybody sneaks out."

"That's _so_!" says the one playing with the balalaka. "Hard labour and prison are just the things to cause _that_."

"It was like that the other day," says the second one, without hearing the remark made to him. "There was a little wheat left, sweepings, a mere nothing; there was some idea of turning the refuse into money; well, look here, they took it to him, and he confiscated it. All economy, you see. Was that _so_, and was it right--yes or no?"

"But whom can you complain to?"

"To whom? Why, the 'spector (_Inspector_) who's coming."

"What 'spector?"

"It's true, pals, a 'spector is coming soon," said a youthful convict, who had got some sort of knowledge, had read the "d.u.c.h.esse de la Valliere," or some book of that sort, and who had been Quartermaster in a regiment; a bit of a wag, whom, as a man of information, the convicts held in a sort of respect. Without paying the least attention to the exciting debate, he goes straight to the cook, and asks him for some liver. Our cooks often deal in victuals of that kind; they used to buy a whole liver, cut it in pieces, and sell it to the other convicts.

"Two kopecks' worth, or four?" asks cook.

"A four-kopeck cut; I'll eat, the others shall look on and long," says this convict. "Yes, pals, a general, a real general, is coming from Petersburg to 'spect all Siberia; it's so, heard it at the Governor's place."

This news produces an extraordinary effect. For a quarter of an hour they ask each other who this General can be? what's his t.i.tle? whether his grade is higher than that of the Generals of our town? The convicts delight in discussing ranks and degrees, in finding out who's at the head of things, who can make the other officials crook their backs, and to whom he crooks his own; so they get up an argument and quarrel about their Generals, and rude words fly about, all in honour of these high officers--fights, too, sometimes. What interest can _they_ possibly have in it? When one hears convicts speaking of Generals and high officials one gets a measure of their intelligence as they were while still in the world before the prison days. It cannot be concealed that among our people, even in much higher circles, talk about generals and high officials is looked upon as the most serious and refined conversation.

"Well, you see, they _have_ sent our Major to the right about, don't ye?" observes Kva.s.soff, a little, rubicund, choleric, small-brained fellow, the same who had announced the supersession of the Major.

"We'll just grease their palm for them," this, in staccato tones from the morose old fellow in the corner who had finished his sour cabbage soup.

"I should think he would grease their palms, by Jove," says another; "he has stolen money enough, the brigand. And, only think, he was only a regimental Major before he came here. He's feathered his nest. Why, a little while ago he was engaged to the head priest's daughter."

"But he didn't get married; they turned him off, and that shows he's poor. A pretty sort of fellow to get engaged! He's got nothing but the coat on his back; last year, Easter time, he lost all he had at cards.

Fedka told me so."

"Well, well, pals, I've been married myself, but it's a bad thing for a poor devil; taking a wife is soon done, but the fun of it is more like an inch than a mile," observes Skouratoff, who had just joined in the general talk.

"Do you fancy we're going to amuse ourselves by discussing _you_?" says the ex-quartermaster in a superior manner. "Kva.s.soff, I tell you you're a big idiot! If you fancy that the Major can grease the palm of an Inspector-General you've got things finely muddled; d'ye fancy they send a man from Petersburg just to inspect your Major? You're a precious dolt, my lad; take it from me that it is so."

"And you fancy because he's a General he doesn't take what's offered?"

said some one in the crowd in a sceptical tone.

"I should think he did indeed, and plenty of it whenever he can."

"A dead sure thing that; gets bigger, and more, and worse, the higher the rank."

"A General _always_ has his palm greased," says Kva.s.soff, sententiously.

"Did _you_ ever give them money, as you're so sure of it?" asks Baklouchin, suddenly striking in, in a tone of contempt; "come, now, did you ever see a General in all your life?"

"Yes."

"Liar!"

"Liar, yourself!"

"Well, boys, as he _has_ seen a General, let him say _which_. Come, quick about it; I know 'em all, every man jack."

"I've seen General Zibert," says Kva.s.soff in tones far from sure.

"Zibert! There's no General of that name. That's the General, perhaps, who was looking at your back when they gave you the cat. This Zibert was, perhaps, a Lieutenant-Colonel; but you were in such a fright just then, you took him for a General."

"No! Just hear me," cries Skouratoff, "for I've got a wife. There was really a General of that name, a German, but a Russian subject. He confessed to the Pope, every year, all about his peccadilloes with gay women, and drank water like a duck, at least forty gla.s.ses of Moskva water one after the other; that was the way he got cured of some disease. I had it from his valet."