Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (205 page)

‘“You’ve tormented me enough. Say your prayers.”

‘I seized her by the hair-she had long, thick tresses- I rolled them round my arm. I held her between my knees, took out my knife, threw her head back, and cut her throat. She screamed, the blood gushed out. Then I threw away my knife. I pressed her with all my might in my arms. I put her on the ground and embraced her, yelling at the top of my voice. She screamed; I yelled; she struggled and struggled. The blood-her blood-splashed my face, my hands. It was stronger than I was-stronger. Then I took fright. I left her-left my horse and began to run; ran back to the house.

‘ I went in the back way, and hid myself in an old ramshackle bath-house which we never used now. I lay myself down under the seat, and remained hidden till dead of night.’

‘And Akoulka?’

‘She got up to come back to the house. They found her later, a hundred yards from the place.’

‘So you hadn’t finished her off?’

‘No.’ Chichkoff was silent for a while.

‘Yes,’ said Tchérévine, ‘there’s a particular artery; if you don’t sever it at once the victim will continue struggling; the blood may flow fast enough, but he won’t die.’

‘But she was dead all the same. They found her in the evening, and she was cold. They told the police, and searched for me. They found me at night in the old bath.

‘And there you have it. I’ve been four years here already,’ he added, after a pause.

‘Yes, if you don’t beat ’em you make no way at all,’ said Tchérévine sententiously, taking out his snuff-box once again. He took his pinches very slowly, with long pauses. ‘For all that, my lad, you behaved like a fool. Why, I myself-I caught my wife with a lover. I called her into the shed, doubled a halter, and said:

‘“To whom did you swear to be faithful? To whom did you swear it in church? Tell me that?”

‘And then I gave it her with my halter-beat her and beat her for an hour and a half, till at last she was quite spent, and cried out:

‘“I’ll wash your feet and drink the water afterwards.”

‘Her name was Crodotia.’

CHAPTER V

THE SUMMER SEASON

April is here; Holy Week is not far off. We set about our summer tasks. The sun becomes hotter and more brilliant every day; there is spring in the air, and it has a powerful effect upon one’s nervous system. The convict in his chains feels the trembling influence of the lovely days, just like any other creature; it rouses desires in him, inexpressible longings for his home, and many other things. I think a man misses his liberty and yearns for freedom more when the day is filled with sunlight than during the rainy and melancholy days of autumn and winter. You may observe this clearly in prison; if the convicts experience a little happiness on a beautiful clear day, they react more readily towards impatience and irritability.

I noticed that in spring there was much more squabbling and more noise; the men shouted louder, and fought more frequently. During working hours one would sometimes notice a man apparently deep in meditation. His gaze seemed lost somewhere in the blue distance on the far bank of the Irtych, where the boundless plain stretched for hundreds of versts, the free Kirghiz Steppe. One would hear long, deep-drawn sighs, as if the air of those wide and free regions, haunted by the convict’s thought, forced him to breathe deeply, and was a kind of solace to his crushed and fettered soul.

At length one poor fellow cries out ‘Ah!’-a long wailing sound-then seizes his pick-axe or gathers up his load of bricks. After a few moments he seems to have forgotten his unhappiness: he begins laughing, or insulting his fellow workers, so fitful in his humour. Then he sets furiously to work with unwonted vigour; he labours for all he is worth, as if hoping that fatigue will stifle the grief which has him by the throat. You see, these convicts are all able-bodied men, all in the flower of their age, with every faculty still unimpaired.

How heavy the irons are during this season! What I say is not sentimentality, it is the report of careful observation. During the hot season, under a fiery sun, when all one’s being, all one’s soul, is vividly conscious of, and feels intimately, the immense force of nature’s resurrection all around, it is more difficult to support the confinement, the perpetual surveillance, the tyranny of a will other than one’s own.

Besides this, it is in spring with the first song of the lark that throughout all Siberia and Russia men set out on the tramp; God’s creatures do their best to escape from prison into the woods. After working in some suffocating ditch or at the boats, after enduring the irons, the rods and whips, they wander where they please, wherever their footsteps lead them; they eat and drink what they can get (it is always pot-luck with them); and by night they sleep undisturbed in field or forest without a care, without the agony of knowing themselves in prison, as if they were God’s own birds; their ‘good night’ is whispered to the stars, and the eye that watches them is the eye of God. Not altogether a rosy life, by any means; sometimes hunger and fatigue are heavy on them ‘in the service of General Cuckoo.’ Often enough the wanderers have not a morsel of bread to chew for days on end. They have to hide from everybody, run to earth like marmots. Sometimes they are driven to robbery, pillage- nay, even murder.

‘Send a man there and he becomes a child, and throws himself on all he sees’; that is what people say of those transported to Siberia. The saying may be applied even more fitly to tramps. They are almost all brigands and thieves, of necessity rather than by inclination. Many of them are hardened to the life, beyond reclaim. There are convicts who take to the road after serving their time, even after being given land of their own. They ought to be happy in their new state, with their daily bread assured» But it is not so; an irresistible impulse drives them to wander.

This life in the woods, wretched and fearful as it is, yet still free and adventurous, has a mysterious allure for those who have experienced it. Among these fugitives you may be surprised to find people of sound judgment and peaceable temper, who had shown every promise of becoming good husbandmen. A convict will marry, have children, and live for five years in the same place; then all of a sudden, one fine morning, he will disappear to the astonishment of his family and the whole neighbourhood, abandoning bis wife and children.

When I was in prison one of these fugitives from house and home was pointed out to me. He had committed no crime-at least, he was under suspicion of none-but throughout his life he had deserted post after post. He had visited the southern frontiers of the empire, he had journeyed beyond the Danube, in the Kirghiz Steppe, in Eastern Siberia, the Caucasus, and many other regions. Who knows but that under other conditions the fellow might have been a Robinson Crusoe, so strong a hold the passion of travel had over him. These details I learned from other convicts, for he did not like talking, and never opened his mouth except when absolutely necessary. He was a peasant, short of stature, about fifty years old, and very quiet in demeanour, with a face so still as to seem quite vacant, so impassive as to suggest weak-mindedness. His delight was to sit for hours in the sun humming a sort of song between his teeth so softly that he was inaudible five yards away. His “features were, so to speak, petrified; he ate little, principally black bread; he never bought white bread or spirits. My belief is that he never had had any money, and that he couldn’t have counted it if he had. He was indifferent to everything. Sometimes he fed the prison dogs with his own hand, a thing no one else was known to do (speaking generally, Russians don’t like feeding dogs from the hand). It was said that he had been twice married, and that he had children somewhere. Why he had been sent to Siberia as a convict I have not the least idea. We fellows were always fancying that he would escape, but his hour did not come, or perhaps had come and gone; anyhow, he went through with his punishment without resistance. He seemed an element quite foreign to the medium wherein he had his being, an alien, self-concentrated creature. Still, there was nothing in that deep surface-calm that one could trust, although to escape would have profited him little.

Compared with prison life, roaming through the forests is as the joys of Paradise. The tramp’s lot is wretched enough, but it is at least free. So it is that every prisoner in Russia becomes restless with the first rays of smiling spring.

Comparatively few make any settled plans for flight, they fear the obstacles with which they will meet and the punishment that may ensue. Only one in a hundred, certainly not more, makes up his mind to escape, but the means of doing so never cease to haunt the minds of the other ninety-nine. Filled as their thoughts are with this longing, anything that looks like offering a chance of success consoles them, and they set about comparing the facts with cases of successful escape. I speak only of those prisoners who have already been sentenced, for those awaiting trial are much more ready to attempt escape. A condemned man rarely manages to get away unless he attempts it in early days of his imprisonment. After two or three years a convict credits the time he has then served to a sort of mental banking account, and concludes that it is better to pay off the law and settle on the land as a free man, rather than forfeit that period if he fails to escape, which is always possible. Certainly not more than one convict in ten succeeds in
changing his lot.
Those who do have almost invariably been sentenced to a very long term of imprisonment, perhaps even for life: fifteen, twenty years seem like an eternity to them. Even so, branding makes it extremely difficult to escape detection.

‘Changing one’s lot’ is prison jargon. When a convict is caught trying to escape, he is subjected to formal interrogation, and will say that he wished to ‘change his lot.’ This somewhat literary formula exactly describes the act in question. No escaped prisoner ever hopes to become a perfectly free man, for he knows that it is almost impossible; what he hopes for is to be sent to some other convict establishment or put on the land, or tried again for some offence committed while on the tramp; in a word, to be sent somewhere else, no matter where, provided he can leave his present place of confinement, which has become unendurable. All these fugitives, unless they find some unexpected shelter for the winter, unless they meet someone ready to conceal them, or unless, as a last resort, they can procure (even at the cost of murder) a passport, flock to the towns in autumn, present themselves at the prison gates, and give themselves up as escaped convicts. They spend the winter in jail, hoping to get away again in the following summer.

I too felt the influence of spring. I well remember how eagerly I gazed at the horizon through gaps in the fence; I would stand for hours on end with my head glued to the palings, watching intently the grass grow green in the moat, and the deepening blue of the distant sky. My anguish, my melancholy, were heavier on me; as each day wore away the jail became odious, detestable. Hatred towards me as a gentleman filled the convicts’ hearts during those first years, and their animosity poisoned my whole life. I often begged to be sent to the hospital, though there was no need of it, simply to escape from the barrack-room and feel myself out of range of that unrelenting and implacable hostility.

‘You nobles have beaks of iron; you tore us to pieces when we were serfs,’ my neighbours used to say. How I envied prisoners from the lower classes! It was so different for them, they were mates with everyone from the start. So it was that in springtime, when Freedom showed herself as it were a phantom of the season, and joy was diffused throughout Nature, they roused in my soul redoubled melancholy and nervous irritability.

As the sixth week of Lent approached I had to fulfil my religious duties. The convicts were divided by the authorities into seven groups of about thirty men-answering to the weeks in Lent-each of which had to perform its devotions in turn. That week was a great solace to me; we went two or three times a day to the church not far from 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 memory of things long, long past, and awoke my earliest impressions to fresh life. I remember so clearly how happy I was when in the morning we were marched off to God’s house, treading the frozen earth under an escort of soldiers with loaded muskets; the escort remained outside the church.

Once within, we were massed close to the door, so that we could scarcely hear anything except the deep voice of the deacon; now and again we caught a glimpse of a black chasuble or the bare head of the priest. Then I recalled how, as a! child, I used to look at the common people who stood huddled at the door; how they made way in servile fashion for some important fellow with epaulettes, some nobleman with a big paunch. Or it might be some pious lady in her splendid gown hurrying for a front seat and ready to make trouble if there was any unwillingness to honour her with the best place. As it seemed to me then, it was only
there,
near the church door, just inside the porch, that prayer was offered with genuine fervour and humility; only there that folk prostrated with true self-abasement and a full sense of their unworthiness.

And now I myself ranked with the common people; no, not even that, for we were outcast and in chains. Everyone shunned us. We were feared, and alms were slipped into our hands as if we were beggars. I remember that all this gave me the strange sensation of a refined and subtle pleasure. ‘So be it!’ 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 the collection for church expenses. ‘ I too, I am a man,’ each one of them perhaps said, as he made his offering. ‘Before God we are all equal.’

At the end of six o’clock mass we went up to communion. When the priest,
ciborium
in hand, recited the words ‘Have mercy on me as Thou had’st on the thief whom Thou didst save,’ nearly all the convicts prostrated themselves, and their chains rattled. I think they took these words literally as applied to themselves, and not as being from Scripture.