Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (209 page)

Nobody would ever have decided to kill our goat Vaska had not something extraordinary happened. I don’t know how it came to be in the prison, or who had brought it. It was a white kid, and very pretty. After some days it had won all hearts with its diverting and winning ways. As some excuse was needed for keeping it in the jail, it was given out that it was absolutely necessary to have a goat in the stables. Vaska did not, however, live there, but chiefly in the kitchen, and after a while he used to roam about all over the place. The creature was full of grace and as playful as could be; he jumped on the tables, wrestled with the convicts, came when called, and was always full of fun and high spirits.

One evening the Lesghian Babaï, who was seated with a crowd of fellows on the stone steps at the door of the barrack, took it into his head to have a wrestling bout with Vaska, whose horns were fairly long.

They were butting one another with their foreheads, a procedure whereby the men used often to amuse themselves, when all of a sudden Vaska jumped on the highest step, reared on his hind legs, drew up his forefeet, and managed to strike the Lesghian on the back of the neck with all his might, and with such effect that Babai went headlong down the steps, to the great delight of all the bystanders, as well as of Babai himself.

Yes, we all adored our Vaska. When he reached the age of puberty a solemn conclave was held, as a result of which he was subjected to an operation performed with great skill by one of the prison vets.

‘Well,’ said the convicts, ‘he won’t have any goat-smell about him, that’s one comfort.’

Vaska then began to put on fat in the most surprising manner, though I must confess that we overfed him. He became a most beautiful fellow with magnificent horns, and corpulent beyond words. Sometimes as he walked he rolled over heavily on the ground through sheer obesity. He used to accompany us to work, which amused the convicts and everyone else who watched. There was nobody who was unacquainted with Vaska, the jail-bird.

Whilst at work on the river bank, the prisoners used to cut willow branches and other foliage, and gather flowers in the ditches to ornament Vaska. They used to twine the branches and flowers round his horns and decorate his body with garlands. Vaska would return at the head of the gang splendidly arrayed; we followed, full of pride at seeing him so beautiful.

Love for our goat went so far that prisoners raised the foolish question whether Vaska ought not to have his horns gilded. It was a vain idea, and nothing came of it. I asked Akim Akimitch, the best gilder in the jail, whether it were possible to gild a goat’s horns. He examined Vaska’s closely, thought a bit, and then said that it could be done but that it would not last, and would be quite useless. So nothing more was done. Vaska would have lived for many years more, and, no doubt, have died of asthma at the last, if, one day as he returned from work at the head of the procession, his path had not been crossed by the governor, who was seated in his carriage. Vaska was in particularly gorgeous array.

‘Halt!’ yelled the governor. ‘Whose goat is that?’

They told him.

‘What, a goat in the prison! and without my leave? Sergeant!’

The sergeant was ordered to kill the goat without a moment’s delay; flay him, and sell his skin, and put the proceeds to the prisoners’ account. As to the meat, he ordered it to be cooked with the cabbage soup.

The occurrence was much discussed and the goat was much mourned, but nobody dared disobey the governor. Vaska was put to death close to the rubbish-dump to which I have alluded. One of the convicts bought the carcase, paying a rouble and fifty kopecks, and with this money white bread was bought for everybody. The man who had purchased the goat afterwards sold it at retail when it had been roasted. The meat was delicious.

We also kept for some time a steppe eagle, quite a small species. A convict brought it in, wounded and half dead. Everyone gathered round. The bird could not fly, its right wing being quite powerless and one of its legs was badly hurt. It gazed angrily upon the curious crowd, and opened its crooked beak as if prepared to sell its life dearly. After watching it for some time the crowd dispersed; the lamed bird went off, hopping on one leg and flapping his wing, hid itself in the farthest corner of the prison which it could find, and there cowered against the palings.

During the three months that he remained in the courtyard he never left that corner. At first we went to look at him fairly often. Bull was sometimes set at him: furiously he would rush, but was frightened to go too near, which greatly amused the convicts. ‘A wild chap that! He won’t stand any nonsense!’ But after a while Bull overcame his fear, and began to worry the eagle. When roused, the dog would catch hold of his broken wing. The creature would defend itself with beak and claws, and then huddle even closer in its corner with the proud, savage look of a wounded king, fixing his gaze steadily upon those who beheld his misery.

The men tired of this sport after a while, and the eagle seemed quite forgotten; but there was someone who every day set by him a piece of fresh meat and a vessel with some water. At first, and for several days, the eagle would touch nothing; but at last he decided to take what was left for him, though he would never be persuaded to take anything from the hand or in public. Sometimes I managed to observe his proceedings from some distance.

When he saw nobody and thought he was alone, he ventured out of his corner, limped along the palisade for a dozen yards or so, and then returned. So he would go, backward and forward, as if he were taking exercise for his health under doctor’s orders. As soon as he caught sight of me he would make for his corner as quickly as possible, limping and hopping. He would then throw back his head, open his mouth, ruffle himself, and apparently prepare to fight.

In vain I tried to caress him. He bit and struggled as soon as he was touched. Not once did he take the meat I offered him, and all the time I remained near him he kept his wicked, piercing eye upon me. Lonely and revengeful he waited for death, defiant and refusing to be reconciled.

At last, after two months of oblivion, the convicts remembered him; then they showed a sympathy which I had not expected of them. It was unanimously agreed to carry him outside.

‘Let him die, but let him die in freedom,’ said they.

‘Sure enough, a free and independent bird like that will never get used to the prison,’ added others.

‘He’s not like us,’ said one.

‘Oh, well, he’s a bird, and we’re human beings.’

‘The eagle, pals, is the king of the woods,’ began Skouratof; but that day nobody paid any-attention to him.

One afternoon, when the drum beat for work, they took the eagle, tied his beak (for he assumed a desperate attitude), and took him out on to the ramparts. The twelve convicts forming the gang were extremely anxious to know where he would go. It was a strange thing; they all seemed as happy as though they had themselves obtained their freedom.

‘ Oh, the wretched brute. One wants to do him a kindness, and he tears your hand for you by way of thanks,’ said the man who held him, looking almost lovingly at the spiteful bird.

‘Let him go, Mikitka!’

‘ It doesn’t suit
him
being a prisoner. Give him his freedom, his jolly freedom.’

They threw him from the ramparts on to the steppe. It was the end of autumn, a grey, cold day. The wind whistled on the bare steppe and went groaning through the yellow dried-up grass. The eagle made off at once, flapping his wounded wing, as if in a hurry to quit us and find shelter from our inquisitive gaze. The convicts watched him intently as he went along with his head just above the grass.

‘ Do you see him, eh?’ said one very pensively.

‘He doesn’t look round,’ said another;
‘he hasn’t looked behind once.’

‘Did you by any chance imagine he’d come back to thank us?’ said a third.

‘Ay, he’s free; he feels it. It’s
freedom!’

‘Yes, freedom.’

‘You won’t see him any more, pals.’

‘What are you loitering about for? March, march!’ yelled the
escort, and all went slowly to their work.

CHAPTER VII

GRIEVANCES

At the outset of this chapter, the editor of this work by the late Alexander Petrovitch Goriantchikoff thinks it his duty to communicate what follows to his readers.

In the first chapter of the
Recollections of the House of the Dead,
something was said about a parricide of noble birth. He was put forward as an instance of the insensibility with which convicts speak of their crimes. It was also stated that he refused altogether to confess to the authorities and the court, but that, thanks to the statements of persons who knew all the details of his case and history, his guilt was proved beyond all doubt. These persons informed the author of the
Recollections
that the criminal had been of dissolute life and overwhelmed with debts, and that he had murdered his father in order to inherit his property. Besides, the whole town where this parricide was imprisoned told exactly the same story, a fact of which the editor of these
Recollections
has fully satisfied himself. It was further stated that the murderer, even when in jail, was of quite a joyous and cheerful frame of mind, a sort of inconsiderate giddy-pated person although intelligent, and that the author of the
Recollections
had never observed any particular signs of cruelty about him; to which he added: ‘So I, for my part, could never bring myself to believe him guilty.’

Some time ago the present editor had word from Siberia concerning the discovery that the ‘parricide’ was in fact innocent and had done ten years’ hard labour for nothing. That was recognized and avowed by the authorities. The real criminals had been discovered and had confessed, and the unfortunate man in question set at liberty. All this stands upon unimpeachable and authoritative testimony.

To say more would be useless: the tragic facts speak too clearly for themselves. Words fail in such cases, when a life has been ruined by an accusation of this kind. Such mistakes as these are among the dreadful possibilities of life, and such possibilities impart a keener and more vivid interest to the
Recollections of the House of the Dead,
which dreadful place, as we see, may contain innocent as well as guilty men.

To continue. I have said that I at last became accustomed, if not reconciled, to the conditions of prison life; but it was a long and dreadful time before I did. It took me almost a year to get used to the prison, and I shall always regard those months as the most terrible in my life: they are graven deep in my memory, down to the very smallest details. I think I could recall every single event and the emotions of each successive hour in it.

I have said that other prisoners, too, found it equally difficult to get used to the life they were obliged to lead. During the whole of that first year I used to ask myself whether they were really as calm as they seemed to be. Questions of this kind pressed themselves upon me. As I have already said, every convict felt himself in an alien element to which he could not reconcile himself. The sense of home was an impossibility; he felt as if he were lodging at some vile inn, a mere stage upon a journey. These men, exiles for and from life, seemed to be either in a perpetual smouldering agitation, or else in deep depression; but there was not one who had not his own everyday ideas about one thing and another. That restlessness which, if it did not come to the surface, was still unmistakable; those vague hopes which the poor creatures entertained in spite of themselves, hopes so ill founded that they were more like the illusions of approaching insanity than anything else; all stamped the place with a character, an originality, peculiarly its own. One could not but feel that there was nothing like it anywhere else in the world. Everybody moved in a sort of waking dream; nor was there anything to relieve or qualify the impression made by the place on each man’s personality. All seemed to suffer from a sort of remote hypersensitivity, and this dreaming of impossibilities gave to the majority of the convicts a sombre and morose aspect for which the word morbid is not strong enough. Nearly all were taciturn and irascible, preferring to keep to themselves the hopes they cherished in secret and in vain. The result was that anything like ingenuousness or truthfulness was the object of general contempt. Precisely because these wild hopes were impossible of fulfilment and, in spite of everything, well known and confessed to their more lucid selves to be so, they kept them jealously concealed in the most secret recesses of their hearts. Yet to renounce them was beyond the power of self-control. It may be they were ashamed of their imagination. God knows. The Russian character is normally so positive and sober in its way of looking at life, so pitiless in criticism of its own weaknesses.

Perhaps it was this inward misery of self-dissatisfaction which underlay the impatience and intolerance shown by the convicts towards one another, and the cruel biting words they spoke to each other. If one of them, more naïve or confiding than the rest, put into words what every one of them had in his mind, painted his castles in the air, told his dreams of liberty or plans of escape, they silenced him with brutal promptitude, and made the poor fellow’s life a burden with their sarcasms and jests. And I think those who did so most unscrupulously had perhaps themselves gone furthest in cherishing futile hopes, indulging senseless aspirations. I have said more than once that those among them who were noticeable for their simplicity and candour tended to be considered stupid and idiotic;
they earned nothing but contempt. The convicts were so soured and hypersensitive that they positively hated anything resembling amiability or unselfishness. I should be disposed to classify them all broadly as either good or bad men, morose or cheerful, and to recognize as a class apart those ingenuous fellows who could not hold their tongues. But the sour-tempered were in far the greatest majority. Some of them were talkative, but these were usually of slanderous and envious disposition, always poking their noses into other people’s business, though they took good care not to let anyone catch a glimpse of their own secret thoughts; that would have been against the fashion and convention of this strange little world. As to the fellows who were really good-very few indeed were they-they were always very quiet and peaceable, and buried their hopes (if they had any) in strict silence; but those hopes were accompanied by more real faith than was the case with the gloomy-minded. There was, however, yet another category which ought not to be forgotten-the men who had lost all hope, the despairing and the desperate, such, for example, as the old man from Starodoub. But they were very few indeed.