The House of the Dead: or, Prison Life in Siberia

"'What d'ye mean by lying in bed, you hound, you thief!' She abused me for some time, then she said, 'Marry Akoulka. They'll be glad to give her to you, and they'll give three hundred roubles with her.'

"'But,' says I, 'all the world knows that she's a bad girl – '

"'Hist, the marriage ceremony cures all that; besides, she'll always be in fear of her life from you, so you'll be in clover together. Their money would make us comfortable; I've spoken about the marriage already to Marie Stépanovna, we're of one mind about it.'

"So I say, 'Let's have twenty roubles down on the spot, and I'll have her.'

"Well, you needn't believe it unless you please, but I was drunk right up to the wedding-day. Then Philka Marosof kept threatening me all the time.

"'I'll break every bone in your body, a nice fellow you to be engaged, and to Akoulka; if I like I'll sleep every blessed night with her when she's your wife.'

"'You're a hound, and a liar,' that's what I said to him. But he insulted me so in the street, before everybody, that I ran to Aukoudim's and said, 'I won't marry her unless I have fifty roubles down this moment.'"

"And they really did give her to you in marriage?"

"Me? Why not, I should like to know? We were respectable people enough. Father had been ruined by a fire a little before he died; he had been a richer man than Aukoudim Trophimtych.

"'A fellow without a shirt to his back like you ought to be only too happy to marry my daughter;' that's what old Aukoudim said.

"'Just you think of your door, and the pitch that went on it,' I said to him.

"'Stuff and nonsense,' said he, 'there's no proof whatever that the girl's gone wrong.'

"'Please yourself. There's the door, and you can go about your business; but give back the money you've had!'

"Then Philka Marosof and I settled it together to send Mitri Bykoff to Father Aukoudim to tell him that we'd insult him to his face before everybody. Well, I had my skin as full as it could hold right up to the wedding-day. I wasn't sober till I got into the church. When they took us home after church the girl's uncle, Mitrophone Stépanytch, said:

"'This isn't a nice business; but it's over and done now.'

"Old Aukoudim was sitting there crying, the tears rolled down on his gray beard. Comrade, I'll tell you what I had done: I had put a whip into my pocket before we went to church, and I'd made up my mind to have it out of her with that, so that all the world might know how I'd been swindled into the marriage, and not think me a bigger fool than I am."

"I see, and you wanted her to know what was in store for her. Ah, was – ?"

"Quiet, nunky, quiet! Among our people I'll tell you how it is; directly after the marriage ceremony they take the couple to a room apart, and the others remain drinking till they return. So I'm left alone with Akoulka; she was pale, not a bit of colour on her cheeks; frightened out of her wits. She had fine hair, supple and bright as flax, and great big eyes. She scarcely ever was known to speak; you might have thought she was dumb; an odd creature, Akoulka, if ever there was one. Well, you can just imagine the scene. My whip was ready on the bed. Well, she was as pure a girl as ever was, not a word of it all was true."

"Impossible!"

"True, I swear; as good a girl as any good family might wish."

"Then, brother, why – why – why had she had to undergo all that torture? Why had Philka Marosof slandered her so?"

"Yes, why, indeed?"

"Well, I got down from the bed, and went on my knees before her, and put my hands together as if I were praying, and just said to her, 'Little mother, pet, Akoulka Koudimovna, forgive me for having been such an idiot as to believe all that slander; forgive me. I'm a hound!'

"She was seated on the bed, and gazed at me fixedly. She put her two hands on my shoulders and began to laugh; but the tears were running all down her cheeks. She sobbed and laughed all at once.

"Then I went out and said to the people in the other room, 'Let Philka Marosof look to himself. If I come across him he won't be long for this world.'

"The old people were beside themselves with delight. Akoulka's mother was ready to throw herself at her daughter's feet, and sobbed.

"Then the old man said, 'If we had known really how it was, my dearest child, we wouldn't have given you a husband of that sort.'

"You ought to have seen how we were dressed the first Sunday after our marriage – when we left church! I'd got a long coat of fine cloth, a fur cap, with plush breeches. She had a pelisse of hareskin, quite new, and a silk kerchief on her head. One was as fine as the other. Everybody admired us. I must say I looked well, and pet Akoulka did too. One oughtn't to boast, but one oughtn't to sing small. I tell you people like us are not turned out by the dozen."

"Not a doubt about it."

"Just you listen, I tell you. The day after my marriage I ran off from my guests, drunk as I was, and went about the streets crying, 'Where's that scoundrel of a Philka Marosof? Just let him come near me, the hound, that's all!' I went all over the market-place yelling that out. I was as drunk as a man could be, and stand.

"They went after me and caught me close to Vlassof's place. It took three men to get me back again to the house.

"Well, nothing else was spoken about all over the village. The girls said, when they met in the market-place, 'Well, you've heard the news – Akoulka was all right!'

"A little while after I do come across Philka Marosof, who said to me before everybody, strangers to the place, too, 'Sell your wife, and spend the money on drink. Jackka the soldier only married for that; he didn't sleep one night with his wife; but he got enough to keep his skin full for three years.'

"I answered him, 'Hound!'

"'But,' says he, 'you're an idiot! You didn't know what you were about when you married – you were drunk. How could you tell all about it?'

"So off I went to the house, and cried out to them 'You married me when I was drunk.'

"Akoulka's mother tried to fasten herself on me; but I cried, 'Mother, you don't know about anything but money. You bring me Akoulka!'

"And didn't I beat her! I tell you I beat her for two hours running, till I rolled on the floor myself with fatigue. She couldn't leave her bed for three weeks."

"It's a dead sure thing," said Tchérévine phlegmatically; "if you don't beat them they – Did you find her with her lover?"

"No; to tell the truth, I never actually caught her," said Chichkoff after a pause, speaking with effort; "but I was hurt, a good deal hurt, for every one made fun of me. The cause of it all was Philka. 'Your wife is just made for everybody to look at,' said he.

"One day he invited us to see him, and then he went at it. 'Do just look what a good little wife he has! Isn't she tender, fine, nicely brought up, affectionate, full of kindness for all the world? I say, my lad, have you forgotten how we daubed their door with pitch?' I was full at that moment, drunk as may be; then he seized me by the hair and had me down upon the ground before I knew where I was. 'Come along – dance; aren't you Akoulka's husband? I'll hold your hair for you, and you shall dance; it will be good fun.' 'Dog!' said I to him. 'I'll bring some jolly fellows to your house,' said he, 'and I'll whip your Akoulka before your very eyes just as long as I please.' Would you believe it? For a whole month I daren't go out of the house, I was so afraid he'd come to us and drag my wife through the dirt. And how I did beat her for it!"

"What was the use of beating her? You can tie a woman's hands, but not her tongue. You oughtn't to give them a hiding too often. Beat 'em a bit, then scold 'em well, then fondle 'em; that's what a woman is made for."

Chichkoff remained quite silent for a few moments.

"I was very much hurt," he went on; "I began it again just as before. I beat her from morning till night for nothing; because she didn't get up from her seat the way I liked; because she didn't walk to suit me. When I wasn't hiding her, time hung heavy on my hands. Sometimes she sat by the window crying silently – it hurt my feelings sometimes to see her cry, but I beat her all the same. Sometimes her mother abused me for it: 'You're a scoundrel, a gallows-bird!' 'Don't say a word or I'll kill you; you made me marry her when I was drunk, you swindled me.' Old Aukoudim wanted at first to have his finger in the pie. Said he to me one day: 'Look here, you're not such a tremendous fellow that one can't put you down;' but he didn't get far on that track. Marie Stépanovna had become as sweet as milk. One day she came to me crying her eyes out and said: 'My heart is almost broken, Ivan Semionytch; what I'm going to ask of you is a little thing for you, but it is a good deal to me; let her go, let her leave you, daddy Ivan.' Then she throws herself at my feet. 'Do give up being so angry! Wicked people slander her; you know quite well she was good when you married her.' Then she threw herself at my feet again and cried. But I was as hard as nails. 'I won't hear a word you have to say; what I choose to do, I do, to you or anybody, for I'm crazed with it all. As to Philka Marosof, he's my best and dearest friend.'"

"You'd begun to play your pranks together again, you and he?"

"No, by Jove! He was out of the way by this time; he was killing himself with drink, nothing less. He had spent all he had on drink, and had 'listed for a soldier, as substitute for a citizen body in the town. In our parts, when a lad makes up his mind to be substitute for another, he is master of that house and everybody there till he's called to the ranks. He gets the sum agreed on the day he goes off, but up to then he lives in the house of the man who buys him, sometimes six whole months, and there isn't a horror in the whole world those fellows are not guilty of. It's enough to make folks take the holy images out of the house. From the moment he consents to be substitute for the son of the family then he considers himself their patron and benefactor, and makes them dance as he pipes, or else he goes off the bargain.

"So Philka Marosof played the very mischief at the home of this townsman. He slept with the daughter, pulled the master of the house by the beard after dinner, did anything that came into his head. They had to heat the bath for him every day, and, what's more, give him brandy fumes with the steam of the bath: and he would have the women lead him by the arms to the bath room.⁶

"When he came back to the man's house after a revel elsewhere, he would stop right in the middle of the road and cry out:

"'I won't go in by the door; pull down the fence!'

"And they actually had to pull down the fence, though there was the door right at it to let him in. That all came to an end though, the day they took him to the regiment. That day he was sobered sufficiently. The crowd gathered all through the street.

"'They're taking off Philka Marosof!'

"He made a salute on all sides, right and left. Just at that moment Akoulka was returning from the kitchen-garden. Directly Philka saw her he cried out to her:

"'Stop!' and down he jumped from the cart and threw himself down at her feet.

"'My soul, my sweet little strawberry, I've loved you two years long. Now they're taking me off to the regiment with the band playing. Forgive me, good honest girl of a good honest father, for I'm nothing but a hound, and all you've gone through is my fault.'

"Then he flings himself down before her a second time. At first Akoulka was exceedingly frightened; but she made him a great bow, which nearly bent her double.

"'Forgive me, too, my good lad; but I am really not at all angry with you.'

"As she went into the house I was at her heels.

"'What did you say to him, you she-devil, you?'

"Now you may believe it or not as you like, but she looked at me as bold as you please, and answered:

"'I love him better than anything or anybody in this world.'

"'I say!'

"That day I didn't utter one single word. Only towards evening I said to her: 'Akoulka, I'm going to kill you now.' I didn't close an eye the whole night. I went into the little room leading to ours and drank kwass. At daybreak I went into the house again. 'Akoulka, get ready and come into the fields.' I had arranged to go there before; my wife knew it.

"'You are right,' said she. 'It's quite time to begin reaping. I've heard that our labourer is ill and doesn't work a bit.'

"I put to the cart without saying a word. As you go out of the town there's a forest fifteen versts in length. At the end of it is our field. When we had gone about three versts through the wood I stopped the horse.

"'Come, get up, Akoulka; your end is come.'

"She looked at me all in a fright, and got up without a word.

"'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 spurted 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 with all my might. 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 the old ramshackle bath-house, which we never used now. I lay myself down under the seat, and remained hid till the dead of the night."

"And Akoulka?"

"She got up to come back to the house; they found her later, a hundred steps from the place."

"So you hadn't finished her?"

"No." Chichkoff stopped a while.

"Yes," said Tchérévine, "there's a vein; if you don't cut it at the first the man will go on 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 hunted me up. They found me in the night in the old bath.

"And there you have it. I've been four years here already," added he, 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 more. He took his pinches very slowly, with long pauses. "For all that, my lad, you behaved like a fool. Why, I myself – I came upon my wife with a lover. I made her come into the shed, and then I doubled up a halter and said to her:

"'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 come; Holy Week is not far off. We set about our summer tasks. The sun becomes hotter and more brilliant every day; the atmosphere has the spring in it, and acts upon our nervous system powerfully. The convict, in his chains, feels the trembling influence of the lovely days like any other creature; they rouse desires in him, inexpressible longings for his home, and many other things. I think that he misses his liberty, 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 positively among convicts; if they do feel a little joy on a beautiful clear day, they have a reaction into greater impatience and irritability.

I noticed that in spring there was much more squabbling in our prison; there was more noise, the yelling was greater, there were more fights; during the working hours we would see a man sometimes fixed in a meditative gaze, which seemed lost in the blue distance somewhere, the other side of the Irtych, where stretched the boundless plain, with its flight of hundreds of versts, the free Kirghiz Steppe. Long-drawn sighs came to one's ear, sighs breathed from the depths of the chest; it might seem that the air of those wide and free regions, haunted by their thought, forced the convicts to draw deep respirations, and was a sort of solace to their crushed and fettered souls.

"Ah!" cries at last the poor prisoner all at once, with a long, sighing cry; then he seizes his pick furiously, or picks up the bricks, which he has to carry from one place to another. But after a brief minute he seems to forget the passing impression, and begins laughing, or insulting people near, so fitful is his humour; then he attacks the work he has to do with unusual fire, labours with might and main, as if trying to stifle by fatigue the grief that has him by the throat. You see they are fellows of unimpaired vigour, all in the very flower of life, with all their physical and other strength about them.

How heavy the irons are during this season! All this is not sentimentality, it is the report of rigorous observation. During the hot season, under a fiery sun, when all one's being, all one's soul, is vividly conscious of, and intimately feels, the unspeakably strong resurrection of nature going on everywhere, 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, if they can, break their prison and escape into the woods. After the stifling ditch where they work, after the boats, the irons, the rods and whips, they go vagabondizing where they please, wherever they can make it out best; they eat and drink what they can get, 'tis all the time pot-luck with them; and by night they sleep undisturbed in the woods or in a field, without a care, without the agony of knowing themselves in prison, as if they were God's own birds; their "good-night" is said 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 keep their teeth going for days and days. 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 just throws himself on all he sees"; that is what people say of those transported to Siberia. This saying may be applied even more fitly to the tramps. They are almost all brigands and thieves, by necessity rather than inclination. Many of them are hardened to the life, irreclaimable; there are convicts who go off after having served their time, even after they have been put on some land as their own. They ought to be happy in their new state, with their daily bread assured them. Well, it is not so; an irresistible impulse sends them wandering off.

This life in the woods, wretched and fearful as it is, but still free and adventurous, has a mysterious seduction for those who have experienced it; among these fugitives you may find to your surprise, people of good habit of mind, peaceable temper, who had shown every promise of becoming settled creatures – good tillers of the land. A convict will marry, have children, live for five years in the same place, then all of a sudden he will disappear one fine morning, abandoning wife and children, to the stupefaction of his family and the whole neighbourhood.

One day, I was shown at the convict establishment one of these deserters of the family hearthstone. He had committed no crime – at least, he was under suspicion of none – but all through his life he had been a deserter, a deserter from every post. He had been to the southern frontier of the empire, the other side of the Danube, in the Kirghiz Steppe, in Eastern Siberia, the Caucasus, in a word, everywhere. Who knows? under other conditions this man might have been a Robinson Crusoe, with the passion of travel so on him. These details I have from other convicts, for he did not like talk, and never opened his mouth except when absolutely necessary. He was a peasant, of quite small size, of some fifty years, very quiet in demeanour, with a face so still as to seem quite without any sort of meaning, impassive almost to idiotcy. His delight was to sit for hours in the sun humming a sort of song between his teeth so softly, that five steps off he was inaudible. His features were, so to speak, petrified; he ate little, principally black bread; he never bought white bread or spirits; my belief is, 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 giving dogs things to eat from the hand). People said that he had been married, twice even, and that he had children somewhere. Why he had been sent 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 this deep surface calm which could be trusted; yet, after all, what good would it have been to him to escape from the place?

Compared with life at the convict prison, the vagabond age of the forests is as the joys of Paradise. The tramp's lot is wretched enough, but at least free. So it is that every prisoner all over the soil of Russia, becomes restless with the first rays of the smiling spring.

Comparatively few form any settled plan for flight, they fear the hindrances in the way and the punishment that may ensue; only one in a hundred, not more, make up his mind to it, but how to do it is a thought that never ceases to haunt the minds of the ninety-nine others. Filled as they are with this longing, anything that looks like giving a chance of success is a comfort to them; then they set about comparing the facts with cases of successful escape. I speak only of prisoners after and under sentence, for prisoners not yet tried and condemned, are much more ready to try at an escape. And those who have been sentenced, rarely get away unless they attempt it in early days. When they have spent two or three years of their time, they put them to a sort of credit-account in their minds, and conclude that it is better to finish with the law and be put on land as a free man, rather than forfeit that time if they fail in escaping, which is always a possibility. Certainly not more than one convict in ten succeeds in changing his lot. Those who do, are nearly always men sentenced to an extremely long punishment, or for life. Fifteen, twenty years seem like an eternity to them. Then there is the branding, which is a great difficulty in the way of complete escape.

Changing your lot is a technical expression. When a convict is caught trying to escape, he is subjected to formal interrogatory, and will say he wanted to change his lot. This somewhat literary formula exactly represents the act in question. No escaped prisoner ever hopes to become a perfectly free man, for he knows that it is nearly impossible; what he looks for is to be sent to some other convict establishment, or to be put on the land, or to be tried again for some offence committed when on the tramp; in a word, to be sent anywhere else, it matters not where, so that he get out of his present prison which has become insufferable to him. All these fugitives, unless they find some unexpected shelter for the winter, unless they meet some one interested in concealing them, or if – last resort – they cannot procure – and sometimes a murder does it – the legal document, which enables them to go about unmolested everywhere; all these fugitives present themselves in crowds, during the autumn, in the towns and at the prisons; they confess themselves to be escaped tramps, pass the winter in jail, and live in the secret hope of getting away the following summer.

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 grass 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 nobility, 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 nobles 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 class 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 God'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 massed 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 mass at the door, and how they would step back in a servile way before some important epauletted fellow, or some nobleman 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 abasement 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 God we are all equal."

After the six o'clock mass 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 principally 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 assigned 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 quantity 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.