Notes from a Dead House

  “But why beat her? The hands are bound, the tongue’s unbound. It’s no good, so much beating. Punish her, teach her, but then be kind to her. That what a wife’s for.”

  Shishkov was silent for a while.

  “It hurt me,” he began anew. “And again I got into this habit: some days I’d beat her from morning till night; she got up wrong, she doesn’t walk proper. If I didn’t beat her, I got bored. She’d sit looking out the window and crying … She cried all the time. I felt sorry for her, but still I beat her. My mother would harp and carp at me on account of her: ‘Scoundrel,’ she’d say, ‘meat for Siberia!’ ‘I’ll kill her,’ I shouted, ‘and nobody dares to say anything to me now, because I got married off by trickery.’ At first old man Ankudim showed up to defend her: ‘God knows you don’t amount to much yourself,’ he says. ‘I’ll get the best of you!’ But then he gave up. But Marya Stepanovna turned all humble. She came once and pleaded in tears: ‘I’ve come to you with a bothersome thing, Ivan Semyonych,’ she says, ‘a small point, but a big favor. Show us some daylight, dear man.’ She bows down. ‘Humble yourself, forgive her! Wicked people have slandered our daughter. You yourself know that you married an honest girl …’ She bows down at my feet, weeps. But I bully her: ‘I don’t want to listen to you now! I’ll do whatever I want now to all of you, because I’m not my own master now; and Filka Morozov,’ I say, ‘is my chum and my best friend …’ ”

  “So you went carousing together again?”

  “Forget it! You couldn’t get near him. He was drunk as a fish. He ran through all he had and leased himself out to a merchant, to go for a soldier in place of his older son. And in our parts, once a man’s leased out, then till the day he’s taken everything in the house has to fall down before him, and he’s master over it all. He gets paid in full when they take him, but till then he lives in the house, sometimes as long as six months, and the things he does to his hosts—saints alive! I’m going for a soldier in place of your son, he says, meaning I’m your benefactor, so you all have to respect me, or else I’ll back out. So Filka let all hell break loose at the merchant’s, slept with the daughter, pulled the master’s beard every day after dinner—did whatever he liked. Took a steam bath every day, and had them make the steam from vodka, and had the women carry him in their arms to the bathhouse. He comes back from carousing, stands outside: ‘I don’t want to go through the gate, pull down the fence!’—so in another place, beside the gate, they have to pull down the fence to let him in. Finally, it was over, they took him, sobered him up. People, people from everywhere came pouring into the street: Filka Morozov’s going for a soldier! He bows on all sides. And just then Akulka was coming from the kitchen garden; when Filka saw her, just by our gate, ‘Wait!’ he shouted, leaped out of the cart, and bowed to the ground before her: ‘My soul,’ he says, ‘my berry, for two years I’ve loved you, and now they’re taking me for a soldier with all the music. Forgive me,’ he says, ‘honest daughter of an honest father, because I’m a scoundrel before you—the guilt is all mine!’ And again he bowed to the ground. Akulka first stopped, as if she was frightened, and then bowed low to him and said: ‘Forgive me, too, good youth, and I know of no evil in you.’ I followed her into the cottage: ‘What’s that you said to him, dog’s-meat?’ And, believe it or not, she looked at me and said: ‘I love him now more than the whole world.’ ”

  “So, then!…”

  “I didn’t say a word to her that whole day … Only towards evening, I said: ‘Akulka, now I’m going to kill you!’ That night I didn’t sleep, I went out to the front hall to drink some kvass, and here dawn began to break. I went back inside. ‘Akulka,’ I say, ‘get ready to go to our plot.’ I’d been planning to go there even before, and mother knew we’d be going. ‘That’s the way,’ she says. ‘It’s the busy season, and I hear the hired man’s been laid out three days with a stomach ache.’ I silently hitched up the cart. Once you leave our town, it’s forest for ten miles, and beyond the forest is our plot. We went two miles through the forest, I stopped the horse: ‘Get out, Akulina,’ I say, ‘your end has come.’ She looks at me, gets frightened, stands in front of me, says nothing. ‘I’m sick of you,’ I say. ‘Pray to God!’ I grabbed her by the hair; she had such long, thick braids, I wound them around my hand, held her between my knees, drew my knife, pulled her head back, and slashed her throat … She screamed, the blood spurted, I dropped the knife, threw my arms around her from the front, lay on the ground, embraced her and cried out over her, howled and wailed; she cries out, and I cry out; she’s trembling, thrashing around in my arms, and the blood, the blood just gushes out at me, gushes out—at my face, my hands. I abandoned her, fear came over me, I abandoned the horse and ran, ran, came running home the back way, into the bathhouse: we had this old, unused bathhouse; I crouched under a shelf and sat there. I went on sitting there till nightfall.”

  “And Akulka?”

  “She must’ve gotten up after I left and also went home. They found her afterwards a hundred steps from the place.”

  “So you didn’t finish her off.”

  “No …” Shishkov paused for a moment.

  “There’s this vein,” Cherevin observed, “if it, this same vein, isn’t cut through first off, then however much a man struggles, and however much blood he loses, he won’t die.”

  “But she did die. They found her dead in the evening. Informed the authorities, started searching for me, and found me that night in the bathhouse … Must be the fourth year I’m living here,” he added after a pause.

  “Hm … Of course, if you don’t beat them—no good’ll come of it!” Cherevin observed coolly and methodically, taking out his snuff horn again. He began sniffing, at length and with pauses. “And then again, lad,” he went on, “you yourself come out so-o-o stupid. I also caught my wife with a lover once. So I invited her to the shed; doubled up the reins. ‘Who’s your master?’ I say. ‘Who’s your master?’ And I thrashed her with the reins, thrashed and thrashed her, for an hour and a half I thrashed her, till she cried out: ‘I’ll wash your feet, I will, and drink the water.’ Her name was Ovdotya.”

  V

  Summertime

  But here it is already the beginning of April, here Holy Week is already approaching.1 The summer work also gradually begins. The sun gets warmer and brighter with each day; the air smells of spring and has a stimulating effect on the organism. The coming beautiful days excite the fettered man, too, and in him, too, give rise to certain desires, yearnings, longings. It seems the pining for freedom is still stronger under a bright ray of sunlight than on a gray winter or autumn day, and that is noticeable in all prisoners. It is as if they are glad of the bright days, and at the same time some sort of impatience, of impulsiveness, intensifies in them. Indeed, I noticed that in the spring quarrels seemed to become more frequent in prison. Noise, shouts, din were heard more frequently, scandals broke out; and at the same time you would notice somebody at work somewhere gazing pensively and intently into the blue distance, there on the other side of the Irtysh, where the boundless stretch of the free Kirghiz steppe, a thousand miles of it, begins; you would hear somebody sigh deeply, with his whole chest, as if the man were longing to breathe in that faraway, free air and relieve his crushed, fettered soul. “Ah, well!” the prisoner finally says and all at once, as if shaking off his dreams and broodings, impatiently and sullenly picks up his spade or the bricks that have to be carried from one place to another. A minute later he has already forgotten his sudden sensation and begins to laugh or curse, according to his character; or else, with an extraordinary ardor out of all proportion with the need, he suddenly throws himself into his work assignment, if he has been given one, and begins to work—to work with all his might, as if he wishes to stifle in himself by heavy work something that is weighing on him and crushing him from inside. These are all strong folk, for the most part in the flower of their youth and strength … Fetters are heavy at that time of life! I am not poeticizing now and am conv
inced of the truth of my observations. Besides the fact that, in warm weather, bathed in bright sunlight, when with your whole soul, with your whole being, you hear and feel nature resurrecting around you with boundless force, you feel all the more oppressed by the locked prison, the convoy, and the will of others; besides that, in this time of spring, across Siberia and across all Russia, with the first lark, the tramp’s life begins: God’s people escape from the jails and take refuge in the forests. After stuffy holes, after courts, fetters, and rods, they wander about entirely by their own will, wherever they like, wherever it looks more inviting and free; they drink and eat wherever and whatever they can, whatever God sends them, and at night they fall peacefully asleep in forest or field, with no great cares, with no prison anguish, like forest birds, saying good night before sleep only to the stars in heaven, under God’s eye. It is sometimes a hard, hungry, exhausting life “serving General Cuckooshkin.” Who says it’s not! At times you go for whole days without a glimpse of bread; you have to lie low, to hide from everybody; you’re forced to pilfer and rob, and sometimes even to kill. “Like exile, like child: where the eye falls, the hand follows”—so they say in Siberia about exiles. The phrase can be applied to tramps in its full force and even with a bit more added. It is rare that a tramp is not a robber, and he is almost always a pilferer, naturally more from necessity than by vocation. There are inveterate tramps. Some run away even after they have finished their term in prison and have already settled. It would seem they should be pleased to be settled and secure, but no! they’re drawn somewhere, they’re called away somewhere. Life in the forest, a life poor and terrible, but free and full of adventures, has something tempting about it, a sort of mysterious enchantment for those who have once experienced it, and—lo and behold—the man runs away, even a modest, conscientious man, who has promised to become a good, sedentary man and a sensible householder. A man may even marry, have children, live in the same place for five years, and suddenly, one fine morning, disappear somewhere, leaving his wife, children, and the whole neighborhood in bewilderment. One of these runaways was pointed out to me in prison. He had not committed any particular crimes, at least I never heard anything of the sort said of him, but he kept running away, all his life he was on the run. He had been to the southern border of Russia beyond the Danube, and in the Kirghiz steppe, and in eastern Siberia, and in the Caucasus—he had been everywhere. Who knows, maybe under different circumstances he would have become a sort of Robinson Crusoe with his passion for traveling. However, it was others who told me all this about him; he himself spoke little in prison, and then only said what was strictly necessary. He was a very small, puny muzhik, already about fifty years old, extremely docile, with an extremely calm and even stupid face, calm to the point of idiocy. In summer he liked to sit in the sun and would invariably hum some little song to himself, but so softly that it couldn’t be heard five steps away. The features of his face were somehow wooden; he ate little, mostly bread; he never bought a single kalach or sup of vodka; it is doubtful that he ever had any money, doubtful that he even knew how to count. He regarded everything with perfect calm. He sometimes fed the prison dogs from his own hands, though none of us fed the prison dogs. Russian people generally don’t like feeding dogs. It was said that he had been married, even twice; it was said that he had children somewhere … Why he landed in prison, I have no idea. We were all expecting him to slip away from us, too; but either his time hadn’t come, or the years overtook him, and so he lived his life, regarding somehow contemplatively this whole strange milieu that surrounded him. However, there was no way to be certain; though you might wonder, why would he escape, and what would he gain by it? But meanwhile, all the same, on the whole, the forest, the tramp’s life, is paradise compared to prison. It is so understandable; there can even be no comparison. Though it’s hard still, it’s your own will. That is why every prisoner in Russia, wherever he may be locked up, becomes somehow restless in spring, with the first welcoming rays of spring sunshine. By no means everybody intends to escape: one can say for certain that, difficulty and accountability considered, only one in a hundred ventures upon it; but the other ninety-nine at least dream of how it would be to escape and where they would escape to; they can at least unburden their hearts by the mere wish, by picturing the mere possibility. Some can at least recall how they escaped once long ago … I am speaking now of convicted prisoners. Those awaiting sentence, naturally, venture to escape far more often and in greater numbers. Convicts already serving a term escape, if at all, only at the beginning of their prison life. Having spent two or three years at hard labor, a prisoner comes to value those years and gradually accepts the thought that it is better to finish his term in legal fashion and go free as a settler than to venture upon such a risk and such ruin in the case of failure. And failure is so possible. Maybe only one in ten succeeds in changing his lot. Among convicted prisoners, those sentenced to very long terms also risk escaping more often than others. Fifteen or twenty years seem like an eternity, and a man sentenced to such a term is permanently prepared to dream of changing his lot, even if he has already knocked off ten years in prison. Finally, branding somewhat hinders a man from risking escape. “Changing one’s lot” is a technical term. So, at interrogations, if a prisoner has been caught escaping, he answers that he wanted “to change his lot.” This slightly bookish expression applies literally to the case. Every runaway has in mind not so much freeing himself completely—he knows that that is almost impossible—as either getting into another institution, or ending up as a settler, or going to trial again for a new crime—committed while he was a tramp—in short, anywhere you like, only not in the old place he’s so sick of, not in the former prison. All these runaways, if in the course of the summer they don’t happen to find some extraordinary place to spend the winter; if, for instance, they don’t find someone who shelters runaways and makes a profit from it; if, finally, they don’t get hold, sometimes by means of murder, of some passport with which they can live anywhere—by autumn all these runaways, if they’re not caught before then, for the most part turn up in dense crowds in the towns and prisons, as tramps, and spend the winter behind bars, not without hope, of course, of escaping again in the summer.

  Spring had its effect on me as well. I remember how I would sometimes look greedily through the chinks in the paling and stand for a long time, my head pressed against our fence, peering intently and insatiably at the grass greening on our prison rampart, while the distant sky turned a deeper and deeper blue. My restlessness and anguish increased with every day, and prison was becoming ever more hateful to me. The hatred which I, as a nobleman, experienced constantly from the prisoners during the first years became unbearable to me. It poisoned my whole life with its venom. In those first years, I often went to stay in the hospital, without any illness, solely so as not to be in the prison, so as to rid myself of that persistent, relentless, universal hatred. “You’ve got iron beaks, you’ve pecked us to death!” the prisoners would say to us, and how I used to envy the simple folk who came to the prison! They at once became comrades with everybody. And therefore spring, the phantom of freedom, the general rejoicing in nature, also told on me somehow sadly and irritably. At the end of Lent, I think in the sixth week, I had to prepare for communion.2 Already in the first week, the senior sergeant had divided all the prisoners into seven shifts, for the number of weeks of Lent, to prepare in turn. So there happened to be about thirty men in each shift. I liked the week of preparation very much. Those preparing were relieved of work. We went to the church, which was not far from the prison, two or three times a day. I hadn’t been to church for a long time. The services of the Great Lent, so familiar from far-off childhood in my parents’ home, the solemn prayers, the bowing to the ground—all this stirred in my soul the distant past, brought back to me the impressions of my childhood years, and I remember having a very pleasant feeling when, in the morning, over ground slightly frozen the night before, we would be taken u
nder armed convoy to the house of God. The convoy, however, did not enter the church. Inside the church, we stood in a compact group just by the door, in the last place, so that we only heard the vociferous deacon and occasionally, through the crowd, glimpsed the priest’s black vestment and bald spot. I remembered how, in my childhood, standing in the church, I sometimes looked at the simple folk thickly crowding by the entrance and obsequiously parting before a pair of thick epaulettes, before a fat squire or a spruced-up but extremely pious lady, who unfailingly went to the first places and were ready every moment to fight for them. There, by the entrance, it seemed to me then, they were not praying as we were, they were praying humbly, zealously, bowing to the ground, and with a full awareness of their own lowliness.

  Now I, too, had to stand in that same place, and not even in that place; we were shackled and disgraced; everybody shunned us, everybody even seemed to fear us, we were given alms each time, and, I remember, I was somehow even pleased by that, some sort of refined, peculiar sensation told itself in that strange satisfaction. “If so, let it be so!” I thought. The prisoners prayed very assiduously, and each of them each time brought his beggarly kopeck to church for a candle or the collection. “I’m also a human being,” he may have thought or felt as he gave it. “Before God we’re all equal …” We took communion at the early liturgy. When the priest holding the chalice recited the words “… but like the thief accept me,”3 almost everybody fell to the ground, their fetters clanking, as if taking these words literally to their account.