The house of the dead or, Prison life in Siberia
“‘I’ll wash your feet and drink the water afterwards.’
“Her name was Crodotia.”
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Daubing the door of a house, where a young girl lives, is done to
show that she is dishonoured.
[6] A mark of respect paid in Russia formerly, now disused.
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