Complete Works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky (203 page)

‘“Take them off to the lock-up,” said he. “I’ll see to them in a bit. As for you” (meaning me), “you wait here!
Just sit down over there, will you.”

‘“Over there” was paper, a pen, and ink; so thinks I, “What’s he up to now?”

‘“Sit down,” he says again. “Take the pen and write.”

‘And then he goes and seizes my ear and gives it a good pull.

I looked at him in the sort of way the devil may look at a priest.

‘“I can’t write, sir.”

‘“Write, write!”

‘“Have mercy on me, sir!”

‘“Write your best. Write, write!”

‘And all the while he keeps pulling my ear, pulling and twisting. Pals, I ‘d rather have had three hundred strokes of the cat; I tell you it was hell.

‘“Write, write!” was all he said.’

‘ Had the fellow gone mad? What the hell was he up to?’

‘No, he wasn’t mad. A little while before, a secretary had done a “job” at Tobolsk: he had robbed the local treasury and gone off with the money. He had very big ears, just as 1 have. They had published the fact all over the country. I answered to that description; that’s why he tormented me with his “Write, write!” He wanted to find out if I could write, and to see my hand.’

‘A regular sharp chap that! Did it hurt?’

‘O Lord! Don’t say a word about it, I beg.’

Everybody burst out laughing.

‘Well, you did write?’

‘What the deuce was there to write? I set my pen going over the paper, and did it to such good account that he left off torturing me. He just gave me a dozen thumps, regula-tion allowance, and then let me go about my business: to prison, that is.’

‘Do you really know how to write?’

‘Of course I did. What d’ye mean? Used to very well; forgotten the whole blessed thing, though, ever since pens came into fashion.’

Thanks to the patients’ gossip time passed fairly quickly. But even so, Lord, how wearied and bored we were! Those long days were suffocating in their monotony-one exactly like another. If only I had had a single book!

For all that, I often went into hospital, especially in the early days of my imprisonment, either because I was ill or because I needed rest, just to get out of the barrack where life was indeed made burdensome and which was far worse even than the hospital, especially as regards its effect upon moral sentiment and good feeling. We gentlemen were the abiding objects of envious dislike: incessant quarrels picked with us, ourselves for ever in the wrong, and looks filled with menacing hate unceasingly directed at us! Here, in the sick-rooms, one lived on a sort of footing of equality, there was something of comradeship.

The most melancholy moment of the twenty-four hours was evening, when night set in. We went to bed very early. A smoky lamp just gave us one point of light at the far end of the room, near the door. In our corner we were in almost complete darkness. The air was pestilential, stifling. Some of the patients could not get to sleep; they would rise and remain for an hour together sitting on their beds, with their heads bent, as though in deep reflection. I used to watch them closely, trying to guess of what they might be thinking; thus I tried to kill time. Then I became lost in my own reverie; the past came before me, showing itself to my imagination in large powerful outlines filled with highlights and massive shadows; details that at any other time would have remained forgotten presented themselves with vivid force, leaving upon me an impression that would have been impossible under any other circumstances.

Then I would begin to muse dreamily on the future. When should I leave this confinement, this dreadful prison? Whither betake myself? What would then happen to me? Would I return to the place of my birth? So I brooded and brooded until hope revived in my soul.

Another time I would begin to count, one, two, three, etc. to see if sleep could be won that way. I would sometimes get as far as three thousand and still be as wakeful as ever. Then someone would turn in his bed.

Then there was Oustiantsef’s coughing, that cough of the advanced consumptive. He would groan feebly, and stammer: ‘My God, I’ve sinned, I’ve sinned!’

How frightful it was, that voice of the sick man, that broken, dying voice, in the midst of that silence so dead and so complete! In a corner there are some patients not yet asleep, stretched on their pallets, and talking in low voices. One of them is telling the story of his life, all about things infinitely far away-things that are for ever fled. He is talking of his wandering through the world, of his children, his wife, and his life in the old days. And the very accent of the man’s voice tells you that all those things belong to an irrevocable past, that he is as a limb cut off from the body of mankind and cast aside. There is another, listening intently to what he is saying. A weak, feeble sort of muttering and murmuring comes to one’s ear from far off in the dreary room, a sound as of some distant river… I remember how, one winter’s night that seemed as if it would never end, I heard a story which seemed at first like the stammerings of a soul in nightmare or the delirium of fever. Here it is.

CHAPTER IV

AKOULKA’S HUSBAND

Late one night at about eleven o’clock I had been sleeping some time and woke up with a start. The wan, fitful flame of the distant lamp barely illumined the room. Nearly everyone was fast asleep, even Oustiantsef; in the quiet of the night I heard his laboured respiration, the rattling in his throat with every breath. Outside, in the corridor, sounded the muffled tread of an approaching patrol. A rifle-butt struck the floor with a low, dull sound.

The door opened; the corporal entered and counted the sick, stepping softly about the room. After a minute or so he withdrew, leaving a fresh sentry at the door; the patrol went off, and silence reigned once more. It was only then that I noticed not far from me two prisoners who were not asleep; they seemed to be holding a muttered conversation. That was by no means uncommon, for it often happened that a couple of patients whose beds adjoined and who had not exchanged a word for weeks, would all of a sudden break out into conversation in the dead of night, and one of them would tell the other his life-story.

They had probably been talking for some considerable time. I had not heard the beginning of it, and could not at first grasp what they were saying; but little by little I grew familiar with the muttered sounds, and understood all that was going on. I had not the least desire to sleep, and could not but listen.

One man was telling his story with some warmth, propped up on his elbow and leaning towards his companion. He was plainly excited to no little degree; the necessity of speech was upon him.

The other sat on his pallet with a gloomy and indifferent air, his legs stretched out flat on the mattress. Now and again he murmured some reply, more out of politeness than interest, and continually took snuff from a horn box. This was a soldier named Tchérévine from the penal battalion, a morose, cold-reasoning pedant, an idiot full of self-esteem. The narrator was one Chichkof: he was about thirty years old, a civilian convict whom I had never observed; indeed, during the whole time I was in prison I could never work up the smallest interest in him, for he was a conceited, heady fellow.

Sometimes he would hold his tongue for weeks together, and look sulky and brutal enough for anything; then all of a sudden he would interrupt a conversation, behave outrageously, fly into a white-hot rage about nothing at all, and tell long, ridiculous yarns about one barrack or another, blowing abuse on all the world, and acting like a man beside himself. Then someone would give him a hiding, and he would have another fit of silence. He was a mean and cowardly fellow, and the object of general contempt. Short of stature, he had little flesh on him, but his wandering gaze sometimes became abstracted and seemed to reflect some vague form of thought. When he told you anything he worked himself into a fever of excitement, gesticulated wildly, broke off suddenly and passed to another subject, lost himself in fresh details, and at last forgot altogether what he was talking about. He was often embroiled in argument, was Chichkof, and as he poured abuse on his adversary, he spoke with a sentimental whine and was affected almost to tears. He was not a bad hand at playing the balalaika, and had a weakness for it; on festival days he would display his prowess as a dancer when encouraged by others, and he danced by no means badly. It was quite easy to make him do what you wanted-not that he was compliant by nature, but he liked to please and to strike up an intimacy.

For some considerable while that night I could not follow Chichkof’s story. It seemed to me as though he were constantly rambling from the point to talk of something else. Perhaps he noticed that Tchérévine paid little attention to his narrative, but I fancy that he was minded to overlook this indifference so as not to take offence.

‘… When he went out on business,’ he continued,  ’everyone saluted him politely, paid him every respect-a fellow with money, that.’

‘You say he was in some trade or other.’

‘Yes; trade indeed! The trading class in my country is wretchedly poor-poverty-stricken, in fact. The women walk miles to the river to fetch water for their gardens. They wear themselves to the bone, and yet when winter comes they haven’t enough to make even cabbage soup. I tell you it’s starvation. But that fellow had a good parcel of land, which was cultivated by his three serfs. He had bee-hives, too, and sold his honey; he was also a cattle-dealer, and was a much respected man in the neighbourhood. He was aged and quite grey; his seventy years lay heavy on his old bones. When he came to market in his fox-fur pelisse everyone saluted him.

‘“Good day, Aukoudim Trophimtych!”

‘ “ Good day,” he’d return. “How are you getting along?” He never despised any man.

‘“God keep you, Aukoudim Trophimtych!”

‘“How goes business with you?”

‘“Business is as good as tallow’s white with me; and how’s yours, dad?”

‘“We’ve just got a sufficient livelihood to pay the price of sin; always sweating over our bit of land.”

‘“Lord preserve you, Aukoudim Trophimtych!”

‘He never despised any man. His advice was always worth having; every one of his words was worth a rouble. A great reader he was-quite a scholar; but he stuck to religious books. He would call his wife and say to her: “Listen, woman, mark well what I say”; then he would embark on some explanation. Marie Stépanovna was not exactly an old woman. She was his second wife, and he had married her in order to beget the children whom his first wife had failed to bear him. He had two boys who were still quite young, for the second of them was born when his father was close on sixty. His daughter, Akoulka, was eighteen years old, and she was the eldest.’

‘Your wife, eh?’

‘Wait a bit, wait a bit. Anyway Philka Marosof begins to kick up a row. Says he to Aukoudim: “Let’s split the difference. Give me back my four hundred roubles. I’m not your beast of burden; I don’t want to do any more business with you, and I don’t want to marry your Akoulka. I want to have my fling now that my parents are dead. I’ll drink my money and then join the army. In ten years I’ll come back here a field-marshal! “ Aukoudim gave him back his money-all he had of his. You see, he and Philka’s father had been business partners.

‘“You’re a lost man,” he said to Philka.

‘“Whether I’m a lost man or not, old greybeard, you’re the biggest cheat I know. You’d try to screw a fortune out of four farthings, and pick up all the dirt to do it with. Bah! Look at you, piling up here, digging deep there, the devil only knows why. I’ve got a will of my own, I tell you. All the same I won’t take your Akoulka; I’ve slept with her already.”

‘“How dare you insult a respectable father, a respectable girl! When did you sleep with her, you spawn of a sucker,

you dog, you hound, you?” cried Abkoudim, shaking with wrath. (Philka told us all this later.)

‘“I’ll not only not marry your daughter, but I’ll take good care that no one else does, not even Mikita Grigoritch, the disreputable wench. We had a fine time together, she and I, all last autumn; but I don’t want her at any price. All the money in the world wouldn’t make me take her.”

‘Then the fellow went and had high jinks for a while, and the town was unanimous in condemning him. He gathered a whole lot of other fellows round him, for he had a heap of money. He carried on like that for three months-such recklessness as you never heard of. Every penny went.

‘“I want to see the end of this money,” he said. “I’ll sell the house, everything; then I’ll enlist or go on the tramp.”

‘He was drunk from morning to night, and went about with a carriage and pair.

‘The girls liked him well, I tell you, for he played the guitar very nicely.’

‘Then it’s true that he had been intimate with this girl Akoulka?’

‘Wait, wait, can’t you? I had just buried my father. My mother lived by baking gingerbread. We got our livelihood by working for Aukoudim; barely enough to eat, a precious hard life it was. We had a bit of land the other side of the woods, and grew corn there; but when my father died I went on the spree. I made my mother give me money, but I had to give her a good hiding first.’

‘You were very wrong to beat her; that’s a great sin.’

‘ Sometimes I was drunk the whole blessed day. We had a house that was just tumbling to pieces with dry rot; still it was our own. We were as near famished as could be; for weeks together we had nothing but rags to chew. Mother nearly killed me with one stupid trick or another, but I didn’t care a curse. Philka Marosof and I were always together day and night. “Play the guitar to me,” he’d say, “and, I’ll lie in bed the while. I’ll throw money to you, for I’m the richest chap in the world!” The fellow could not speak without lying. There was only one thing: he wouldn’t touch a thing if it had been stolen. “I’m no thief, I’m an honest man. Let’s go and daub Akoulka’s door with pitch,
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for I won’t have her marry Mikita Grigoritch, I’ll stick to that.”

‘The old man had long meant to give his daughter to this Mikita Grigoritch. He was a man well on in life, in trade too, and wore spectacles. When he heard the story of Akoulka’s bad conduct, he said to her old father: “That would be a terrible disgrace to me, Aukoudim Trophimtych. On the whole, I’ve made up my mind not to marry-it’s too late.”