Visitors were not allowed to come in contact with the prisoners at Alexandrovsk. There were two steel gratings in the office, separated by a distance of a couple of feet. The prisoner was kept behind one grating, while the persons who came to see him were placed behind the other. They could not touch each other.
This was the manner in which I was permitted to meet Yasha. We both cried like children, he, at the sight of my thinness, realizing that he had wronged me in suspecting me of faithlessness. It was a pathetic scene, this meeting behind bars. Yasha told me that he would not be exiled before May. As I offered to accompany him into exile, it was necessary for me to spend the several intervening months at some work. I also had to get permission to join Yasha in exile.
I found work with the same asphalte firm, but now as a common labourer, earning only fifty kopeks (about 1s.) a day. At intervals I would go to Alexandrovsk to see Yasha. It happened once that I was working at a job in the Irkutsk prison, and it was not long before the prisoners knew that I had a husband in Alexandrovsk, for there was a complete secret system of communication between the two prisons. On the whole, I was well treated by the convicts.
One evening, however, while at work in the hall, a trusty, catching me in a corner, attacked me. I fought hard, but he knocked me down. My cries were heard by the labourers of my party and several prisoners. Soon we were surrounded by a crowd, and a quarrel ensued between those who defended me and the friends of the trusty. An assistant warden and some guards put an end to it, drawing up a protocol of my complaint to have the trusty tried in court for assault.
As the day of the trial drew near Yasha was urged by his fellow-prisoners to influence me to withdraw my charge. He told me that the law of prison communal life demanded that I should comply with the request to drop my complaint. I knew that my refusal might mean Yasha’s death, and when I was called in court to testify against the trusty, I declared that there had been no assault and that I had no complaints to make. The case was dismissed, and my act enhanced Yasha’s reputation among the inmates of both prisons.
The winter passed. Toward Easter of 1913 I succeeded in obtaining permission to have myself arrested and sent to Alexandrovsk, in anticipation of my exile with Yasha. I was put in the women’s building, in which were detained a number of women criminals. What I endured at their hands is almost beyond description. They beat me, but I knew that complaining would make my lot more bitter. When supper was served to us the matron asked me if I had been badly treated. I said no, but she must have known better, for, turning to the women, she told them not to ill-use me.
My reply to the matron somewhat improved my relations with my prison-mates, but they forced me, nevertheless, to wait on them and do their dirty work. In addition to these sufferings, the food was putrid. The bunks in which we slept were dirty. Eight of us were in one tiny cell. I saw Yasha only once a week, every Sunday. I spent two months in this voluntary imprisonment, but it seemed like two years to me, and I looked forward eagerly and impatiently to the day of our starting on the open road to exile.
IV
The Road to Exile
May had come. The Lena had opened and become navigable. The heavy iron doors of the prison were unlocked and hundreds of inmates, including myself and Yasha, were mustered out in the yard to prepare for exile.
Every winter the huge prison at Alexandrovsk would gather within its walls thousands of unfortunate human beings, murderers, forgers, thieves, students, officers, peasants and members of the professional classes, who had transgressed against the tyrannical regime. Every spring the gloomy jail would open its doors and pour out a stream of half-benumbed men and women into the wild Siberian forest and the uninhabited regions bordering on the Arctic.
All through the spring and summer this river of tortured humanity would flow through Alexandrovsk into the snowbound north, where they languished in unendurable cold and succumbed in large numbers in the land of the six months’ night. Tens of thousands of them lie scattered from the Ural mountains to Alaska in unmarked graves. …
So finally we were to breathe some fresh air. There was much stir and bustle before our party was formed. It consisted of about a thousand persons, including twenty women. Our guard was composed of five hundred soldiers. We were to go on foot to Katchugo, near the source of the Lena, a distance of about one hundred and thirty-three miles. Our baggage was loaded on wagons.
We travelled about twenty-two miles in the first day, according to schedule, stopping for the night at an exile-station on the edge of a village. There are many such stations on the Siberian roads—large wooden buildings of barn-like construction, with iron doors and grated windows. Empty inside, save for double tiers of bunks, they are surrounded by high fences, with a sentry-box at every corner. They offer no opportunity for escape.
We supped on food we had brought from
